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Miracles You’ll See In The Next Fifty Years (Feb, 1950)
Some more up-to-date predictions: science, invention, space travel, colonisation, immortality, water shortage, flooding, nanotech, techno-apocalypse, extinction, mental health, smart machines, robots, mind uploading, AI, Asia, economics, demographics, goverance, cities. What is your prediction?
posted by MetaMonkey at 11:24 PM PST - 54 comments

Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage. The Annoying Frequency of Fingernails on a Blackboard. How Many Blinking Photographs Does it Take? The 2006 Ig Nobels.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:14 PM PST - 33 comments

Nietzsche Family Circus : Family Circus cartoons randomly combined with quotes from Nietzsche. Remixing Family Circus is nothing new, but I find this one fascinating.
posted by Lirp at 8:43 PM PST - 30 comments

Do you want a titty blow mastrubator? Comedian mericilessly mocks bad sex toy packaging. The question is- does she use them?
posted by juliarothbort at 8:26 PM PST - 15 comments

Popular art teacher, Sydney McGee, a teacher for 28 years at the Wilma Fisher Elementary School in Frisco, Texas, was suspended from her job on September 22. Her infraction? Exposing her students to "nude art" during a visit to the Dallas Museum of Art. "One of her students saw nude art in the museum, and after the child’s parent complained, the teacher was suspended."

[A situation similar to that of teacher Pete Panse previously discussed here?]
posted by ericb at 6:05 PM PST - 127 comments

The sound of the Universe being born. University of Washington professor calculates the frequencies of sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years by analyzing small differences in sky temperature. More information here and here.
posted by zaebiz at 5:39 PM PST - 26 comments

Both Find a Flu Shot and Flu Clinic Locator will let you punch in a date & zip code and find a bunch of locations near you in the U.S. selling the vaccine. For the first time in three years there's plenty to go around. The CDC estimates that everyone who might want one will be able to get one. And you probably want one. According to wikipedia "36,000 people per year in the United States die from influenza, and 114,000 per year are admitted to a hospital as a result of influenza. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, between 250,000 and 500,000 die from influenza infection each year worldwide." That's 5 to 10 times as many civilian casualties as the Iraq conflict in 1/3 the time. [more inside]
posted by phearlez at 3:01 PM PST - 50 comments

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers. (Google Video.) Sort of like Stomp, except Scandihoovian and, you know, not totally embarrassing to like.
posted by Astro Zombie at 2:57 PM PST - 16 comments

To help enforce the genuine advantage, Microsoft will include a "kill switch" in Vista--if it's not validated within a specified time, all of its functions except web browsing are locked down and the machine automatically kicks you out after an hour. Will it mean more Linux users, an excuse to just use Google desktop, or is it just a matter of time until this, too, gets cracked?
posted by camcgee at 2:09 PM PST - 136 comments

America's worst school violence ever was not a recent event, but the Bath School disaster of 1927. Andrew Kehoe, a school board member upset with his tax bill, used dynamite and some pyrotol from WWI-era military surplus to blow himself up along with the elementary school of Bath Township, Michigan, leaving 45 dead and 58 injured. See a 1927 book on the disaster, a list of victims, the coroner's inquest, a historical marker, a memorial park, an oral history from a witness, and a 1920s KKK rant denouncing Kehoe as an agent of the Roman Catholic conspiracy.
posted by jonp72 at 1:45 PM PST - 14 comments

What does everyone called Gary Smith, John Williams or Robert Johnson have in common with Saddam Hussein, the Speaker of the Parliament of Lebanon, the President of Bolivia, and the dead 9/11 hijackers? They're on the No-Fly List, that's what, even if they're babies. But the 11 British suspects recently charged with plotting to blow up airliners with liquid explosives were not on it, despite the fact they were under surveillance for more than a year. They were deliberately left off the list. in case it fell into the wrong hands.
posted by unSane at 12:14 PM PST - 65 comments

The Bijlmermeer Disaster Yesterday marked the anniversary of the 1992 crash of El Al Flight 1862 into the Amersterdam neighborhood of Bijlmermeer, "whose sordid aftermath opened up a whole can of worms relating to secret weapons trafficking and unaccountable government." Six years after the crash, an investigation revealed that the flight had been carrying three of the four chemicals needed for Sarin.
posted by frecklefaerie at 12:03 PM PST - 19 comments

The world's longest undefended border apparently gives the U.S. enough freedom to send in the FBI for routine investigations in another country. Of course, this is not the first time that American authorities operated illegally in Canada. How would Americans feel if it was the other way around? Pretty funny, eh?
posted by Kickstart70 at 11:34 AM PST - 42 comments

We'll all end up as wormlike web-based life forms in the bass players online literary dihorrea. Iggy and the Stooges' hilarious rider.
posted by drezdn at 11:30 AM PST - 35 comments

Web 2.0 is pretty played out. Today's new buzzphrase: "the chmod 777 web." [via Technically Speaking]
posted by GuyZero at 9:53 AM PST - 74 comments

Protecting your privacy on Craig's List. Sex blogger Violet Blue re-assures Craig's List users with a list of tips to protect yourself from the new scammers who harvest your pictures and emails, and then publish them on the web.
posted by destinyland at 9:32 AM PST - 30 comments

It's October, and across the nation, the search for the most sincere Pumpkin Patch begins anew. For those unfamiliar (or those wishing to reacquaint themselves) with the rituals & lore of the Great Pumpkin, the entire CBS Special is online here. Also, for the blind readers of this site, the long out-of-print spoken word radiodrama version of the Great Pumpkin can be found here.
posted by jonson at 9:18 AM PST - 12 comments

Executive Coloring Book. The original 1961 edition. There have been imitations: The Account Executive Coloring Book and A Coloring Book for Lawyers. (via The Presurfer and TextUrl)
posted by caddis at 9:03 AM PST - 29 comments

HIV is a gay disease.
posted by thirteenkiller at 8:56 AM PST - 87 comments

Good coders borrow. Great coders steal. Google Code Search, originally developed as an internal tool to search their volumes of source code, has been expanded to include many major open-source repositories, and released via Google Labs. Who knows what lurks in the heart of cvs?
posted by mkultra at 7:38 AM PST - 42 comments

Teleportation Breakthrough. Until now scientists have teleported similar objects such as light or single atoms over short distances from one spot to another in a split second. But Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter. A more technical explanation.
posted by empath at 6:30 AM PST - 67 comments

The Navier-Stokes equations constitute the fundamental equations that describe fluid mechanics, and are used everywhere from atmospheric science to airplane design. Proof of the existence of a smooth solution to the Navier-Stokes equations in 3-dimensions is considered a challenging problem, so challenging that the Clay Math Institute has offered a million dollars to anyone who can do so. Has it been done? (More detailed explanation). (via)
posted by onalark at 6:28 AM PST - 17 comments

The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive Is the recently aired work of Stephen Fry. [1][2] a well know english comedian diagnosed as manic-depressive.Now also know as bipolar disorder manic-depression is a class of mood disorders in which the person experiences clinical depression and/or mania, hypomania, and/or mixed states; a rollercoaster of highs and lows.Fry's work and personal involvment help shine a spotlight on a condition obscured by the stigma associated with mental disorders.
posted by elpapacito at 6:26 AM PST - 27 comments

Military hones a new strategy on insurgency (NYT) Perhaps someone in the Pentagon has finally watched The Battle of Algiers (and learned a lesson from it)?
posted by dylanjames at 5:43 AM PST - 36 comments

At 1400 CET today, (in Swedish) the Swedish Riksdag is expected to elect Fredrik Reinfeldt (again, in Swedish) as Swedish Prime Minister, replacing Göran Persson, the Social Democrat who has been in power for 12 years. Reinfeldt is head of the Alliance of four "borgerliga" (literally, non-socialist) parties who won a majority of seats in the riksdag on the September 17th election. The alliance promises "a better government than the ruling left-wing cartel."
posted by three blind mice at 4:09 AM PST - 12 comments