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After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.
posted by meowzilla at 11:38 PM PST - 128 comments

The universe of Game Of Thrones remixed with Mr.Men and Little Miss! One new character to discover each day.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:56 PM PST - 11 comments

Following the long-awaited replacement, which opened in September, the original east span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is due to be demolished. However, before that happens, the California Highway patrol, along with MADD is inviting family and friends of those who have lost their lives in traffic crashes to visit the decommissioned original span and pay their respects at the site where their loved ones died. CHP will accompany family and friends out to the now-empty bridge span on Saturday morning so that perhaps a little closure can be gained. [more inside]
posted by otherwordlyglow at 4:06 PM PST - 33 comments

Get Data [SLYT]
posted by zennie at 3:09 PM PST - 36 comments

r/FullMovieGifs is a sub-reddit maintained by user matt01ss which is dedicated to compressing feature length movies to .gif format. The Fifth Element, Up, The Rock and many more. Via The AV Club.
posted by codacorolla at 3:00 PM PST - 79 comments

Dirtiest Book in the Canon: A new translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. [Previously]
posted by homunculus at 3:00 PM PST - 22 comments

Between 1989 and 2003 journalist and UFO researcher Philip J. Klass published 76 volumes of his Skeptic's UFO Newsletter. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has posted them all (as pdfs) on their website. Klass died in 2005
posted by IvoShandor at 1:54 PM PST - 9 comments

The National Toy Hall of Fame has added its two latest inductees: the Rubber Duck and the game of Chess.
While featuring many interesting facts, the site does fail to mention Florentijn Hofman's giant rubber duck (featured multiple times here) or Tim Rice's "Chess" (seen here). [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 1:42 PM PST - 25 comments

They're Rad. They're Brown. They are Dads. They're Rad Brown Dads
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:21 PM PST - 21 comments

Inspired by a field game with foam swords, Killer Queen Arcade, a giant 10-player dual-sided arcade cabinet that premiered at NYU's No Quarter 2013 has been described as Half Joust, half StarCraft and one giant snail.
posted by guywithnoear at 1:07 PM PST - 13 comments

"A curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them, / Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating." [more inside]
posted by mr. digits at 12:52 PM PST - 22 comments

At mile 10, local elite runner Mike Cassidy considered dropping out of the New York City Marathon; bolstered by the thought of his friends and family waiting for him at mile 16, he soldiered on, and just before mile 23, he caught up to Olympic silver medalist Meb Keflezighi. [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 12:33 PM PST - 37 comments

"Perhaps, in some way, the suburbs encapsulate the British identity in a way that the cities don't any more – small dramas playing out beyond the stations without barriers, rather than the heavily policed, heavily funded bourgeois ghettos of the inner cities."
posted by mippy at 12:14 PM PST - 11 comments

Forward March (YouTube) is a silly little animated film, featuring four formal British military men and a furry fellow who emerges from the sewer. This short is one of the graduation pieces (Google auto-translate; original link) from the French arts school, ESMA (official French site). You can find more short animations on their YouTube and Vimeo accounts.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:53 AM PST - 5 comments

‘Gangster Party Line’: For Real Men Who Just Want To Talk Smack Are you lonely? Do you feel like talking smack? Do you just wanna talk to a hard gangster? Look no further. The ‘Gangsta Party Line‘ will fulfill all your needs. Hundreds of gangstas are waiting for your motherfucking call, and they’re all talking smack about you right now. The hardest niggas are standing by, waiting to answer your call. For only $4.99 a minute, you can talk to the hardest guys in the game.
posted by jcterminal at 11:49 AM PST - 51 comments

"In Advanced Readings in D&D, Tor.com writers Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode take a look at Gary Gygax’s favorite authors and reread one per week, in an effort to explore the origins of Dungeons & Dragons and see which of these sometimes-famous, sometimes-obscure authors are worth rereading today." [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 10:32 AM PST - 42 comments

László Krasznahorkai's most recently translated book, Seiobo There Below, whose first chapter can be read online, is a collection of interconnected stories about art and revelation, stories composed almost entirely of pages-long sentences, "long, sinewy sentences," sentences which might make you think "Krasznahorkai holds the run-on in a suffocating bear hug," as Adam Z. Levy has it, sentences which other critics call "captivating", "vertiginous", "apparently endless [...] like diving deep underwater, with no hope of coming up for air, or like releasing the brakes on a bicycle at the top of a steep hill", but those sentences, which go on for pages as they shift scenes and perspectives, serve as vehicles for a terrifying aesthetic bliss or bewilderment [more inside]
posted by RogerB at 10:25 AM PST - 6 comments

CBS News/60 Minutes Have apologized for their interview of 10/27/13 in which Benghazi security Supervisor Dylan Davies said he was inside the Benghazi Consulate the night of the attacks. 2 Senior Government officials have confirmed the existence of a report in which Davies tells the FBI he was never there. Benghazi critics who were crowing about the interview earlier in the week are now strangely silent.
posted by Xurando at 9:55 AM PST - 121 comments

Double is the ultimate tool for telecommuting. From anywhere in the world, you have a physical presence in the office and can speak to co-workers at anytime. Double is a remotely controlled, mobile teleconferencing system, enabling conversations to happen anywhere and anytime.
posted by andoatnp at 9:45 AM PST - 72 comments

There are a few ways to end up on Hart Island. One third of its inhabitants are infants—some parents couldn’t afford a burial, others didn’t realize what a “city burial” meant when they checked it on the form. Many of the dead here were homeless, while others were simply unclaimed; if your body remains at the city morgue for more than two weeks, you, too, will be sent for burial by a team of prisoners on Hart Island.
posted by anastasiav at 9:26 AM PST - 30 comments

Tiny puppies napping on tiny couches! (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by elizardbits at 9:15 AM PST - 40 comments

The last remnants of the old LLC are being swept away forever. Nathan Rabin over at The Dissolve offers his own personal requiem to the store. And because moving on is part of the healing process, movie fans should prepare themselves for some final liquidation sales.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 7:46 AM PST - 79 comments

Super-Typhoon Haiyan has struck the Philippines. It is the fourth strongest hurricane in recorded history and has the highest wind speed of any hurricane at landfall.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:15 AM PST - 51 comments

Joey Manley, founder of Modern Tales and its spinoff sites (Serializer, Graphic Smash and Girlamatic) has passed away. Manley's vision of comics as something that could provide a sustainable business model to creators didn't pan out in the long term, but did launch and/or promote the online comics careers of a number of creators, including Justin (Wonderella) Pierce, James (American Elf) Kolchaka, Roger (Fred the Clown) Langridge, Shaenon (Narbonic) Garrity, Gene (American Born Chinese) Yang, Alexander (Panel One) Danner and many more. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 6:33 AM PST - 19 comments

Yoko Ono's new single Bad Dancer has a video which involves Ira Glass, Questlove, Ira Glass, and other cool people dancing, well, poorly.
posted by Rory Marinich at 5:12 AM PST - 44 comments

Blonde hair, skimpy skirt, big blue eyes. Yup, it's ... INTERNET EXPLORER — Get ready for Inori, the 'personification of IE'. Microsoft launches ad campaign in Singapore featuring a new Internet Explorer 11 mascot (mildly NSFW anime, not hentai).
posted by cenoxo at 3:14 AM PST - 97 comments

...to leave a smile on your face, by Helder Guimarães: Individual vs Crowd | Chaos | Freedom | Trick [more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:00 AM PST - 14 comments

"By figuratively sticking her foot in America’s front door and keeping it wedged there long enough for an anonymous band of war-tossed Mongols to navigate around daunting racial barriers, Countess Tolstoy not only became the architect of the Mongol “invasion” of New Jersey and the country’s first ethnic Mongolian community, she also served as the midwife for the birth of Tibetan Buddhism in America." -- tells the amazing story of how a small band of Kalmyk Mongols (all WWII Wehrmacht veterans) established Tibetan Buddhism in America, as told by David Urubshurow, who was one of them. Featuring Leo Tolstoy's youngest daughter, Cold War CIA and Ivy League intrigues, how the Dalai Lama came to America and why this was only possible under president Carter and more.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:06 AM PST - 15 comments