February 11, 2013

Linguistic Time Travel

"The discovery advances UC Berkeley’s mission to make sense of big data and to use new technology to document and maintain endangered languages as critical resources for preserving cultures and knowledge. [...] it can also provide clues to how languages might change years from now."
posted by batmonkey at 9:10 PM PST - 21 comments

“I see a giant pirate ship in the middle of a hurricane.”

Remember that replica of HMS Bounty that went down in the middle of Hurricane Sandy? If you've ever asked yourself why a replica wooden sailing ship was in the middle of a hurricane, Outside has your answer.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 8:44 PM PST - 56 comments

If This Then Basically Anything

Though it was discussed before in beta, If This Then That lets you do amazing things by connecting web services together. There is a good Lifehacker guide to getting started, but then you can create your own "recipes:" automate job searches, download torrents by sending emails from your phone, text to escape awkward situations and much more [more inside]
posted by blahblahblah at 8:41 PM PST - 56 comments

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy

Who Said It: Marissa Cooper Or Franz Kafka? A little game from Buzzfeed. Guess if these quotes are from “The O.C.” or Modernist 20th century Austrian literature? The OC previously, Kafka previously.
posted by sweetkid at 6:03 PM PST - 29 comments

And the winner was...

Check out the official 85 Years of Oscar poster, commemorating every Best Picture winner for the last 85 years.
posted by crossoverman at 5:30 PM PST - 40 comments

oh my god i can see forever

What happens to comics if newspapers go away? Garry Trudeau imagines a terrifying void. Webcomic artists think Garry Trudeau is silly. But if you, too, fear the vast abyss of a world without newspaper funnies, and lack the patience to search for all the treasures of the webcomic world, what you want is a comic that never ends. Pandyland and Mezzacotta each offer an infinite supply of three-panel comics, so that you'll never have to go without a brief moment's amusement. Sure, 99% of the comics you see might be crap, but there are gems amidst all the rubbish.
posted by Rory Marinich at 3:21 PM PST - 101 comments

The ultimate virtual battlegrid. A Darwinian cyberstate.

Immercenary is a forgotten hybrid first-person shooter/RPG that was exclusive to the 3DO console. The game combined the aesthetics of Snow Crash, Lawnmower Man and LSD Dream Emulator into a massive open-world game. Gamasutra article. [more inside]
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 3:06 PM PST - 18 comments

Project(or): Snow

"During a blizzard, I pointed a video projector out the window and projected a movie onto the snow. These are the results in motion, and you can also see high-resolution stills."
posted by maxwelton at 2:16 PM PST - 31 comments

Schmucks with Underwoods

Vanity fair on the rise and fall and possible rise again of the spec script.
posted by Artw at 1:17 PM PST - 44 comments

"cruel to the weak and cowardly in the face of the brave"

The Evolution of Irregular War - Insurgents and Guerrillas From Akkadia to Afghanistan
Pundits and the press too often treat terrorism and guerrilla tactics as something new, a departure from old-fashioned ways of war. But nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout most of our species' long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who disdained open battle in favor of stealthy raids and ambushes: the strategies of both tribal warriors and modern guerrillas and terrorists.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:14 PM PST - 10 comments

Polio Eradication

How the CIA Is Hurting the Fight Against Polio.
posted by homunculus at 11:55 AM PST - 63 comments

Flintheart Glomgold!

DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:44 AM PST - 156 comments

"That's how it was done"

Angelo Badalamenti describes the origin of the Twin Peaks theme. [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by Doleful Creature at 10:54 AM PST - 26 comments

So I guess it was worth perstering them about?

Forget Saturday delivery: The Postal Service is back! (site)
posted by anotherpanacea at 10:36 AM PST - 46 comments

Mooning Pluto

"Help Us Name the Moons of Pluto!" Pluto may have lost is designation as a full-fledged-planet in 2006 (after 'dwarf planet' Eris was discovered that is larger than it), but it still gets plenty of attention by astronomers. In the last two years, the Hubble Space Telescope discovered two more moons of Pluto, which have not yet been named. So Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute is doing an online survey. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:21 AM PST - 51 comments

Do You Remember Your First Time

Adeline hears Bad Brains for the first time. SLYT
posted by Sailormom at 9:55 AM PST - 24 comments

Donald Byrd December 9, 1932 – February 4, 2013

"One day, in the early 1960's, Mongo Santamaria called up Herbie Hancock and asked him to sit in as a pianist with Mongo's band, which was then performing at Club Cubano InterAmericano on Prospect Avenue, a popular Latin music spot. Herbie was reluctant to do it because he never played Latin before, but accepted the offer and was doing pretty well by the end of the first set. Then during intermission, Donald Byrd, who was there, asked Herbie to play his original composition "Watermelon Man" for Mongo. When Herbie started doing this, Mongo's band, especially his huge percussion section, started joining in, and before you knew it the whole club was dancing. Mongo was so excited by what happened that he asked if he could record the song. He did, and it became his greatest hit." [more inside]
posted by MartinWisse at 9:47 AM PST - 26 comments

First rule of Motherboy is you do not talk about Motherboy.

A dramatic reimagining of Arrested Development, just in time for the series' return.
posted by Rock Steady at 9:39 AM PST - 42 comments

"No one noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot."

John E. Karlin, Bell Labs' first behavioral psychologist and the father of human factors engineering, has died at the age of 94. [more inside]
posted by spitefulcrow at 9:30 AM PST - 32 comments

Hwæt!

In 1731, a fire broke out in Ashburnham House, where the greatest collection of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the Cottonian Library, was then being stored. Frantically, the trustees raced into the burning library and hurled priceless and unique manuscripts out the windows in order to save them. One of these was the sole manuscript of Beowulf. Today, bearing the charred edges of its brush with extinction, it's been digitized by the British Library, along with a group of other treasures including Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Arundel and the Harley Golden Gospels.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 9:00 AM PST - 25 comments

What's in a Name?

Is your name linked to your life chances? The Guardian's Data Blog examines the link between first names and life outcomes in a series of diagrams. "The Guardian Digital Agency has looked at the first names of doctors, prisoners, football players, Guardian staff and other professions and mapped how often certain names occur."
posted by sundaydriver at 8:31 AM PST - 62 comments

Oh, what a tiny compressed history of love and struggle.

Sister Arts: On Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Others Starting off examining the friendship between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Lisa L. Moore examines how poetry acted as the lingua franca of second-wave feminism. [more inside]
posted by eustacescrubb at 8:22 AM PST - 2 comments

Because, Why Not?

Timelapse-icus Maximus 2012 "A Burning Man for Ants" James Cole, Byron Mason & Jason Phipps put together an interesting way to view Burning Man 2012; as a tilt-shift, time-lapse video.
posted by quin at 8:17 AM PST - 11 comments

Happy Valentine's Schadenfreude

Here, have some stories about other peoples' painfully awkward dating lives!
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:57 AM PST - 97 comments

The Shooter

The Shooter. It begins, "The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care."
posted by chunking express at 7:38 AM PST - 212 comments

"I always knew, really, that I was a late night person."

Derek Morris is a septuagenarian former Cadbury's accountant from Bristol. He works a straight 9 to 5. That is 9pm to 5am, because he's also a legendary reggae DJ who M.C.s in Jamaican patois. His album is here (and part 2 of the video is here).
posted by bashos_frog at 7:29 AM PST - 12 comments

Double black diamond

"Dude, we can TOTALLY ski through this abandoned building in Alaska!" [SLV]
posted by Chrysostom at 7:09 AM PST - 27 comments

Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

Pablo Neruda's Body Will Be Exhumed For Autopsy [bbc.co.uk] "A judge in Chile has ordered the exhumation of the remains of the poet Pablo Neruda, as part of an inquest into his death in 1973."
posted by Fizz at 6:08 AM PST - 8 comments

The pope resigns

Pope Benedict resigns [more inside]
posted by Dumsnill at 3:11 AM PST - 641 comments

« Previous day | Next day »