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1968: Lessons Learned. Dissent Magazine examines the transcontinental legacy of one of the most tumultuous years in world history. Essays from Marshall Berman, Robin Blackburn, Mitchell Cohen, Ralf Fuecks, Vivian Gornick, Michael Kazin, Enrique Krauze, Lillian B. Rubin, Christine Stansell and Michael Walzer.
posted by amyms at 11:33 PM PST - 42 comments

Some people like to make things difficult for Mario, but others like to make it easy (and musical!).
posted by mullingitover at 10:28 PM PST - 28 comments

A letter from the whole world: "Dear sir, you won the internet!" And more from Patrick Alexander and his Hilarity Comics. "I want the... the Sonic. The Facebook. I'm sorry."
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 10:19 PM PST - 20 comments

"With most animals, males duke it out and the winner gets the girls," says Holekamp. "But with hyenas, females have 100 percent say." They decide when and under what conditions they will tolerate deferential sperm donors. At age 2 or 3 a male leaves his natal clan and wanders off to beg acceptance into another clan. After vicious rejections, he eventually succeeds and reaps his reward: brutal harassment as the clan's nadir, one of the last in line for food and sex. This probation, which biologists call "endurance rivalry," is a test, Holekamp explains: "The guy who can stick it out the longest wins." The trial lasts about two years, after which some females may grant him access. "You do not want to be a male hyena," Holekamp says.

-From an article in Smithsonian Magazine, Who's Laughing Now? Professor Holekamp's hyena site. Also, hyena pictures and The Hyena Pages, a fine site about this fascinating animal.
posted by Kattullus at 8:28 PM PST - 32 comments

Tom Waits Press Conference (that is all)
posted by ornate insect at 8:24 PM PST - 79 comments

FaceStat, a new startup from crowdsourcing consultants at Delores Labs bills itself as "market research for the individual." You upload a photo of yourself, and "within a couple hours, you will have detailed statistics about how people feel about the picture you provide." Oh, and it's powered by creepers like you, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (previously posted about here). [more inside]
posted by thisjax at 7:20 PM PST - 37 comments

Chinese manufacturers are setting up shop in the U.S. due to a weak dollar, energy shortages, tax credits, and a desire to compete globally.
posted by gman at 5:23 PM PST - 38 comments

With the big screen bonanza imminent, let's have a go at bean-plating G.I. Joe.
posted by mikoroshi at 3:34 PM PST - 40 comments

Animal Kingdom Odd couples. Evidently, altruism is everywhere.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:33 PM PST - 26 comments

Jacqui Smith to reclassify cannabis - despite pressure from the UK Government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the Home Secretary has announced the reversal of Tony Blair's 2004 decision to downgrade cannabis. Critics see the move as pandering to tabloid scaremongering
posted by Acey at 3:28 PM PST - 59 comments

Art curators explain (on youtube) Luc Tuymans art and suggest how people on the street would respond to it. How correct are they?
posted by semmi at 3:05 PM PST - 23 comments

Ebbsfleet? Never heard of it? Not even the new international railway station? A 50m sculpture is hoping to change that... the five short-listed designs have been revealed today.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 3:02 PM PST - 15 comments

Teams of student entrepreneurs around the world had six days to add value to a stack of Post-It notes as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The results are documented in Imagine It!, which aims to promote creative thinking. [more inside]
posted by divabat at 3:00 PM PST - 20 comments

The Day the Music Died The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) [...] has also been warning anyone who would listen that they should not “purchase” encrypted music from these services, since if these services go under then all that “purchased” music will no longer… what’s the word… “play”. But mostly people ignored them (and me), because, you know, Microsoft was at the center of it all, and nobody ever got fired for “buying” from Microsoft.
posted by desjardins at 2:18 PM PST - 67 comments

Gmail Redesigned is a really slick CSS makeover for - you guessed - Gmail. It uses the Stylish Firefox add-on. (So yes, this is something you would need a computer, firefox, and gmail to care about.)
posted by Wolfdog at 1:45 PM PST - 64 comments

Federal and state government officials and border activists say the garbage dumped in the Sonoran Desert by illegal immigrants and their smugglers is staggering. The cleanup is costing taxpayers millions. The Southern Arizona Project(pdf) is a multi-year program setup by the Bureau of Land Management to mitigate the impacts to the ecology by illegal immigration and smuggling. In 2006 alone, more than 1.18 million pounds of trash was collected along the southern Arizona border.
posted by netbros at 1:17 PM PST - 22 comments

WTF, Nature? is a blog about natural oddities. Kinda like Cute Overload, but with a different adjective.
posted by owhydididoit at 12:12 PM PST - 12 comments

Watch Spike Jonze's amazing skate video Yeah Right!, in it's entirety. Previously [more inside]
posted by auralcoral at 11:39 AM PST - 21 comments

Coming soon, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Undead, probably the first movie to combine Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, and vampires. It is, however, not the first time The Bard and the undead have been seen together. [more inside]
posted by cerebus19 at 11:24 AM PST - 86 comments

“I actually ran it by a number of colleagues who teach administrative law and constitutional law,” Professor Duffy said, recalling his own surprise at finding such a fundamental and important flaw. He thought he must have been missing something. Law prof notices that every US patent approved since 2000 was approved unconstitutionally and thus are all probably invalid. Looks like he may be right. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan at 10:36 AM PST - 49 comments

"What the autistic 12-year-old can't express verbally or in social interaction he can show through his carefully cut out geometric shapes assembled into characters in a paper collage."
posted by Orb at 9:56 AM PST - 30 comments

Like sea monkeys in your pants! Entomological blogger Bug Girl (previously) debunked a web site touting the benefits of giant Japanese non-biting genital lice as personal "pets" (they just live happily in your underwear. It’s so COOL! They grow, and have families. You can feel em living and crawling around!). She dismissed it as a hoax. So the site's author sent her a sample.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 9:34 AM PST - 60 comments

Gary Snyder, sublime and seminal poet of ecological awareness and activism [YouTube link], Zen appreciation of "ordinary mind" and American speech, shamanistic intimacy with the natural world, and surviving member of the Beat Generation (West Coast posse) at age 78, has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly poetry prize. "Gary Snyder is in essence a contemporary devotional poet, though he is not devoted to any one god or way of being so much as to Being itself," said Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman. "His poetry is a testament to the sacredness of the natural world and our relation to it, and a prophecy of what we stand to lose if we forget that relation.” Previous recipients of the Lilly prize include Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, and W.S. Merwin. [Previously mentioned here.]
posted by digaman at 9:15 AM PST - 44 comments

The Mediocre Samaritan is a bittersweetly funny film fictionalization of an event that took place in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin on February 21, 2007. Produced by J. Elvis Weinstein of MST3K, Stinkburger Inc. and Cinematic Titanic fame. (Event detailed previously on Metafilter. Also, NSFW for a couple seconds of pasty, naked male butt and tactfully censored footage of Casa de Culo.)
posted by cog_nate at 9:08 AM PST - 14 comments

I though documenting my early sex life would be a perfect reason to use Polaroids to do something other than take naked pictures, yet to still play on the sexual identity of the medium. I lived in Alexandria from 1980 to 1999. These were my formative years and they determined the way I dealt with women. A guy documents the spots in his old neighborhood (SFW) where he got kissed, dumped, laid or confused as a kid, and tries to work out "what went wrong." (via, via — both NSFW)
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:58 AM PST - 16 comments

Of forty participants in Milgram's first experiment on obedience to authority, fifteen refused to continue at some point. An insight into the thoughts of one man who refused to obey Milgram's immoral orders.
posted by iffley at 8:52 AM PST - 45 comments

It's 15:00 UTC. Do you know where your Common Toads are...? World on the Move.
posted by Kronos_to_Earth at 7:59 AM PST - 1 comments

Meet the new boss... Same as the old boss.
posted by psmealey at 6:55 AM PST - 43 comments

Pixeljam (the folks responsible for the retro flash classic Gamma Bros) have just released a new game: Dino Run. Control your dinosaur and escape the wall of doom.
posted by pancreas at 6:48 AM PST - 17 comments

In addition to violins, violas and cellos, there are also Stradivarius guitars. Two still exist: one in South Dakota and one in the Ashmolean in Oxford (see a reproduction of the Oxford one here). These are Baroque guitars, strung a little like modern ones without the low E string and with the other five strings doubled. Instructions for Baroque guitar. [more inside]
posted by motty at 6:33 AM PST - 14 comments

You say you don't like drum machines? Well, here's one even the staunchest Luddite has gotta love. Or you might like some of the recent experiments in making the interfaces more physical. And surely you'll admit this one's really very charming. Wanna go non-Western? Get yer talas out with this tabla machine. It'll be only a matter of time, then, till you get into the whole classical Hindustani gitchtronica thing, which is what the cool kids are into. [NOTE: see hoverovers for link descriptions]
posted by flapjax at midnite at 6:14 AM PST - 22 comments

FileSharingFilter: With the possible exception of Sweden, Canada is today's frontier upon which the war of file-sharing legality is waged, with the greatest number of file-sharers per capita, and a steady increase in the number of persons who partake (according to the OECD). Historically, the CRIA's own piracy campaign (2004) was given birth only one year after the RIAA began suing individuals (2003) for participating in peer-to-peer file distribution. Unlike the RIAA, the CRIA was shot down by the courts, establishing a sort of precedent in favour of the end-user which has been upheld ever since, and indeed even reinforced. However, we may be seeing the beginning of the end as QuebecTorrent now fights the good fight to prevent a legal precedent outlawing Canadian BitTorrent trackers.
posted by tybeet at 5:52 AM PST - 21 comments