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China's Olympic beaches, choked by a plague of green algae. Sez David Suzuki: This is not an unusual occurrence, but it is a symptom of an underlying problem with potential repercussions far more serious than hampering Olympic events. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu at 10:31 PM PST - 11 comments

Things [blank] people like. New search engine RushmoreDrive is a first step into the waters of Identity Based searching. Specifically, it weighs your demographic heavily when ordering your search results.
posted by tkolar at 9:47 PM PST - 33 comments

"Roy Den Hollander, a graduate of the Ivy League university’s business school, contends Columbia's Institute for Research on Women and Gender is discriminatory and unconstitutional because there is no equivalent 'men’s studies' programme." So Mr. Hollander is suing Columbia, thereby completing his "trilogy of antifeminist lawsuits." More at Gothamist.
posted by milquetoast at 9:43 PM PST - 44 comments

Dave Matthews Band saxaphonist LeRoi Moore dead at 46 Died unexpectedly from complications of an ATV accident back in June. DMB is apparently going ahead with their concert tonight at the Staples Center in LA. Can't imagine them withour LeRoi, though. Here is one of my favorite DMB tracks featuring LeRoi.
posted by Bluecoat93 at 8:08 PM PST - 60 comments

Cockatoos are much better dancers than macaws. Well that was my clear conclusion after watching the first two vid clips linked to why animals dance in this Guardian feature. And since this is from a serious researcher I don't think they are faked. For those with much more time, this site has an interesting podcast on the topic of music and the brain.
posted by binturong at 7:18 PM PST - 21 comments

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile | And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife | And you may ask yourself... Well...How did I get here?
posted by unSane at 7:02 PM PST - 68 comments

RADIOMARU is (award-winning Canadian cartoonist) Bryan Lee O'Malley's website. Several free comics are in the offering, ranging from the quirky to strange to inexplicably bizarre. [more inside]
posted by CrunchyFrog at 5:15 PM PST - 8 comments

The Pisces Effect is a statistician's find that birth sign may predict likelihood of Olympics medal victories relating to Zodiacal attributes. Past statistical studies indicate Pisceans may be bad drivers...with perhaps some fluctuation for hemisphere. One columnist feels Washington, D.C.'s problems (and potential) may be attributable to being Pisces. Maybe Pisceans [flash; auto/unstoppable sound] have more luck as horses. Previously: [post] [comments]
posted by batmonkey at 4:15 PM PST - 54 comments

Get your learn on. 180+ ways of investigating the human brain = hours of fun for the whole family. Thanks to an innocuous question by a 5 year old, my entire evening is now being spent investigating and discussing the structure and workings of the human brain. This flash site lets you explore the workings of the brain according to 12 subject areas (each with subtopics which are not included in the "180" count), within each of which are 5 levels of organization from social to molecular, within each of which are three levels of explanation (beginner, intermediate, and advanced.) discovered via Wikipedia.
posted by ThusSpakeZarathustra at 3:27 PM PST - 10 comments

Emily is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' (watch the video) - from the team who, in part, brought you GTA4. [more inside]
posted by nitsuj at 3:13 PM PST - 105 comments

It's that time of year again. College students are buying supplies and returning to classes, as their prospective professors prepare syllabi for their budding new pupils. It also means it's time for Metafilter's semi-annual "get off my lawn" snarkfest blowout, which can only be sparked by the release of Beloit College's Mindset List for incoming Freshman. Now with webcast goodness!
posted by bjork24 at 1:11 PM PST - 76 comments

Google goes geothermal with EGS.
posted by Artw at 1:06 PM PST - 16 comments

Baseball behind barbed wire. Japanese-Americans brought baseball with them when they emigrated to America. The game had been introduced to Japan, so the story goes, by American Professor Horace Wilson in the 1870s. When Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were relocated to internment camps during World War II, playing baseball was one of the few freedoms allowed them by camp directors. [more inside]
posted by nanojath at 12:54 PM PST - 4 comments

Tim Kreider (previously) tells the tale of telling the tale of getting stabbed in the throat. [more inside]
posted by griphus at 12:32 PM PST - 23 comments

Hawaii 70s-80s Punk Museum Back in the late '70s and early '80s, Honolulu had a small but close-knit punk scene. Poi Dog Pondering started out in Hawaii before relocating to Austin, then to Chicago. Two members of Boston's Dambuilders started out as the eXactones. Many other bands -- such as The Wrong and Cringer -- would relocate to the Mainland, hoping to seek an audience they couldn't quite find back home (embedded autoplay audio). Dave Carr was involved with a lot of these bands, and the Hawaii 70s-80s Punk Museum was curated from much of his own collection. [more inside]
posted by NemesisVex at 12:28 PM PST - 9 comments

Picturing our thoughts. "We're looking for too much in brain scans." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 12:20 PM PST - 16 comments

It started with sequencing 8-bit chipsets on Nintendo Game Boys, but the Chiptune scene has now expanded well beyond game systems. Reformat the Planet is the essential introduction to this awesome new genre, and proves it's more than just a blip. This week only you can watch the feature length documentary in its entirety on Pitchfork.tv. [more inside]
posted by sveskemus at 7:15 AM PST - 71 comments

In a strange and incestuous twist of the space-web-time continuum, a fascinating comment about the mechanism by which The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (previOusly.) records every bit of daily news appeared inside a post on PVRBlog, the red-headed stepchild blog of our selfless benefactor, user 1.
posted by jckll at 6:23 AM PST - 26 comments

A group of 100 college presidents has come together to state that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses. They want to encourage a dialogue about lowering the drinking age. They face opposition from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and from other college presidents, who accuse them of 'not wanting to deal with the problem'.
posted by showbiz_liz at 5:45 AM PST - 171 comments

The Echo Label (splash page, site offline) a subsidary of Chrysalis, is "an independent creatively driven record company which nurtures artists before they sign deals with major labels." Blaming a "challenging macroeconomic environment" for hampering sales of CDs, a decline in synchronisation revenues from music used in TV programmes, films and advertisement, Chrysalis recently warned its investors that the Echo Label has performed below management expectations, with "marginally higher" write-offs for new unproven artists, noting that it had not "upstreamed" any artists to major labels in the third quarter.
posted by three blind mice at 5:22 AM PST - 26 comments

After Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's diagnosis made the news, a group of knitters banded together to make him a gift. The result was The Pratchgan, which -- after several months of organization and knitting -- made it into Pratchett's hands this past weekend. There's a Flickr pool of individual squares and the construction of the afghan. [Via Cleolinda] [more inside]
posted by pxe2000 at 4:45 AM PST - 22 comments

A Swiss gourmet - who was on a world tour of Michelin three-starred restaurants when he mysteriously disappeared before paying the bill at El Bulli - has just been spotted in Geneva. [more inside]
posted by gomichild at 1:13 AM PST - 24 comments