MetaFilter

"Individuals Active in Civil Disturbances". Rare Alabama publication from the Civil Rights era. Courtesy of the Memory Hole.
posted by plep at 11:47 PM PST - 5 comments

Florida band plans to stage suicide. If you're dying of a terminal disease, you could always go this route.
posted by Lusy P Hur at 11:11 PM PST - 19 comments

Bring Back the Elephants! This article proposes returning these "super keystone species" to the Americas, which were inhabited by proboscideans for so long. The eating habits of free-ranging elephants would help prevent wildfires, and this extreme exercise in rewilding would restart the evolution of one of humanity's own "evolutionary nursemaids."
posted by homunculus at 8:54 PM PST - 23 comments

Caribou Coffee is smacked with a lawsuit for doing nothing when four employees complained of same-sex harassment from their boss. Among the allegations, one claims that the woman "[invited] one of the plaintiffs to her house to engage in some type of sexual activity with her dogs." You've gotta love the local tv news treatment of any given situation. Streaming video also available.
posted by Hammerikaner at 7:32 PM PST - 6 comments

The IAAIS othersise known as "Radio Reading Services. Policy Statement: Everyone with a visual impairment, physical disability or learning disability has a right to equal access to all forms of information available to the general public. IAAIS works actively to promote and protect this access.

More inside.
posted by ashbury at 7:14 PM PST - 4 comments

In a move sure to please independent record store owners and further alienate everyone else, music giant Universal has scrapped its to lower CD prices to a MSRP of $12.98. Just when you thought they might be getting it.
posted by keswick at 6:08 PM PST - 25 comments

"You'd think that predicting human behavior would be easy...everyone should be a rational economizer, busy calculating their individual costs and benefits, and acting accordingly. Right?" So begins the review of Socionomics: The Science of History and Social Prediction on slashdot. I've always thought the Elliot Wave Theory sounded like psuedoscience, but found the rational choice theory problematic as well, even ridiculous at times. What's voodoo, and what's promising in advancing predictive social sciences?
posted by weston at 3:24 PM PST - 15 comments

U.S. court rules FTC overstepped its authority when it set up the list to block telemarketing calls. Damn.
posted by MidasMulligan at 2:45 PM PST - 64 comments

American Routes with Nick Spitzer is one of the best radio shows ever. It's a "... two-hour public radio program produced in New Orleans, presenting a broad range of American music -- blues and jazz, gospel and soul, old-time country and rockabilly, Cajun and zydeco, Tejano and Latin, roots rock and pop, avant-garde and classical. Plus stories and conversations with musicians and everyday people, known and unknown." There are great archived interviews with people like Dick Dale, Calvin Cooke, Sleepy LeBeef, Koko Taylor, Bob Moog, Nick Hornby, Ahmet Ertegun, John Hammond Jr., Keely Smith, Jim Jarmusch and everyone in between. Playlists back to April 1998. Photos. The shows usually have a theme--"Cool", "Arabs and Jews in Jazz & Blues and Beyond", "East Texas / West Louisiana"--and are always interesting. Get even more info. at Deep Routes .
posted by lobakgo at 12:53 PM PST - 7 comments

Did you ever go to summer camp? Today I ran across the Adirondack camp and was struck by the beauty of the pictures on the site. However, I was stunned by the expense when I looked at their tuition rates. All of my summer camp experiences were at Boy Scout camps (Philmont, Emerald Bay, El Rancho Cima and Camp Orr). I never knew it before, but there are lots of kinds of camps: fine arts camps, camps for disabled children, camps affiliated with various churches and other organizations. So, did you go to camp? What was it like?
posted by Irontom at 12:48 PM PST - 50 comments

“Hybrid Humans” Very early on in the womb, two fertilized eggs that would have normally created fraternal twins will occasionally fuse to form one embryo, producing a "chimera": one person with two sets of DNA. The link goes to a Nature article, here is an NPR piece.
posted by o2b at 12:35 PM PST - 15 comments

Sexy? NOT! Nerve.com lists their top 50 "genital retracting people, places, and things". Safe for work. Linked via the the Sporting Press...
posted by vito90 at 12:24 PM PST - 50 comments

Historical Revisionism
All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.
posted by nofundy at 12:23 PM PST - 5 comments

Sex for Money, Money having Sex? Ban on Russian ads depicting euro having sex with dollar. Immoral or are they just dancing?
posted by kodas at 12:12 PM PST - 14 comments

Ugh - and Ooqa Ooqa The company that brought us "shoshkeles" (flash ads plastered over your webstite of choice), United Virtualities - has now launched a newer, more annoying ad banner/tool/, ooqa-ooqa, which basically takes over your browser, removes your toolbar, and inserts ads. (They call it a "Branded Browser", and say it's fully "opt-in", which it wasn't for me) I saw it in action here, at Forbes.com (to be a victim, I believe you need IE5+ on a PC, maybe not). Wasn't the idea of taking over the end-users browser squashed, chalked up as never a welcome or good idea years ago, when the ability to do it first arose?
posted by kokogiak at 11:47 AM PST - 47 comments

DynCorp Disgrace "Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston, a hulking 6-foot-5-inch Texan, and more than a year ago he blew the whistle on his employer, DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia..."
posted by psmealey at 11:31 AM PST - 27 comments

Sonnet Central Wordsworth once said of the sonnet that he hoped that those "[w]ho have felt the weight of too much liberty,/Should find such brief solace there, as I have found." Sonnet Central offers a copious library of sonnets, mainly in the Anglo-American tradition but with examples from around the world. Those who wish to explore further in the sonnet's paradoxically expansive "scanty plot of ground" (Wordsworth again) may also wish to try Petrarch's Canzoniere (complete set, Italian with English translations); Shakespeare's Sonnets (self-described as "amazing"; the full cycle with glosses and paraphrases, plus illustrations and links to other poems); Golden Age Spanish Sonnets (translations); Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets (a reflection on the traditional sonnet sequence); George Meredith's Modern Love (a bleaker revision of the sonnet sequence tradition, featuring sixteen-line "sonnets"); and an excerpt from John Hollander's Powers of Thirteen (do the math and you'll see the experiment--it's an interesting modern sequence).
posted by thomas j wise at 10:49 AM PST - 24 comments

A Cautionary Tale: DNA Analysis of Alleged Extraterrestrial Biological Material: Anatomy of a Molecular Forensic Investigation .pdf file
::From The National Institute for Discovery Science via The Daily Grail::
[more inside]
posted by anastasiav at 10:07 AM PST - 7 comments

It's not democracy if Republicans don't win! After spending $1.6 million to save California, Darrell Issa tells Republicans to vote No on recall if it means a Democrat will win.
posted by badstone at 10:02 AM PST - 25 comments

Directory of Iranians who blog in English
posted by hoder at 8:52 AM PST - 7 comments

Swedish band postcards via a machine that generates excitement
posted by mookieproof at 8:36 AM PST - 3 comments

Tehelka is the Indian journalism Web site that published video of bribe-taking on the Net, launching a Watergate-like corruption scandal at the highest levels of government. Since breaking the story, however, "Tehelka’s staff has gone from 120 people to three; its office has been vacated; its staffers arrested and harassed; and its debts have spiraled." But the site perserveres. And Malaysiakini seems to be following in its footsteps. As Doc Searles says, it's "the duct tape of journalism."
posted by hairyeyeball at 7:33 AM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Massachusetts governor has new plan to get death penalty re-introduced. Romney claims that his science is so tight that guilt will be irrefutable. It's an interesting angle to take to change legislation. I do, however, wonder how science can irrefutably detect crooked cops.
posted by Mayor Curley at 7:24 AM PST - 33 comments

Wind Power cheaper than coal, electric car does 0 to 60 in 3.7 w/300 mile cruising range

It's official: wind power is now cheaper than electricity from Coal, Stanford Researchers report in a study published in the Journal Science. Quiz for Metafilter science wonks: how much of current US energy consumption could be supplied by spending 200 billion dollars on wind turbines?

Meanwhile...Powered by 6800 lithium-ion batteries, the Tzero "from zero to 100 and through the quarter mile, will run with, or beat, the $281,000 Lamborghini Murci
posted by troutfishing at 6:53 AM PST - 53 comments

Psychedelic Flash [note: flash]
posted by crunchland at 6:24 AM PST - 8 comments

Important expose and interview runs on Salon today. "This evening the site the aritcle features is shut down. As soon as we get that new server up we'll host the materials (yes, we have a copy) that Diebold doesn't want the public to see. Diebold cannot silence everyone. " The links (2) for this piece can be found at URL given here. "If you're not outraged you are not paying attention. " The Agonist, as usual, is both outraged and paying attention.
posted by Postroad at 6:14 AM PST - 47 comments

Have more sex says the Conservative party in the UK, procreate for the good of the economy and solve the looming pensions crisis. "Europe's real demographic crisis is not longevity but birth rates". Research says, apparently, that most women want more children than they have, but could it also be the case that a growing number of people just don't see the attraction?
posted by jonvaughan at 4:44 AM PST - 30 comments

In her autobiography, "Living History," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recounts how China's imprisonment of a prominent human rights activist, Harry Wu, caused a sensation in the United States and nearly derailed her plans to attend a United Nations women's conference held in Beijing in 1995. In the officially licensed Chinese edition of Mrs. Clinton's book, though, Mr. Wu makes just a cameo appearance. While named, he is otherwise identified only as a person who was "prosecuted for espionage and detained awaiting trial." But nearly everything Mrs. Clinton had to say about China, including descriptions of her own visits here, former President Bill Clinton's meetings with Chinese leaders and her criticisms of Communist Party social controls and human rights policies, has been shortened or selectively excerpted to remove commentary deemed offensive by Beijing. My question: is anybody other than Hillary really suprised by this?
posted by RevGreg at 12:57 AM PST - 14 comments