I'm looking for some compact, relatively self-contained resources (posters, handouts, Youtube videos, the like) that lay out the fundamentals of usable document design in terms beginners could understand: just very basic principles like white space, balance, choosing fonts, use of color, etc.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Bardolph at 7:09 AM on July 21, 2015 (7 comments)

Knock knock!
   Who's there?
Norns
   Norns who?
Nordstrom!
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 5:50 AM on July 22, 2015 (50 comments)

In 1846, a dead snail was glued to a specimen card in the British Museum. In 1850, somebody realized that the snail…wasn’t so dead after all, kicking off a curious story of molluskular stoicism that charmed the mid 19th C. science-and-nature circuit. But what went on in the ensuing 150 years? Site user "nicebookrack" wanted to know, and posted question to Ask MetaFilter asking, well, whatever happened to the snail that wouldn’t die?
posted to MetaTalk by cortex at 11:53 AM on July 21, 2015 (85 comments)

A remake of the same song by Dead or Alive, only much better! Disclaimer: I was the producer of the album this is off of, not a performer. (MI)
posted to MeFi Music by edgeways at 7:36 PM on July 5, 2006 (33 comments)

Or, like gel pens? I was given a couple of coloring books and love them but I really know nothing about the best stuff to use for them and really can't afford to purchase a set I'll just be irritated with and need to replace to give me he results I want.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by merelyglib at 2:04 PM on July 13, 2015 (26 comments)

Keeping up with the breakneck pace of life at a San Francisco startup isn't as easy as it looks.
posted to MetaFilter by jjg at 5:01 PM on April 3, 2000 (8 comments)

The Web We Have to Save. SLhoder: "The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying. Why is nobody stopping it?" (h/t mkb, via ...uh... facebook.)
posted to MetaFilter by advil at 11:28 AM on July 14, 2015 (69 comments)

A Yes Yes No about the recent (and massive) dustup on Reddit.
posted to FanFare by radioamy at 8:06 PM on July 9, 2015 (9 comments)

Dune, 50 years on
posted to MetaFilter by fearfulsymmetry at 6:31 AM on July 3, 2015 (99 comments)

Should the next Librarian of Congress be the Librarian of Progress?
posted to MetaFilter by metaquarry at 10:35 AM on July 1, 2015 (33 comments)

A young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is selected to participate in a breakthrough experiment in artificial intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a breathtaking female A.I (Alicia Vikander).
posted to FanFare by Gin and Broadband at 3:56 AM on February 1, 2015 (99 comments)

An email to the wrong address sends us hurtling into the world of professional cookie advisors.
posted to FanFare by radioamy at 12:20 PM on June 18, 2015 (24 comments)

The radio signal that occupies 4625 kHz has reportedly been broadcasting since the late 1970s. The earliest known recording of it is dated 1982. Ever since curious owners of shortwave radios first discovered the signal, it has broadcast a repeating buzzing noise. Every few years, the buzzer stops, and a Russian voice reads a mixture of numbers and Russian names.
posted to MetaFilter by standardasparagus at 2:54 PM on June 15, 2015 (65 comments)

Things Garry Winogrand Can Teach You About Street Photography An amazing post about the life and work of Garry Winogrand, a street photographer (who HATED that phrase) who took millions of photographs in his lifetime--so many, in fact, that he died without seeing half a million of them.
posted to MetaFilter by ColdChef at 2:28 PM on June 10, 2015 (15 comments)

After reading the first two books in the Narnia series and realizing not everything from my childhood is going to hold up, I'd like to solicit recommendations.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by imabanana at 1:10 PM on June 9, 2015 (51 comments)

Somehow the idea of doing an alternate podcast theme riffing on Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger got into my head a while a go, and here it is.
posted to MeFi Music by cortex at 11:25 AM on June 3, 2015 (10 comments)

What is an octobass?, you may have wondered. The answer: It is a ridiculously huge bass.
posted to MetaFilter by theodolite at 6:45 PM on May 13, 2015 (29 comments)

Daenerys Targaryen ponders motherhood. Grey Worm ponders fear. Stannis makes a move. Jon makes a decision. Roose plans the future. Ramsay plans a wedding. Sansa finds a frenemy. Aemon finds his family. Brienne puts out feelers. Jorah puts out unwanted guests. And Tyrion takes a bath.
posted to FanFare by the man of twists and turns at 10:15 PM on May 10, 2015 (108 comments)

I've recently picked up The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammet. It blends a fairly standard hard boiled mystery novel plot with elements of the occult. I think this is something I'd like to read more of, although the occult aspect is most important, and the mystery can be of any sort (hardboiled or no). What are some other works that have an investigator taking on mysteries with occult elements (either real or imagined)?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by codacorolla at 1:42 PM on May 8, 2015 (46 comments)

Things get hotter with the sparrows, war in the North looks more inevitable and Sansa ponders her role in it. Down south Jamie reveals some of his motivation and learns a new fighting tactic. Across the narrow sea the Harpy's are starting to turn up the heat.
posted to FanFare by skewed at 10:04 PM on May 3, 2015 (97 comments)

The Open Wikipedia Ranking lets you browse Wikipedia pages "by importance". Their primary ranking system is called "Harmonic Centrality", but you can select other methods, including PageRank and raw Page Views. Type an inquiry into the search box or choose from one of the rather whimsically selected front page categories.
posted to MetaFilter by oneswellfoop at 2:38 AM on April 30, 2015 (9 comments)

Don comes up with a big idea; Roger asks Joan to help him fix a clerical error.
posted to FanFare by crossoverman at 2:58 AM on April 27, 2015 (152 comments)

Lucero Tena (Spanish) has amazing rhythm and control, as seen and heard in her dancing, tapping, clapping and snapping, but she is best known for her mastery of the castanets, used in accompaniment to a solo guitar along with her dancing, and perhaps more impressively, as a solo instrument in front of an orchestra there in a piece specifically written for her and her castanets. She may not dance any more, but her skill with the castanets is still astonishing. If you're lucky, you can catch her in a live performance.
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 12:35 PM on April 28, 2015 (13 comments)

A girl at the beach, one year before WWI. In 1913, Amateur photographer Mervyn O'Gorman took beautiful, vivid photos of his daughter using an early color photography process called autochrome.
posted to MetaFilter by Alexandra Michelle at 5:12 PM on April 24, 2015 (29 comments)

There's a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country's poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can't get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better. (Beeped version)
posted to FanFare by jenfullmoon at 10:59 AM on March 16, 2015 (13 comments)

Last year, Sophie's "Bipp" came out and blew a bunch of people's minds. It was XLR8R's best track of 2013 ("On a very basic level, it's almost impossible to define exactly (or even approximately) what 'Bipp' is.") Now the mysterious Sophie is going to be working with equally unusual J-pop star Kyary Pamyu Pamyu (of "PONPONPON" fame/notoriety), pointing toward something singular and unprecedented on the horizon. On some level "Bipp" might be a pop manifesto of sorts, or a distilled blueprint for the future - global and k-/j-pop influenced, strange and disorienting, candy-coated and synthetic to an uncomfortably garish extent. A lot of people are wondering what happens next. Well, a post-Bipp (or post-ringtone) era might be underway: enter A.G. Cook, Hannah Diamond, and the rest of the shadowy collective PC Music.
posted to MetaFilter by naju at 12:13 PM on June 4, 2014 (48 comments)

The Unknown War: WWII And The Epic Battles Of The Russian Front, the 20-episode documentary of the Nazi-Germany/Soviet Union conflict, first aired in the United States in 1978 but was subsequently pulled after the Soviet Union invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. "The footage was edited from over 3.5 million feet of film taken by Soviet camera crews from the first day of the war, 22 June 1941, to the Soviet entry into Berlin in May 1945. Most of these films have never been seen outside this documentary series." It is available in full (1040 minutes).
posted to MetaFilter by cwest at 1:58 AM on March 5, 2015 (24 comments)

The Problem: Toreadors were everywhere.
posted to FanFare by jazon at 12:42 PM on February 23, 2015 (3 comments)

The Problem: Everything’s gonna be fine.
posted to FanFare by jazon at 9:44 AM on February 3, 2015 (3 comments)

There was a lot that Errol Morris never knew about his brilliant, distant older brother Noel. Decades after Noel's death, Errol read an internet comment that said his brother had invented email. So he launched an investigation to find out if it was true.
posted to FanFare by radioamy at 8:08 AM on January 29, 2015 (13 comments)

Well, now things are getting interesting. We had a floor brawl, a couple of dumpings, and a potential kidnapping being planned!
posted to FanFare by jenfullmoon at 10:34 PM on February 1, 2015 (47 comments)

A man wants to dedicate a room of his house to the movie Frozen; his husband objects. With special expert witnesses Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez!
posted to FanFare by ocherdraco at 6:11 PM on February 4, 2015 (6 comments)

Locus Magazine has published its 2014 Recommended Reading List. BestSF.net has given its Best SF Short Story Award for 2014. Tables of contents have been announced for The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois, Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Two edited by Kathe Koja and Michael Kelly, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Nine edited by Jonathan Strahan. And several writers have called out their favorite stories of the year too, e.g. Ken Liu, Carmen Maria Machado and Sofia Samatar, Usman Malik, and Fran Wilde, Michael R. Underwood, Tina Connolly, and Beth Cato. Quite a few of these short fiction selections from 2014 have been published online in full.
posted to MetaFilter by Monsieur Caution at 9:10 PM on February 3, 2015 (28 comments)

INTERESTING.JPG is an AI trying its hardest to describe the contents of random news photos. Sometimes it does quite well. Sometimes it thinks ice is sheep. See also: Novice Art Blogger. See also, if you're daring: the super duper completely not-safe-for-work porn-analysis robot @NSFW_JPG. Via mefi's own cmyr on Projects.
posted to MetaFilter by cortex at 2:09 PM on February 3, 2015 (41 comments)

In the grand tradition of John Belushi and Joe Cocker, we now have Jimmy Fallon and Neil Young.
posted to MetaFilter by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 9:33 AM on February 4, 2015 (34 comments)

This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way, and even if we did… out of 32 Polish characters, why would this random one be the only one causing problems? Turns out, it wasn’t so random. This is a story of how four incidental ingredients spanning decades (if not centuries) came together to cause the most curious of bugs, and how we fixed it.
posted to MetaFilter by Chrysostom at 2:52 PM on February 3, 2015 (49 comments)

Audience can clap but ain't got no swing? No problem (if you're Harry Connick Jr.). (SLYT)
posted to MetaFilter by swift at 9:19 AM on February 2, 2015 (91 comments)

Television commercial for The Facebook from the mid-90s. (SLYT)
posted to MetaFilter by DirtyOldTown at 7:09 PM on January 21, 2015 (43 comments)

As Neda Maghbouleh pointed out for an article in the January 2009 issue of Center for New Racial Studies, the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama gave Portland newspapers a striking image of its racial makeup. Just look at the photo above from Portland during Senator Obama's presidential campaign. You'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe Dave Matthews Band was about to go on stage.

There's a reason why Portland, and Oregon in general, are so whitebread: it was founded as a whites-only, racist utopia with no room for black or Asian people.
posted to MetaFilter by MartinWisse at 10:32 AM on January 22, 2015 (147 comments)

Candide Thovex in "One of those days 2" a 5min first-person GoPro video of a perfect day at the Val Blanc, France resort.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 8:06 PM on January 18, 2015 (54 comments)

Late last year, a number of outlets reported that both AT&T and Verizon Wireless were injecting customer-identifiable, permanent tracking cookies into web requests. After this activity was made public, AT&T ceased injecting the cookies, claiming that they were only testing the practice. Verizon, however, did not. Now, computer scientist and lawyer Jonathan Mayer at Stanford University has reported that Verizon's advertising partner The Turn is using these super cookies to re-instate tracking cookies after a user clears their browser cache.
posted to MetaFilter by tocts at 12:53 PM on January 15, 2015 (101 comments)

This week we enter the mysterious, Byzantine underworld of domain sales, where people make money speculating on the website naming market. A few years ago, the owners of the popular journalism website longform.org blundered into this world when they innocently tried to procure longform.com. In this episode, we find out about their misadventures, and we hear from the Derek Jeter of URL purchases.
posted to FanFare by radioamy at 12:21 PM on January 1, 2015 (13 comments)

In June 2014, authorities released information about a massive child pornography ring being conducted in North Carolina.  Four suspects had already been arrested, and the police were asking the public for help finding a fifth suspect. But they didn't need to look very hard -- the suspect was about to turn himself in, almost by accident.
posted to FanFare by Potomac Avenue at 2:22 PM on January 13, 2015 (3 comments)

Yik Yak is a an app that allows users to communicate anonymously with anyone within a 10-mile radius. At Colgate University in upstate New York, the anonymity brought out a particularly vicious strain of racism that shook the school.
posted to FanFare by mathowie at 9:08 AM on January 15, 2015 (9 comments)

Trail Type is a site showcasing loads of examples of type found out on the trail. You probably thought there were only a couple standard fonts used by Forest Service and National Park organizations, but it turns out there are loads of different examples of handmade, routered-into-wood, and quickly made letterforms, and they're all beautiful.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 6:28 PM on January 12, 2015 (28 comments)

The acclaimed 26-episode WWII documentary "The World at War", produced by Thames Television and aired in 1973-1974, is available in full (clocking in at over 22 and a half hours).
posted to MetaFilter by cwest at 10:06 AM on January 6, 2015 (27 comments)

Please hit me with your favorite dad joke. I'm looking for those extremely lame ones like when you say, "I'm tired." Dad says, "Hey Tired, it's nice to meet you. I'm Dad." If you can cite who originally made the joke that's great, but not really needed (I just like giving credit). I would prefer short jokes to long jokes. Thank you. I'll take my answer off the air.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by cjorgensen at 7:44 AM on December 30, 2014 (104 comments)

A Facebook discussion about good books by well-known authors passing into undeserved obscurity had me looking up reviews of Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth. In the comments on Jo Walton's review there's a discussion about the ending, specifically whether he wrote two distinct endings, replacing the an earlier one in later editions. Did Clarke rewrite the ending? Spoilers below the cut.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kattullus at 4:48 AM on December 29, 2014 (5 comments)

I'm looking for podcasts that have interesting guided meditations. I've found a few meditation podcasts, but they don't seem to have updated in ages. I have an android phone and use Podkicker. I'd like sleep and relaxation themed meditations, preferably less than 50 minutes long.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Kitty Stardust at 8:35 AM on December 29, 2014 (12 comments)

Director Mel Brooks spent a lot of money on white handkerchiefs while making his 1974 tour de farce, Young Frankenstein. "I gave everybody in the crew a white handkerchief," said the 88-year-old comedy legend during a recent phone interview. "I said, 'When you feel like laughing, put this in your mouth.' Every once in a while, I'd turn around and see a sea of white handkerchiefs, and I said, 'I got a hit.'"

Young Frankenstein was more than a hit. It is a comic masterpiece.

An interview with Mel Brooks on the 40th anniversary of Young Frankenstein, with an overview of the events that lead to what Mel Brooks calls 'by far the best movie I ever made.'
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 4:05 PM on December 20, 2014 (77 comments)