Enzyme reactions use quantum tunneling. British scientists have apparently solved the question of how enzymes speed up atomic reactions -- through a quantum tunneling effect at the reaction site. Just when you thought biology couldn't get any cooler. [via]
posted to MetaFilter by spiderwire at 10:12 AM on August 27, 2006 (22 comments)

Flight Patterns (watch the overview video) is a cool visualization based on FAA flight records for one day. You can see the overnight lull, then the morning sweep across the country in a series of short videos. It's like cabspotting, but on a much larger scale. This is from the same guy behind The Sheep Market.
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 9:08 AM on August 26, 2006 (23 comments)

Photographing Squirrels with Cameras No really, taking pictures of real wild squirrels next to real vintage cameras. No computer editing, he swears. Some are completely odd and others entirely cute as hell. Hours of time well spent!
posted to MetaFilter by Dome-O-Rama at 7:14 PM on August 25, 2006 (23 comments)

The Trailer Mash is the spot for movie trailer recuts and mashups. We've done the subject before, but now the subject has its own blog. Current new favorites: Garden State as a murder thriller and School of Rock as a kidnap film. [via mefi projects]
posted to MetaFilter by mathowie at 9:56 AM on August 25, 2006 (12 comments)

Neutral Moresnet - a wedged-shaped, almost Esperanto speaking, janiformed currency using, one-step anthem playing, created because of a zinc mine, mini-state, that is now nothing more than some border markers. [more inside]
posted to MetaFilter by tellurian at 9:00 PM on August 24, 2006 (25 comments)

Playing cards and tarot cards. An amazing resource about cards with hundreds of scanned decks, and an illustrated timeline of cards through the ages. Cards started in China, but the link to the West was the gorgeous decks of the Marmeluks [Coral cache],which used 52 cards (though the suites were polo sticks, coins, swords, and cups), from there, they spread to Europe and evolved into the tarot and playing cards. Through their history, cards remained art there are many beautiful decks in the past, and 20th century artists like Dali and Hockney created their own decks [coral cache].
posted to MetaFilter by blahblahblah at 12:31 AM on August 24, 2006 (14 comments)

Free Your Imagination : from the furry "Yeti crab" to the almiqui, animals discovered and rediscovered this millenium.
posted to MetaFilter by anjamu at 7:30 PM on August 23, 2006 (17 comments)

New Orleans City Ordinance #26031 --...those who have not been able to make the necessary repairs to their battered homes by August 29th risk having their property seized and bulldozed by the city.... Bush says today: Katrina Repair Will Take Time, but time's up for many New Orleans residents. (more here from ACORN, who has been trying to help save homes there)
posted to MetaFilter by amberglow at 2:48 PM on August 23, 2006 (62 comments)

Feature request: I want swap.metafilter.com. I really want to unload my junk on my fellow MeFites, and buy their junk off them. Please, Matt? Craigslist and eBay don't require a 5-spot to join, unlike MeFi, so that cuts down dramatically on the skeezy lowlife scammer factor. Another advantage is that this place is a real community and people care about their reputations. The community self-policing is strong, and MeFi's full of interesting people with (most likely) compelling junk they want to get rid of. One man's junk is another man's treasure.

Also, people here are really creative. Wouldn't it be cool if Miguel could sell his books here, for instance? Or Steven Den Beste could trade anime with other otaku. MeFites who are painters could sell their paintings. Sculpture. And so on.
posted to MetaTalk by evariste at 10:21 PM on August 22, 2006 (59 comments)

How can I use a Barney Fife Impersonator at my next event? Do vasectomies prevent abductions? Where is the least painful spot? All these (and many more) questions answered at UsedFaqs, a round-up of the more bizarre frequently asked questions from all around the series of tubes.
posted to MetaFilter by jonson at 12:20 AM on August 23, 2006 (12 comments)

Color of My Sound. Choose a color of a sound or song and see how others have voted with their comments. Add your own audio files. (more)
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye at 10:33 AM on August 22, 2006 (7 comments)

Dirty Car Art
posted to MetaFilter by mattbucher at 11:57 AM on August 22, 2006 (27 comments)

In a small town in Central Serbia called Guca, the "Festival of Brass Music" takes place since 1961. The main event is an epic trumpet competition which Boban Markovic has won 5 times. (You might have heard his playing in several films by Emir Kusturica, most notably The Underground.) Now there is also a film about the festival , which begins this year on the 30th of August.

The festival is an insane mixture of Oktoberfest, Carnival of Rio and folklore show with a Serbian twist.

Some examples of the music to be heard on the festival. And if you like those, you'd better check out Fanfare Ciocarlia and Taraf de Haidouks too.
posted to MetaFilter by hoskala at 9:39 AM on August 19, 2006 (15 comments)

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative provides access to "1,800 digital images, the work of 100 photographers, who used 50 different processes." It's the first online batch of the Smithsonian's 13 million photographs. (More info here and here). The Enter the Frame feature lets you save your own photo sequences.
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 10:40 PM on August 20, 2006 (4 comments)

Mandolux - photographic desktop wallpapers. Just keep hittin' previous.
posted to MetaFilter by nthdegx at 3:04 AM on August 20, 2006 (22 comments)

a collection point for deleted threads from the front page of Metafilter.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by bigmusic at 4:06 AM on July 28, 2006

Crummy Church Signs
posted to MetaFilter by konolia at 4:10 PM on August 20, 2006 (59 comments)

Anna and Laura Tirocchi ran a dressmaking shop for the elite of Providence, Rhode Island between 1915 and 1947. In 1989 the building, which had been shut for 42 years, was found to contain a time capsule of the development of early 20th century fashion - from fabric and dresses to photographs and sewing machines and associated ephemera. The A&L Tirocchi Dressmakers Project website showcases the collection (after 12 years of research by RISD) through: the 514 project (with an image archive), essays, databases and exhibition sections. [via Intute]
posted to MetaFilter by peacay at 4:04 AM on August 18, 2006 (12 comments)

Indexed: life lessons in chart and graph form.
posted to MetaFilter by hydrophonic at 12:03 PM on August 17, 2006 (21 comments)

From Abadan to Zurvanism, The Encyclopaedia of the Orient is your one-stop shopping mecca for bite-sized info-bits on North Africa and the Middle East.
posted to MetaFilter by flapjax at midnite at 6:59 AM on August 19, 2006 (8 comments)

The strange saga of Harvey Matusow, "most hated man in America". Said to be the most notorious of the paid perjurious snitches for the Communist witch-hunters, married 12 times, gave LSD to Robert F. Kennedy, tangled with Roy Cohn, was prison buddies with Wilhelm Reich, recorded a psychedelic Jews Harp record, started the rumor that smoking dried banana peels gets you high (as an act of revenge against Chiquita Banana), wrote one of the first how-to books on computer hacking. [via]
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye at 7:32 PM on August 18, 2006 (20 comments)

Proverbs which also work the other way around.
posted to MetaFilter by signal at 6:43 PM on August 18, 2006 (31 comments)

The Domesday Book is online. This book is "a great land survey from 1086, commissioned by William the Conqueror to assess the extent of the land and resources being owned in England at the time, and the extent of the taxes he could raise. The information collected was recorded by hand in two huge books, in the space of around a year." You can browse it here. The site also has some background info both on England at the time and the book itself.
posted to MetaFilter by marxchivist at 6:02 AM on August 17, 2006 (20 comments)

Good evidence that dark matter is for real.
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 7:46 PM on August 16, 2006 (57 comments)

Nivbed's artwork
posted to MetaFilter by nthdegx at 4:49 AM on August 5, 2006 (13 comments)

Holding up sprigs of parsley, Trujillo's men queried their prospective victims: What is this thing called? The terrified victim's fate lay in his pronunciation of the answer. Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo spearheaded an anti-Haitian massacre in which armed thugs killed every Creole speaker who couldn't pronounce the trilled R in the Spanish word for parsley. (Using pronunciation to make ethnic distinctions is called a shibboleth, a tactic often used in wars.) The murders inspired Edwige Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat, as well as a poem recited for Bill Clinton by poet laureate Rita Dove. Ironically, Trujillo's desire to "whiten" Hispaniola not only led him to order the 1937 massacre, but to lobby in 1938 for the settlement of Jews fleeing Hitler.
posted to MetaFilter by jonp72 at 5:13 PM on August 5, 2006 (9 comments)

The sketchbooks of Edward Burne-Jones, Benjamin Champney, Henri-Edmond Cross, Jacques-Louis David, Paul Feeley, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Sanford Gifford, George Grosz, Frederic Leighton, and John Singer Sargent. UnderCover, Artists' Sketchbooks exhibition by the Harvard Art museums [via woolgathering]
posted to MetaFilter by bigmusic at 7:15 PM on August 14, 2006 (9 comments)

Sex in prehispanic times. Cuba Chronicles. The arrow of time. Brazilian homosexual culture. The sword and the cross. Very similar. Bestiarium. Mini-descriptions of the many varied exhibits. Essays in English and Spanish by the artists with their images from ZoneZero.
posted to MetaFilter by nickyskye at 10:42 AM on August 14, 2006 (7 comments)

The Daily Kitten No matter how jaded and cynical you are, it is well nigh impossible to visit this site and resist clicking thru at least a few weeks' worth of pictures.
posted to MetaFilter by Artifice_Eternity at 9:09 PM on May 8, 2006 (41 comments)

"Soon there would be no space left. But the cats kept coming. What could she do with them all? The solution turned out to be right outside Henriette's front door. If people could live on the houseboats which lined the canals, why not cats? And so came the idea to buy one for them." De Poezenboot.
posted to MetaFilter by reklaw at 3:18 PM on August 7, 2006 (22 comments)

The Stephen Colbert "On Notice Board" Generator
posted to MetaFilter by ColdChef at 4:30 PM on August 9, 2006 (59 comments)

Tiny animals look especially tiny when perched on fingers. From mefi's own specklet.
posted to MetaFilter by dersins at 11:19 AM on August 10, 2006 (35 comments)

TERRA! Men With 1,000 Prepaid Cellphones Planned To Attack Mackinac Bridge. Or sell them in Texas. Or, you know, something.
posted to MetaFilter by quonsar at 3:26 PM on August 13, 2006 (123 comments)

Yury Gitman and his students make electronic toys: Pululus; Mr. Spoon Man; even a Katamari! Learn how they make them, inside and out. More about Yury at we make money not art and his own website.
posted to MetaFilter by jessamyn at 10:40 AM on August 13, 2006 (3 comments)