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A 400 year old clam has been slaughtered by ruthless 'scientists'. How much could this clam have told us about history, about longevity, about life? Probably not much--it's a clam.
comment posted at 4:17 PM on Oct-28-07

So he didn't read the baby books! BFD says Judith Rich Harris, author of the "No Two Alike", and originator of a controversial theory about personality development. Namely, that when it comes to our kids' adult personalities, what we did as parents doesn't really matter much at all.
comment posted at 6:37 PM on Oct-26-07
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Cat Found!!! Not very friendly, I think he might be scared.
comment posted at 6:47 PM on Oct-26-07

Recently passed Benjamin Libet conducted some famous experiments that had incredible implications on how we think about free will and consciousness. The results of these experiments are open to interpretation.
comment posted at 2:54 PM on Oct-26-07
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comment posted at 3:26 PM on Oct-27-07

Director Henry Bean has written and directed a new movie, Noise. It's about the bad kind of noise: car alarms that won't stop going off, garbage trucks that wake you up, endless horns honking. You know the pain.
comment posted at 10:25 AM on Oct-24-07
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comment posted at 8:02 PM on Oct-24-07

Dennis Kucinich had a UFO encounter. [one link newsfilter]. "The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him." I guess this sort of puts him in the company of other delusional nutjobs that have seen giant UFOs.
comment posted at 12:55 PM on Oct-24-07

Nad Shot
comment posted at 7:15 AM on Oct-23-07

Warming Climate Fuels Mega-Fires (11-minute video) 60-Minutes reports. "Recently there has been an enormous change in Western fires. In truth, we've never seen anything like them in recorded history. It appears we're living in a new age of mega-fires -- forest infernos ten times bigger than the fires we're used to seeing."
comment posted at 7:33 AM on Oct-23-07

Jon Ronson decides "I'm going to tell my son the worst swearword in the world". His follow up article is also interesting. Incidentally, his "Bad Science" colleague from The Guardian did uncover a list of the worst swearwords from the BBC no less (and previously)
comment posted at 4:54 AM on Oct-23-07

45 bits of not-so known trivia, much of it word related.
comment posted at 5:03 AM on Oct-23-07

How to properly hug a baby
comment posted at 5:09 AM on Oct-23-07
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comment posted at 2:02 PM on Oct-23-07
comment posted at 4:18 PM on Oct-23-07

Wilson et al v. McConnell et al. This site has all the legal documents surrounding Valerie Plame's legal case against the CIA over her new book. CIA censors blacked out 10 percent of the copy, as can seen in this excerpt from the book, and Plame is not allowed to speak freely in her interviews. [Via No Quarter.]
comment posted at 12:26 PM on Oct-22-07
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comment posted at 3:17 PM on Oct-23-07

The worst sounding thing ever? Van Halen, on a show of their reunion tour in North Carolina, attempting to match up their pre-recorded background synths for "Jump" with their live instruments & vocals. The pre-recorded material is accidentally being played back at a higher pitch, approximately 1.5 semitones sharp of the key from the guitar/vocals.
comment posted at 11:00 AM on Oct-22-07
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comment posted at 6:40 AM on Oct-23-07
comment posted at 8:32 AM on Oct-23-07

Castle Kashan, the castle on the hills above Malibu, is gone. The home of an Iranian oil minister's daughter, Castle Kashan was built in 1977, appeared in episodes of The Rockford Files, and was the setting for numerous weddings and the Malibu Film Festival. Fret not, America has lots of other castles. Canada, too! (previously on MetaFilter)
comment posted at 5:19 AM on Oct-23-07

The US may be the economic superpower, and China the new manufacturing powerhouse, but there is one industry in which Africa still leads the world: the manufacture of red tape. The World Bank releases its 2008 Doing Business report (overview, pdf) on the ease of, well, doing business. The USA is pushed into third by plucky New Zealand and Singapore but overall Eastern Europe has overtaken East Asia as the most business-friendly environment behind high-income OECD countries.
comment posted at 9:09 AM on Oct-22-07

Chasing women will take years off of your life. But hey, things always even out somehow. You'll just return the favor to your poor, innocent mother.
comment posted at 10:25 AM on Oct-20-07
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comment posted at 6:11 AM on Oct-23-07

How The Edwardians Spoke :: BBC documentary via Google Video, about an hour
comment posted at 10:27 PM on Oct-19-07

Two executives of the alternative newspaper chain Village Voice Media were arrested last night after running a story about grand jury subpoenas [PDF] they received seeking reporters' notes and information on who visits their Phoenix New Times Web site. The article, titled "Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution," claims that the grand jury investigation stems from a long-running feud with controversial county sheriff Joe Arpaio (who calls himself "America's toughest sheriff"). The subpoenas demand New Times turn over all notes, tapes and records of the reporters who have ever written about Arpaio. The subpoenas also seek online profiles of anyone who read four specific articles about Arpaio and profiles of anyone who visited the paper's Web site since Jan. 1, 2004. Also sought is information on what Web users did while on the site.
comment posted at 2:19 PM on Oct-19-07
comment posted at 7:35 PM on Oct-19-07

Hammer-wielding granny smashes up Comcast office.
comment posted at 2:19 AM on Oct-24-07
comment posted at 7:08 AM on Oct-24-07