August 20

Selections from H.P. Lovecraft's brief tenure as a Whitman's Sampler copywriter.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:22 AM - 0 comments - Post a Comment

Follow the money: for the past year, the big trade was short bank stocks, and use the cash to go long oil. Massively profitable, but now that trade is unwinding. So where is the big money being invested now? Lots of places: diamonds, fine art, guitars, and Madonna.
posted by Mutant at 2:50 AM - 14 comments

The latest part of Doki and Nabi's attempt to find happiness. Previously on Metafilter. The top link takes you to the home page, select 'English" and then "amalloc" in the side bar. Will they find happiness? Perhaps Yoda knows?
posted by fallingbadgers at 1:52 AM - 6 comments

Two commercial pilots find themselves on the no-fly list. One pilot sues after having his flight privileges revoked, while the second pilot (and a five-year old sharing his name) note they can bypass the watchlist by checking in using their initials instead of their full names. TSA has also found themselves in the news this week for disrupting 40 flights and damaging 9 planes during an overzealous security check.
posted by grippycat at 12:03 AM - 23 comments

August 19

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 - 6 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 - 26 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 - 20 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 - 43 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 - 13 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 - 59 comments

Geographer Trevor Paglen, who researches the so-called "black world" of the military (previously: secret military patches, setec astronomy, tracing unmarked military planes, Torture Taxi), is curating a collection of his photos of classified satellite activity, The Other Night Sky, now at the Berkeley Art Museum. He's identified 189 such satellites.
posted by liketitanic at 6:19 PM - 3 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 - 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 - 47 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 - 9 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 - 92 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 - 72 comments

Google goes geothermal with EGS.
posted by Artw at 1:06 PM - 14 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 - 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 - 21 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 - 9 comments

Picturing our thoughts. "We're looking for too much in brain scans." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 12:20 PM - 14 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 - 68 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 cklennon at 6:23 AM - 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 - 165 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 - 23 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 - 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 - 24 comments

August 18

One Pill Makes You Autistic -- And One Pill Changes You Back. It might also lead to recreational autism, where people who want to take a break from having messy emotions about other people decide to unplug and enter a state where human relationships are no more important than inanimate objects. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 9:43 PM - 67 comments

Inspired by an episode of the short-lived TV series Medical Investigation, researchers have found that survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic continue to make antibodies against the virus.
posted by Knappster at 9:05 PM - 11 comments

Make make a pancake from Atlanta all the way to the Great Lakes! [via]
posted by grapefruitmoon at 8:16 PM - 8 comments

The RIAA has taken action against the much-beloved muxtape. Alas, the many predictions regarding muxtape.com's inevitable demise have proven to be true.. With the recent speculation regarding Pandora, who else is next? [more inside]
posted by crazyray at 8:13 PM - 53 comments

The Hong Kong Lego Users Group created an exhibition called Lego Sport City, a recreation of the Olympic Village in Lego. It's 3m x 8m, and has over 300,000 bricks; you can read more about it here and here. Brickshelf has a very comprehensive collection of photos here, including a lot of shots showing the construction and the smaller details. [Via /.]
posted by Upton O'Good at 7:36 PM - 8 comments

The US military has been putting more attention into brain science research, covering such potential applications as mind reading, mind control, cognitive enhancement and brain-machine interfaces. This is detailed in the report "Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience and Related Technologies" (also available in an abridged PDF version), authored by a National Research Council committee convened by the Department of Defense.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 4:53 PM - 29 comments

Society In Decline Project: Intrastate Commerce
posted by Dave Faris at 3:59 PM - 14 comments

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 "represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm." The highest ranked factor is Keyword Use in Title Tag.
posted by Soup at 3:37 PM - 44 comments

Yearbook Yourself. Have you ever thumbed through an old yearbook and wondered what you'd look like if you were part of that class? Wonder no more! Try on a 50s beehive hairdo, become a 60s flower child or prepare to join the cast of "That 70s Show".
posted by scalefree at 2:10 PM - 23 comments

An Iraqi national with a fascinating background, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad has been documenting the situation in Iraq. His video report is in three parts on YouTube (1, 2, 3). Of particular note is the cemetery on the outskirts of Sadr City (at 2:13 of segment 2), which is disturbing beyond words.
posted by dbiedny at 1:53 PM - 11 comments

Psych Securities LLC. "With future forecasts declaring ultimate doom from all components of the man-altered world, it seems there is a clog in the conduit of information transmitted between those in control and the public at large. Black Ops, psychological torture, acoustic weapons, Project Starfire, and a multitude of other state sponsored programs exist, well-hidden in plain sight, shrouded in a stigma of conspiracy and diluting any significant public inquiry. Psych Securities LLC is an ongoing exploration of this aforementioned covert reality, most clearly seen while in an alternative psychological state. By compiling declassified documents, historical narratives, and psychedelic conjecture, a visual world is pieced together; undermining strategies of deception and concealed truths." [Via]
posted by homunculus at 12:12 PM - 39 comments

Digital Apoptosis is a photoblog, with a new photo posted pretty much daily. You can also browse photos by topic/location. Many are fairly stunning. Via (second bullet item).
posted by cog_nate at 11:39 AM - 8 comments

Richard Wilkinson's illustrations - modern, melancholy pictures with a subdued palette but vivid identity.
posted by nthdegx at 11:27 AM - 6 comments

Then I imagined what my friends would say if I got killed: I kept hearing them retell the story of how I went out to O'Hare to get a cat and instead met my doom wandering down the middle of a highway in a blizzard. I could just hear them saying, It's how he would have wanted to go ... [more inside]
posted by enn at 11:18 AM - 89 comments

"Magnum photographer Thomas Dworzak is in Georgia for The Wall Street Journal. His photographic essays from the region span two decades and tell a moving story of the people and now war there." [more inside]
posted by chunking express at 10:13 AM - 29 comments

I made tea. {Flash, I think. Via notcot.}
posted by dobbs at 9:30 AM - 59 comments

A View of America ― Aquariums, beaches, gardens, monuments, parks, zoos, etc. This site aims to describe American attractions that tourists may find interesting. Listings are sorted by state and by category. Also includes recipes, jokes, and puzzles. [more inside]
posted by netbros at 7:19 AM - 28 comments

Ret. Col. Andrew Bacevich speaks to Bill Moyers (transcript) about the American empire and his new book "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."
posted by geos at 7:00 AM - 75 comments

Year of Da Cat: Known as surfing's "Black Knight" or "The Angry Young Man of Surfing" (even "the consummate surf nazi") for his attitude, but more famously as "Da Cat" for his feline grace on a wave, Miki Dora defined the soul of surfing when it exploded into 60's popularity via Gidget (a historical moment in which he had no small part). Cashing in as the go-to stunt surfer for beach party movies even as he decried surfing's commercialization, Dora parlayed his notoriety in the surf media (including a highlight in The Endless Summer) to icon status, venerated even more since his death in 2002. [more inside]
posted by bonefish at 6:22 AM - 7 comments

Journalist Leroy Sievers has lost his fight with cancer. He passed away Friday night. He was 53. His blog, My Cancer, and his commentaries on NPR, documented the progression of his disease while creating a community of those touched by cancer themselves.
posted by Toekneesan at 4:23 AM - 19 comments

10 Futuristic User Interfaces. [...] we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 2:33 AM - 57 comments

Truth's Caper : essay by Simon Blackburn on Sokal's Hoax.
posted by Gyan at 1:22 AM - 152 comments

August 17

Following up to this post, the people at the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust recently completed their 18-year project to build a new steam locomotive. Congratulations are in order.
posted by pjern at 9:23 PM - 32 comments

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