August 20

A Good Poop is an entertaining blog by an occupational and environmental health student who enjoys finding oddities in medical and scientific research from PubMed. (via Look at This...)
posted by madamjujujive at 9:15 PM - 18 comments

Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road. Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world's. [more inside]
posted by destrius at 8:33 PM - 24 comments

The book 1421 was a publishing sensation, selling over a million copies in several languages. Its author, Gavin Menzies, despite being roundly criticized and thoroughly debunked, is back with a new book. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:23 PM - 19 comments

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong. [more inside]
posted by finite at 7:02 PM - 72 comments

A collection of riffs on the Mona Lisa.
posted by prefpara at 6:08 PM - 8 comments

Who watches The Watchmen? Kevin Smith has, Dave Gibbons has, Alan Moore won't (Gibbons hopes he'll watch the DVD), and if Fox has its way maybe YOU won't either.
posted by Artw at 5:00 PM - 44 comments

slyt: Two perpetrators of a poetic internet theology flamewar recite aloud, with hilarious, barbed, awesomely dorky results. Brother of Few Words vs Yasir Qadhi.
posted by By The Grace of God at 4:58 PM - 3 comments

Julien Briton draws calligraphy with light. [Via]
posted by gottabefunky at 4:52 PM - 7 comments

"Why the fuss? Well, Colin's a baby whale..." Oh no. They named the doomed little thing ('little' meaning about the size of a large car). Mal Holland's report from the Daily Telegraph gives a very illuminating rundown of the nervous breakdown that "Sydney's booming whale watching industry" is experiencing right now... [more inside]
posted by ZachsMind at 3:31 PM - 51 comments

Food Porn Daily. Brought to you by Amanda & Tyler from What We're Eating and Nicole from Pinch My Salt. Click, Drool, Repeat. [more inside]
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 3:25 PM - 20 comments

Frustrated with recent political developments, Malaysian blogger Kickdefella started an online protest of posting the Malaysian flag upside down on his blog, reflecting the use of an upside down flag as a sign of distress. Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi decries the move as 'evil'. More information at Global Voices Advocacy.
posted by divabat at 2:17 PM - 19 comments

The Archive. A short film by Sean Dunn and Ed David. "The world is dead out there. They have their ears closed. They don't understand what's going on at this moment. It's gonna take them 10, 15, 20 years to wake up and realize what they missed." Nobody has more records than Paul Mawhinney. He's ready to sell the whole thing for 6 cents on the dollar of their worth. 3 million records for $1 each. And nobody is buying. (Previously on Mefi.) [more inside]
posted by grabbingsand at 1:25 PM - 24 comments

A People's History for the Classroom [pdf] is a high school history lesson plan/workbook based on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The entire 124-page workbook available for free as a downloadable PDF, as part of the Zinn Education Project, supported by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. You must enter an email and agree to take a later survey to download.
posted by Miko at 12:28 PM - 35 comments

Can the Burmese people rescue themselves? A powerful piece by George Packer in the New Yorker on the recent history and current conditions in Burma.
posted by homunculus at 12:24 PM - 8 comments

The humble magpie joins humans, apes, dolphins, and elephants in Club Self-Awareness.
posted by jamaro at 11:48 AM - 47 comments

Artist Joseph Griffith, whose work draws from fantasy and mythology, has also turned his attention to one of America's most significant historical moments: "I painted this for the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown when George Washington and the Continentals traunched the British. The county would not dignify it with a response, however, George Washington's Mount Vernon estate kindly wrote me an e-mail saying they would 'pass it along to the staff'."
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing at 11:25 AM - 49 comments

Your unborn child as produce - You'll never look at chard the same way again.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 10:30 AM - 46 comments

Bar Surya in London was the first. Now Club Watt in Rotterdam is recycling dancers' energy. Brought to you by the Sustainable Dance Club.
posted by gman at 8:33 AM - 22 comments

It's the law: "No person who has attained the age of sixteen years shall take any migratory waterfowl unless at the time of such taking he carries on his person an unexpired Federal migratory-bird hunting and conservation stamp". The Federal Duck Stamp turned 75 this year. [more inside]
posted by Deathalicious at 8:25 AM - 11 comments

Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert's got a blog where he serves up demos of recipes he makes in his toaster oven.
posted by contessa at 7:57 AM - 36 comments

Spammers helping with the New Orleans recovery efforts. [more inside]
posted by jourman2 at 7:55 AM - 13 comments

Some of the female Chinese gymnasts are apparently under-age. It wasn't their skulls, their chins or their eyes that gave them away: it was the internet.
posted by chuckdarwin at 7:51 AM - 127 comments

When art imitates life. The Onion once again.....
posted by djseafood at 7:29 AM - 45 comments

Worried about food prices? Don't be, if you've got capital! You can lease land from starving countries like Sudan to ease your own food problems. This ain't Food Force (previously), but the gamesmanship (via) is underway (pdf). On the bright side, let them eat lobster!
posted by cal71 at 6:43 AM - 5 comments

Selections from H.P. Lovecraft's brief tenure as a Whitman's Sampler copywriter.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:22 AM - 46 comments

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 - 35 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 - 7 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 - 70 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 - 11 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 - 33 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 - 39 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 - 58 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 - 20 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 - 68 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 - 5 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 - 54 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 - 10 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 - 101 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 - 74 comments

Google goes geothermal with EGS.
posted by Artw at 1:06 PM - 16 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 - 23 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 - 16 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 - 71 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 - 168 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 - 26 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

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