October 31
Built for the Kill. No Halloween costume? How about going as a chameleon? deconstructing the world's deadliest killers. A game by World Archipelago for National Geographic Channel Europe. Guide your Namid chameleon, barn owl, American alligator, grassland cheetah, and Komoto dragon around the screen using the cursor keys. Your stealth and power need to be up to capture prey or they will escape. Finally, guide your Orca around the screen using the space bar to dive under boats or attack prey that are beneath the water. When you reach the beach use the space bar to launch an attack on the seals. (Flash and music ahead....)
posted by Dunvegan at 8:47 PM PST - 2 comments

Blondie's Rapture, a heartfelt cover of it by My Robot Friend. -another Flash link...
posted by giantkicks at 8:33 PM PST - 5 comments

world domination [note: flash, demo version] ... a little tricky to figure out at first, but intriguing.
posted by crunchland at 7:24 PM PST - 5 comments

Doctor Foxglove's Polaroid Tryptich Project.
posted by hama7 at 7:12 PM PST - 9 comments

Play with a virtual ecosphere. [Flash].
posted by nthdegx at 6:29 PM PST - 1 comments

"Little old lady got mutilated late last night..." On this special day, when we all have a certain song running through our heads, I thought a few links on werewolves might be appropriate. So, here's a chance to brush up on German werewolf legends, peruse werewolf myths from around the globe, check out this werewolf filmography, and sift through other werewolf sites. Requiescat in pace, Warren.
posted by UKnowForKids at 6:08 PM PST - 4 comments

Three Rivers Film Festival - fine film comes to the Iron City.
posted by engelr at 3:19 PM PST - 2 comments

The Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos, "Day of the Dead."
posted by moonbird at 2:38 PM PST - 10 comments

Police find skeleton in Oddfellows lodge. Turns out, they'd already found it, 6 years before (your guess is as good as mine why no one did anything then). Even more interesting, it's not the only one that's been found and subsequently investigated by the police around the country. Makes you wonder about those Oddfellows.
posted by tommasz at 2:06 PM PST - 26 comments

C'mon People Now, Shine on Your Hipster • "A new and disturbing trend has sprung up as of late in our great city (NYC): beating up hipsters for sport. Sucker punching Williamsburg trendsters is the new Whack-A-Mole. It's cow-tipping for urbanites. It's blowing up mailboxes, but with less angst and more anger." (more inside)
posted by dhoyt at 2:00 PM PST - 44 comments

Low Budget Laughs for Friday. I recommend Pez Heads.
posted by uftheory at 1:58 PM PST - 1 comments

Tour the Nasher Sculpture Garden. Can't make it to Dallas. Big D is now home to the one of the first institutions in the world dedicated exclusively to the exhibition of modern and contemporary sculpture with a collection of global significance as its foundation. The Nasher Sculpture Center is further distinguished by a groundbreaking facility and landscaped garden specifically designed for the indoor and outdoor display of sculpture - not to mention the "designer dirt". (flash)
posted by sierray at 12:49 PM PST - 1 comments

EXTREME pumpkin carving!
posted by xmutex at 12:24 PM PST - 19 comments

CocoWeb (trans) is a project which has assembled 516 manifestations of the Bogeyman in Latin America. The list includes the well-known Coco or Cucuy, a dark figure who makes an appearance in the art world as the subject of one of Goya's Caprichos. Any Hispanic child can tell you about La Llorona, a grieving woman who walks in the night (familiar enough to be used in a controversial got milk? ad). In South America they can tell you about the Sack-Man, on of the original bogeymen, who walks in the darkness, looking for children to throw into his sack.
posted by vacapinta at 11:55 AM PST - 4 comments

Schoolgirls attack sexual predator! Kind of awesome in its own "aha, the tables are turned" way--but schoolgirl mob mentality can be horrifying.
posted by jennanemone at 11:09 AM PST - 225 comments

Dark matter flowchart.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:55 AM PST - 11 comments

3d17.org - Ian Clarke of Freenet fame has created a distributed, collaborative document editing web application. Much like a wiki, but geared more purely towards polishing and editing documents. Rather than the "build fast" model of the wiki, 3D17 doc modifications are subject a voting process before being applied. [more inside]
posted by y6y6y6 at 10:07 AM PST - 4 comments

SCO is at it again ... this time they've asked a federal judge to declare that Linux's general public license — a backbone of the free software movement — unconstitutional. Let's hope the judge has more sense than SCO.
posted by silusGROK at 9:48 AM PST - 33 comments

How much do you like your cell phone? (NY Times link - alternate here) Bronx resident reaches into train toilet to retrieve dropped phone, becomes trapped, is rescued by jaws of life.
posted by Aaorn at 9:40 AM PST - 11 comments

The night the devil went dancing Growing up in San Antonio, I heard the story of the devil at El Camaroncito from my dad. We kids had our own spook stories, from the haunted railroad tracks to midget mansion. Here in Austin, we have our own share of ghosts, including the legendary Driskill hotel ghost. What local spook stories did you grow up with?
posted by Gilbert at 8:26 AM PST - 15 comments

a reminder that our world is full of plenty of real horror and monsters. happy halloween. via yewknee.com
posted by specialk420 at 8:21 AM PST - 53 comments

Long Wait for a Taste of Home: Guatemalan Fried Chicken Draws a Crowd. Pollo Campero's first US store in Los Angeles reached the unprecedented sales mark of $1 million in an astounding seven weeks, a daily average of $20.4 thousand. After a full weekend of operation in the Washington DC market, Pollo Campero broke this record by selling $65 thousand in two days, a daily average of $32.5 thousand. At the franchise in Herndon (Virginia), I have personally seen the line exit the store, cross the front of the building and circle around to the back (at 3pm). Is this fried chicken really that good?
posted by probablysteve at 7:01 AM PST - 42 comments

Adult and exploitation movie posters from the 1960s and the early 1970s. Days of Sin and Nights of Nymphomania, Ordered to Love (teen-age girls forced to submit in secret Nazi mating camps!), Uncle Tomcat's House of Kittens, and more! Meow!
posted by sparky at 6:48 AM PST - 4 comments

The Bunny Man. Never mind the witch...here's the D.C. region's other scary legend (Washington Post).

Insist upon the original. Accept no substitutes. Read label carefully. Effectiveness not guaranteed.
posted by LinusMines at 6:48 AM PST - 10 comments

Food, Glorious Food - Of The Real Kind! What pumpkins? Forget about the pumpkins. What you really need is to get your lips round some courges d'hiver, you Yankee varmint philistines! (More inside.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:08 AM PST - 7 comments

SpookyFilter presents: The Faces of Belmez.
posted by WolfDaddy at 3:44 AM PST - 8 comments

"On a cold winter morning in 1937, a janitor grabbed his flashlight and headed down into the pitch-black basement of the Willard Library to stoke the coal furnace." And so begins the legend of the "Lady in Grey," an apparition said to be haunting the aisles of the Evansville, Indiana building to this very day. In fact, so many have been said to have seen her, and other ghosts, that the library has set up 24-hour online web cams so that others may try their hand at spectre spotting. Whether real or not, the cams have revealed some interesting, yet creepy pictures and, some rather silly spoofs.
posted by snarkywench at 2:50 AM PST - 23 comments

"Actually, we have 999 happy haunts here, but there's room for a thousand... Any volunteers? Well, if you should decide to join us, final arrangements may be made at the end of the tour. A charming 'ghost'ess will be on hand to take your application."
posted by Katemonkey at 2:17 AM PST - 7 comments

SIX SUE SKY OVER SEX-CHANGE SNOGGER: The contestants only discover the truth when Miriam picks the winner and then lifts up her skirt. (pop-up ad on first link)
posted by BobsterLobster at 2:16 AM PST - 102 comments

Live From Nowhere Near You is the name of a benefit CD created in the Northwest by Kevin Moyer and over 75 musicians. Professional contributors include Mike McCready and Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam, director Gus Van Sant (singing/guitar), Squirrel Nut Zippers and more.

Might make a great Christmas present.

See also related Billboard story.
posted by Twang at 12:03 AM PST - 2 comments

October 30
Mr. Civil Rights reaches out Other, bigger fish ex-CEOs of companies brought down to earth by major accounting, shall we say, woes, may be keeping quiet, even if they haven't been convicted of anything. But not former HealthSouth exec and would-be platinum girl group-manager Richard M. Scrushy, who not only has flaunted his wealth as of late, but produced a personal web site that plays up his humble Alabama roots and which, in a totally bizarre fashion, links his struggle to the Civil Rights Movement. (Note: The site's all screwed up on Mozilla, designed strictly for IE.)
posted by raysmj at 10:27 PM PST - 7 comments

The severed foot : "The force of the blast propelled this severed foot over a high wall, into the yard of an unoccupied house." - In Iraq, has the US seized something similar to the West bank or the Gaza strip (but the size and population of California) in which "The light at the end of the tunnel" casts a wan, pallid light over a future in which such events will seem routine ?
posted by troutfishing at 9:23 PM PST - 30 comments

Inside Fox News. Charlie Reina, employed by Fox News from 1997 to 2003, tells it like it is. Reina: The Memo warned us that anti-war protesters would be "whining" about U.S. bombs killing Iraqi civilians, and suggested they could tell that to the families of American soldiers dying there. Editing copy that morning, I was not surprised when an eager young producer killed a correspondent's report on the day's fighting - simply because it included a brief shot of children in an Iraqi hospital.
posted by skallas at 8:50 PM PST - 13 comments

Bad Writing = Good Writing? The academic journal Philosophy and Literature used to hold a "Bad Writing Contest" to ridicule dense, unreadable academic prose... but a new book argues headache inducing sentences are necessary to express subtle theoretical points.
posted by gregb1007 at 8:02 PM PST - 28 comments

A case study in modern Washington dishonesty. Michael Kinsley responds to Bush's former chief domestic policy adviser's reply to Kinsley's recent article on Bush's stem cell policy. [Via Fark.]
posted by homunculus at 7:03 PM PST - 18 comments

desktop subversibles ... a collection of background subversions and awareness applications for the desktop.
posted by crunchland at 6:58 PM PST - 5 comments

Moovl . Another cool thing from the Sodaplay people.
posted by none at 4:36 PM PST - 6 comments

Where is Boing Boing?
posted by coudal at 1:12 PM PST - 58 comments

Unlike Microsoft, which supports their OS releases for 5 years, Apple is forcing users to purchase new OSX 10.3 to fix security issues. No support is provided for any other OSs in the OSX family.

Sounds like an open door for intentional software bugs and issues.
posted by omidius at 11:12 AM PST - 30 comments

A friend reports that she's in lockdown in her office at The Canon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. due to a man wielding a .38 pistol. The Canon House Office Building houses 1/3 of the members of the United States Congress. Offices are now being searched for the gunman. He is supposedly a shorter man with dark hair and white shirt. News first emerged of the gunman around an hour ago.
posted by ericrolph at 11:03 AM PST - 32 comments

Hats Off! A Salute to African Headwear. 'Many African cultures throughout the continent have long considered the head the center of one's being--a source of individual and collective identity, power, intelligence and ability. Adorning the head as part of everyday attire or as a statement, therefore, is especially significant. '
Related :- African Loxo: photos of hairstyles from the Fifties (in French); mathematical patterns in African American hairstyles.
posted by plep at 10:39 AM PST - 6 comments

Wonderful system of government. Fake democracy, fake elections, fake political system surrounded by humbug and greedy lawyers. This allows business to get on with its tasks, buying candidates, a bribe here, a bribe there. An interview with Karl Marx.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 10:16 AM PST - 13 comments

some do it with the dead. some wont until they marry. some attempt career resuscitation with it. most twist the same direction during it. and one man teaches it on college campuses.
posted by i blame your mother at 9:56 AM PST - 5 comments

Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News....
Today is the 65th anniversary of the famous Mercury Theatre presentation of War of the Worlds, as adapted for Radio by Orson Welles. The infamous broadcast (listen in Real Audio or RealAudio or TrueSpeech) caused no small amount of uneasyness, and even some outright panic as listeners, already unsettled by coverage of the impending war in Europe, were all to willing to believe that Martians had indeed landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. The broadcast led to an FCC investigation and remains a touchstone in the evolution of the American media.
posted by anastasiav at 9:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Studious peeps. A comprehensive and well documented look at the study habits and research practices of marshmallow Peeps. "Our observations indicated that it was virtually impossible for Peeps to remove items from the upper shelves of the library stacks." Conclusion: Marshmallow Peeps have no business doing research at the university level.
posted by y6y6y6 at 9:50 AM PST - 13 comments

New form of mousepox developed. A scientist has created an extremely deadly form of mousepox (a relative of smallpox) through genetic engineering. The new virus kills mice even if they have been given antiviral drugs as well as a vaccine that would normally protect them.
posted by Irontom at 9:35 AM PST - 42 comments

Descansos. Public Altars to an Interrupted Journey.
posted by grabbingsand at 9:23 AM PST - 8 comments

No matter where you go... there you are. It is indeed Trysteroic that the self-suing Fox Television, of all media conglomerates (and seemingly, one of the many scions of YoYoDyne?), should have had the brilliant idea to turn "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" into a TV series. Perhaps the selected few at the Banzai Institute will find a way to get Dr. Banzai to defeat the evil John Joe Millioniare.
posted by DenOfSizer at 9:19 AM PST - 26 comments

"It's a tragic event ..., but it's an example of the American spirit of protecting our assets." Interesting/odd quote regarding a Firefighter who lost his life yesterday saving the historic mining town of Julian in San Diego County. Tragedy aside, since when is having/protecting stuff a part of the "American Spirit?"
posted by afx114 at 9:05 AM PST - 29 comments

You're probably feeling safer today than you were a few days ago, and you know why? It's Protection from Porn week, direct from the White House. Spurred on from groups such as Morality in Media (who issued a jubilant press release to mark their achievement) you can finally feel safe now that you've gotten out from under pornography's thumb. (note: These links couldn't be any safer for work)
posted by mathowie at 8:50 AM PST - 34 comments

Moo Mixer is a very cool interactive music mixer courtesy of the British Columbia Dairy Foundation. Incidentally, they say that cows are music lovers and will provide up to 3% more milk while listening to music.
posted by debralee at 6:06 AM PST - 7 comments

It's the Cthulhu songbook. Time to go a-carrolling in the neighbourhood with these catchy tunes. Who could resist a rousing chorus of The Great old ones are coming to town? Or maybe you fancy the more traditional Carol of the old ones? So lets get those songbooks out and make it a very merry Cthulhu solstice.
posted by ciderwoman at 5:29 AM PST - 4 comments

A Private Army Grows Around the U.S. Mission in Iraq and Around the World As Report Shows Iraq Contractors Politically Active
--see also Making A Killing - The Business of War, and on the inside...
posted by y2karl at 4:50 AM PST - 21 comments

Neil Armstrong. The awful truth. In 1969, Neil Armstrong made history by becoming the first man to walk on the moon, uttering the immortal phrase, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Or did he? Previously suppressed footage discovered by blogjam shows that Armstrong's reaction was a great deal more uninhibited than history suggests, and that a hasty editing job was needed to prepare the astronaut's moment of glory for broadcast. So here, for the first time, is the unedited NASA film from the triumphant Apollo 11 mission. [Maybe NSFW]
posted by srboisvert at 4:13 AM PST - 51 comments

October 29
All The Nudes That Are Fit To Print: It's no exaggeration to say La Repubblica is Italy's finest newspaper. It's liberal, modern, intelligent and independent. Along with Spain's El Pais; France's Libération and Le Monde; the UK's Guardian; Germany's Die Zeit and Portugal's Público, it's one of the mainstays of the European Left and Centre-Left. And yet its website offers calendars in the, er, Pirelli tradition of time-keeping. Imagine the New York Times being similarly... liberal. Can soft prOn and serious reporting live together? Is it an Italian thing? The only other example I can think of is Spain's Interviú, a magazine which in its heyday mixed superb (again, left-leaning) investigative journalism with politically incorrect - and photographically retouched - tits and ass. (NSFW, obviously, unless you're somewhere in Southern Europe or Louisiana.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 11:08 PM PST - 49 comments

Mathematics and art are thoroughly explored as two intertwined fields, in this online version of a Dartmouth course focusing on patterns [more inside].
posted by edlundart at 10:03 PM PST - 10 comments

Has the economy got you down? Studies show that if you give suicide the ol' college try your income will increase 36.3%
posted by palegirl at 8:02 PM PST - 22 comments

Hopi dancing in pictures and words: Kachina, ladder, rain, butterfly and snake.
posted by moonbird at 7:59 PM PST - 5 comments

An accurate, real-time planetarium, all made in Flash... Use your mouse to look around the sky (click to start/stop moving). Pointing at stars shows their name, magnitude and constellation (all loaded from an XML file).
posted by crunchland at 6:52 PM PST - 29 comments

Search stock photos by color scheme. I generally hate (hate hate hate) that obnoxious stock photography that shows up everywhere, but this is actually kind of cool. Pick a color, and find pictures that match your site. I'd love to see this kind of tool hooked up to more personal photo galleries.
posted by majcher at 6:34 PM PST - 9 comments

Early eBook designs. William Caxton's first two editions of The Canterbury Tales, probably published in 1476 and 1483, have been put online by the British Library.
posted by liam at 6:27 PM PST - 11 comments

Vintage Poster Art.
posted by hama7 at 5:43 PM PST - 8 comments

Man Pleads Guilty to Raping his own 2 month old Daughter
But wait, that's just the beginning. This guy's daddy heads the state Corrections Department and part of his plea is to reduce the amount of time he's going to spend in jail for this most heinous act.
This guy is facing, if the judge agrees to the plea, only 6 months in jail! The standard sentence for first-degree child rape is seven to 10 years in prison.
He's admitted to molesting a 9 year old in Maine before and has also been convicted of orchestrating an armed robbery.
How in the heck he's going to get ANY leniency is beyond me.
posted by fenriq at 5:32 PM PST - 65 comments

Donald Luskin threatens to sue and "out" blogger Atrios. Donald Luskin, right-wing blogger, has threatened to sue the enigmatic Atrios for "numerous libelous statements regarding Mr. Luskin" in a post on Atrios' blog. Particularly interesting is the threat by Luskin's attorney to use a subpoena to learn Atrios' identity -- which, as far as I know, is a pretty closely-held secret.
posted by Mid at 3:29 PM PST - 58 comments

The good-looking textured light-sourced bouncy fun smart and stretchy page
By one of the guys who did this, so you can do this while you spend the day away here.
posted by magullo at 2:07 PM PST - 6 comments

The Secret History of the Magna Carta. This is a fascinating article on the Magna Carta and the lesser known Charter of the Forest, and the early establishment of the rights of commons.
posted by homunculus at 1:24 PM PST - 7 comments

Getchya Blacklist on "Actor Dustin Hoffman was so dismayed to find his name missing from the NRA's shadowy 19-page list of U.S. companies, celebrities, and news organizations seen as lending support to anti-gun policies that he wrote to the powerful pro-gun lobby group begging to be included. " You can join too!!
posted by GernBlandston at 12:59 PM PST - 28 comments

Welcome to Rawson, N.D., Population. 6. Are towns like these worth saving? Should these "areas" be allowed to go back to their natural equilibrium between man and nature? Is there a "natural" equilibrium? What does this mean for the future of small towns v. urban sprawl? Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times and Drs. Frank and Deborah Popper of Rutgers have an idea.
posted by Bag Man at 11:13 AM PST - 27 comments

American Choices is a pretty cool new site that guides you through a series of questions aimed at telling you where you stand in terms of foreign policy philosophy. It reminds me a lot of the Selectsmart presidental voting thing that matches you up with a candidate.
posted by mathowie at 11:03 AM PST - 21 comments

Web-based Humor at It's Finest
Words fail me. DeCloak sells (I'm guessing) an HTML templating system that works in tables. But they can't make it work in CSS. The good news is there's no reason to use CSS:
Q: TABLES are for TABULAR DATA and not meant for Web Page Layout . . .
A: Last time I checked, most web sites use a database. And databases are just a bunch of tables in the first place, hence tabular data.
[from Zeldman]
posted by yerfatma at 10:09 AM PST - 54 comments

The University of the Bleeding Obvious -- down with butterflies! Shave the moon! Death by pastry!
posted by serafinapekkala at 10:08 AM PST - 3 comments

The world's largest card file? "Google is in talks with several publishers to build a service that would allow Web surfers to search the full text of books online, according to a report this week from Publishers Weekly's online site."
posted by sierray at 9:47 AM PST - 12 comments

Blogger Joshua Micah Marshall solicits funding so he can cover the Howard Dean campaign in New Hampshire. Readers respond with nearly $5,000 in 24 hours. See? You CAN buy that kind of coverage.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 8:37 AM PST - 12 comments

Fecal tongs throughout history.
posted by qDot at 7:55 AM PST - 34 comments

It's official: Napster sucks. The RIAA's newest sticky fingers wants you to download.
posted by the fire you left me at 7:38 AM PST - 30 comments

New software packages help parents keep tabs on teens.
posted by Irontom at 7:28 AM PST - 26 comments

"Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer... Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple..."

Fox News threatens to sue the Simpsons (and as a result, its sister company) over news ticker parody, according to an NPR interview of Matt Groening.
posted by MintSauce at 6:38 AM PST - 21 comments

Why, I'll be a monkey's uncle! (Or is that great-great-great-grandson?) I've been reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel, Baroque Cycle Volume 1: Quicksilver and was intrigued by the descriptions of the natural philosophers. I had learned about their laws and how they were discovered in high school and university but not about their other investigations. Intrigued I searched for a bit of additional information and came up with the linked site. It provides biographies and links to other biographies of many natural philosophers.
posted by substrate at 5:24 AM PST - 7 comments

No Microsoft web fonts for Mac OS? With the passing of Internet Explorer for Mac OS it seems that web favourites such as Verdana & Georgia may no longer be available without installing Microsoft software. More discussion here. [via Typographica]
posted by i_cola at 3:58 AM PST - 23 comments

October 28
"The Band uses unique instrumentation: the music is performed using obsolete computer equipment for instruments. Currently they are using a 1977 Atari 2600 game console, a 1986 portable 286 PC, a 1983 Commodore 64 computer, and a 1985 Epson dot matrix printer."
posted by cody at 10:32 PM PST - 14 comments

Another day, another blogger gets fired (from Microsoft, in this case) for posting something harmless to their blog.
posted by mathowie at 9:43 PM PST - 82 comments

Bush Tells Muslims His Administration Rejects Bigotry. But with Bush refusing to penalize Gen. Boykin after his Xtian fundamentalist remarks regarding Islam and the US Senate quickly pulling funding for Malaysia after Mahathir Mohamad's remarks, it seems a double-standard is at work here and many Muslims remained unconvinced of Bush's statements. NYTimes' Paul Krugman calls this Bush's Willful Ignorance.
posted by skallas at 9:13 PM PST - 29 comments

The Interactive Buzzword-Compliant Semantic Symbiosis Systemization : w00t! What's not to hate? (Other words I truly hate are fancy; delusional; slag; uber; natty and solace.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 9:11 PM PST - 30 comments

There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex (NYT link) Neuroscience + Advertising = Neuromarketers. You will consume and enjoy. You will consume and enjoy.
posted by dejah420 at 8:43 PM PST - 18 comments

The Picture of Everything. If it is a thing, it's in this here picture. [props to Ober Dicta]
posted by Hildago at 8:14 PM PST - 21 comments

Raaga: streaming Bollywood soundtracks. [warning: realplayer, popups, and realplayer popups]
posted by eddydamascene at 7:32 PM PST - 4 comments

NPR's "All Things Considered" had a great piece on the anger management industry today and it's increasingly ubiquitous presence in many strata of American society. This is the most well known anger management company in the biz, while programs like this promote less orthodox techniques of trumping stressors.

Had any network rage lately?
posted by moonbird at 6:37 PM PST - 6 comments

So you've "had enough" and you're talented? Well how about a possible 30 seconds of fame?
WARNING: This link deals with subjects of a political nature and may not necessarily represent the views of MetaFilter.
posted by LouReedsSon at 6:18 PM PST - 9 comments

The end of the world, a scenario. [flash]
posted by xmutex at 5:23 PM PST - 20 comments

Russian Prisoners Sing for Freedom
A strange take on the whole American Idol concept, prisoners in Russia were allowed to take part in a singing competition to get freed. Of the 26 finalists, six were freed. That only leaves just about a million prisoners left. I'm curious about the precedent this sets.
posted by fenriq at 5:04 PM PST - 6 comments

It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing. Russell Baker reviews Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. We have now reached a point when even the White House may be forced to sort out how a president who got elected to execute a straightforward business agenda managed to sandbag himself with the coinciding fantasies of the ideologues in the Christian fundamentalist ministries and those in his own administration.... Joan Didion reviews Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The New York Review of Books 40th anniversary edition is an especially good read..
posted by y2karl at 5:02 PM PST - 10 comments

3d stress ball [note: shockwave]
posted by crunchland at 4:16 PM PST - 18 comments

Welcome to The Mah Jong Museum.
posted by hama7 at 3:54 PM PST - 5 comments

IEEE bans residents of Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan from publishing "The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) recently imposed a ban on the residents of Cuba, Iran, Libya and Sudan from publishing and contributing to any IEEE publication or standard." I think this is something that deserves much wider coverage then it has been getting.
posted by Calebos at 3:38 PM PST - 25 comments

How'd that crazy sign get there? Pressed about the "Mission Accomplished" banner that so strategically hung behind May's rerouted-aircraft-carrier photo-op, Bush says it wasn't his sign, it was "put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff they weren't that ingenious, by the way." Huh. Wonder how Scott Sforza feels about that assessment.
posted by soyjoy at 1:35 PM PST - 81 comments

Ancestry Maps from the 1990 census: Which states have the highest percentage of people of Danish ancestry? Greek? Hispanic? Who (perhaps) doesn't realize that we almost all came here from somewhere else? Using the data provided on 1990 Census question 13, which asked respondents to identify the ancestry groups with which they identified most closely, the State of Minnesota provides us with these nifty Ancestry maps. More info here on 'the ancestry question' from the US Census Bureau. link via ::crabwalk.com::
posted by anastasiav at 11:05 AM PST - 38 comments

The largest solar flare of the current solar cycle shot off the sun earlier today. After the media latched on to what was predicted to be mostly a non-event last week (probably due to a NASA article released around the same time about a super spacestorm) , it's not making as much news this time. But you should pay attention this time. This could be the best and last chance for a lot of us farther south to see some auroras before the sun dives into solar minimum, assuming all the variables line up correctly this time. I recommend watching the Solar Terrestrial Dispatch, as it is a great all around resource for solar activity and auroras that includes live data and sightings reports by the general public. Unfortunately though, no doubt as word IS spreading, that site is being hammered again and may be quite slow.
posted by yupislyr at 10:34 AM PST - 21 comments

Shipwrecks of Lake Superior- Some are famous, others are obscure but amazing.
posted by COBRA! at 9:31 AM PST - 13 comments

PublicRadioFan.com An extensive customizable list of (almost) all public radio stations that offer streaming audio and what they have playing now and in the future.
posted by Mick at 9:31 AM PST - 30 comments

Unloved Garden Gnomes. "A French police station has been stuck with a room of homeless garden gnomes, victims of a wave of gnome abductions, after a fresh bid to trace their owners failed." And I had never even heard of the 'Garden Gnome Liberation Front'.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 9:27 AM PST - 11 comments

U.S.S. Enterprise analyzed. "For StarTrek [sic] fans we tested the USS Enterprise in our super-orbital expansion tube... We perform similar tests on other models investigating dissociation and ionisation processes which occur during atmospheric re-entry."
posted by tbc at 9:13 AM PST - 10 comments

Images from Science - An Exhibition of Scientific Photography.
posted by ashbury at 9:06 AM PST - 4 comments

Fun with Fibonacci numbers. So you say you scored 130 on yesterday's IQ test, did ya?
posted by archimago at 8:59 AM PST - 5 comments

Polyominoes! ! ! ! !
posted by angry modem at 8:00 AM PST - 1 comments

A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries, and other actual Hong Kong film subtitles. T-shirts, too. How can you use my intestines as a gift?
posted by kirkaracha at 6:20 AM PST - 5 comments

Anchors Away, A Life Unmoored An interesting, albeit sad, story about a once prominent D.C. lawyer who walked away from his life and now lives on a garbage-filled boat in the waters around Annapolis, MD. "Trash People" have always perplexed me; is there anything that society can do to truly help them?
posted by tommyspoon at 5:39 AM PST - 36 comments

Seattle's Museum of History & Industry has compiled a photographic archive of Seattle and its surrounding communities. Over 12,000 images from local museums, libraries and historical societies capture the heritage of King county spanning over 100 years. The project was developed through the National Leadership Grant for Library and Museum Collaboration.
posted by yonderboy at 12:05 AM PST - 4 comments

October 27
Tinyurl, Whacked. First there was GoogleWhacking. Now, via the address shortening service from TinyURL.com comes a new game, an entertaining and frightening view into the deranged minds of your fellow internet denizens. (more)
posted by iamck at 11:29 PM PST - 17 comments

Rod Roddy Dies at 66 Veteran game show announcer known for his work on the Price is Right and Press Your Luck succumbs to breast and colon cancer.
posted by dr_dank at 8:27 PM PST - 11 comments

Cinco: 2 4 4 6 5 4 5 3 3 4 3 4 8 4 7 3 7 6 2 2 2 11 3 3 1 3 3 4 4 6 4 6 5 7 4 3 1 3 3 4 7 5 5 4 4
posted by ed at 7:26 PM PST - 374 comments

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary... Ok, but ever wonder what "quaff this kind nepenthe" means, or where "the night's plutonian shore" is? You'll be an expert on "The Raven" in minutes with this interactive annotation of Poe's classic Halloween poem. There are many interesting subjects on this site, which was linked previously in a thread about the mysterious toaster who leaves cognac at Poe's grave every year on the writer's birthday.
posted by planetkyoto at 6:54 PM PST - 6 comments

First time I've heard a harmonica AND beatbox used together. Although not a fan of the harmonica, I found this to be suprisingly cool.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 6:35 PM PST - 17 comments

Can it be? Has MetaFilter's front page never visited YERKALAND?* Polish artist Jacek Yerka: Bosch-Breughel-Dali-esque or just trippy fun?
*(Potentially slow on dial-up.)
posted by Shane at 6:31 PM PST - 14 comments

Coming to a phone near you. The creative entries you'll see here fit not only the small screen size, but the on-the-go nature of mobile use. Entries typically run up to 3 minutes. All are sized and purposed to work in small handheld formats. Flash, live action, 3D animation, its all here at the World's Smallest Film Festival.
posted by Grod at 3:56 PM PST - 3 comments

At least four times in the fall of 2002, the president and his advisers invoked the specter of a "mushroom cloud," and some of them, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, described Iraq's nuclear ambitions as a threat to the American homeland... Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

So in regards to Iraq's possession of the one weapon we can be certain causes mass destruction: the atomic bomb, as Gregg Easterbrook put it, the verdict is the unsurprising (and unsurprisingly closely held) nope, not, zero, zip, nada...
posted by y2karl at 3:43 PM PST - 21 comments

Photo studios from around the world (from the latest issue of Colors Magazine)
posted by gwint at 3:06 PM PST - 9 comments

The art of Andrzej Jackowski. [Via wood s lot.]
posted by homunculus at 2:59 PM PST - 6 comments

Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted by condour75 at 2:30 PM PST - 29 comments

LAMP is an on-demand music service offered to the MIT campus through its cable TV network. The NYTimes mulls the copyright implications.
posted by liam at 1:47 PM PST - 7 comments

How much would you pay for a pushbutton in your car that changes red traffic lights to green? Like in that dopey Italian Job movie? The correct answer is $300.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 12:48 PM PST - 29 comments

One of my joys of going on vacation is to get off the interstate and collect a bit of an old historic road. In California over the weekend we managed to grab a bit of Hwy. 1 aka the Pacific Coast Highway past nature preserves, resorts and neighborhoods. Another goal is to do all of U.S. 50, the initial stages of which were reportedly surveyed by George Washington during his tour in the British Army. Wired has a nice article about how a journalist and a photographer ignored the advice of a Federal Highway Administration spokesperson to take a trip down Route 1 from Maine to Florida.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:29 PM PST - 9 comments

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't even play one on TV. But every once in a while, I run across the website of one of these individuals that, in its own way, at least appears to make sense. Using photos from the US Army, the DOD and the US Marine Corps., this English translation of a French site asks, "Can you find the Boeing 757 that 'crashed' into the Pentagon on 9/11/01?" [Linked page scrolls to the right, not down as one might expect...]
posted by JollyWanker at 12:26 PM PST - 28 comments

Over the past few years, doping in sports has grown into an arms race of biology, chemistry, and technology as atheletes attempt to push their limits and escape detection. While it's hard to estimate how widespread the problem is or how much it actually improves one's performance, one amateur athelete for Outside Magazine decided to test the latest on himself as he spent 8 months training for an ultramarathon cycling event. The article also notes pro-cheating sites filled with atheletes trading stories of their own programs. Disturbing stuff, when you think of all the records being broken in sports these days. As Rafe says, this might be one of the most important sports articles ever written. note: it's a long article, but worth it.
posted by mathowie at 12:22 PM PST - 14 comments

Win one and lose one.
posted by madamjujujive at 12:14 PM PST - 7 comments

TV and the Hive Mind
64 years ago this week, six million Americans became unwitting subjects in an experiment in psychological warfare.
posted by Irontom at 7:46 AM PST - 12 comments

"Check out the big brain on Brett!" ... A visual IQ test.
posted by crunchland at 7:20 AM PST - 79 comments

Another My Lai. Investigative journalism in action: a small Toledo newspaper called The Blade commits eight months to uncovering atrocities against civilians by an elite group of American soldiers in Vietnam called Tiger Force (pic at bottom). Will we have to wait 36 years to find out what's really happening in Baghdad?
posted by digaman at 7:20 AM PST - 10 comments

Broadcast flag blues?! The EFF seems to be fighting a losing war against the FCC's proposed "broadcast flag" initiative (Salon), but they're making a big last-minute push to get more people to spread the news and contact the FCC. Will the broadcast flag initiative become a "gateway regulation", leading us to a future where Hollywood dictates to manufacturers what they can and cannot create? Mass exodus to Tokyo, anyone?!
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:58 AM PST - 4 comments

Apple: Innovator & Oppressor of Independent Software: As they once did with Karelia's Watson software and, to a certain extent, Panic's Audion, Apple has "borrowed" a concept from an independent, third-party developer without credit or compensation. It would seem that Steve Jobs is not as far removed from Bill Gates as he would like the Mac faithful to believe . . .
posted by aladfar at 6:55 AM PST - 31 comments

Recently, Rick Bayless has been making some appearances in Burger King ads for some new sandwiches they're trying to sell. If you've ever seen Rick's show, you know that he's a true lover of food. Why would he do an ad for BK? The money, you say? Many seem to agree. Here's what Rick Bayless has to say for himself: "I decided that it’s time for those of us in the healthy food/sustainable food movement to applaud any positive steps we see in the behemoth quick-service restaurant chains." I have noticed that Rick looks like he's in pretty good shape, despite the fact that he occasionally cooks with "a little freshly rendered pork fat". Maybe he's for real.
posted by blakewest at 6:24 AM PST - 28 comments

“The string theorists have a theory that appears to be consistent and is very beautiful, and I don’t understand it.” Nova invites Brian Greene to explain everything with the superstring.
posted by the fire you left me at 6:15 AM PST - 12 comments

Astonishing geometric art using only folded paper plates, from Bradford Hansen-Smith at wholemovement. View the gallery of fantastic polyhedral creations, and learn how to do it yourself. (For more fun with paper plates, see also Paper Plate Education: Serving the Universe on a Paper Plate.)
posted by taz at 5:18 AM PST - 7 comments

Everybody needs a 303.
posted by nthdegx at 4:30 AM PST - 9 comments

October 26
Indymedia to cease operations. Sure, it's not announced just yet on their homepage. You have to go here to find out why. A hint: they have screenshots of this trash post on the usually very trash commentboards of a fine idea of a website.
posted by crasspastor at 11:20 PM PST - 51 comments

What is old is new again, unfortunately. Wholesome Wear (boy that name just makes you cringe eh?) makes modern, and even less revealing, duplicates of what your Grandma or Great Grandma used to swim in - for the thoroughly modern Mormon (or other religious zealot wackos who cant accept girls have knees). God hates females in swimsuits, I guess.
posted by Dome-O-Rama at 8:04 PM PST - 66 comments

Of All The Gin Joints In All The Towns In All The World, (You) Walk Into Mine: In Lisbon, it would have to be Lux for fun or The Ritz for serious drinking. But in all the towns in all the world, only Harry's Bar in Venice, despite the carping, would do. Listen to Hemingway! (More inside.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:25 PM PST - 12 comments

Mike's Electric Stuff
Glass tubes and high voltages galore. Of particular interest, tesla coils, and how to build a clock using nixie tubes, the prettiest display devices ever invented. If you can't build your own, other people will do it for you.
posted by Mwongozi at 5:06 PM PST - 7 comments

Vintage Technology: home electrical goods from the twentieth century.
posted by hama7 at 4:53 PM PST - 5 comments

Santa Ana Speeds the Spread of So Cal Fires
Five separate fires are burning in San Diego County, including several densely populated suburban areas. Dozens of homes have been burned. Marine Corps Air Station Miramar has been affected, including an FAA air traffic control installation. 16,000 people in the South Bay lost electricity when a major distribution line went down. Many San Diego firefighters went up to Camp Pendelton yesterday. (1, 2)
posted by rschram at 3:04 PM PST - 42 comments

The trade in stolen Asian relics is booming. TIME reports on how cultural sites are being looted and precious artifacts smuggled overseas. Sometimes they're returned, but much of Asia's cultural heritage is being lost.
posted by homunculus at 2:41 PM PST - 9 comments

Napster re-launching on Wednesday as a pay-per-download service. Anyone see this coming?
posted by Ufez Jones at 2:36 PM PST - 40 comments

CEO of Russia's largest oil company in jail The guy sounds like a crook to be sure; but its an interesting contrast to the US. When was the last time in this country someone with limitless financial resources was thrown in jail? Is Key Lay in jail? How about Bernie Ebbers? (Worldcom getting Iraq contracts is of course another story) Jeff Skilling? With all the talk of crony-capitalism anymore its easy to get desensitized. But to get a reality check on how to treat toplevel white-collar crime from Russia of all places is sobering.
posted by H. Roark at 9:51 AM PST - 23 comments

The Diebold Memos' Smoking Gun
Volusia County Memos Disclose Election 2000 Vote Fraud
posted by wsg at 9:43 AM PST - 47 comments

Dezain.net is a weblog about design by Eizo Okada, with links to architecture, furniture, textiles, and other designalicious stuff.
posted by carter at 8:41 AM PST - 4 comments

Mark Lombardi created art out of the stuff of conspiracy theories. Following the money trails, he was just completely fascinated by connections, how one thing led to another, how the C.I.A. would back a coup in Australia, someone would be murdered in Turkey and things would happen in Indonesia." Some of his work here and here, and more about his work here. His drawings satisfy because they address a human need for coherent order drawn from chaos. Such a need, however, is bound to be frustrated. Instead of blueprinting perfection, the works' aura of mastery arises in the context of a sprawling dystopia.
posted by amberglow at 7:42 AM PST - 13 comments

National Register of Historic Places Travel Itineraries. Virtual American travel - Detroit, the Underground Railroad, utopian communities in Iowa, Pipestone, Minnesota, Shakers, Indian mounds of Mississippi, etc.
posted by plep at 1:30 AM PST - 8 comments

October 25
Ted Conover is a fantastic, prize-winning author. His book Newjack is, to quote Jon Krakauer, "a compelling, compassionate look at a terribly important, poorly understood aspect of American society." In it, he works undercover as a guard at Sing Sing. You can read the truncated New Yorker version on the site. Additionally, there are many other articles, reviews and interviews, and a pretty interesting group of e-mails from "officers, their families, and others affected by prison." And, just to name-drop once more, Sebastian Junger says: "Ted Conover is a first-rate reporter and more daring and imaginative than the rest of us combined." Check him out!
posted by adrober at 11:56 PM PST - 7 comments

Train Spotters rejoice! Rail Pictures has all sorts of locomotive shots.
posted by jasonspaceman at 10:53 PM PST - 5 comments

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, u, w, x, y, z.
posted by crunchland at 10:40 PM PST - 31 comments

There comes a time when people at a technical conference like this need something more relaxing. A change of pace. A shift of style. To put aside all that work stuff and think of something refreshingly different. So let's talk about coding theory.
posted by thebabelfish at 8:04 PM PST - 7 comments

Examining Bush's stem cell policy, two years later. Kinsley: Put it all together, and the stem cells that can squeeze through Bush's loopholes are far less promising than they seemed two years ago, while the general promise of embryonic stem cells burns brighter than ever. If you claim to have made an anguished moral decision, and the factual basis for that decision turns out to be faulty, you ought to reconsider or your claim to moral anguish looks phony. But Bush's moral anguish was suspect from the beginning, because the policy it produced makes no sense.
posted by skallas at 7:52 PM PST - 1 comments

What time is it? Tonight marks the transition in many parts of the US between daylight savings and non-daylight savings time. Don't forget to set your clocks back one hour!
posted by silusGROK at 6:24 PM PST - 46 comments

Scicult: bridging science & culture through contemporary art.
posted by hama7 at 4:42 PM PST - 5 comments

What's The Best Excuse When You're Caught Reading MetaFilter... when you're supposed to be working? (More inside.)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 4:34 PM PST - 39 comments

Knee Defender is a product that airline passengers can use to keep the person in front of them from reclining their seat during a flight. They market it as an alternative to deep vein thrombosis and lawsuits (Warning: Flash Menu). It is creating a stir in the news. But people with long legs who do not want to detract from a fellow passenger's enjoyment can always save their money and consult the Seat Guru (SG previously discussed here). (Via Fark.)
posted by cup at 12:17 PM PST - 77 comments

Sand. (Java applet)
posted by Wet Spot at 11:53 AM PST - 13 comments

superhandz is billed as an an x-treme hand sportz site. But impressive as some of these displays are, when it comes to flourish, can anyone even begin to compete with three-year old Mo Kin?(quicktime clip)
posted by madamjujujive at 7:52 AM PST - 16 comments

Pick your poison: highbrow (virtual tour of 10 Downing Street), or lowbrow (virtual tour of the White House). Hint: one of these is funny.
posted by taz at 6:06 AM PST - 10 comments

Building Coffins Boosts Monks' Coffers. Trappist monks at the New Melleray Abbey in rural Iowa turned to casket-making five years ago after their farming operation went under. But the casket business is good. So now, in between prayers, the monks can be found in the wood shop.
posted by bluedaniel at 12:49 AM PST - 8 comments

October 24
exploring color ... online utility to help room designers (and maybe even web designers) choose the right color for their project.
posted by crunchland at 10:04 PM PST - 13 comments

Truefire TrueFire is a self-publishing tool and open marketplace for authors and artists wishing to promote and distribute their original poetry, guitar lessons, novels, music, reference material, photography and artwork.
posted by crunchburger at 9:40 PM PST - 4 comments

"If Tom Delay is acting out of his Born Again Christian convictions in pushing legislation that disadvantages the poor every time he opens his mouth, I'm not saying he's not a Born Again Christian, but as a the Lord's humble fruit inspector, it sure looks suspicious to me. " - Bill Moyers interviews Joe Hough.
posted by specialk420 at 7:32 PM PST - 36 comments

The RIAA Strikes Back. (c/o arstechnica.com) What do you do when nothing else seems to be working and you're the RIAA? Do it Soviet style! Take your message to the classroom! Indoctrinate the kiddies! Get them to rat on their friends! I don't know about everyone else, but I think that this latest RIAA tactic is particularly insidious. But what is worse is that schools apparently are welcoming the RIAA. And you thought that Coke machines in the cafeteria were bad...
posted by tgrundke at 3:48 PM PST - 37 comments

Forecasters at the NOAA Space Environment Center in Boulder, Colo., observed two dynamic areas of the sun, one of which has produced a coronal mass ejection, or CME, Wednesday morning at 3 a.m. EDT that appears to be Earth-directed. The forecasters are predicting a strong geomagnetic storm, G-3 on the NOAA Space Weather Scales, that should reach Earth on Friday, October 24. Satellite and other spacecraft operations, power systems, high frequency communications, and navigation systems may experience disruptions over this two-week period. Auroras visible in the lower 48 states are possible tonight and tomorrow.
posted by y2karl at 1:42 PM PST - 22 comments

"We are becoming the masters of our own DNA. But does that give us the right to decide that my children should never have been born?" John Sundman is a science fiction novelist and the father of two children with severe medical conditions. In this two-part article he shares his experiences and thoughts on bioethics, the Human Genome Project and whether genetics research is paving the way for a resurgent eugenics movement.
posted by homunculus at 11:27 AM PST - 56 comments

The Guardian