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How Metafilter Brought a Deceased Father's Jokes Back to Life
David Drucker (Daniel Drucker) Two weeks ago Daniel Drucker went to Metafilter with a request. "My father passed away this morning," he wrote. "I'm going through his file, and I came across JOKES.TXT...
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Beautiful Renaissance Paintings, All Done Up Real Handsome-Like as Photographs
Left: Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449 -1492), by Agnolo di Cosimo detto il Bronzino, 1565-1569. Right: Dre Love, originally of Queens, New York. (Mark Abouzeid) One day artist Mark Abouzeid's eight-year-old...
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The Soul of a New (Facebook) Machine
The rock music stopped. The lights dimmed. People in boots and heels scurried back and forth whispering. The music returned and faded away again. The Facebook "f" was projected on four screens in...
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'Screamer,' 'Slammer,' 'Bang' ... and 15 Other Ways to Say 'Exclamation Point'
Eva the Weaver via Flickr The exclamation, for all its ubiquity, is neither the most useful nor the most delightful of punctuation marks. In practicality it is trumped by the comma and the apostrophe,...
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When Your Facebook Friend Is Racist
One of Tom Scott's searches on Facebook's Graph Search (actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com) Is Facebook making us lonely connected dumb happy complacent racist? Maybe, according to a new study. At...
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Why Do People Use Facebook?
Embedded in a complicated paper Megan Garber covered for us, we found a survey of 623 people's reasons for using Facebook. A few caveats: 71 percent of the respondents were students and 69 percent...
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It Was a Rough Winter for Arctic Sea Ice
The sea ice that caps our planet shrinks and grows every year with the seasons -- but these levels have experienced a disturbing downward trend in recent decades. Following the record-setting low this...
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Meet the 'Crypto Anarchist' Who Wants Everyone to Print Their Own Guns
Just because you have the ability to 3D print guns, doesn't, of course, mean that you have to. But -- law of large numbers -- somebody is going to. And that somebody isn't just going to print their...
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Touring the Largest Active Landfill in America
On a visit delayed by a long stretch of rain the day before, Venue drove east from downtown Los Angeles to visit the Puente Hills landfill--the nation's largest active municipal dump--near the city of...
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'Screamer,' 'Slammer,' 'Bang' ... and 15 Other Ways to Say 'Exclamation Point'
Eva the Weaver via Flickr The exclamation, for all its ubiquity, is neither the most useful nor the most delightful of punctuation marks. In practicality it is trumped by the comma and the apostrophe,...
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A Whole-Sky View of the Aurora Borealis
For more Atlantic Aurora coverage, see here, here, here, and here. For more work by Göran Strand, visit http://www.fotografgoranstrand.se/.
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The Sounds of the Fastest Plane in the World, an ICBM Missile, and 28 Other...
If you spend any time looking for records at flea markets and garage sales, you come to recognize a variety of common vintage records: Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Barbra Streisand, box...
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Chronicling Decline From Inside
Last week I mentioned Dr. David Hilfiker's ongoing chronicles of how the world seems to him, and how he is able to express his experience of it, as his Alzheimer's disease progresses. Readers mentioned...
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Margaret Thatcher May Have Helped Invent Soft-Serve Ice Cream
A young Margaret Thatcher, in the lab. (BBC via YouTube) Margaret Thatcher died this morning at the age of 87. While some of her achievements over her long career have been and remain controversial,...
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Is This What the Big Bang *Sounded* Like?
ESA Is there any more primal curiosity than the desire to know how the Universe began? Cosmologists devote their lives to piecing that puzzle together, but the evidence they have to work with -- the...
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The Secret Life of Cats: What You Can Learn By Putting a GPS on Your Kitty
The cat came back. But why? And what was he doing while he was gone?These questions plague cat owners across the world, and they form the backbone of the new book, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love,...
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Looking for a Latin American Seed Fund? Try the Colombian Government
coolinsights/Flickr Grooveshark creator Andres Barreto is placing a bet on Colombia. Barreto, who founded the music sharing site before he hit 20 and has built tech companies everywhere from...
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Watch the Navy Take Down a Drone With ... a Laser
Last July, off the coast of San Diego, California, a laser weapon installed on the USS Dewey was about to bring an unmanned aerial vehicle right down from the sky, no ammunition necessary. The U.S....
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Gorgeous 'Light Paintings' of D.C.'s Cherry Blossoms at Night
Reuters D.C.'s famed cherry blossoms have finally (finally) bloomed, ringing the Tidal Basin with puffy pink clouds of flowers. At night, the trees' colors fade. They become silhouettes against the...
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Astronauts' Favorite Space Food: Shrimp Cocktail
Yeah, this. This is their favorite. (NASA) Here's the thing about space food. While it might seem exotic to people here on Earth -- to people who live in some relative proximity to a farm or a grocery...
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