Irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you. 'Your chair is your enemy. It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death.' 'Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.'
posted to MetaFilter by VikingSword at 1:22 PM on March 15, 2010 (137 comments)

Based on Robert Kennedy's book Thirteen Days, with a stunning cast and a riveting screenplay, broadcast a scant 12 years after the event... The Missiles of October.
posted to MetaFilter by timsteil at 4:28 PM on October 16, 2012 (20 comments)

First Draft of the Revolution is a browser-based, interactive, epistolary story, where the process of letter writing is used to explore aspects of character and plot that might otherwise remain hidden. Plus, lashings of classism and magical references.
posted to MetaFilter by Sparx at 10:30 PM on October 10, 2012 (2 comments)

Berk Senturk presents "Ottoman was Geeky", a collection of reinterpreted pop culture characters.
posted to MetaFilter by griphus at 1:02 PM on October 13, 2012 (8 comments)

Pity the Billionaire (YT): Thomas Frank discusses how the American right pulled off a massive coup and successfully branded itself the party of rebellion and protest in the wake of the financial crisis.
posted to MetaFilter by shivohum at 8:17 PM on October 5, 2012 (32 comments)

Bidzina Ivanishvili, presidential candidate, has a long name, but a story you won't forget. From village boy to billionaire (estimated worth of USD 6.4 billion - half of Georgia's GDP, making him the 153rd richest person on the planet), Ivanishvili essentially created his own kingdom in his old village, setting up alternative healthcare and education system, paving the roads, and designing welfare payment. After starting an opposition party earlier this year, he may have a shot at using his fortune to experiment with Georgia's future. While he isn't running for president directly, whichever party wins Parliament on Monday will be able to elect a prime minister next year.
posted to MetaFilter by k8t at 6:28 AM on September 29, 2012 (24 comments)

In honor of the opening of Shepherds Flat Wind Farm in Oregon this week, the largest wind farm in the United States, let's take look at 'high-altitude wind power', HAWP:
posted to MetaFilter by stbalbach at 11:08 PM on September 24, 2012 (35 comments)

35 years ago today, Voyager 1 transmitted three images which NASA processed into a single frame of Earth and its moon.
posted to MetaFilter by Wordshore at 6:48 AM on September 18, 2012 (49 comments)

Got a few hours to kill and want to spend a little time in gaming history? Don't have anything else to do until 2013? Check out Anacreon: Reconstruction 4021 (wiki) (previously), one of the earliest 4X games ever made, dating to 1987-88. The original version was DOS-based, but the creator, George Moromisato, released a Windows version in 2004 which has significant updates.
posted to MetaFilter by valkyryn at 6:07 AM on September 12, 2012 (11 comments)

Suppose I could offer you a choice of two technologies for watching TV online. Behind Door Number One sits a free-to-watch service that uses off-the-shelf technology and that buffers just enough of each show to put the live stream on the Internet. Behind Door Number Two lies a subscription service that requires custom-designed hardware and makes dozens of copies of each show. Which sounds easier to build—and to use? More importantly, which is more likely to be legal? If you went with Door Number One, then you are a sane person, untainted by the depravity of modern copyright law. But you are also wrong. The company behind Door Number One, iCraveTV, was enjoined out of existence a decade ago. The company behind Door Number Two, Aereo, just survived its first round in court and is still going strong. Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane by MeFi's own James Grimmelmann.
posted to MetaFilter by Horace Rumpole at 9:37 AM on August 30, 2012 (18 comments)

A cold autumn day was dawning as the German soldiers of the Altenwalde Versuchskommando prepared their V2 rocket for launch. They'd done this a hundred times before, but when the V2 finally roared up into the sky over the North Sea, the men of the AVKO couldn't help but smile and cheer. Soon the rest of the soldiers and officers around the launchpad were cheering as well. British officers and soldiers. Because this was Operation Backfire, the beginning of something that most people don't even know existed - the British Space Programme.
posted to MetaFilter by garius at 10:41 AM on August 30, 2012 (41 comments)

Troma Entertainment has released 150 movies for free on Youtube. (via)
posted to MetaFilter by curious nu at 8:28 AM on August 31, 2012 (54 comments)

On July 5, 1816, the passengers and crew of the shipwrecked French frigate Méduse abandoned 147 people on a makeshift raft in a gale off the coast of Africa. When the raft was found 13 days later only 15 people were still alive. The incident inspired Théodore Géricault's painting Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa).
posted to MetaFilter by kirkaracha at 7:49 AM on August 31, 2012 (34 comments)

From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader. Jerry DeWitt is a former Pentecostal pastor in the evangelical parish of DeRidder, Louisiana who slowly lost his religious faith. Last Fall, he went public with his atheism, committing what he calls "identity suicide," and instantly becoming "the most disliked person in town." Since then, Mr. DeWitt's lost his job, his wife, his community and may be losing his house, but is still persevering and working to help others who find themselves in similar circumstances.
posted to MetaFilter by zarq at 9:47 AM on August 27, 2012 (162 comments)

"I guess it started for me when, as a young sci-fi movie fan, I did a fanzine at age 12 to 15... that’s when I learned how relatively cheap and easy it was to self-publish, at least for a small circle of weirdos. Later, after comics went up to 50¢, I started collecting stuff equally weird but much cheaper than comic books: kook literature." - Rev. Ivan Stang

You may know of the Church of the SubGenius, that parody religion that worships the almighty "Bob" and was a fixture of MTV and Night Flights back in the day. But do you know of its SECRET ORIGINS? Co-founder Ivan Stang corresponded with hundreds of "mad prophets, crackpots, kooks & true visionaries," from sincere cults to winking charlatans to utter nutjobs to hate groups to independent artists and musicians, with some respected names thrown in, and synthesized them into a half-joking, half-serious celebration of the kook spirit. These days of course the forward-thinking crackpot looking for sheep goes directly to the internet. But while it lasted Stang and co-authors Mike Gunderloy, Waver Forest and Mark Johnston collaborated to document this vanished scene in the legendary book HIGH WEIRDNESS BY MAIL. (All links within may quickly lead someplace NSFW by the nature of the beast.)
posted to MetaFilter by JHarris at 3:05 PM on August 27, 2012 (132 comments)

False Positive is a a short story, webcomic anthology, which author and illustrator Mike Walton likes to call a stew, cooked from the gut, made with "a scoop of horror, a pinch of science-fiction, a dash of fantasy, and a bit of (To Be Determined)." Mike says the language could be rated PG-13, and the visuals feature a varying degrees of comic book violence and gore. There are 10 stand-alone "chapters" posted now, and new posts are made every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Mike also made a short trailer to further pique your interest.
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 2:28 PM on July 23, 2012 (8 comments)

"In a genre of its own—Live-Action Graphic Novel—The Intergalactic Nemesis saga is a hilarious, uplifting adventure of heroes-by-circumstance overcoming impossible odds. But the telling is what makes the experience of The Intergalactic Nemesis so incredibly unique: while three actors, one Foley artist, and one keyboardist perform all the voices, sound effects and music, more than 1,250 hand-drawn, full-color, hi-res, blow-your-mind comic-book images blast from the screen, all performed live."
posted to MetaFilter by TheSecretDecoderRing at 6:23 AM on July 22, 2012 (9 comments)

"A Tall Tail," by MeFi's own Charles Stross.
posted to MetaFilter by brundlefly at 4:43 PM on July 21, 2012 (20 comments)

A liquor store in Amsterdam. A veteran in Bagdad. A family in Rome. A WWII veterans memorial in Berlin. A house in Oxford. Edouard Levé photographed towns in the United States that shared names with famous cities. He photographed fully-clothed actors reenacting scenes from rugby and pornography [nsfw]. He also wrote some novels, influenced by Oulipo. Autoportrait, describes his life in 120 pages of unordered vignettes and brief, declarative sentences—"The girl whom I loved the most left me. [...] I am uneasy in rooms with small windows." and so on. His fourth novel, Suicide, is a one-sided conversation between an anonymous narrator ("I") and his friend ("you"), who committed suicide twenty years ago. It's a painfully intimate meditation on the act and its fallout on its own merits—"Your life was hypothesis. Those who die old are made of the past. Thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. Thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. You were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities."—but few will read Suicide unburdened with the knowledge that Edouard Levé killed himself several days after completing it, at the age of 47.
posted to MetaFilter by spanishbombs at 6:52 PM on July 7, 2012 (7 comments)

Rio Wang has posted a fantastic 1892 photo album of Russian army fashions.
posted to MetaFilter by gman at 3:09 PM on June 30, 2012 (23 comments)

Chilling amateur home video of the Challenger disaster "Obviously a major malfunction." Those words have always haunted me, but to hear them here, echoing across a PA system as shocked onlookers come to terms with what they have just seen, they carry even more power than they did when they were just an anonymous voiceover on a TV shot.
posted to MetaFilter by LondonYank at 2:41 AM on May 2, 2012 (103 comments)

11541 Red Chairs each representing a life lost during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996 which started 20 years ago this weekend.
Bosnia's victims 20 years on: survivors of a nightmare with no reckoning, by Ed Vulliamy.
Emma Daly, then a journalist recalls “We were reporting, reporting, reporting. And it took so long for anyone to react,”.
posted to MetaFilter by adamvasco at 6:27 AM on April 8, 2012 (26 comments)

Alien: The Easter Edition (YouTube, 2:55)
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 10:56 PM on April 7, 2012 (10 comments)

In the late 1970s Jorge Luis Borges edited a 33-volume series of fantastic tales by many authors, from Jack London to Pu Songling, Leopoldo Lugones to Henry James. The series was called "The Library of Babel," after the Borges story of the same title. In 2009, Grant Monroe found a directory of Spanish-language science fiction, fantasy, terror and mystery stories, listing the contents of the 33 volumes -- JLB's own favorite weird tales both well-known and obscure -- and began tracking down links to each of the stories, one by one: "Searching the Library of Babel".
posted to MetaFilter by finnb at 2:15 PM on January 29, 2012 (11 comments)

Cats On Film brings us My Day, By Jonesy. What's a cat to do when all the can-openers seem to have their attention focussed on the giant hairless kitten which just burst out of one of their chests?
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 5:48 PM on January 27, 2012 (8 comments)

We are putting up a black interstitial about SOPA/PIPA for the next 24hrs or so. If you click away from it, you'll get a cookie stored so you won't see it again in the same browser, but what follows is my reasons for doing it.
posted to MetaTalk by mathowie at 9:06 PM on January 17, 2012 (555 comments)

This summer, The Paris Review interviewed two science fiction writers at length, Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson. Below the cut there are two passages, one from each interview. They aren't representative, they are just two of the many, many passages which have been going around in my head for the last few days.
posted to MetaFilter by Kattullus at 10:57 AM on December 25, 2011 (37 comments)

The History and Future of Computing an interactive timeline from the New York Times which crowdsources predictions.
posted to MetaFilter by gwint at 5:25 AM on December 11, 2011 (22 comments)

For US users, today's Google Doodle is a turkey. For those outside the US, today's Google Doodle commemorates the 60th publication anniversary of Stanisław Lem's first novel, in their most ambitiously interactive doodle yet.
posted to MetaFilter by McCoy Pauley at 6:47 AM on November 23, 2011 (63 comments)

Guy buys engagement ring. Guy gets dumped. Guy sells engagement ring and buys a fully armored Master Chief suit.
posted to MetaFilter by desjardins at 3:54 PM on November 18, 2011 (114 comments)

World War II in Photos "A retrospective of World War II in large-size photo stories. 900 photos in all, over 20 chapters, telling many of the countless millions of stories from the biggest conflict and biggest story of the 20th century." [via mefi projects]
posted to MetaFilter by bru at 9:03 AM on November 1, 2011 (34 comments)

For the last few decades, discoveries at Blombos Cave near Capetown have been pushing back our timeframe for the earliest known periods of complex human thought. Henshilwood et al have now discovered a 100,000 year old ocher paint factory at the same site.
posted to MetaFilter by jjray at 9:28 PM on October 13, 2011 (17 comments)

I am not going to try now to open the eyes of the world to the Leningrad Blockade. What I will write about here is less ambitious and somewhat more promising: the literature of the siege.
posted to MetaFilter by Trurl at 6:57 PM on October 12, 2011 (7 comments)

How does it feel to fly over planet Earth from the perspective of the ISS? A timelapse movie by James Drake, compiled from pictures drawn from the incredible Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Place the video in HD and fullscreen for the full effect. via
posted to MetaFilter by Bora Horza Gobuchul at 11:38 PM on September 17, 2011 (27 comments)

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1981, NPR); an audio adaptation of Walter Miller's 1960 history of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz in the centuries after the Flame Deluge.
posted to MetaFilter by Iridic at 2:37 PM on July 19, 2011 (68 comments)

10 Unconventional Bookstores For Your Browsing Pleasure. Includes The Secret Bookstore and The Book Barge but not The Ateneo Grand Splendid.
posted to MetaFilter by Saxon Kane at 5:38 AM on July 19, 2011 (22 comments)

Inside RIM: An exclusive look at the rise and fall of the company that made smartphones smart. 'Research In Motion is in the midst of a major transition in every sense of the word. Publicly, the company is portraying a very defensive image — one that is very dismissive, as if RIM is profitable and class-leading, and the media is out of line to criticize its business, as are investors. Internally, however, there’s a different story to be told. It’s a story filled with attitude, cockiness, heated arguments among the executive team and Co-CEOs, and paranoia.'
posted to MetaFilter by VikingSword at 5:01 PM on July 16, 2011 (70 comments)

When a TV meteorologist says "temperatures will be ten degrees above normal", the word "normal" has a specific meaning. Every 10 years NOAA re-calculates the "normal" temps for the USA based on the prior 30-year averages. The new normals have just been released, based on the 30 year period 1980-2010. Hotter is the new normal. With hotter weather comes more extreme weather. Extreme Weather and Climate Change, 3-part series from Scientific America .. and map of extreme weather events 1995-present.
posted to MetaFilter by stbalbach at 9:39 AM on June 30, 2011 (35 comments)

"Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers — I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated — but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called ‘A Short Vision’ in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner." [via]
posted to MetaFilter by brundlefly at 12:41 PM on June 27, 2011 (13 comments)

Eyes of a Generation is a "virtual museum of television cameras, and the broadcast history they captured," curated by actor and radio DJ Bobby F. Ellerbee. The site has hundreds of photos of cameras and of television sets backstage. It also includes vintage articles and a neat look at how the moon backdrop on the Conan set works.
posted to MetaFilter by zarq at 7:50 AM on May 10, 2011 (5 comments)

"Legendary" Russian movie studio Mosfilm is posting some it's most famous films on its youtube channel. They will be posting 5 new legendary Soviet films per week. They expect to have 200 uploaded by end of year. Most have English subtitles.
posted to MetaFilter by spicynuts at 2:11 AM on May 6, 2011 (16 comments)