jessamyn's votes
Displaying vote 61 to 80 of 222

Anthology of the Best Short Stories
In a 1914 New York Times article, twenty-six of the most prominent writers of the day were asked what was the best short story in the English language. Among those naming what they considered the best story were Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Edna Ferber and Booth Tarkington. I have compiled these stories (approximately 1,500 pages) into a three volume series.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 2:59 PM on September 11, 2014 - 6 comments


This Is What Anne Frank's Arrest Looked Like
70 years ago, Anne Frank and her family were arrested after more than two years in hiding in Amsterdam. But what did their arrest really look like? I write about it for mental_floss.
posted by mynameisluka at 8:31 AM on August 4, 2014


Predicting Game of Thrones
I finally gave in and started reading Game of Thrones. When I got to the end of the first chapter, I texted a bunch of my nerd friends like, "Why do people think this is surprising? It is like super-obviously signposted!" From there, it turned into a project where I try to predict what will happen in Game of Thrones. I am blogging my predictions and there is a page where I mark off my predictions as correct or incorrect as I get to them.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:35 PM on August 10, 2014 - 9 comments


Name That Student: An app to help teachers learn students' names
Name That Student is a free Android app to help teachers (post-secondary or K12) learn the names of their students. The app uses pictures of each student to create study flashcards and then to create quizzes: flashcard, multiple choice (one picture: 3-5 names), and reverse multiple choice (one name: four pictures).
posted by A.Marin at 6:44 AM on August 28, 2014


Documentary: Round Window stained glass, stop motion
I make stained glass windows for a living. For a long time I've wanted to make a stop motion movie of a window going together. So I finally did it.
posted by yesster at 2:15 PM on June 19, 2014 - 5 comments


World of Objects - Found product photography from eBay & Craigslist listings
Strange & wonderful vernacular photography collected from eBay and Craigslist listings. Witness as ordinary Objects take on other-worldly, pathetic or even menacing qualities. You will never look at Objects the same again. http://worldofobjects.tumblr.com
posted by kingfelix at 2:54 PM on July 2, 2014 - 5 comments


How Not To Be Wrong
After three years of work, my book HOW NOT TO BE WRONG: THE POWER OF MATHEMATICAL THINKING comes out today from Penguin Press! It's about math. Also: baseball, Reaganomics, daring lottery schemes, Voltaire, the replicability crisis in psychology, Italian Renaissance painting, artificial languages, the development of non-Euclidean geometry, the coming obesity apocalypse, Antonin Scalia’s views on crime and punishment, the psychology of slime molds, packing 24-dimensional spheres, what Facebook can and can’t figure out about you, the invention of calculus, and the existence of God. The book is available at Amazon, Indiebound, Waterstones, and (I hope!) your local bookstore. MetaFilter has been a fantastically useful resource for me in putting this together; partly because I can use Ask for my questions about statistical significance in different languages and stockpicking scams, but more importantly because I've learned so much about how to write about math for non-mathematicians from writing about math on MetaFilter!
posted by escabeche at 10:33 AM on May 29, 2014 - 13 comments


Lapsed Historian - Because History is Fun. Honest.
A website for long form history writing, such as The Longest Forecast, the story of the Meteorologist Eisenhower challenged to find the right day for D-Day. Also for sharing interesting history pieces found elsewhere as well.
posted by garius at 9:24 AM on June 6, 2014


TruckPlease: Moving sucks, so we made it easier
Post whatever you need moved and get bids from drivers in your city, eliminating the need to scour craigslist or rent a U-Haul the next time you need something moved.
posted by 913 at 12:04 AM on May 3, 2014 - 2 comments


UX Launchpad
Hello! UX Launchpad is a one day design course in Seattle. The event is built with non-designers in mind, and so far we've had a great blend of developers, PMs, fine artists, and interaction designers looking to learn more. Classes are designed to be small and hands-on.
posted by jragon at 7:09 PM on March 1, 2014


A Better Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine, an archive of historical web pages dating back to 1996, has been greatly improved. The index is now updated every hour, there is a new front page, a new Availability API, a 404 handler that webmasters can use, and many other improvements. I think the most important new feature is the ability to instantly save a page and receive a permanent URL for use in citations.
posted by rajbot at 1:57 PM on October 29, 2013 - 2 comments


College Football Calendar
For almost a decade I would spend a few days every December tinkering with a PHP script that would let me publish an ics calendar of all the college bowl games. A couple of years ago I bit the bullet and just decided to cover the whole season, and then the next year I decided I might as well cover every team every season instead of only my favorites. You can go to this little pet project of mine and subscribe (in Outlook or iCal, or on your mobile device, whatever) to your favorite team's football schedule. You can also subscribe to an entire conference, or to just the AP Top 25.
posted by GatorDavid at 2:10 PM on October 8, 2013 - 3 comments


DEFCON: The Documentary is Released
In February of 2012, I was in Helsinki traveling with Rachel Lovinger when I was contacted by long time goon Russ Rogers. His question was simple: since DEFCON was coming up on the 20th anniversary, and I had been both an attendee and director of several technology-based documentaries, would I be interested in doing a documentary on DEFCON and its 20th year? I said I needed to think about it, but I really didn't have to think that long. A year and a half later, I put the finishing touches on a two hour movie and an hour of bonus footage, having spent the previous 18 months planning, shooting, organizing, editing, and just generally living this movie day in and day out. While we weren't able to cover every last aspect of DEFCON (and who really could?) I think you'll find there's something for everyone in the movie. It was done out of love And respect for this incredible event, I hope it brings a whole new appreciation of the special event DEFCON has every year.
posted by jscott at 5:56 PM on August 6, 2013 - 3 comments


Scrablet (Pro) Scrabble Trainer App
My husband and I wrote this Android app for serious Scrabble players to train their anagramming ability. Unlike similar apps it allows the player to choose between various scrabble competition dictionaries (SOWPODS, TWL, etc), to choose to get a rack that includes J, Z, Q or Z, to require that at least one 7-letter word is available and to specify whether or not blanks should be allowed. Word definitions are available, although in my experience most Scrabble players don't really care about those! There's also a free version people can try out that doesn't have some of these "professional" features.
posted by lollusc at 2:54 AM on August 15, 2013 - 1 comment


Miller's Crossing, 20 Years Later
The Coen Brothers' "handsome movie about men in hats" was filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1989. Twenty years later I visited as many of the exterior filming location as I could find and photographed them in their current state.
posted by komara at 6:25 PM on July 12, 2013 - 4 comments


Messages to America: The Letters of Ho Chi Minh
Following up on an askmefi question, where I was surprised that Ho Chi Minh's various messages to America couldn't be found online anywhere in a simple resource, I made it. Here it is.
posted by history is a weapon at 10:58 AM on July 13, 2013 - 2 comments


Gnomeland
We had a need to prank a coworker with the "best prank ever", and we decided the best way to do it was to wait for an occasion when she and her boyfriend were out of the house for the day, and then turn their house into Gnomeland, New Hampshire's Premiere Gnome Destination. This involved installing approximately 500 gnomes in an around her house, including hiding gnomes in all sorts of places across the property. And we put up a giant "Gnomeland" banner. And replaced the photos in her house with pictures of gnomes traveling to tourist landmarks like the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge.
posted by kaszeta at 2:34 PM on July 24, 2013 - 8 comments


You Can't Eat The Sunshine, Esotouric's podcast celebrating Los Angeles lore
Esotouric turns the notion of guided bus tours on its ear with excursions like Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles and Pasadena Confidential. Now you don't have to get on the bus to get the skinny. Each week on the You Can't Eat The Sunshine podcast, join Kim Cooper and Richard Schave on their Southern California adventures, as they visit with fascinating characters for wide-ranging interviews that reveal the myths, contradictions, inspirations and passions of the place. There’s never been a city quite like Los Angeles. Tune in if you’d like to find out why.
posted by Scram at 10:31 AM on May 12, 2013


Waeguk.in
Waeguk-in is (a romanization of) the Korean expression that means 'foreigner,' and that's what I am. The site is Wonderchicken Industries™ newest entry into Korea blogging for fun and no profit whatsoever. I've dismantled my old neglected Korea-focused site and built a shiny new one devoted more to fun and interesting Korea-related stuff and less to turgid essays. If you're interested in Korea, come and have a look, or just follow @iamthewaegukin for updates.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:27 PM on May 14, 2013 - 7 comments


Ebook Index of Free Ebooks for the Kindle
My parents got a Kindle for Christmas, and I've looked into ways for them to read public domain books from outside Amazon on it, and the interfaces for browsing for books and transferring them are ... non-optimal. I found the Magic Catalog, an ebook index of Project Gutenberg books, linked up so that you can immediately download books and add them to your Kindle, without using a computer or Amazon. It's in a useless order, though – it's not sorted by the book title, or by author. So I thought I'd take a shot at fixing that. Here’s the prototype, sorted by the author's last name. This is my first ebook, so please forgive the rough edges.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:57 PM on February 18, 2013 - 7 comments


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