Mssv

The Third Wave - in 1968, a schoolteacher conducted an experiment to find out how easily ‘normal American students’ could fall into patterns of behaviour as seen in Nazi Germany. The results were quite astonishing and unexpected, and well worth reading (via Metafilter).

MetaFilter has just become energised about a new project: MetaFilter Online Journalism (aka MoJo). You can see the origin of this idea in this thread. It is basically being put forward as some kind of website in which members of the public will be able to perform collaborative and investigative journalism, something which has been [...]

There’s been a bit of a ruckus on MetaFilter recently regarding a journalist, Laurie Garrett, who attended the World Economic Forum and sent an email to her friends filled with her personal thoughts an speculations about the conference. The email was of course not intended for publication, but this being the 21st century and what [...]

What with yet another release of a MetaFilter engine clone, I’ve gone and registered gamesfilter.com. It’s not active yet, and probably won’t be for a while until I’ve experimented with various engines, but eventually I hope to turn it into a MetaFilter-esque forum for interesting and breaking news regarding massively multiplayer online games. And let [...]

The Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed today; one of the worst disasters in spaceflight history. See this Metafilter thread for more information and commentary.

Son of Spam - a fun article about the US military’s latest advances in creating edible and long lasting food for troops on the move.
Says Darsch: “It wasn’t the four-letter words” in soldiers’ letters that caused his lab to abandon its “father knows best mentality” about MREs [meals ready to eat]. “It was the intriguing [...]

Collective - the BBC’s latest effort to create its own online community and yet more evidence of their web savvyness. As pointed out on Metafilter, it’s more accessible than h2g2, but to my eyes the front page looks far too busy for newcomers. What I’d like to know is how on Earth the BBC manages [...]

There’s no doubt that there are many who love Marmite, but personally speaking, I can’t stand the thing. Clearly MetaFilterites don’t agree with me though: “The marmite is not too strong for us. It is we who are too weak for the marmite,” and “Bow before the Gods of Yeast Extract! Bow damn you!”

I’m getting quite annoyed with MetaFilter, again. It’s not that the posts aren’t good - they are, I’ve seen some moderately good ones recently. It’s that I cannot sum up the enthusiasm to take part in discussions any longer. A thread about the link between autism and vaccines caught my eye today, and I was [...]

There’s an interesting discussion taking place at Metafilter (say it ain’t so!) about an article written by a mother who doesn’t allow her daughters to watch television.
Most posters are in agreement that it’s absurd to ban a medium of information just because there happens to be some tripe on TV. You might as well ban [...]