The Pisces Effect is a statistician's find that birth sign may predict likelihood of Olympics medal victories relating to Zodiacal attributes. Past statistical studies indicate Pisceans may be bad drivers...with perhaps some fluctuation for hemisphere. One columnist feels Washington, D.C.'s problems (and potential) may be attributable to being Pisces. Maybe Pisceans [flash; auto/unstoppable sound] have more luck as horses. Previously: [post] [comments]

Get your learn on. 180+ ways of investigating the human brain = hours of fun for the whole family. Thanks to an innocuous question by a 5 year old, my entire evening is now being spent investigating and discussing the structure and workings of the human brain. This flash site lets you explore the workings of the brain according to 12 subject areas (each with subtopics which are not included in the "180" count), within each of which are 5 levels of organization from social to molecular, within each of which are three levels of explanation (beginner, intermediate, and advanced.) discovered via Wikipedia.

Emily is considered to be one of the first animations to have overleapt a long-standing barrier known as 'uncanny valley' (watch the video) - from the team who, in part, brought you GTA4.
Previously, sort of. The video linked above is definitely most realistic I've seen any CGI.

Captivating animated short which recycles 60's era illustrations. Simple but mesmerizing animated short. 8 mins.

It's that time of year again. College students are buying supplies and returning to classes, as their prospective professors prepare syllabi for their budding new pupils. It also means it's time for Metafilter's semi-annual "get off my lawn" snarkfest blowout, which can only be sparked by the release of Beloit College's Mindset List for incoming Freshman. Now with webcast goodness!

Google goes geothermal with EGS.

Baseball behind barbed wire. Japanese-Americans brought baseball with them when they emigrated to America. The game had been introduced to Japan, so the story goes, by American Professor Horace Wilson in the 1870s. When Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans were relocated to internment camps during World War II, playing baseball was one of the few freedoms allowed them by camp directors.
Independent producer/filmmaker, actor, researcher, and writer Kerry Yo Nakagawa founded the The Nisei Baseball Research Project to preserve the history of Japanese American Baseball; his research has resulted in several non-fiction books and American Pastime, a feature-length fictional treatment of the internment camp baseball story.

Tim Kreider (previously) tells the tale of telling the tale of getting stabbed in the throat.
(Direct link to PDF)

Hawaii 70s-80s Punk Museum Back in the late '70s and early '80s, Honolulu had a small but close-knit punk scene. Poi Dog Pondering started out in Hawaii before relocating to Austin, then to Chicago. Two members of Boston's Dambuilders started out as the eXactones. Many other bands -- such as The Wrong and Cringer -- would relocate to the Mainland, hoping to seek an audience they couldn't quite find back home (embedded autoplay audio). Dave Carr was involved with a lot of these bands, and the Hawaii 70s-80s Punk Museum was curated from much of his own collection.
I was way too young to go to any of the shows played by these bands, but I did eventually get to learn about them in high school when I picked up the No Place to Play compilation from Jelly's Comics and Music.

Warning: Lots of embedded QuickTime links. The site design is very much Web 0.2.

Picturing our thoughts. "We're looking for too much in brain scans." [Via]

It started with sequencing 8-bit chipsets on Nintendo Game Boys, but the Chiptune scene has now expanded well beyond game systems. Reformat the Planet is the essential introduction to this awesome new genre, and proves it's more than just a blip. This week only you can watch the feature length documentary in its entirety on Pitchfork.tv.
Want to listen to some of the incredible music? Check out 8bitpeoples (previously 1, 2).

In a strange and incestuous twist of the space-web-time continuum, a fascinating comment about the mechanism by which The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (previOusly.) records every bit of daily news appeared inside a post on PVRBlog, the red-headed stepchild blog of our selfless benefactor, user 1.

A group of 100 college presidents has come together to state that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses. They want to encourage a dialogue about lowering the drinking age. They face opposition from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and from other college presidents, who accuse them of 'not wanting to deal with the problem'.

The Echo Label (splash page, site offline) a subsidary of Chrysalis, is "an independent creatively driven record company which nurtures artists before they sign deals with major labels." Blaming a "challenging macroeconomic environment" for hampering sales of CDs, a decline in synchronisation revenues from music used in TV programmes, films and advertisement, Chrysalis recently warned its investors that the Echo Label has performed below management expectations, with "marginally higher" write-offs for new unproven artists, noting that it had not "upstreamed" any artists to major labels in the third quarter.

After Terry Pratchett's Alzheimer's diagnosis made the news, a group of knitters banded together to make him a gift. The result was The Pratchgan, which -- after several months of organization and knitting -- made it into Pratchett's hands this past weekend. There's a Flickr pool of individual squares and the construction of the afghan. [Via Cleolinda]
Previously on Mefi: Match it for Pratchett; Pratchett diagnosed with Alzheimer's.