Metafilter

The one song played at every bar mitzvah isn't "Celebration," or "I Gotta Feeling," or even "New York, New York" -- it's "Hava Nagila." But what is it? A 9-minute documentary tells the story of how a wordless meditative nigun became a song everybody in the world, Jewish or not, could sing. Seriously, everybody. Harry Belafonte and Danny Kaye. Harry Dean Stanton with Bob Dylan backing up on harmonica. Polish metal band Rootwater. A guy who plays the ukulele behind his head. The Modern Female Choir of Zhejiang. The Dark Knight. What appears to be a group of comedy fiddlers ("featuring John and Pancho") from John Hagee's church in San Antonio. Even ... um... this guy. (Previously on MetaFilter: The closest you're going to get to the Beatles covering "Hava Nagila.")

There is a Horse in the Apple Store, a story and a meditation on exceptional things that "no one, for whatever reason, notices."

"Every input in agriculture is a war chemical. Every agrichemical is a war chemical." Physicist Vandana Shiva on monoculture, agricultural imperialism, and protests in Delhi conscribed to the hours of 9-5.
[When] I started to save seeds, and I'd try and find the English names for our dals, you know, urad dal is the black gram. ...You didn't have black gram, red gram. You had chickpea, cowpea, horse gram, because the British didn't know how to use it, so they treated all this as animal feed. And we still only have animal feed names for the most important part of the Indian diet. And the other day, [Mirah] came back, she'd collected this package from the local market, of a new dal called iDal. iDal. 'i' like iPod. IPhone. iDal. It literally is a dal only in imagination, because it's made of [wheat] flour and soya flour. And it's colored yellow. And it's extruded. And they have a whole science of this now, called analogue dals. It'll be the same soya and flour extruded into different shapes and dyed different colors. And we will imagine we are eating different things, but it'll be the same thing." This footage is from Dr. Shiva's recent talk on food and seed sovereignty at the International Meeting on Resisting Hegemony held 2-5 August 2010 in Penang, Malaysia.

Even though only four issues were published, Daniel Raeburn's 'The Imp' is widely regarded as a classic publication of comics criticism. Long out of print, he has now put them online for free. The four insanely comprehensive issues each cover Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Jack Chick and Mexican Historietas (violent and bizarrely sexual comics-NSFW).
Ira Glass comments.. "It was clearly the work of an obsessed person, in the very best way possible. A really smart obsessed person. There was a kind of Talmudic completeness to the whole thing, in a way that journalism rarely even aspires to. Not much journalism tries to be so emotional, and funny, and analytical, and thorough. There's really very little like it out there. The closest you get is one of those big stories they used to do in the old New Yorker, where at the end you feel like there's nothing else that needs to be said on the subject. I read it admiringly and jealously. In the years since I read the Chris Ware issue I've actually become friends with Chris Ware, real friends, we talk all the time, and probably a third of what I know about Chris still comes from that issue of The Imp. It was that complete and emotionally insightful."

Combat operations in Iraq are over! Except, the AP says "our content should not refer to the end of combat in Iraq, or the end of U.S. military involvement." Meanwhile, in Iraq, a new show has been airing since Ramadan that has been described as "Punk'd, Iraqi-Style, at a Checkpoint." You can watch 14-minutes of the show (in Arabic, no English subtitles), here.

"Keep your man hot. But for when you cannot, Make sure no one else will do it for you. Do not use for birth control!" (Very, very NSFW)

Like voting things against other things? Princeton University has applied this concept to the suggestion box to create All Our Ideas, a website where you can create a suggestion box and allow others to vote on and add suggestions. As an example, here's one for MeFi!
Special thanks to jasonhong for commenting about this!

How to End the Great Recession. Robert Reich's prescription for the economy.

On Tor.com, Mefi'sown Patrick Garcon (smoke) is writing lively essays on Victorian fantasy illustration, from the Pre-Raphaelites to Orientalism. [via mefi projects]

Iranian Typography Now makes a nice appetiser to a book like Graphic Design from the Arab World and Persia (annoyingly small flash gallery) where calligraphy goes digital and comes alive as it collides with graphic design, art, graffiti, and even light.

Over fifty years after Los Angeles' first nuclear meltdown, the State of California is finally getting around to decontaminating the radioactive fallout.

It's a simple concept: Given a choice between two random movies, which one do you like best? That's the driving force behind Flickchart, an addictive review site for movie lovers. Faced with two posters, click the one for the title you prefer (weeding out the ones you haven't seen). Good! Now do it again. And again. And again. With each new face-off, Flickchart perfects a growing list of your favorite films -- and there can be no ties. This leads to some difficult dilemmas: Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark? Citizen Kane or The Godfather? WALL-E or Spirited Away? But you needn't struggle alone -- Flickchart is also social. By drawing on the data of tens of thousands of fellow users, you can create remarkably specific lists: Martin Scorsese's Best Period Films. The Best Road Movies of the 1980s. The Worst Movies of All Time. If you rank enough films, you can generate interesting personalized charts, like "Your Favorite Musicals" or "The Best Movies You Haven't Seen." These filters carry over to the ranking system, letting you judge nothing but Horror movies or 1960s movies or unranked movies or movies from your top 100. You can also comment on popular match-ups, lending your voice to contentious debates like Ghostbusters vs. Back to the Future or Jaws vs. Predator. Not a movie fan? Don't worry. Flickchart will be expanding into books, games, and music soon. Until then, you can give your own data sets the Flickchart treatment using this tool from CNN.
Note: Don't let the homepage scare you away! Registration is only required to rank your own movies, and the process is near-instant: just enter a username, password, and a gibberish email address (you don't need to confirm it), and you can start ranking immediately. If you don't want to do that, you can still use the site's non-personalized tools, including the best-of lists, the custom chart-builder, and all the articles and features on the official blog, such as movie reviews, user articles, and the site podcast. But I'd recommend registering, myself -- it takes only a few seconds, requires no personal information, and the rankings and other personalized features it enables make it totally worth it.

Last Lights On - a zoom down into the Mandelbrot set to 6.066 e228 (2^760)
Longer Vimeo and downloadable version here. Mandelbrot set tutorial.

Hackspaces are open resources for community, group, or solo work on digital media, electronics, robotics, and art installations. Many allow drop-ins, and are run on a voluntary, non-profit basis - there's likely one near you. Just want to repair something by yourself? iFixit, previously known for their teardowns of Apple products, have launched an open wiki to create manuals on how to repair everything from vehicles to household appliances.

A team of researchers from the Hebrew University has developed a treatment that completely destroys HIV-infected human cells in laboratory cultures, according to an article published last month in the scientific journal AIDS Research and Therapy. The full text of the article is available here as a PDF: Specific eradication of HIV-1 from infected cultured cells. Previously.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blanks catastrophically in a TV debate. No matter how strongly you feel about her immigration bill, it's hard not to feel for her. After all, public speaking is America's greatest fear, so the trainwreck might conceivably even help her. But then, here's her equally terrible reaction to press questions afterwards about her false claims that immigrants behead people. Not a good day for the controversial Arizona gov, who has now sworn off debates.
Here's Craig Ferguson's enhanced version. And a look back at some classic debate meltdowns and gaffes.

The Student Loan Scheme: Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery ...Americans now owe more on their student loans than they do on credit cards. With for-profit universities under recent scrutiny, many argue that the student loan industry itself is in need of more reform.

Very happy Gentoo penguin.
From the youtube page: Just to be clear, I DID NOT TAKE THIS VIDEO, and nor did I add the (annoying) music. This video was given to me by the chef at Vernadsky, the Ukrainian research station about 90 miles south of where I'm currently living (Palmer Station, Antarctica).

Drivers in West Vancouver will soon see a 3D image in the street of a small girl chasing a ball. The BCAA Traffic Safety Foundation is teaming with Preventable to create the image with the goal of enhancing traffic safety.
(some previous discussions of 3D art on sidewalks)

Got a 90210 Day hangover? Chill.It is the 3rd of September.