A People's History for the Classroom [pdf] is a high school history lesson plan/workbook based on Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The entire 124-page workbook available for free as a downloadable PDF, as part of the Zinn Education Project, supported by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change. You must enter an email and agree to take a later survey to download.
posted by Miko at 12:28 PM Aug 20 2008 - 44 comments [33 favorites]

SoundJunction is all about music. You can take music apart and find out how it works, create music yourself, find out how other people make music and how they perform it, you can learn about musical instruments and voices, and look at the backgrounds of different musical styles. Over 40 musicians talk on film about their experiences.
posted by netbros at 4:09 AM Aug 21 2008 - 3 comments [25 favorites]

A Good Poop is an entertaining blog by an occupational and environmental health student who enjoys finding oddities in medical and scientific research from PubMed. (via Look at This...)
posted by madamjujujive at 9:15 PM Aug 20 2008 - 35 comments [24 favorites]

Le Bernardin chef Eric Ripert's got a blog where he serves up demos of recipes he makes in his toaster oven.
posted by contessa at 7:57 AM Aug 20 2008 - 36 comments [62 favorites]

"Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on."
posted by jbickers at 8:29 AM Aug 21 2008 - 20 comments [15 favorites]

A cool tale about second graders at P.S. 178 in Queens falling in love with John Coltrane, and raising funds to help restore the house in nearby Dix Hills [previously on mefi] where the saxophonist (and saint?) composed his spiritual masterpiece A Love Supreme [last four links go to Youtube].
posted by the_bone at 10:27 AM Aug 21 2008 - 10 comments [11 favorites]

Atlantic Yards is the largest project Frank Gehry, now seventy-eight, has ever undertaken. And if it proves to be his last large project, it will be a fitting capstone to a career utterly blind to the public function of architecture. For how better to assert your dedication to personal expression over context than to have your distinct visual style serve as the emblem for the death of two Brooklyn neighborhoods?

Charles Taylor discusses the anti-humanism of Modern architecture. [Via] [Previously]
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:34 AM Aug 21 2008 - 60 comments [11 favorites]

The Peloton. A gallery of professional bike racers taken just moments after they crossed the line after a brutal long stage of 2006's Giro d'Italia. After a hundred miles of racing, the rider dumps their bike on a team soigner and enters a makeshift tent for a quick photo among the finish line chaos. The photos showcase the pain and suffering well, but some photos also capture a bike racer's most damaging feeling: doubt.
posted by mathowie at 12:42 PM Aug 21 2008 - 39 comments [10 favorites]

Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road. Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world's.
posted by destrius at 8:33 PM Aug 20 2008 - 48 comments [9 favorites]

"Grandmaster" Ashida Kim has always been a controversial figure in the martial arts world, with his claims to Ninjitsu fame. Most who are familiar with him have read his book, Secrets of the Ninja, now freely available from his site. Modern times have made it pretty easy to establish him as a fraud, but even better, you can now view his Ninja Sentry Removal Techniques via youtube. Now you can learn to be a ninja, too!
posted by MysticMCJ at 8:52 AM Aug 21 2008 - 47 comments [9 favorites]

Food Porn Daily. Brought to you by Amanda & Tyler from What We're Eating and Nicole from Pinch My Salt. Click, Drool, Repeat.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 3:25 PM Aug 20 2008 - 23 comments [9 favorites]

Julien Briton draws calligraphy with light. [Via]
posted by gottabefunky at 4:52 PM Aug 20 2008 - 10 comments [9 favorites]

Olympic logos from 1896 to present. Tons of trivia too.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:24 AM Aug 21 2008 - 74 comments [9 favorites]

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
posted by finite at 7:02 PM Aug 20 2008 - 121 comments [8 favorites]

Ghost Particles & Pyramids: How physicists and archaeologists “see” inside ancient monuments.
posted by homunculus at 12:34 PM Aug 21 2008 - 6 comments [6 favorites]

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology.
posted by monospace at 8:30 AM Aug 21 2008 - 28 comments [6 favorites]

The humble magpie joins humans, apes, dolphins, and elephants in Club Self-Awareness.
posted by jamaro at 11:48 AM Aug 20 2008 - 49 comments [8 favorites]

Disassembled household appliances.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:30 AM Aug 21 2008 - 15 comments [5 favorites]

Elves in the upper atmosphere. Weird phenomena and not well understood, they are observed in the upper atmosphere. More can be found here and here.
posted by dibblda at 12:01 PM Aug 21 2008 - 12 comments [4 favorites]

Who watches The Watchmen? Kevin Smith has, Dave Gibbons has, Alan Moore won't (Gibbons hopes he'll watch the DVD), and if Fox has its way maybe YOU won't either.
posted by Artw at 5:00 PM Aug 20 2008 - 68 comments [4 favorites]