How Metafilter Helped Two Girls From Human Trafficking Yesterday

I was watching this thread all day. Metafilter user Fake posted that two friends from Russia were likely about to fall into the textbook human sex trade trap last night, and the community found the resources to warn them and get them to safety.

Foucault's Pendulum Snaps

Times Higher Education:

If there were ever any truth in the esoteric tales of Umberto Eco’s bestselling novel Foucault’s Pendulum, it seems that the key to that knowledge has been lost.

The original pendulum, which was used by French scientist Leon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth and which forms an integral part of Eco’s novel’s labyrinthine plot, has been irreparably damaged in an accident in Paris.

The pendulum’s cable snapped last month and its sphere crashed to the marble floor of the Musée des Arts et Métiers.

Hand-made Hobbit Hole

Fabulous diorama of a hobbit hole.

Most Popular Baby Names of 2009 in the United States

From the Social Security Administration’s official stats, the top 1000 baby names from 2009. “Evelyn” was 39th, with 5536 occurrences. We tried not to pick a terribly popular name, and I’m glad the numbers matched out intuition.

Criterion Collection on Netflix

Here is a list of the films from the Criterion Collection that are available for instant streaming on Netflix. Now to find the time.

Comic Cubes

Cabinets for comic storage.

Drawer Boxes

We discovered this afternoon that a bottle of laundry detergent had a leak in it and had been dripping onto my comic boxes! Fortunately, I store them in Drawer Boxes, so the outside of the outer boxes got goop on them but the inner boxes were dry (and the comics are bagged, anyway, so should have been safe). I’ve recommended them before for their ease of storage, and I doubly recommend them now for the extra layer of protection.

In other comics-storage news, I send a few things away to Library Binding last month. I’ll be posting pictures soon when the shipment gets here.