Korfball, the world's most popular Dutch-made sport. Probably closest in description to netball or handball, korfball was created so boys and girls could play together "on equal terms". It's catching on around the world (need more words!) and has been a demonstration sport at the Olympics (Okay, in the 1920s, but still). And if you don't want to join a club right now, you can "bet" on tournament winners! more inside

Six Apart, parent company of Movable Type and TypePad, are buying LiveJournal. Five point five million LJers will be forced to spellcheck before publishing (if only). more inside

Curious, George: Graves Disease So my mother recently found out she has Graves Disease. She's looked up the available info on the web and is well-informed but understandably a little depressed at the news. I'd like to be able to tell her that with treatment, she'll be fine, but obviously I don't know that for sure. Has anyone here had experience with it, either themselves or a friend/relative? I can take the bad stuff, too. more inside

It's World AIDS Day today and Viewropa has a banner available for use on websites to promote AIDS awareness. It will be visible for 24 hours on MoFi from 5am UTC and highlights the "lottery effect" - one in every 157 people is HIV-positive. And one in 157 hits on the front page will see the banner.

T-shirt designs! Firstly, apologies to all monkeys for taking so long to get this up. I'll post inline images to all the designs received thus far, and anyone with other designs can email them to me or post/send me a link. Once it seems that all designs are in for viewing, we'll set up voting to give everyone a fair chance. more inside

Nerdfilter. Say no more. Not actually via Mefi, although it is linked there.

Precedent time A link has been removed from the front page due to inappropriate suggestions of physical violence against a group. The complainant contacted us in an inappropriate way and we will be taking this up with them. more inside

Curious George: Recording lightning Yesterday we had a pretty good thunderstorm. On the news last night, the weather report included a computer animation of the region from the air with each lightning strike over sped-up real time. How do they know where the lightning hit?

The MoFi archives are back up! Warning: they're in plain HTML which means you can read 'em but not change 'em. But I wanted them up by the 17th, for obvious reasons. They're a bit hard to navigate because I see there's still errors. I just played around until I found ways to navigate by manually changing the URLs. Here's the main archive page.

Preserving the Inuit language. Now Inuit speakers can create websites, make online payments, and manage documents online in their native language.

FrenchFilter! Koant's newest venture.

The Pitcairns are one of the most isolated settlements in the world. They lie midway between New Zealand and Peru and were settled famously after the mutiny on the Bounty in 1789. (Photo tour here.) The primary family on Pitcairn is still the Christian family, who claim to be descended from Fletcher Christian. The islands are officially a British colony, but as far as the settlers and their descendants are concerned, they are an independent and self-governing nation. So the three-and-a-half year criminal investigation and subsequent trial of several Pitcairn men for indecent assault and rape has opened up serious issues for the residents and the British Crown. more inside

New Australian party platform: enslave New Zealand. I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry hysterically, but either way I'm not washing Nostril's socks.

Read here for details. MonkeyFilter experienced about six hours of downtime today which can be read about in my blog. We've reset MoFi with the most recent forty posts and two thousand comments. This is not an excuse for double posts, monkeys! Let me know if anything's broken. Have a nice day.

Darwin's Autobiography cover picture ...is of Alfred Russell Wallace. more inside

Need a way to fill in your summer? One COBRA recruit's diary of how he was trained to take on G.I. Joe.

"I love the smell of burnt cookies in the morning. Smells like...Tollhouse." Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory meets Apocalypse Now.

Attention CD Swappers: Build a lamp from empty CD spindles! Maybe we should have a "how to make interesting things out of leftover junk" thread, since I'm springcleaning this weekend.

A rather lame study into IQ changes after having children. Basically, parents lose IQ points after having kids, and are incapable of thinking objectively about the special talents of their child. Uh huh. more inside

Ook! is a programming language designed for orang-utans. Since the word "ook" can convey entire ideas, emotions, and abstract thoughts depending on the nuances of inflection, Ook! has no need of comments.