"Maintenance of martial law until the president lifts martial law"...We've seen armored vehicles in the city center. As the National Assembly said, the request for the lifting of the emergency martial law has been approved, but the martial law history is still maintained. It is said that martial law history will be maintained until a separate order from the president is given. It's still urgent inside and outside the government building. Police and military personnel are controlling around the entrance. [more inside]

You're Probably Wrong About Rainbows is a Veritasium deep dive into the physical processes by which rainbows form. YouTube, 27m10s [more inside]

Autogenerating something that sounds a lot like a makefile with signed inputs from Python code on Linux. Sounds as useful for reproducibility as for efficiency.

"The chat-breaking behavior occurs consistently when users mention these names in any context, and it results from a hard-coded filter that puts the brakes on the AI model's output before returning it to the user. When asked about these names, ChatGPT responds with "I'm unable to produce a response" or "There was an error generating a response" before terminating the chat session." (SL Ars Technica). [more inside]

Fish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too? [more inside]

While critics have typically described it as a novel of ideas, Mann first offered it to his readers as a fairy tale, albeit a modern, melancholic, ironic one. Its plot is a quest, a search undertaken by our hero, Hans Castorp, who desires to abandon the world of work, of exams and apprenticeships that leave him pale and trembling, for a utopia of eating, smoking, arguing, and having love affairs. Hans Castorp may strike us as a naïf, but among the fastidious German middle class, this confers upon him a paradoxical nobility; he is a modern knight errant, a young man at leisure to seek his paradise on earth. from The Apostle of Love by Merve Emre [The Yale Review]

Because we are all familiar with the modern deck of playing cards, a standard deck of Bicycle rider back playing cards seems very "normal" and "traditional" to most of us. But to people of the past, a deck like this is anything but normal! The reality is that playing cards have undergone a radical transformation since their first beginnings several centuries ago.

The chicks are back in Byron Bay as new life thrives on some of the town's best real estate. Byron Bay in New South Wales is known for its celebrity residents, but some of the town's best real estate is now home to a thriving ecosystem.

comment: There's a distinct irony in building a prison taller than the Statue of Liberty New York is Building a Skyscraper Jail

This yule log goes to the moon (SLYT) This glowing mood-setter is brought to you by the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket that launched Artemis I on its mission around the Moon and back on Nov. 16, 2022.

Not a snowflake. Not a camera. Not an umbrella. Not an apartment. Not a water drop. [more inside]

The Feast of St. Barbara You have some time to prepare your costume for the Feast of St. Barbara, celebrated by Middle Eastern Christians on December 4th. Go house to house for local tasty treats as you participate in a tradition that pre-dates the pumpkins and ghouls of US Halloween. [more inside]

"The wind phone is an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, where visitors can hold one-way conversations with deceased loved ones." "In Japan, there is a frontier between life and death, and it’s perched on the steep slopes of a mountain called Kujira-yama, the Mountain of the Whale. That’s where we’re going..." 'How Japan’s Wind Phone Became a Bridge Between Life and Death.'

Over a year ago, automotive YouTuber Robert Dunn ran a video showing the stark difference between the experience of charging an electric vehicle on the Supercharger network and the varied CCS charging platforms out in the wild. With a year marked with the opening of the Supercharger network to non-Tesla EVs and improvements to both NACS and CCS infrastructure, Dunn has revisited that assessment. [more inside]

Hey, Evan & Katelyn, what have you been up to? "Oh, you know, we made a bean phone case"

Though uncertainty around royalties abounds, the ringtone itself remains alive and well. While that life has not been nurtured by the world’s most prominent music companies, it’s been adopted by a slew of app developers and freelance producers. [Sherwood]

What would your walk-up/intro music be? What should be playing as Team MetaFilter takes the court? Here are the 1997 Chicago Bulls in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, a classic of the genre. How about a newer classic? Timmy Trumpet plays a live intro for Mets' relief pitcher Edwin Diaz. Get hype, MeFites: it's your weekly #freethread.

Julia Serrano compiles over two decades of academic research on gender affirming care for trans youth and summarizes it into a brief, compelling fifteen minute essay with pages and pages of sources. For those who don't know her, Julia Serrano is a transgender woman, the author of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity and activist for LGBTQ causes.

Ocean fish and seaweed to be farmed hundreds of kilometres inland using salt water from deep underground. An Adelaide-based aquaculture company hopes to use saline groundwater to grow the products at a landlocked site in South Australia's Riverland.

A child isn’t a luxury, but in 2024, the ability to provide that care, without significant material worry, can feel like one. Should we feel good about that? [more inside]

A survey of all the cuisines in China, probably undercounted. Chinese Cooking Demystified attempts to catalog every single regional cuisine in China, complete with explanations, maps, and of course, the food.

Pipedreams.org has aired 1-2 hours of pipe organ music a week for since 1982. And it's all online for anyone to listen to. (Note: The latest episode is always a one-minute preview. But all of the other episodes make the full, hours-long audio available.) [more inside]

The Continue and Persist Letter. A official-looking legal letter that encourages and uplifts people, one that tells people to keep doing what they’re doing! Surprise someone you appreciate by sending them a Continue and Persist Letter.

"Many of the figure compositions look like clusters or bundles of flesh, encompassing a feeling of tightness, bonding, holding. I feel the need to keep the bodies close together. I think that’s the protection instinct.” [NSFW] [more inside]

President Biden pardons his son Hunter Biden [more inside]

Linguists argue that style is almost impossible to hide because many of the choices we make are unconscious. Someone may decide to spell a word wrong, but forget to modify less noticeable details, such as their use of punctuation. “People say a lot about themselves when they’re trying to hide their writing,” said Roten. “For us it’s just more information.” from Can a Comma Solve a Crime? [The Dial]

warming up ... Intimités... Tentáculos... Le Faux-Orchestre... ?

A short essay by Daniel Lavery (previously (previouslier)), written during a COVID lockdown, about a monk's discipline over his own self, a movie about an abusive imposter's discipline over a family, and Daniel's discipline over his memories of his father. [Archived version] [more inside]

A new invention could wipe away nearly one third of the fatbergs in our sewers. A group of engineers have invented a protective coating for concrete pipes that could help drastically reduce the presence of fatbergs — congealed masses of oils, grease and sanitary items – that block the sewer system.

For 50 years, Exponent II has made the LDS Church squirm. It has no plans to stop. (High Country News, archive)

A retrospective (YT, 10 minutes) by Brian McIntosh on Descent: FreeSpace - The Great War (WP), plus an extended ode (YT, 1 hour) to FreeSpace 2 (WP) by Llaren Sagan.

Muse. 'The 2nd Law: Isolated system' (slyt. 4:59)

From specimens of chromatic woodtype to the groovy letter people and 16th Century writing templates typography and calligraphy turn visual language into something beautiful. Beginning in the early 20th Century, the Ludlow Typograph Company (1906 to late 1980s) gave its sales staff specimen books to advertise fonts and ornaments that could be printed on its Ludlow Typograph, a hot metal typesetting system used in letterpress printing for large-type material such as newspaper headlines or posters. from The Beautiful Ludlow Typography Specimen Books c. 1958 [Flashbak]

The time is around 1998, when Cartoon Network had a much much better web presence than they do now (these days it's just a subsite of Max). Then, the Space Ghost Coast 2 Coast people, long before "Adult Swim" or "Williams Street," kept up a web presence for each of the members of the "Council of Doom" league of supervillains. Those sites are long gone now, but a fairly decent backup of them exists on the Internet Archive! So jump into a time machine and catch up retroactively with the affably evil blogs of Zorak, Brak, Moltar, Black Widow, Metallus, Lokar (hisssss) and Tansut. These should be the last versions of these pages that were up; the bottom of each page has links to past entries. [more inside]

The calm, serene life associated with gardening pairs suspiciously well with rose-tinted wistfulness for a simpler time in computing. I’m happy to be wrong though, because software doesn’t get more real than PlantStudio. Written by Kurtz-Fernhout Software, PlantStudio is a surprisingly deep botany simulator for creating and arranging 3D models of herbaceous plants based on how real plants grow, change, fruit, and flower, over their life cycles. The last release of the app was in 2002, and it was for Windows 95/98/2000/NT4, but a little bit of work gets it running on macOS.

And we're off and running with the 2024 edition of Advent of Code, December's greatest nightly programming puzzle adventure game. Make friends with a new programming language you want to learn (but keep the old) and head on over to day 1 to collect stars and save Christmas! No CS degree or fancy computer necessary. [more inside]

LinkMe, December '24: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other members have found interesting and would like to read more about! Just tag the resulting post "LinkMe" and include a nod back to the original suggestion. No self-linking and usual site rules apply, but otherwise feel free to post whatever you like! Holiday links encouraged but not required. Look inside for a round-up from last month! [more inside]

The 10 Best Comics That Are Based On Video Games. 10 Comic Books Based On Hit Video Games Worth Reading. Short on time? Try The 8 Best Comic Books Based On Video Games. Decide you do have time? Try the 10 Video Game-Based Comics That Are Actually Worth Reading. Really have quite a bit of time? Check out Wikipedia's List Of Comics Based On Video Games (which has a lot of comic-book-character-adapted-to-a-video-game-and-then-made-back-into-a-comic book). [more inside]

The Ashmolean museum in Oxford has an online Advent calendar of objects in their collection.

There are no shops in town really that sell bras or underwear but we wanted to provide resources for all the students.

It doesn’t seem far-fetched that Medicare or private insurance companies might eventually turn to AI therapy tools as an even cheaper way of ostensibly expanding access. Woebot’s website cites studies that show early intervention via outpatient care can lead to a reduction in mental health emergency room visits and inpatient hospitalizations. But the concern isn’t coming from a place of compassion for the seriously ill; rather, the point is to imply that widespread adoption of Woebot could yield “potential healthcare cost savings of up to $1,377 per patient, per year.” Just as mental health awareness campaigns eventually became a way for governments to justify prioritizing cheaper primary care interventions over crisis care, AI therapy may be the next step in a long tradition of cutting back care for the people who need it the most. from The Therapist in the Machine [The Baffler; ungated] [more inside]

LED lighting on surfboards may deter great white sharks from attacking surfers. Researchers believe their work could mean a revolution in surfboard design.

Join Read Palestine Week - download free ebooks, participate, and take action.

Prolific hacker arrested after threatening woman online. The guy allegedly behind the massive Ticketmaster and AT&T data breaches this year was unmasked after picking a fight with Allison Nixon, the chief research officer at a cybersecurity firm. [more inside]

Does what it says on the tin [more inside]

If someone asked you to define the "Star Wars" aesthetic, how would you respond? The movies, live-action shows, and animated series all possess a specific look and feel, but can you boil it down to a sentence or two? Perhaps you could say it's a mixture of junk and sleek, but that's too general. There's something essential missing. And that essential element may be an ineffable quality. Maybe you just know "Star Wars" when you see it, and that's that! Or maybe you could describe that singular aesthetic by what "Star Wars" doesn't have. from Star Wars Movies Are Secretly Forbidden From Showing These Five Objects

Check out the top 25 images up for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award. Judges have already awarded the winners of a bunch of different categories in the prestigious competition. But now it's the public's turn to have a say.

Many folks have wondered why the devastation of Hurricane Helene was so bad in Western North Carolina, after the hurricane had already moved 500 miles over land. A couple of good, science-filled explanations: Why did Swannanoa become Helene’s ‘ground zero’? Deadly combination of topography, development and a ‘tidal wave’ of water and The Struggle To Restore Drinking Water After Hurricane Helene

A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer is an essay [archive link] by Oscar Schwartz about Kevin Killian, poet, fiction writer, and incredibly prolific Amazon reviewer. A selection of his reviews has been published as a book. Amazon has an extensive sample. His Amazon user profile has only a small selection of reviews, but here’s a handful if you want to see what the fuss is about: MacKenzies Smelling Salts, Devotion (Why I Write) by Patti Smith, and Advil. If you want to read more of his two thousand plus reviews, you can go digging with the Wayback Machine or buy the book.

Shooting enemies in a virtual Ukrainian landscape may seem like a surprising way for soldiers to relax, but “I always clearly understand where the game is and where it is not,” said Ihor.