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In a story broke in the Manual Redeye the school paper for duPont Manual High School in Louisville, Kentucky by the two teenage children of a lawyer involved in an officer involved shooting and picked up by the New York Times we get a taste of the kind of classes that have been (and may still be) given to police academy cadets. [more inside]
posted by Ignorantsavage at 8:59 PM PST - 68 comments

...By standard intelligence tests, the dogs have failed at the puzzle. I believe, by contrast, that they have succeeded magnificently. They have applied a novel tool to the task. We are that tool... How savvy we are in dogs’ eyes! It’s a clever strategy to turn to us after all. The question of the cognitive abilities of dogs is thereby transformed: dogs are terrific at using humans to solve problems, but not as good at solving problems when we’re not around.

Forget Everything You Know About Your Dog [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 7:14 PM PST - 29 comments

Happy Halloween, New York City! If you miss the madness that is the annual Halloween parade in nyc, these puppets are here to help. [more inside]
posted by vrakatar at 6:48 PM PST - 3 comments

"A Non-Hero’s Guide to The Road of Monsters" by A.T. Greenblatt (previously mentioned in a list of recommended sf/f from 2017) is a light adventure tale of a sidekick-turned-blogger/entrepreneur. "So why do I bother running a business like this? Because monsters are remarkable, unexpected, and totally worth the wait." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:43 PM PST - 7 comments

Old Dog: Ann Marie Fleming who lives in Vancouver makes award-winning animated films. Ann-Marie Fleming who lives in 100 Mile House runs Dog Quality, which sells wheelchairs she has designed and other assistive products for dogs. After a case of mistaken identity, the two met up last year, and the idea for this three-minute animated short was born: The result is the charming and touching Old Dog that tells the story of an aging pug who needs a lift on a long walk and can't see very well anymore. It features the clever gadgets from 100 Mile House Fleming and the filmmaker's own experience of watching her father age.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 1:40 PM PST - 8 comments

Things fall apart in the United States — and Canada takes a hard look in the mirror. The United States has offered the world a demonstration of how things can fall apart — not in one cataclysmic moment, but slowly and steadily over a long period of time as institutions and ideas erode and crumble. Every other country on earth has to deal with the ramifications of what's happening now in the U.S. But beyond those consequences, there's another question for every other democracy: how do you make sure your own country doesn't end up like that? [slCBC]
posted by heatherlogan at 11:49 AM PST - 55 comments

Do you need a to-do list, but sticky notes, ordinary pieces of paper, daily planners, and physical calendars seem too darn straightforward?
Do Remember The Milk, ToDoist, TickTick, Microsoft ToDo, EverNote, 2Do, Google Keep and your smartphone’s note-taking app have too many fancy graphics?
Does paying for a program like Things or OmniFocus really grind your gears?
Would using the free option from some project management startup like Notion, ClickUp, Clubhouse, Trello, Quire, BaseCamp, or Asana take your household in a disturbingly corporate direction?
Are online bug trackers like Pivotal Tracker, JetBrains YouTrack, GitHub Issues, or Jira just silly?
Is org-mode for emacs too laughably old school, powerful, and arcane?
Well then, you might be be in the market for TaskWarrior! It’s a command line to-do list management tool, that’s as easy as task add "Use TaskWarrior"; task 1 done. It can even sync your tasks across devices, although that will take some work unless you’re willing to trust Inthe.am and some guy named Adam Coddington who runs it.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:46 AM PST - 52 comments

The remotely operated vehicle SuBastian being deployed in waters off Australia’s north coast by the Research Vessel Falkor. When Dr. Vecchione got a good look at the image, he knew exactly what it was: Spirula spirula, or the ram’s horn squid. Spirula is the only living squid to have an internal coiled shell, which it tucks under the fleshy flaps of its rear end, according to Jay C. Hunt, a biologist at East Stroudsburg University. The squid can also emit lime-green light from a large photophore, also located on its behind. Dr. Vecchione and other experts were astonished. For ages, biologists and beachgoers had stumbled upon the thumbnail-white shells of Spirula stranded on shores around the world. But no one had ever seen the animal alive in its natural habitat.
posted by PixieS at 11:18 AM PST - 10 comments

“Watching all the nasty political ads has been a soul-crushing experience.” New York State Assemblyman Al Stirpe has released a new campaign ad and it is refreshingly different. [more inside]
posted by kinnakeet at 10:39 AM PST - 12 comments

OH HELL YEAH: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE SHARKNADO FRANCHISE I had no idea how weird this got over the six films until I saw this kill count of the series. Involves sharks, chainsaws, laser chainsaws, going into space, chainsaw swords, laser chainsaws with built in death blossom, and time travel, and running over Bret Michaels.
posted by zabuni at 8:26 AM PST - 23 comments

Kind of perfect for Halloween, Pokey LaFarge's Fuck Me Up off his new album Rock Bottom Rhapsody is wicked good (but the video is a wee bit intense, so if you're feeling like everything is too much, you may want to wait until a time you just need something to eff you up, ... because hell, eventually everyone feels like it). [more inside]
posted by taz at 8:21 AM PST - 2 comments

On the Halloween chapter of William Gaddis’s novel Carpenter’s Gothic from Biblioklept [includes NSFW prose]
posted by chavenet at 6:29 AM PST - 1 comment

Sir Sean Connery passed on at 90.
posted by hearthpig at 5:40 AM PST - 157 comments

The first Russian edition of George R. R. Martin’s A Feast for Crows included two chapters featuring Brienne based on an earlier draft. A translation reveals significant changes from the final draft, illustrating Martin’s process and the improvements his rewrites provide (Reddit).
posted by adrianhon at 4:33 AM PST - 6 comments

Meanwhile, on a small European island, as stormy weather, Halloween and a blue moon all coincide, different nations are under different systems/tier structures, while different regions of England are under different tiers of lockdown, with some local variations within tiers, and schools and universities open (though with some students quarantined). Cases of Covid19 are generally rising, and hospitals filling or full, possibly due to taxpayer-subsidised restaurant schemes last summer. (Speaking of food, subsidised meals for MPs but not for children). Leaks and speculation point to a possible England lockdown (minus schools), or perhaps Tier 4, next week. [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 3:26 AM PST - 94 comments

"Cascade" by A.J. Fitzwater (published July 2020) is (as reviewer Vanessa Fogg says) "an unusual story of time travel, in which a group of grieving friends discuss what steps they would take to change the past without changing the current world too much—and only for the better." Or, as the author puts it, "This story is about a trans guy mourning the death of his best friend, and in a drunken state with his other friends manifesting a Goddess of Change into the world." Lots of queer representation; content note for mention of a trans person's suicide before the story starts.
posted by brainwane at 6:40 PM PST - 3 comments

A UK business decided to make a splash with their corporate name = by formally registering a cross site scripting (XSS) attack as one, waiting to confound anyone who read the list of corporate names without sanitizing the results. (SLRegister) [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:44 PM PST - 16 comments

Happy by Danny Elfman. Take my hand, in my hand, and my eloquent knife. First solo song since 1985. Puppy, Puppy, Puppy, Puppy. 2020 2020 2020 2020. [Warning: Video has flashing lights]
posted by swift at 12:03 PM PST - 26 comments

"While it’s true that older generations are more vulnerable to fake news in some ways, they are more resilient in others. Millions of millennials’ parents did not suddenly decide to slide into conspiracy-land. They are simply living in a country with more and better ways of pulling them there. "
posted by Ouverture at 10:32 AM PST - 88 comments

An analysis of the genomes of people from 50 ethnolinguistic groups in Africa spots 62 genes under positive selection and 3 million more genetic variants than previously documented. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 10:30 AM PST - 5 comments

538 has finally done something useful this election season beyond reminding us constantly that any percentage for a Trump win still means he can win. Popular voting ends on Tuesday, and the electoral college votes on December 14, this is a guide to when all the popular votes will be counted in between.
posted by diva_esq at 10:15 AM PST - 103 comments

"There was a dignity to feeling kind and good. It was enjoyable." A single-link-essay in which Wallace Shawn expounds on the inherent cognitive dissonance required to perpetuate the myth of American Exceptionalism. Not, unfortunately, inconceivable.
posted by mce at 7:26 AM PST - 33 comments

So begins Disneyland Records' Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. Narrated by Laura Olsher (IMDB), side one of the certified gold 1964 sound effects record consists of ten "frightening" tracks sure to entertain children who were alive 40 years before YouTube was a thing. Track listing and more inside. [more inside]
posted by bondcliff at 7:26 AM PST - 31 comments

Adam Robinson-Yu, creator of A Short Hike (previously), has a new free game out for Halloween: Mayor Bones Proudly Presents Ghost Town’s 999th Annual Pumpkin Festival (Win/Mac/Linux). Carve pumpkins in 3D and show them off on the World Wide Web! “It’s simple, and it makes me very happy” (Polygon).
posted by adrianhon at 4:12 AM PST - 2 comments

AI Camera Ruins Soccer Game For Fans After Mistaking Referee's Bald Head For Ball.
posted by Pendragon at 3:11 AM PST - 39 comments

Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 2:22 AM PST - 30 comments

Keke Palmer's Actually Vote. Do watch this - it's great.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:03 AM PST - 7 comments

Vancouver In 8mm. Shot with my grandfathers Regular8 during the summer of 2020. [more inside]
posted by mannequito at 11:51 PM PST - 17 comments

Sci Phi Journal is an online magazine that "wishes to provide a platform for idea-driven fiction, as opposed to the ‘character-driven’ mode that has come to predominate speculative fiction." A few short stories they've published: "Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of CYBIMPLANT INC held at 10:00 AM on 14 May 2036" by Rick Novy (October 2020), the futuristic legal what-if "Habeas Corpus Callosum" by Jay WerkHeiser (January 2017; content note for rape), a fictional FIFA ruling in "Red Card" by Madeline Barnicle (June 2020), and an academic investigation of the missing Pope "John XX" by Timons Esaias (March 2020).
posted by brainwane at 6:39 PM PST - 17 comments

Tired of reading wonky, bland polling analysis? The angry Canadians from Lean Tossup are the cure for what ails you. [more inside]
posted by reenum at 5:22 PM PST - 17 comments

India saw recreational use of opium during the Mughal era, as well as the ruthless British determination to push the addictive drug into China by military force, with devastating effects on the Chinese (as well as Indians). But inventive Bengali women turned poppy seeds - a byproduct of the opium industry - into the delicious and iconic comfort food base পোস্ত (posto). Here's a beatifully videographed recipe from the good folks at Bong Eats showing how to make the classic Bengali dish of alu posto (potatoes in poppyseed sauce) at home.
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:54 PM PST - 14 comments

Cecilia Chiang, Who Revolutionized American Chinese Food, Dies At 100

The chef and restaurant owner who helped change the way Americans think about Chinese food has died. Cecilia Chiang was twice a refugee before she opened the influential San Francisco restaurant The Mandarin and taught Chinese cooking to Julia Child and James Beard. Chiang died Wednesday in San Francisco. She was 100 years old.

[more inside]
posted by Lexica at 2:50 PM PST - 18 comments

Kavanaugh corrects a concurring opinion after Vermont secretary of state Condos issued a strong condemnation.
posted by Chickenring at 1:47 PM PST - 70 comments

Glenn Greenwald on Thursday announced that he had resigned from The Intercept—the digital outlet he founded in 2013 with fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, and with funding from First Look Media—claiming “repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity” at the publication. (The Daily Beast no-paywall link. more here.)
posted by valkane at 12:26 PM PST - 197 comments

For Intersex Awareness Day, Colonial Williamsburg shares the story of Thomas or Thomasine Hall, an early Virginian settler who was brought to trial for refusing to identify as a man or a woman.
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:11 PM PST - 9 comments

Cocaine Ads of the 70s and 80s (slimgur) [more inside]
posted by box at 12:05 PM PST - 35 comments

As a member of Physicians for Human Rights, Rohini Haar (MD, MPH) has used her medical background to document human rights abuses among the Rohingya in Myanmar and to bring attention to health consequences of crowd-control weapons abroad. She is now leveraging social media to document the use of kinetic impact projectiles (“rubber bullets”) in Black Lives Matter protests in the US. Warning: violent imagery [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 11:34 AM PST - 2 comments

"I still love this place as is, because I saw this place grow from not having a [garden] centre, not having a conservatory, and a protea garden and so on ... So I saw this garden grow, but I didn't really grow with it. White people, they took ownership of it, and we didn't [do] that as yet. And there's a difference, because once you take ownership of anything, something changes: 'No, this is ours. We should look after it better.' And no one really explains that to you." [more inside]
posted by smcg at 11:33 AM PST - 2 comments

The 11 greatest vacuum tubes you've never heard of.
Carter M. Armstrong in IEEE Spectrum lays down the law on the vacuum tubes that receive too little honour. [more inside]
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:36 AM PST - 20 comments

The Death of Sierra On-Line a longread from Vice Gaming
posted by backseatpilot at 9:04 AM PST - 17 comments

2020 reads like a TV script. So we asked screenwriters how it should end.

If 2020 were a TV show, the first draft would be terrible. The premise is promising — what happens when political dysfunction meets a deadly virus? — but the execution needs work. Think about how messy it all has been: competing plotlines, too-abrupt soap opera twists, one-dimensional villains, stories introduced and then just as quickly dropped. Like it or not, we’re barreling toward the finale, and no one knows what’s going to happen in the last episode. Will there be a satisfying ending? Or one of those unsettling, ambiguous ones that gnaws at you long after you’ve finished the show? Will it be an ending at all?

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 8:37 AM PST - 62 comments

Investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party. (pdf) [more inside]
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 7:01 AM PST - 72 comments

"When my wife and I had COVID-19, we lost our sense of smell and taste for a bit. It was, as my wife put it, 'a joyless existence.' Now I had my taste back, but somehow the joy of eating was still gone."
posted by Ouverture at 6:02 AM PST - 21 comments

"Some staff at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights were told not to talk about pregnancy or abortion, in addition to censoring LGBT content, during some tours involving religious schools. ... A current museum staffer says her supervisor told her to avoid 'women's content like abortion' while giving a tour to a religious school group. She says she was sometimes asked not to mention anything related to the empowerment of women, like the story of Black human rights pioneer Viola Desmond."
posted by clawsoon at 4:09 AM PST - 15 comments

Austin Walker comes out of review retirement to argue Watch Dogs: Legion Promises Revolution, But Mostly Delivers Distraction (Vice). “How does one break a neighborhood free from “oppression”? Deface a few billboards. Sabotage a weapons factory. Knock out a really bad person. Complete three tasks like these in a district and you’ll unlock a special liberation mission, which are empty-calorie fun that somehow result in city-wide fireworks and celebration claiming that the neighborhood is now “defiant,” despite the fact that nothing has changed.” Polygon’s more positive review.
posted by adrianhon at 4:02 AM PST - 25 comments

Good question. While the ascendant Yahoo of the 1990s now only lives in our memories, its name and branding continue to shamble on zombie-like to its owner Verizon’s other products — this time, a purple 'Yahoo! Mobile' branded phone which retails for $49.99. [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 12:59 AM PST - 60 comments

Homestar Runner has a new cartoon for Halloween! If you still have a way to play it, there is even a Flash version! Side effects may include zig-zaggéd pants, large bean, clichéd parodies and playing in a band.
posted by JHarris at 11:23 PM PST - 14 comments

The full run of Chris Morris' dark comedy radio program Blue Jam is available, in mp3 format, at the Internet Archive. (previously and in AskMeFi) [more inside]
posted by eotvos at 10:59 PM PST - 14 comments

"He was a senior CIA official tasked with getting tough on Russia. Then, one night in Moscow, Marc Polymeropoulos's life changed forever. He says he was hit with a mysterious weapon, joining dozens of American diplomats and spies who believe they’ve been targeted with this secret device all over the world—and even at home, on U.S. soil. (GQ) Now, as a CIA investigation points the blame at Russia, the victims are left wondering why so little is being done by the Trump administration. (NYT)" [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 9:27 PM PST - 26 comments

Big Pharma teams up with Dave Grohl and the Foo Fighters to help fight back against Big Bean in a new ad for Freshpotix, a pharmaceutical cure for coffee addiction.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:02 PM PST - 14 comments

"Clark Kent invites Bruce Wayne and Diana of Themyscira to his parents' house for Christmas. It goes, in general, pretty okay." "Christmas in Kansas" by unpretty is a cute, sweet, funny fanfiction piece about Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman with tags "Christmas, Fluff, PTSD, the only real violence is in flashback form, aka that one scene that every single thing with batman has to have". An ebook with a pretty cover is available (although you can also download from Archive Of Our Own as ePub/MOBI/AZW3/PDF). Part of unpretty's "DC universe where moms are awesome and raise their kids right. Now with more melanin and queerness."
posted by brainwane at 6:38 PM PST - 21 comments

Where is the butterfly-eater, exuberant and mad in the manner of a ten-year-old naturalist, absorbed in a particle that looks like the world, in the rest of these ossified answers? And what is Véra buying in the supermarket – almonds? Green cheese? --Patricia Lockwood revisits Vladimir Nabokov's work in the LRB [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:33 PM PST - 6 comments

The Voyageurs Wolf Project is examining the predation behavior and reproductive ecology of wolves in Minnesota's Voyageurs National Park in summer months. Along with research findings, its website and Youtube channel contain numerous photos and videos, including wolves feeding on wild blueberries, wolves chasing off a bear that got too close to their den, and a dancing bear with bonus moose butt trailcam footage.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 1:28 PM PST - 6 comments

Instant Lettering
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 1:16 PM PST - 47 comments

Can we safely reopen schools? These debates over the science have grown more charged, as leaders seek to bring more students back to the classroom, but as Congress continues to drag its feet on stimulus funding. Many cash-strapped districts are struggling to implement the kinds of mitigation strategies that experts say have worked well abroad and that more-affluent schools have adopted. As COVID-19 cases rise nationwide, the question remains if reopening schools is a tolerable risk or a dangerous gamble, especially for communities of color ravaged most hard by the virus.
posted by toastyk at 12:27 PM PST - 50 comments

A guide to learning and teaching ichthyology using the FishBase Information System
posted by aniola at 11:09 AM PST - 3 comments

Yesterday, scientists and supply chain experts participated in an /r/AskScience AMA, sharing the following: "Since March, clinical microbiology laboratories have faced shortages of testing supplies, including SARS-CoV-2 molecular test reagents. Due to the growing demand and need for COVID-19 testing, production of supplies required to test for other infectious diseases has dwindled. This has led to a ripple effect of shortages and is causing a major delay in testing for common infections, such as urinary tract infections, sexually-transmitted infections including chlamydia and gonorrhea, gastroenteritis and cystic fibrosis." [more inside]
posted by glaucon at 8:02 AM PST - 18 comments

Quiz: Can You Tell a ‘Trump’ Fridge From a ‘Biden’ Fridge? (SLNYT)
posted by slogger at 6:47 AM PST - 148 comments

Pious Dagestani-Russian mixed martial arts champion Khabib Nurmagomedov defended his 155-pound title this past Saturday, and promptly retired. The capstone on his career was another textbook grappling "smesh": a buttery-smooth wrestling takedown which led to his late father's favorite submission trap: a triangle choke that put the heavy-hitting Justin Gaethje to sleep. Journalist Karim Zidan writes eloquently about the popular Muslim athlete's mixed legacy. [more inside]
posted by daveliepmann at 4:09 AM PST - 25 comments

The (Not Failing) New York Times - "How The New York Times went from failing newspaper to thriving digital subscription business."
posted by kliuless at 3:45 AM PST - 35 comments

The 2020 Indiecade Anywhere and Everywhere Award Winners are here, including Electric Zine Maker (Interaction Design, Previously), The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] (Experience Design), Wide Ocean Big Jacket (Jury Prix), Mutazione (Grand Jury), Holly Gramazio (Bernie DeKoven Big Fun Award), Derek Yu (Trailblazer), Zuraida Buter (Game Changer), Tangle Tower (Performance), I Was A Teenager Exocolonist (Procedural Design), NUTS (Audio Design), Labyrinth City: Pierre the Maze Detective (Visual Design), Terrarium: An Alternate Reality Game (Location Based and Live Play), Thousand Year Old Vampire (Tabletop), Sin Sol / No Sun (Impact), Journey of the Broken Circle (Narrative), Mini Motorways (Indiecade Choice). [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 3:08 AM PST - 4 comments

Some helpful tips from the Oregon Health Authority for the spooky season
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:37 PM PST - 14 comments

Dodgers Win the World Series After Years of Frustration. A win against the Rays in Game 6 sealed the franchise’s first title in 32 years and compensated for several postseason disappointments in recent years. "The same manager that left Tyler Glasnow out there to die for 112 pitches when he didn’t have it took Blake Snell out of an elimination game when he had a 2-hit shutout going at 73 pitches with the part of the order coming up that was 0-for-6 with 6 strikeouts on the night. How." Twitter melts down over TB pulling Snell due to ... analytics?
posted by geoff. at 8:45 PM PST - 34 comments

Seattle-based collective Polyrhythmics specializes in a flavorful blend of progressive funk, psychedelic rock, and modern afro-beat. As Troy Nelson explains in this week’s episode of Live on KEXP, it’s music for the "heads.” Their songs take time to unravel, rewarding patient listeners with a lush and intricate experience that defies the current song trends for something more gratifying. When the world is a whirlwind, don’t forget– take the time to let something develop. [about 30 minutes] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:39 PM PST - 6 comments

Four scifi stories about jobs, loyalty, and navigating difficult politics and priorities. In the happiest of the four, "Happenstance" by Fran Wilde (2017), an engineer of serendipity has to subvert residents' expectations and a skeevy executive's plans. "Sweet Marrow" by Vajra Chandrasekera (2016) (audio) portrays the fraught relationship between a journalist and a government worker in a turbulent time. "Exile’s End" by Carolyn Ives Gilman (August 2020) is "a complex, sometimes uncomfortable examination of artifact repatriation and cultural appropriation." And in "Thank You For Your Patience" by Rebecca Campbell (March 2020), Mark's stuck doing tech support while the world slow-motion falls apart outside.
posted by brainwane at 6:37 PM PST - 4 comments

The long-running UK avant music festival TUSK moved to an online streaming format this year in early October. They've posted the sets on their YouTube channel.

Some highlights: Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O'Rourke • The Dead C. (set one | set two) • Horse Lords • Matana Roberts • Crank Sturgeon • Blood Stereo [more inside]
posted by porn in the woods at 3:09 PM PST - 12 comments

In three books and a series of essays, Hartman has explored the interior lives of enslaved people and their descendants, employing a method that she says “troubles the line between history and imagination.” Her iconoclastic thinking on the legacy of slavery in American life has prefigured the current cultural moment. In 2008, five years before Black Lives Matter was founded, she wrote of “a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril.” Her writing has become a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 2:25 PM PST - 3 comments

"My son Akash represents our fourth generation in this occupation," Ashok Yadav told me. "My grandfather was the first in our family to take up tuning and repairing harmoniums - a skill he learned from musical instrument shop owners in Jabalpur 60-70 years ago. In those days, far more people were into classical music and playing harmoniums. This skill earned our landless family a living." [more inside]
posted by smcg at 12:40 PM PST - 10 comments

Ballrooms, Carriages, and Luxury Cottages During Trump's Term, Millions of Government and GOP Dollars Have Flowed to His Properties (WaPo)
posted by box at 12:03 PM PST - 36 comments

When (and why) right-wing conspiracy theories converge with faux-progressive wellness utopianism. A weekly podcast hosted by Derek Beres, Matthew Remski and Julian Walker whose experiences as cult survivors and yoga teachers inform their insights. In addition to the podcast and the extensive notes for each episode, resources include Redpilled , an "ever-growing list of wellness industry figures that have posted, shared, or explicitly created QAnon-related content." [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:56 AM PST - 56 comments

There's an update on this previous post about fanfic tropes that the NYT wrote about this past May, about a situation involving copyright law and DMCA takedowns and accusations of DMCA takedown abuse within publishing for a somewhat niche genre. ('Omegaverse' wolf-related porn.) Author Addison Cain and her publisher levied accusations of copyright infringement against author Zoe Ellis, and hijinks have, as the kids say, ensued. Media critic Lindsay Ellis (previously), no relation to Zoe Ellis, posted this video about the whole situation last month, which lays things out pretty well. Addison Cain's lawyer mailed her about it with further accusations of copyright infringement and sent DMCA takedowns. Lindsay Ellis has posted her video response.
posted by rmd1023 at 10:37 AM PST - 14 comments

You may remember Russian propaganda campaigns from the 2016 US presidential election, but did you know operations really kicked into gear after the election of Trump? Things look a little different in 2020, but that is likely how the story will go this time, too. [more inside]
posted by Lonnrot at 10:21 AM PST - 25 comments

What could make you walk miles across a landscape full of Ice Age predators, all alone except for the toddler you’re carrying? Archaeologists recently discovered a long trail of footprints left behind by someone brave enough—or desperate enough—to undertake the journey. A typical teenager’s stroll: Carrying a baby and dodging mammoths [Ars Technica]
posted by chavenet at 7:12 AM PST - 9 comments

Anna Wiener profiles Moxie Marlinspike (The New Yorker), founder of the end-to-end encrypted messaging service Signal, exploring his path from Silicon Valley anarchist groups to ethical hacking, working for Twitter following the acquisition of his startup Whisper Systems, to the development of the Signal Protocol, now used in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 2:59 AM PST - 27 comments

Two short scifi stories about space programs run by brown and Black people: the optimistic "Heard, Half-Heard, in the Stillness" by Iona Datt Sharma (published August 2020) and the mostly optimistic "At the Village Vanguard (Ruminations on Blacktopia)" by Maurice Broaddus. Datt Sharma's story is also listed in Ladybusiness's recommendation list of eight short & sweet stories published in 2020: "I found all of these stories hopeful."
posted by brainwane at 6:35 PM PST - 2 comments

Vaccine Boot Camp is an infographic that explains vaccine concepts in a clear and memorable way.
posted by storybored at 4:50 PM PST - 12 comments

The Washington Post has a map showing early voting compared to 2016 early voting and 2016 total votes: The U.S. has hit 133% of total 2016 early voting. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 4:12 PM PST - 141 comments

The O. Henry House Museum in Brush Square [Ed. In Austin, TX] is the home of the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships.
Our Official Definition of a pun: the humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications, or the use of words that are alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning.
It’s too late to vote, but if you go here you can watch all 32 of the 2-minute entries and decide which one you think people should have voted for as the best.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:30 PM PST - 5 comments

Earn $20K EVERY MONTH by being your own boss
posted by mhoye at 1:46 PM PST - 55 comments

The coup in Wilmington was overt, but the horrific violence and families losing everything wasn't the end. The leaders of the coup planted a seed that grew and cracked through the new foundation laid down by reconstruction. Many of the advances black people achieved were dissolved. And Jim Crow laws spread through the south like Kudzu vines. And that might seem like ancient history, like that's what the civil rights movement was supposed to take care of, right? But Kudzu vines are hard to kill and you can still see them today.

Remembering a White Supremacist Coup [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:35 PM PST - 4 comments

It was clear from gene sequencing that D614G had overtaken the "original" variant but wasn't clear whether this was the result of some meaningful difference or statistical anomalies such as "founder effect." Now new research shows that the D614G variant that quickly became dominant in Europe in the Spring is more highly transmissible because it replicates at a higher rate in the upper respiratory tract. The fear in a situation like this is that the virus is unstable and we'll need more than one vaccine, but the good news in this article is that the antibodies appear to be backwards compatible.
posted by diva_esq at 12:45 PM PST - 9 comments

How We Got Voters to Change Their Mind: "We don't try to directly persuade people to change their minds on a candidate or an issue. Rather, we create intimacy, in the faith that people have an ability to reexamine their politics, and their long-term worldview, if given the right context. We’ve found that when people start to see the dissonance between what they believe and what they actually want, their views change—many of them come around to a more progressive perspective." [more inside]
posted by Ouverture at 10:52 AM PST - 47 comments

NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. The detection is at Clavius crater, familiar as the location of the moonbase in 2001: A Space Odyssey. [more inside]
posted by Major Clanger at 9:43 AM PST - 45 comments

What's your favorite scary movie? Do you really like scary movies? The low-budget schlocky kind, the classic 80's horror kind? Zombies? Werewolves? Creeping hands? Masked killers with implausible murder weapons? [more inside]
posted by FritoKAL at 8:39 AM PST - 65 comments

Geothermal energy is poised for a big breakout - "An engineering problem that, when solved, solves energy." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 3:45 AM PST - 52 comments

Max Benwell interviews Nathan Apodaca (@420Doggface208) on his viral TikTok video longboarding to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams while sipping cranberry juice (The Guardian). “It was just a regular day. [My car breaking down] happened to me almost every other day. So that’s why it was so easy for me to get my board, get my juice and just take off. Stuff happens. Let’s just figure it out. And everything worked in line: the song, the scenery, everything just came in line, it was perfect."
posted by adrianhon at 2:56 AM PST - 24 comments

Arsenika "is a quarterly journal of speculative poetry and flash fiction." "Flash" means very short. "Mother?" by Cynthia So (starts with the protagonist's mother dead, but no new grief after that): "I came out to a moth, because I couldn’t come out to my mother." "Not an Ocean, But the Sea" by Nino Cipri: "The ocean behind the couch, she thought, had probably not been ordered from Ikea or Electrolux."
posted by brainwane at 6:34 PM PST - 1 comment

The Cybertronic Spree a Transformers-themed cover band (previously), released a performance video for "Dare to Be Stupid" two days ago, on Weird Al Yankovic's 61rst birthday. (Warning: One written curse word does appear on screen in the video) [more inside]
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 4:53 PM PST - 21 comments

Classical Greek mythology in the pandemic. Quarantology by Jonathan Muroya...
posted by jim in austin at 4:18 PM PST - 9 comments

Chileans gather at Plaza de la Dignidad (realtime video, worth a watch) to start celebrating what looks like a massive 'Yes' vote on the plebiscite to change the Pinochet-era Constitution. [more inside]
posted by signal at 3:57 PM PST - 26 comments

How to Talk to a Conspiracy Theorist. "I find myself saying to believers, “I don’t know if you’re right or wrong, but if you were right, I would expect the following to happen,” referring to any number of established conspiracies whose unmasking all followed a similar pattern. My goal is usually to press the believer’s own recognition of internal contradictions so that the belief itself gets harder to sustain." Also.
posted by storybored at 1:54 PM PST - 34 comments

The RIAA argued that the tools (youtube-dl) were meant to circumvent YouTube's piracy prevention measures. Want to still access youtube-dl? It is now part of the DMCA request itelf!
posted by geoff. at 1:06 PM PST - 73 comments

Lincoln Project’s Lawyer Sends Scathing Response to Jared and Ivanka’s Lawsuit Threat Over Times Square Billboards: ‘Peddle Your Scare Tactics Elsewhere’ [Mediaite] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:12 PM PST - 61 comments

“Nothing prepared me for the drama I found ... the first time I opened a folder of readers’ letters to Simone de Beauvoir. . . . an outpouring of projection, identification, expectation, disappointment, and passion.”
posted by Schroder at 7:37 AM PST - 25 comments

A Russian mayor, Nikolai Loktev, needed someone to run against him to make the election look legitimate. After everyone else refused, he made Marina Udgodskaya, who cleaned city hall, run. Then she won (NYT).
posted by adrianhon at 2:40 AM PST - 12 comments

Stories about how we cope with disasters, in the short and the long term. "Ambient and Isolated Effects of Fine Particulate Matter" by Emery Robin (horror-y), published in April, and the more hopeful "Growing Resistance" by Juliet Kemp (audio and text at that link), first published in August 2019. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:18 PM PST - 1 comment

Bön is a Tibetan religion followed by about 10% of Tibetans within Tibet and internationally, similar to Tibetan Buddhism yet usually seen as a pre-Buddhist indigenous religion originating within the Zhang Zhung region in what is now Western Tibet. That area is filled with a number of abandoned caves and other historic sites, many of which are adorned with rock art and rock art paintings (pdfs). Many early Bön texts have been found in a walled off cave called the Library Cave, closed up around the 11th century and re-opened and accessed in the early 1900s. The International Dunhuang Project is attempting to provide one central place to access many of the documents from that cave which were given away or sold. [previously]
posted by jessamyn at 3:43 PM PST - 3 comments

One of the great ones has passed: Jerry Jeff Walker, the man who invented Luckenbach and Jimmy Buffet, has left us. I can't do justice to his work, or his influence; but Kinky Friedman thought he was a national treasure, he was Todd Snider's muse, and he wrote Mr. Bojangles. Live on Austin City Limits in 1979 is a good slice-of-life; there's plenty more to find after.
posted by BReed at 7:21 AM PST - 44 comments

Marbled crayfish can reproduce asexually and all their children are genetically identical females. "It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research. [more inside]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:37 AM PST - 73 comments

Despite a poor box office reception to its 2003 premiere, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World has become a beloved movie, with more in common with classic historical epics than contemporary action thrillers. On its 15th anniversary, producer Duncan Henderson and actor James D’Arcy reminisced about what made the movie special, and the Friendly Fire podcast examined its unusually immersive audio and its ideas of patriotism. Previously. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 2:13 AM PST - 66 comments

“I had this idea for a video game.”
Soft spoken YouTuber The CrafsMan describes the plot of his conceptual Aliens vs. Shovels video game No-Dig Bill. [more inside]
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:43 AM PST - 12 comments

So I started to dig around in the SAILDART archives, and quickly found Donald Knuth’s TeX working directory, because this actually was the system TeX initially was developed on! Not only the early TeX78 can be found there (look for the TEX*.SAI files), but also the source code of TeX82, written in literate Pascal, which essentially still is the core of today’s TeX setups. 1400 words from Leah Neukirchen on some deep UNIX roots.
posted by cgc373 at 11:04 PM PST - 13 comments

"A new vending machine was dropped into a North Philly barbershop on Thursday night, and it officially opened for biz on Friday morning. But don’t show up looking for snacks. Painted bright pink, this machine is stocked with nearly 500 balls of yarn." (Billy Penn)
posted by biogeo at 10:33 PM PST - 11 comments

Ellen Raskin's classic (and funny!) whodunit is one of the most adored (if, somehow, under-the-radar) children's novels of all time. But in The Westing Game May Be A Murder Mystery—But It's Also A Ghost Story, CrimeReads, an offshoot of Literary Hub, pegs The Westing Game as a ghost story, and sees Raskin's earlier novels as ghostly siblings of Raskin's best-known work. [more inside]
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 10:05 PM PST - 15 comments

"The Avengers’ training regime will start soon; today is for her to relearn the world." "Pour Back The Ocean" by imperfectcircle (Katherine Fabian) is a sweet fanfiction story depicting Wanda Maximoff after the events of the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Age of Ultron. As the author puts it, "Wanda has to find a new place in the world. Contains team training exercises, expected grief and unexpected kindness." There are also cute dogs.
posted by brainwane at 6:11 PM PST - 2 comments

Meet Gerald Stratford slTwitter [more inside]
posted by sjswitzer at 5:51 PM PST - 6 comments

Daily new infections with COVID-19 virus hit a new peak in the United States as a third surge takes place shortly before the election.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 5:35 PM PST - 148 comments

In 2012, the parent company NCSoft to the shock of the players shutdown down the MMORPG City of Heroes even though it was making a profit. Everything thought this was the end of their beloved game. [more inside]
posted by KaizenSoze at 3:40 PM PST - 20 comments

Squish that cat! All you need to do is squish that cat.
posted by Slap*Happy at 3:19 PM PST - 16 comments

Contrary to Elon Musk's Twitter claims, Bolivians return Evo Morales's party to power one year after a U.S.-applauded coup. [more inside]
posted by Ouverture at 3:19 PM PST - 31 comments

Retro-future airship suits from 1936's "Thing to Come" available now for your virus-free todays.
posted by acroyear at 2:27 PM PST - 21 comments

An infomercial from the Kyrö Distillery in Finland (some mild profanity) regarding their products and Finnish culture.
posted by Wordshore at 2:03 PM PST - 22 comments

"The spring before I left for a summer job in Colorado and then college in Montana, Dad and I went turkey hunting. He proudly photographed me in PapPap’s old cotton camo fatigues buttoned to the collar and my bad small-town pixie cut, holding a 12-gauge shotgun and a turkey decoy. Today when I look at that turkey-hunting photo, I see someone who was trying to reconcile two seemingly disparate cultures; I’m proud, now, to recognize a kid who was already one very queer redneck." Sarah Keller on Hunting for themself in the high Montana sagebrush, celebrating a new vision of queerness and rural culture.
posted by ChuraChura at 1:35 PM PST - 1 comment

Remember the Murder Hornets? Washington Department of Agriculture has found a nest. Video of Hornets entering/exiting nest in tree. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 1:04 PM PST - 35 comments

is Red's Java House.
posted by chavenet at 11:16 AM PST - 8 comments

Personally, I just can't listen to Trump talking. It hurts my brain. So last night, when I needed something in my headphones to drown out the sound of the debate coming from the next room, I fired this up in a tab, intending to keep multitasking: Adult Swim x Ben & Jerry’s Present Holy Calamavote | A Special Performance by Run The Jewels. [more inside]
posted by hypnogogue at 10:30 AM PST - 12 comments

Vagina Witchcraft (self-titled album) 2020 (NSFW album cover) Fronted by genderqueer nonbinary poet & activist Kayla Fernandes, Vagina Witchcraft dives headfirst into deeply personal topics concerning mental health, depression, heartbreak & anger. The 4-piece doom metal-hardcore band hailing from Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada, draws influence from classics like Black Sabbath combined with the sheer, combative energy of 80s hardcore punk. [more inside]
posted by CrystalDave at 9:43 AM PST - 6 comments

The Go-Go's perform "We Got the Beat" live for The Today Show, September 2020. (SLYT) (The Go-Go's previously) [more inside]
posted by Gelatin at 9:06 AM PST - 38 comments

The Panic Decision Matrix This is a page for anyone who still wants to do something, anything to help in the November election. Answer the questions below and follow the arrows to figure out the appropriate place to give money. [more inside]
posted by mecran01 at 8:10 AM PST - 41 comments

Have you wanted your own Bongo Cat? Now you can! I saw this on HN and immediately wasted several minutes. I apologize for derailing your Friday morning productivity.
posted by jquinby at 6:25 AM PST - 11 comments

<p>The world of esoteric programming is filled with examples of people stretching the rules to breaking point, and misusing technology in creative ways. In particular (for example) I love <a href='http://wiki.secretgeek.net/quine'>quines</a>. Quines are programs which output their own source code. Life is a Quine.</p> [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:39 AM PST - 23 comments

Microsoft’s new folding Surface Duo smartphone has had a mixed reception – “all the right ideas but spoiled by buggy software and a bad camera” (The Verge) and “orphaned Windows hardware makes a poor Android device” (Ars Technica) – but it remains the fulfilment of Microsoft’s dual-screen dream dating back to the ill-fated Courier tablet (previously). Meanwhile, the Surface Neo dual-screen tablet running Windows 10X (the original OS for the Surface Duo before it moved to Android) has been delayed beyond 2020.
posted by adrianhon at 2:07 AM PST - 28 comments

Four short fantasy stories in which unpleasant things happen to characters who (kinda?) seem to deserve them. "The Wolf and the Woodsman" by T. Kingfisher (a.k.a. Ursula Vernon), a darkly funny "Little Red Riding Hood" retelling about a That Guy. "The Vampire of Kovácspéter" by P H Lee (2020; author interview) is witty: "The village of Kovácspéter was plagued by a vampire, which was increasingly embarrassing." And "Nobody Gets Out Alive" by George R. Galuschak (2020), a thriller about a livestreaming celebrity getting back at her stalker. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:10 PM PST - 6 comments

Here's the CNN livestream, go to it, you crazy kids.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:07 PM PST - 214 comments

Mezerg is a unique one man theramin-centric EDM band. [more inside]
posted by Lutoslawski at 5:39 PM PST - 13 comments

After 5,5 years, the landmark trial of Golden Dawn ended with seven former MPs of the neo-Nazi party being convicted as leaders of a criminal organisation (1) (2). All other former MPs were convicted as participants in the organisation. In the final act of a marathon five-year, politically charged trial, the three-judge panel ordered a total of 39 people, including 13 former lawmakers, jailed, rejecting appeals for suspended sentences. It ruled 12 others, including five former lawmakers, would remain free pending their appeals. Thursday's decision came after two weeks of summations by defense lawyers following the prosecutor's recommendation that all former Golden Dawn lawmakers be allowed to remain free pending appeal. (1) (2) (3) [more inside]
posted by ersatz at 4:18 PM PST - 22 comments

No-Instrument Mixing Board is a full-length album of manipulated feedback by Japanese musician Toshimaru Nakamura, whose instrument is a mixing board with its output plugged into its input. (Track 4 has some very high frequency tones; you may want to skip to 25:20 when those show up if you still have your hearing up there.)
posted by cortex at 1:09 PM PST - 14 comments

Mysteries of the 2,500-year-old butter found at the bottom of a loch (The Scotsman): “Because of the fantastic anaerobic conditions, where there is very light, oxygen or bacteria to break down anything organic, you get this type of sealed environment. When they started excavating, they pulled out this square wooden dish, well around three quarters of a square wooden dish, which had these really nice chisel marks on the sides as well as this grey stuff.” Related: Bog Butter Barrels and Ireland’s 3000-Year-Old Refrigerators (JSTOR Daily) [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 12:58 PM PST - 17 comments

Twitter user @rashiq: I reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine
posted by CarrotAdventure at 12:35 PM PST - 86 comments

Using Game Design to Make Virtual Events More Social. A thoughtful writeup of how this years's Roguelike Celebration conference was designed as a MUD-like social space, avoiding some of the pitfalls of online events in 2020. "Instead of using Zoom and Discord, what if we built our own event platform and social space, built from the ground up to foster the sorts of intimate social interaction that made the in-person event special?"
posted by signal at 10:55 AM PST - 15 comments

Rhaina Cohen writes about the people who prioritize friendship over romance for The Atlantic Many of those who place a friendship at the center of their life find that their most significant relationship is incomprehensible to others. But these friendships can be models for how we as a society might expand our conceptions of intimacy and care. [more inside]
posted by pjsky at 10:37 AM PST - 31 comments

A Washington Post op-ed argues that colleges ought to create academic departments for sports. The idea is that athletics would be treated as another liberal art, and that the academic departments would function like music, dance, or drama departments, with a "sports performance" major. Coaches would be professors or instructors, but the departments would also offer traditional academic classes in addition to instruction in athletic activities themselves. Appeals are made to the ancient Greeks.
posted by vogon_poet at 10:25 AM PST - 38 comments

About what? About roadies (multi-link live YouTube post). [more inside]
posted by MattWPBS at 10:08 AM PST - 14 comments

Kotaku writer Ash Parrish capped off an article discussing the sublime theme to Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater with a request for the singer, Cynthia Harrell, to contact her to discuss the song further. Then, she managed to track Ms Harrell down, using her photo from the cover of the single of "I Am The Wind" from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:50 AM PST - 12 comments

A skilled hobbyist turns facial recognition around Legal issues, a little about methods, ethical issues.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:47 AM PST - 12 comments

Milwaukee band TENLo just put out a new single, Sunlight. The video has Stormy Daniels in it, which is neat, but the video is pretty cute and innocent, and the song is just incredible. It's a good way to wake up. Enjoy!
posted by Slinga at 7:13 AM PST - 3 comments

The mobile-focused streaming service Quibi, set up by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, has announced it will close just six months after its launch. [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:21 AM PST - 51 comments

OCTOBER 22 IS INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY!!! EVERY YEAR WE GET TOGETHER AND MAKE SALMON FOR TOAST, EVERY YEAR WE GET A CROCKETY BLOAT, EVERY YEAR WE GET DRUNK ON THE DOCKS, AND EVERY YEAR WE HAVE SEX WITH OUR CAPS LOCKS!!!!
posted by greenish at 3:05 AM PST - 107 comments

Masha Gessen profiles Chase Strangio and his recent victories for transgender rights in the US as the ACLU’s deputy director for transgender justice (The New Yorker). Previously: Bostock v. Clayton County (June 2020).
posted by adrianhon at 1:57 AM PST - 5 comments

Two “masked” intruders broke into a California bank using a method straight out of the movies: crawling along air ducts – only to fall through the ceiling tiles and onto the floor.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:39 AM PST - 10 comments

An Infinite Universe of Number Systems - "The p-adics form an infinite collection of number systems based on prime numbers. They're at the heart of modern number theory."
posted by kliuless at 11:42 PM PST - 17 comments

The magician's magician and the skeptic's skeptic, The Amazing Randi, has died from "age related causes" at the age of 92.
posted by JiffyQ at 6:30 PM PST - 113 comments

Since September 1, 2010, Daily Science Fiction has published a new short scifi/fantasy story each weekday. The easiest way to navigate the archives is probably by story topic, so you get titles, author names, and excerpts (example). Here are six very short stories you might like. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:07 PM PST - 5 comments

The Media Manipulation Casebook. "The Media Manipulation Casebook is a research platform that advances knowledge of misinformation and disinformation and their threats to democracy, public health, and security. The Casebook is a new resource for building the field of Critical Internet Studies by equipping researchers with case studies, theory, methods, and frameworks to analyze the interplay of media ecosystems, technology, politics, and society." Background.
posted by storybored at 5:53 PM PST - 4 comments

I Was In Charge of the Deck Chairs On the Titanic, and They Absolutely Did Need Rearranging (McSweeney's, via kottke)
posted by roaring beast at 3:16 PM PST - 29 comments

A newly described bacterium sets a world record for longest Latin name. [more inside]
posted by OverlappingElvis at 2:24 PM PST - 8 comments

What we can learn from the Baltimore Museum of Art's recent deaccessioning announcement. [more inside]
posted by PussKillian at 11:59 AM PST - 25 comments

How Rudy Giuliani Got Caught Red-Handed With Borat’s Daughter
posted by y2karl at 11:56 AM PST - 171 comments

30 egg omelette.
50 egg omelette.
60 egg omelette.
90 egg omelette.
21,000 egg omelette.
2 egg omelette.
posted by cortex at 11:03 AM PST - 29 comments

NY MTA has created a digital version of their map with the company Work & Co (who did the work for free. There is a cool video that really explains what was done.
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:28 AM PST - 22 comments

From onions as big as babies to pumpkins that weigh more than a car, it has been a record-breaking year for oversize veg. But what motivates someone to grow an 8-metre beetroot – and is skulduggery involved? [SL Guardian]
posted by ellieBOA at 8:04 AM PST - 20 comments

People were surprised when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez set up her own Twitch channel, but she demonstrated why the channel was set up with a streamed game of Among Us to help get out the vote. The stream had a number of notable guests, from collegue Representative Ilhan Omar to streamers such as Pokimane, HBomberGuy (who got the first kill on AOC in game) and DisguisedToast (who made the statement in the lede right after proceeding to marinate the Representative.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:01 AM PST - 54 comments

"It's glaringly obvious we need to change the model" In what will be among the largest and boldest urban police reform experiment in decades San Francisco is creating and preparing to deploy teams of professionals from the fire and health departments — not police — to respond to most calls for people in a psychiatric, behavioral or substance abuse crisis. [more inside]
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 3:02 AM PST - 24 comments

Katie Okamoto explores the world of direct-to-consumer (DTC) olive oils, spices, grains, and seasonings like EXAU, Loisa, and Fly By Jing. “For outsider pantry brands that seek to gain traction within the food-retail industry—which skews white and male—the DTC model has made business possible without huge amounts of capital or buy-in.”
posted by adrianhon at 1:54 AM PST - 16 comments

Beastie Boys - Intergalactic But It's Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. From William Maranci, just in time for Halloween [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 9:12 PM PST - 32 comments

I’ve been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken. Here’s why… and what it should be like instead. "Or, another way to put it … if I’m a good engineer, it should be easy for me to talk to a hiring manager at a company I might be interested in, at a time of my choosing. But that’s simply not possible today. Despite the refrain that we’re in a candidate’s market and that there’s a shortage of good candidates, which should mean that candidates should have the power to call the shots, today’s hiring process couldn’t be further removed from this ideal. And it’s not just broken for a specific type of candidate. It’s broken for everyone."
posted by geoff. at 8:53 PM PST - 48 comments

Ledger Art (previously) is art drawn by Native Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Someone has been selling ledger art on EBay that has unknown provenance and bears a very close resemblance to known pieces.
posted by larrybob at 8:48 PM PST - 4 comments

Merriam-Webster has a couple of timesinks for ya: The Time Traveler, in which you get to travel to a year and see which words entered the (English) lexicon; and the Time Traveler Quiz: Which Word Came First?, in which you have to guess which word of a pair entered the lexicon first. More word games? Sure.
posted by not_on_display at 8:15 PM PST - 10 comments

Surprise! There's a Secret Organ in Your Head (Popular Mechanics, Oct. 20, 2020, from New York Times reporting; partial NYT excerpt via Yahoo News) "A team of researchers in the Netherlands has discovered what may be a set of previously unidentified organs: a pair of large salivary glands, lurking in the nook where the nasal cavity meets the throat." The tubarial salivary glands: A potential new organ at risk for radiotherapy [Open access, Radiotherapy & Oncology; also at Science Direct] [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 6:35 PM PST - 31 comments

Two short speculative stories featuring computers with consciousness. "Batteries For Your Doombot5000 Are Not Included" by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor (published this year) is a light sf/f story about an ex-supervillain who gets a second chance at talking with a woman she had a crush on. "Applied Cenotaphics in the Long, Long Longitudes" by Vajra Chandrasekera (audio) is "an RFC 9481-compatible full personalytic profile recorded in Binara-Unduvap 2561 (Sep-Dec 2018 in the Christian calendar) at R. Satka's home and studio in the New City in the Autonomous Territory of Vilacem. The interview interprets itself in real time as each interviewer asks their questions...Since Satka's death, this interview is her primary being-in-the-world, and retains executive authority over her estate."
posted by brainwane at 6:04 PM PST - 4 comments

How to remove ham from CD drive
posted by ardgedee at 5:04 PM PST - 27 comments

Chris Peterson (D) and Spencer Cox (R) released a campaign video... together.
posted by dfm500 at 1:57 PM PST - 43 comments

By all accounts, Biden’s second climate plan is better than his first. But how much “better” will it take to save the world?
posted by Ouverture at 12:42 PM PST - 101 comments

Fluoridated water --> alkaline water using crystals
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:42 PM PST - 20 comments

The complete lyrics and (most of the) music of Tom Lehrer is now available for official, public domain download... at least until December 31, 2024.
posted by SansPoint at 10:08 AM PST - 49 comments

@GrippingFood is a single purpose Twitter account (and Instagram, and TikTok, and Facebook page, and (adjacent?) Subreddit) featuring before-shots of held food and after-shots of that same food after it has been forcefully gripped.

Carly Tennes in Cracked: “‘Gripping Food With Force’ Is the Social Media Trend We Deserve in 2020” (September 15, 2020)
Bettina Makalintal in Vice: “The Grotesque Satisfaction of ‘Gripping Food With Force’” (September 14, 2020)
posted by Going To Maine at 9:15 AM PST - 33 comments

Is Your Favorite Podcast Tracking You?
posted by Monochrome at 8:49 AM PST - 44 comments

In need of relaxation in *these times*? Try a virtual forest walkthrough on YouTube.
posted by ellieBOA at 7:43 AM PST - 4 comments

"Consider that misinformation is information that merely happens to be false, whereas disinformation is false information purposely spread. Similarly, mispronunciation is people trying too feebly and in vain to say our names — and dispronunciation is people saying our names incorrectly on purpose, as if to remind us whose country this really is. Mispronunciation is a matter of limited tongues. Dispronunciation is a matter of limited hearts. For as long as I can remember, I have had to navigate around the shortcomings of both organs." Anand Giridharadas in his newsletter on the meaning of Sen. Perdue's misnaming of Kamala Harris and #MyNameIs on Twitter.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:13 AM PST - 42 comments

Lauren Southern could spew racist propaganda like no other. But the men around her were better at one thing: trafficking in ugly misogyny. (CONTENT NOTE: Full article describes incidents of Islamophobia, sexual harassment, racism, white supremacy, and rape threats.) Hutcheson looked uneasy as his girlfriend [Lauren Southern] continued to talk about her career ambitions. “All of us Europeans have the responsibility to reproduce,” he interjected. “Motherhood is to women as war is to men.” Southern’s eyes glazed over as Hutcheson kept talking. Finally, the waitress arrived with the bill. Hutcheson gestured for Southern to grab it. “Okay, cool. I’ll make it a business expense,” she whispered. Earlier, she’d told me that her boyfriend leaned on her financially.
posted by MiraK at 6:40 AM PST - 64 comments

Voting ContraPoints engages in a 20-minute dialogue with herself about why even communist revolutionary Twitter should get out and vote for Biden. [more inside]
posted by Kybard at 5:09 AM PST - 53 comments

Virtual influencers have always courted controversy (NYT), but League of Legend’s fictional Seraphine went a step further this month by talking about her mental health struggles – and in doing so, exploited people’s sense of empathy to market a product to them, argues Natalie Flores (Fanbyte). Previously.
posted by adrianhon at 1:38 AM PST - 9 comments

Smashiell, one of those who put animation to the Botnik-generated Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looks Like a Large Pile of Ash and his own sequels Ron Magic, The Nice Bit of Battenberg Trim, The Dream of October and Ron's interview on a late-night arts show, has, while working on his animated film, returned to the concept via a weekly audiobook that starts with Botnik but soon begins using the GPT-2 neural network: the Lynchian pulpy noir novel Harry Potter and No One in Particular (the parts so far: 1, 2 and 3). (previously) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 1:31 AM PST - 1 comment

Gore Vidal has a few words to say about Orson Welles. [NB: Right now there is free access to all the NYRB archives. This will probably end November 5.] [more inside]
posted by CCBC at 12:53 AM PST - 22 comments

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's Well-Being Budget Proves Politically Successful: "targeting budget resources towards outcomes in areas like environmental protection, poverty and literacy rates and even the amount of free time people need to volunteer with community organisations."[1] [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:26 PM PST - 9 comments

Ross Douthat, a columnist with The New York Times, writes that “There Will Be No Trump Coup.” [more inside]
posted by NotLost at 10:16 PM PST - 81 comments

Tired of the Monster Mash? How about some Halloween Monster Blues... Here's a snappy-funny country-monster tune for the season ahead! By Ted Parks and the Busted Bones.
posted by ecorrocio at 8:49 PM PST - 2 comments

The United States Constitution provides no right to vote. While seven of the 27 current amendments to the Constitution are concerned with expanding the franchise, US citizens do not have an affirmative right to cast a vote or have their vote counted — as demonstrated in 2000's Bush v. Gore, which cheerfully noted that "[t]he individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States". [more inside]
posted by saturday_morning at 6:15 PM PST - 18 comments

Four sweet pieces of fan fiction in which characters watch election returns come in. The one for which you least need to know the underlying canon: "A Great and Gruesome Height" by Jae Gecko, a queer romance that pays homage to the Dar Williams song "Iowa" along with The West Wing. "It's 1998, Josiah Bartlet is the Democratic nominee battling sitting Republican President Lawrence Armstrong for the Oval Office, and back in Iowa, Republican campaign coordinator Megan Richter is about to fall from a great and gruesome height." (This is a Yuletide story, and you can sign up for this year's Yuletide exchange between now and 9am UTC on 26 October.) [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:02 PM PST - 13 comments

Led by Numberphile's resident composer Alan Stewart, YouTube composers re-imagine nursery rhymes with a bit more oomph.

• The Itsy Bitsy Spider in Quintuplets
• BINGO in 5/4 (mostly)
• London Bridge in Mixed Meter
• Ring-a-ring o' Roses in Free Time
• Wind the Bobbin Up in 11/8
• Hickory Dickory Dock in Polyrhythm
• Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Additive Meter
• Frère Jacques in 7/4
• Row, Row, Row the Boat in Tempo Canon
• Ants Marchin in Metric Modulation

The composers react to each other's contribution: Making Advanced™️ Kids Music (odd meters, metric Modulation, etc). [more inside]
posted by zengargoyle at 5:52 PM PST - 17 comments

Halloween looks different this year. Across the U.S., cities and towns have gotten creative to celebrate the holiday during the covid-19 pandemic.
posted by Lyme Drop at 4:32 PM PST - 22 comments

It was like Foucault’s panopticon, except for private-school kids in Dri-Fit. Ruth S. Barrett surveys the increasingly fraught world of niche sports for the college-bound kids of wealthy families, and how competition and COVID-19 have made things harder. (SLAtlantic) [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 1:22 PM PST - 146 comments

An oversized cat drawing has been discovered on a hill at the famous Nazca Lines site in Peru. The impressive artwork dates back some 2,000 years and measures over 120 feet across.
posted by waving at 12:26 PM PST - 47 comments

The universe does many things. It makes galaxies, comets, black holes, neutron stars, and a whole mess more. We’ve lately discovered that it makes a great deal of planets, but it’s not clear whether it regularly makes energy-hungry civilizations, nor is it clear whether such civilizations inevitably drive their planets into climate change. There’s lots of hope riding on our talk about building a sustainable civilization on Earth. But how do we know that’s even possible? How Do Aliens Solve Climate Change? A piece by astrophysics professor Adam Frank on modeling hypothetical past exo-civilizations (aliens) and how they might have handled situations like our own current predicament. Link to study. Frank also has a book, Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth, on the same subject.
posted by Lonnrot at 12:00 PM PST - 10 comments

"You're So Vain" (lyrics) was a big hit for Carly Simon, reaching Billboard's number one spot in 1973. However, who the song is about has been an enduring mystery. [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 11:55 AM PST - 55 comments

3M, in partnership with Discovery Education, Oct. 14 announced that Indian American student Anika Chebrolu won the 2020 Young Scientist Challenge competition. Chebrolu, of Frisco, Texas, developed a novel antiviral drug to combat the spread of COVID-19 by researching protein spikes in coronavirus. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 11:11 AM PST - 10 comments

The 8th Wonder of the World* (*wonder not guaranteed) A long piece by Josh Dizeza at theverge.com covering the creation, confusion, and (as of current date) collapse of the massive ($4 billion) Foxconn manufacturing facility touted by Trump and then-Gov Scott Walker as the first step in building a "Silicon Valley of the Midwest", one that would revitalize manufacturing in and the economy of southern Wisconsin. [more inside]
posted by soundguy99 at 9:47 AM PST - 51 comments

How frozen waffles are made This crushed a lot of preconceived notions about those frozen waffles at the supermarket and who is actually making them. Turns out, they're made almost EXCLUSIVELY by machines!
posted by GernBlandston at 8:42 AM PST - 72 comments

What is the best magazine interview–ever–that Dorothy Parker sat down for? This one. Journalist Gloria Steinem was 30 and Parker was 71 when they met in the winter of 1964-65 for a long chat that ended up as a 2,300 word article in the New York edition of The Ladies Home Journal. (Also: Ms. Parker has again come home to New York.)
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:46 AM PST - 11 comments

Bijan Stephen interviews Frank Cifaldi and Kelsey Lewin (The Verge) of the Video Game History Foundation on their efforts to preserve videogame history by studying original source code, art, sketchbooks, documentation, and correspondence. They’ve already deconstructed Aladdin, reconstructed Days of Thunder, and recovered the NES version of SimCity. On October 30, they’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the The Secret of Monkey Island by looking through its source material with creator Ron Gilbert. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 1:16 AM PST - 3 comments

The Mario Bros. theme was apparently given lyrics in Japan and released as a pop single in 1986 (SYTL)
posted by CarrotAdventure at 9:18 PM PST - 21 comments

Three fantasy stories about magic, gender oppression, and fights that, as it turns out, aren't finished. "Many Mansions" by K.J. Parker, published September 2020, a sort of cat-and-mouse tale. "Charms" by Shweta Narayan, 2009: "Women's magic, she says, is like everything else. Not good enough for girls these days." "True Names" by Stephanie Burgis, 2009, is the most triumphant of the three: "The bell rings again while I'm still standing rigid as a rock in pure astonishment, right in the middle of the kitchen with a frying pan in my hand." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 6:01 PM PST - 5 comments

We know that in theory green hydrogen could be used throughout industry, transport, power and heating. However, it won’t magically happen in sectors that don’t currently use it, just because it is green. Hydrogen is going to have to win, use-case-by-use-case, but it will not be easy. Not only does it have to beat the incumbent technology, it also has to beat every other zero-carbon option for that use-case. This is where hydrogen hype really meets reality.

Michael Liebreich writes about "separating hype from hydrogen": Part One: The Supply Side, Part Two: The Demand Side
posted by MartinWisse at 1:09 PM PST - 58 comments

How To Avoid Spoilers For Everything Forever
posted by simmering octagon at 12:45 PM PST - 104 comments

Generative Machines, an introduction and overview of generative artwork with Matt DesLauriers.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:41 PM PST - 8 comments

Biscuit or cake? Choosing not to make coffins, Tunnock instead developed several items of confectionary including the Caramel wafer (extremely popular in middle class Bristol), and the tea cake preferred by HRH. Said tea cake is a small round shortbread biscuit covered with a dome of meringue, encased in a layer of chocolate and wrapped in reusable silver foil. Present in a cloche, and accompany with a nice cup of tea. For a fuller meal, they can be deep fried. It's gotta be big, or quickly eat 14 normal ones. Terry in space. Another MeFite discovers cushions. Doughnuts and ice cream and masks are available, while the wrappers can be used in art.
posted by Wordshore at 5:05 AM PST - 46 comments

24 Strange Beauty Queens and Pageants from the Past Beauty pageants are another way of worshipping beauty at the altar of the ramp. However, there are certain pageants that puts a spin on the more conventional varieties. Check out these 24 most bizarre beauty pageant queens of all time. [more inside]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:02 AM PST - 36 comments

Election Profit Makers (Soundcloud) is back for the 2020 US elections, hosted once again by Jon Kimball, Starlee Kine, and David Rees. Ostensibly about betting on PredictIt, the show also reviews notable city skylines, remixes politics-related music, and has raised $20,000 for voting rights organisations by listeners paying to ban their friends from listening to the show, with the ultimate goal of reaching zero listeners by election day. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 12:57 AM PST - 9 comments

A lovely, very well done documentary about the animals and their human attendants at the Memphis Zoo. Informative at what it takes to care for the animals there in plus it presents both keepers and kept in depth as living, breathing sentient individuals each with their own stories.

See the Keepers
posted by y2karl at 7:45 PM PST - 11 comments

Two short, exciting scifi stories in which underdogs fight battles. "The Hard Quarry" by Caleb Huitt, published this year, has a solo asteroid miner outwitting pirates: "The only statement the regs make on going extravehicular at speed is not to." "Corporate Robo Renegade Piston" by Nicholas Sugarman (2017) has an underfunded mecha pilot strapping in to fight a kaiju: "it hurt his pride knowing his face was plastered onto a waffle iron. He sighed, comforting himself with the knowledge that at least he wasn't on the kaiju cleanup team."
posted by brainwane at 5:59 PM PST - 4 comments

Deep Sea Diver has a new album, Impossible Weight. It's really good guitar oriented moody rock, stop reading and go listen. [more inside]
posted by signal at 4:08 PM PST - 10 comments

If they know more about [William] Gaddis, it is perhaps that his books are long and difficult and unwelcoming, and that they are not much read. They may also have some sense that Gaddis wanted it this way, that he held common readers in contempt and meant to scare them off. Except for the part about not being much read, none of this is quite right. So Gaddis may be ripe, after all, for the kind of rediscovery in which his new publishers specialize. From Because God Did Not Relax by Christopher Beha [Harper's] [Trim version]
posted by chavenet at 2:39 PM PST - 16 comments

Wildflowers & All The Rest is a re-release of Tom Petty's most personal album with the original + 10 songs left off the original release. “I swear to God it’s an absolute ad-lib from the word ‘go,’” he told author Paul Zollo for his book Conversations With Tom Petty. In the next three minutes, Petty waxed poetic about love and freedom, heart and home while the reels on his recorder spun around in a steady rotation. When the song came to its seemingly natural conclusion he reached over his guitar and clicked the stop button. “Then [I] sat back and went, ‘Wow, what did I just do?’ And I listened to it. I didn’t change a word. Everything was just right there, off the top of my head.” [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 7:06 AM PST - 24 comments

Yesterday, Edmund O'Leary tweeted "I am not ok. Feeling rock bottom. Please take a few seconds to say hello if you see this tweet. Thank you.". Twitter responded with worldwide support and kindness, and it's just a source of joy and support for anyone in these trying times.
posted by hippybear at 5:57 AM PST - 12 comments

Emily Flitter profiles Matt Levine (NYT), the author of Money Stuff, a free newsletter with 150,000 subscribers. “Mr. Levine’s favorite subjects include insider trading statutes, bond-market liquidity and the ubiquity of securities fraud, but his columns are never boring. They may be the only entertaining words a financial markets professional reads all day.” [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 11:55 PM PST - 18 comments

Two stories about making shocking decisions to use color to change our perceptions. "The Regime of Austerity" by Veronica Schanoes (2009, science fiction): "These days there are a lot of gray people walking around in bright blue coats with green shoes. Lately it's become popular to use color on the inner walls of your home." "The Minister's Black Veil" by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1832, allegorical/romantic/dark/didactic fiction): "On a nearer view it seemed to consist of two folds of crepe, which entirely concealed his features, except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight, further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things." Kind of a Johnny Cash "Man in Black" vibe on that one. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:48 PM PST - 4 comments

Toots Hibbert & the Birth of Reggae
posted by y2karl at 4:10 PM PST - 7 comments

Colin Purrington broke into his snack cake stash from 2012, and it turns out Twinkies aren't immortal. He sent his findings to some scientists, and learning ensued!
posted by thoughtful_ravioli at 3:14 PM PST - 29 comments

From 1968, Glenn Gould - How Mozart Became a Bad Composer. [SLYT]
posted by clawsoon at 2:50 PM PST - 34 comments

Director Rachel Pony Cassells was in charge of the visual score [Ed. note: 40-minute music video] for harpist Mary Lattimore’s new album Silver Ladders

The images and edit were created very intuitively. Mary and I were an isolation pod, and this was I think for both of us our first times leaving LA and the confines of our homes for many months. This score will always be a document of this very isolated and strange moment in time.

posted by Going To Maine at 1:43 PM PST - 3 comments

... might be just what you need today. Puddles Pity Party. [more inside]
posted by sjswitzer at 12:32 PM PST - 32 comments

Before it was a movie, Mars Attacks was a set of 55 narrative trading cards, depicting the brutal invasion of Earth by aliens and the equally vicious Earthman reprisal. Here's all of them. (cw: graphic violence, sexual assault, racism, a dog gets fucking melted, seriously be warned)
posted by theodolite at 8:44 AM PST - 94 comments

October 16, 2020 marks the 52nd anniversary of the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. After winning the 200-meter dash, American runners Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) took the medal stand and raised gloved fists during the playing of the US national anthem (link to YouTube). To their right on the medal stand was Australian sprinter Peter Norman (silver). [more inside]
posted by wicked_sassy at 7:40 AM PST - 9 comments

From our friends at Defector, the strange tale of the mayor of Anchorage.
posted by zenon at 6:33 AM PST - 27 comments

Remember the days when you could still get away with not having good special effects? Through the Dragon's Eye, the 1989 educational British educational fantasy series. Storylords, the 1984 educational US educational fantasy series. (More from the greater Look and Read series of which Through the Dragon's Eye was a part below the fold.) [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 4:56 AM PST - 11 comments

Breaking with long apolitical traditions, The Lancet, Science, Scientific American, New England Journal of Medicine and Nature have published editorials critical of the Trump administration.
posted by adept256 at 2:28 AM PST - 19 comments

Start Your Christmas Cake Now! Get it in the oven! As Christmas Day is only ten weeks away, it is time (still time, or traditionally) to contemplate either the construction of the cake centrepiece, or the purchase of same. Which to choose? Go with Delia or Mary? Cognac or brandy to the rafters? Do you want it moist or beautifully moist or brandy-moist or very moist in your mouth? Perhaps an old-fashioned look? Or Hebridean? Or add marmalade or soak the fruit in alcohol for a few days or ten or even longer? Don't forget to regularly feed the cake alcohol. Eat with a slice of cheese, perhaps some Wensleydale or a bit of Cheshire. Alternately, some christstollen, or a panettone, and consume while listening. (sorry the first Christmas post is late this year)
posted by Wordshore at 1:24 AM PST - 20 comments

'Everyone that was working in a WeWork is now working out of a house' Hacker homes, the newest iteration of remote work adaption, feels like a nostalgic attempt to recreate some of the synergies COVID-19 wiped out. Generally speaking, it’s a nod to the digital nomad lifestyle, but in some cases, hacker homes feel closer to Hype House, a TikTok mansion laden with sponsored indulgence and wealth.
posted by geoff. at 11:11 PM PST - 40 comments

The 2020 New Zealand General Election will be held on Saturday 17 October. New Zealanders will also be voting in two referendums:

1) whether terminally ill people will have the option of assisted dying

2) whether the recreational use of cannabis should become legal.

[more inside]
posted by Start with Dessert at 9:45 PM PST - 84 comments

How Iceman Wim Hof Uncovered the Secrets to Our Health. "Over the past decade, researchers from major universities have studied Hof and found solid evidence that when practicing his method, he can control his own body temperature, nervous system, and immune response—findings that are head-scratchers for medical science, because humans aren’t supposed to be able to do any of that. It’s now documented in peer-reviewed papers that, among other things, Hof may be able to turn on at will his body’s tap of opiates and cannabinoids—euphoria-inducing chemicals that provide natural pain relief and an overall sense of well-being. What’s more, Hof insists, if he can do this, so can the rest of us." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:37 PM PST - 36 comments

A bar-tailed godwit (previously) has been tracked flying more than 12,000km (7,500 miles) flying non-stop from Alaska to New Zealand over 11 days, setting a new world record for avian non-stop flight.
posted by ShooBoo at 9:33 PM PST - 6 comments

Two scifi stories about the work we offload to robots. "Drones Don’t Kill People" by Annalee Newitz (a bunch of violence): "You learn a lot by seeing what people do when they think they’re in private. Most of it I found confusingly irrelevant to assassination." "Cleaning Lady" by J. Kyle Turner (no violence): "Her listing says All Cleaning Done By Hand so she makes a big show of unpacking her bag, laying out her tools, and rolling up her sleeves."
posted by brainwane at 5:44 PM PST - 6 comments

The movie “Mystery Road” introduces us to Detective Jay Swan. Portrayed by Aaron Pederson (and written for him by director Ivan Sen), Detective Swan is an indigenous Australian cop who navigates not being fully trusted by his fellow servants of The Crown for being “a blackfella”, and not being fully trusted by the indigenous communities for being a cop and a servant of the Crown. Swan constantly code-switches between modes of speaking (or not) depending on who he’s talking to, and which community they are from. Over the course of season 1 and season 2 of the TV show “Mystery Road” followed by the movie “Goldstone”, we get a look at issues of race, money, history, resource exploitation, drugs, corruption, and life in sparsely populated small-town/rural Western Australia, the landscape of which is almost a character itself.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 4:43 PM PST - 28 comments

Zachary Crockett investigates the economics of vending machines (The Hustle), including the world of vending machine entrepreneur YouTubers. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 4:16 PM PST - 20 comments

During the pandemic, The 8-Bit Big Band hasn't slowed down. Following on from Still Alive, they've brought back Benny Benack III and the gang for a swing version of Portal 2's Want You Gone.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 4:02 PM PST - 4 comments

Somewhat surprisingly, the difference between keeping or losing a head and/or a left arm might be explained by the difference in hairstyle between the two statues. Amunhotep’s long, thick hair, enveloping his neck and extending over the upper part of his shoulders, reinforced his neck and made it more difficult to remove his head. Djehuti’s short hair did not extend around his neck and down his back; iconoclasts therefore had much less work to do to when they removed Djehuti’s head.

Iconoclasm in Egypt: Why Are the Noses Broken on Egyptian Statues?
posted by jenkinsEar at 1:29 PM PST - 24 comments

What's that you say? You enjoy watching drumcam videos of metal and metal adjacent artists playing extremely technically demanding music? Well step inside and let's do this! [more inside]
posted by saladin at 11:51 AM PST - 32 comments

The Grouse podcast dives into the complicated project of protecting the Sage Grouse, via interviews and stories of biologists, ranchers and indigenous people. The Sage Grouse is threatened by oil extraction, overgrazing, ever-expanding wildfires, and cheatgrass, which crowds out the native sage grass. The podcast is also a fascinating reflection on the role of reporting on the environment in an age of catastrophes: The primary reporter, Ashley Ahearn, left Seattle for rural Washington after transformative experiences at Standing Rock. [more inside]
posted by kaibutsu at 11:28 AM PST - 3 comments

Only God knows, he said, when America will return to normal: “And I sometimes think we’ve got Him scratching His head because this is a bunch of craziness.”

Appalachia in Southeast Ohio after the Great Society: A photo essay with words by Tim Sullivan and photos by Wong Maye-E. [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 11:01 AM PST - 20 comments

I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby! is a fresh self-launched earworm and fun video by fledgling singer-songwriter (and self-proclaimed "Global Celebrity Teen Pop Sensation From Ireland") CMAT, who describes her musical style as "Dolly Parton meets Weird Al Yankovic, mixed with Katy Perry." [more inside]
posted by taz at 11:52 PM PST - 22 comments

Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers TopPop Special September 16, 1978

Jonathan Richman Live in Barcelona Spain 1987 Part 1

Jonathan Richman Live in Barcelona Spain 1987 Part 2

Jonathan Richman Full Set Live Stream Capture Burger Boogaloo 2015 [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 11:35 PM PST - 22 comments

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s nominee to the US supreme court, promised to keep an “open mind” when considering cases before the court during a final round of questioning on Wednesday, as Republicans declared her confirmation all but assured despite Democrats’ forceful opposition.
posted by geoff. at 8:28 PM PST - 307 comments

"Baking Bad" by heyjupiter: "Jesse Pinkman and his former home-ec teacher Walter White are co-owners of Heisenbrew's Uncertainty, an up-and-coming food truck." A Breaking Bad fanfic with a happy ending, tags: "Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Father-Son Relationship, Drug Addiction, Recovery, Minor Character Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort". Found via capricorn on MeFi five years ago. Also: "Illicit Alchemy" by Eric Lewis (published this year), a short fantasy story about an alchemist who gets way deeper into her employers' business than she wants.
posted by brainwane at 5:42 PM PST - 11 comments

Twoonty covers popular songs as K.K. Slider, a famous canine musician in Animal Crossing, including The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! (Sufjan Stevens), No Surprises (Radiohead), and This Charming Man (The Smiths). [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 4:15 PM PST - 6 comments

It’s no surprise, then, that we’ve come to relish jokes about men who are totally uninterested in sex, because there’s an element of recognition there. There’s pretty much no surprise or shock value left to wring out of being horny on main now, and like the sexless men of the jokes we’ve come to love, we’re refusing to take the bait. From The Rise of the Unhorny Man [MEL] [CW: NSFW language, racy pictures, dubious links]
posted by chavenet at 2:21 PM PST - 55 comments

The old air traffic control tower for WLG is for sale. And it is zoned as a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom residential property complete with street number and letter box. And of course the Air Traffic Control deck with (obviously) quite a view of the runway. [more inside]
posted by inflatablekiwi at 1:39 PM PST - 27 comments

A cultural history of Satyajit Ray’s height
posted by infini at 12:33 PM PST - 6 comments

Matthew Desmond (previously, 2, 3) reports: "For years, Jackson, Chacón and other residents of five buildings in the city’s Corcoran neighborhood had been involved in a prolonged battle against their landlord, Stephen Frenz, and his business partner, Spiros Zorbalas. The tenants had mobilized for better conditions, resisted evictions and participated in a rent strike. They had banded together and pushed the City Council to revoke Frenz’s rental license. It eventually did, stripping his ability to collect rent. But Frenz still owned the apartments where Jackson and Chacón lived. He wanted everybody out so he could renovate and sell to the highest bidder. The tenants had another idea: They wanted Frenz to sell to them."
posted by jshttnbm at 9:06 AM PST - 8 comments

This week marked the debut of a new writer/artist for "Mark Trail". "Mark Trail" is an American newspaper comic strip that's been running since it was first created by Edward Dodd back in 1946. The new writer is Jules Rivera, creator of "Love, Joolz", and now "the sole daily syndicated female Latinx cartoonist." This might seem like just a mildly interesting, perhaps encouraging development, but in the world of newspaper comic syndicate discussion forums and social media more broadly, there's no story so small that it can't be the cause of crazed over-reactions.
posted by Ipsifendus at 8:47 AM PST - 39 comments

The forthcoming Lord of the Rings adaptation, with five series on order and a budget over $1billion, may, like Game of Thongs, contain nudity and "scenes of a sexual nature". The original Tolkien books, and Peter Jackson adaptation, were bereft of elf-on-orc and similar action (maybe not). However, an intimacy coordinator may have been hired, plus requests for actors 'comfortable with nudity'. Some are not happy, but others are up for a "never before seen" story. Speculation and more and desire.
posted by Wordshore at 5:31 AM PST - 186 comments

At the time, mainstream games made money from the hatred between players after a battle. Revenue came from competition among players. We asked ourselves why we would want to pay: it’s because we love a certain virtual character that we become willing to pay for her. This impulse to pay was the opposite of what mainstream games had to offer at the time. [more inside]
posted by xdvesper at 2:53 AM PST - 39 comments

It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation... “

Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50 [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 7:18 PM PST - 165 comments

Amanda Ajamfar, an Iranian-American short story writer, wrote "Catastrophizing", published this year in The Georgia Review, in which a woman deals with ecological anxiety and overwhelming fear. "Then she picked at Atoosa’s choice of words in describing her mother, wanting to hear more about that than about the difficulty Atoosa was having trying to negotiate her need to have a phone for her job and social life with the unethical production of the object." Also by Ajamfar: "True Stories Never Satisfy", on the stories we tell that induce fear in women. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:41 PM PST - 10 comments

Flanders holds 1666 charter in reserve to fish in English waters Fishing rights in UK waters remain a stumbling block, but Flemish trawler men can look forward to the ‘sunlit uplands of Brexit’ with more confidence than most thanks to the charter that grants them eternal rights to fish in English waters.
posted by kingless at 4:19 PM PST - 19 comments

LibrarianShipwreck presents Theses on Doomscrolling, including “1. To doomscroll is to hear the scream of the fire alarm,” “3. One can only doomscroll from a position of, relative, safety,” and “9. The platforms on which doomscrolling occurs are complicit in giving rise to the world situation in which doomscrolling occurs.” [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 4:13 PM PST - 29 comments

As habitat for pollinators and other beneficial insects and wildlife rapidly disappears, the argument that it will be up to private landowners to provide crucial homes and corridors for migration thereby rescuing us all from extinction (if the insects go, we all go), is gaining ground. Groups all over the world are providing information and instruction to gardeners and land owners to help them provide resources for the world's dwindling wildlife. I'd planned to spend a day compiling a list of resources for gardeners by country and post it, but 10 mins of searching brought me to this SubReddit, and I don't think I can do better.
posted by WalkerWestridge at 3:49 PM PST - 25 comments

The libertarian social experiment underway in the small town of Grafton, NH was uniquely incapable of dealing with the problem. “Free Towners were finding that the situations that had been so easy to problem-solve in the abstract medium of message boards were difficult to resolve in person. ... [C]ertain libertarians who questioned whether they should do anything at all—especially since several of the town residents had taken to feeding the bears, more or less just because they could."
posted by MiraK at 2:54 PM PST - 101 comments

This is the image of time that is familiar to us: something that flows uniformly and equally throughout the universe, in the course of which all things happen. A present that exists throughout the cosmos, a “now” that constitutes reality. The past for everyone is fixed, is gone, having already happened. The future is open, yet to be determined. Reality flows from the past, through the present, toward the future—and the evolution of things between past and future is intrinsically asymmetrical. This, we feel, is the basic structure of the world ... This familiar picture has fallen apart, has shown itself to be only an approximation of a much more complex reality. The End of Time by Carlo Rovelli [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:54 PM PST - 21 comments

To cut a long story short, the article appeared to be completely made up and did not in fact exist. It was a "phantom reference" that had been created merely to illustrate Elsevier's desired reference format. Even so, Pieter found that in the Web of Science there were nearly 400 articles citing this non-existing reference and many more citing articles appeared in the more comprehensive Google Scholar. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 12:38 PM PST - 27 comments

This year's finalists have not yet been announced, so it's not too late for a post about the winners of the 2019 Best Illusion of the Year contest. First Prize: the Dual Axis Illusion; Second Prize: Change the Color; Third Prize: The Rotating Circles; and my favorite of the honorable mentions: 3D Graffiti. (MetaFilter posts about previous years: 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2009)
posted by straight at 10:48 PM PST - 53 comments

Clean vectored outlines? Wide-screen format? These don't look like reruns! That's because Steven Spielberg Presents The Animaniacs on Hulu, coming this November. (twitter link to new 1m30s preview. it's everything I hoped it would hint that the new series would be... omg so so very much this)
posted by hippybear at 10:11 PM PST - 50 comments

Two fanfiction short stories by Marie Brennan, writing on Archive of Our Own. "Darkness in Spring", a very short, silly riff on Greek mythology and today's exponents of darkness: "One year, Persephone doesn't leave Hades on schedule. Demeter goes to find out why." "The Rest", a clever James Bond-The Sandbaggers crossover: "Very few people remember where M came from." (You don't need to know The Sandbaggers to enjoy it -- just enjoy seeing competent women's tradecraft applied to bureaucracy and spy shenanigans.)
posted by brainwane at 5:29 PM PST - 7 comments

Tim Sneath upgrades his trusty Macintosh SE/30 to a brand new iMac G4 and marvels at the technological progress that a decade brings, including a DVD player, built-in Ethernet and modem, OS X Panther, EarthLink, and World Book 2004.
posted by adrianhon at 4:13 PM PST - 47 comments

It's a good year to be elsewhere. If you've a warm sweater, stout boots, and a tolerance for solitude, consider caring for a remote island. There are lots of options for armchair or eventual cargo ship travel: [more inside]
posted by SandCounty at 4:08 PM PST - 24 comments

Superman By Goldfinger, Except It Keeps changing genre every 15 seconds
posted by OverlappingElvis at 3:42 PM PST - 24 comments

This is my message to the western world - your civilization is killing life on Earth. An opinion piece for The Guardian by Nemonte Nenquimo, a member and leader of the Waorani people of the Ecuadorean Amazon and one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people of 2020. [more inside]
posted by biogeo at 2:38 PM PST - 27 comments

We All Live in Don DeLillo’s World. He’s Confused by It Too. [NYT] [trim version] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:35 PM PST - 11 comments

SLYT: Library Takeout A librarian at Duke University created a video to explain how to get materials safely and friends, it slaps! [more inside]
posted by jquinby at 1:24 PM PST - 23 comments

BBC Culinary Roots: “The first time you see a burrata sitting on a plate, tilted, you might be perplexed. Burrata is as white as mozzarella but comes with a strange narrowing at the top, like a giant dumpling. With a knife and fork, you poke the pouch, knowing something hides below that initial cheese layer. With a firm stroke, you cut the sachet in two, and the filling made of cream and mozzarella strips spills out and spreads across the plate. You roll the mozzarella strips with your fork like spaghetti, and with cream dripping, you have the first bite: an explosion of milk mixed with sweet cream and mozzarella.”
posted by Wordshore at 12:13 PM PST - 31 comments

Furman explains that her own use of throwback elements - swing beats, wailing saxophones, doo-wop choruses - is partially the product of all the "musical debris" floating around in her head, but it’s also a useful way to set up bigger thematic ideas. That’s especially where the '50s and '60s influences come in. "I go to that music because I feel a sort of similar level of repression in my life, where I know that transphobia and heteronormativity are not going to destroy me, but I can feel it holding me back and I can feel myself pushing against it," she says. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 11:44 AM PST - 8 comments

Eunice Newton Foote rarely gets the credit she’s due. In 1856, she theorized that changes in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could affect the Earth’s temperature, arriving at her breakthrough through experimentation. With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of “carbonic acid gas” (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against “common air.” When placed in the sun, she found the cylinder with carbon dioxide trapped more heat and stayed hot longer. From this simple experiment, Foote connected the dots between carbon dioxide and planetary warming—and she did it more than 160 years ago. Elle excerpts a book edited by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson on climate feminism. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 10:38 AM PST - 18 comments

Popular in South America, Europe, and Quebec, Argentine-Spanish cartoonist Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón (July 17, 1932 - September 30, 2020) — better known as Quino — drew his comic strip Mafalda (a politically/socially aware six year old girl) from 1964 to 1973. There’s an English fan website, and a large gallery of Tejón’s later wordless political cartoons on Imgur [H/T Macwhiskey]. *Before the Calvin Era.
posted by cenoxo at 9:33 AM PST - 13 comments

The role of cat eye narrowing movements in cat–human communication. (SLNature) Or How to Teach Your Dang Cat to Pay Attention to You. "One common anecdotally acknowledged yet subtle behavioural display that cats appear to direct at humans is the slow blink sequence (see also33). Slow blink sequences involve a series of half-blinks (where the eyelids move towards each other without ever fully closing the eye34) followed by either prolonged narrowing of the eye aperture or a full eye closure (see Fig. 1). Anecdotal evidence and personal observations suggest that the slow blink sequence can be used as a method of cat–owner communication, and is said to occur in calm, positive contexts." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:52 AM PST - 24 comments

The Swamp that Trump Built A businessman-president transplanted favor-seeking in Washington to his family's hotels and resorts--and earned millions as a gatekeeper to his own administration (the latest in an ongoing NYT investigation) (previously)
posted by box at 5:22 AM PST - 24 comments

Dr. Wenowdis, played by Kate McKinnon, visits Weekend Update. It goes a little off the rails.
posted by mosst at 8:37 PM PST - 48 comments

Have you ever lost a ring somewhere--just had it slip off your finger and...disappear? The Ring Finders is a network of metal detecting enthusiasts who help folks find lost rings, sometimes even underwater, usually for free or on a "reward basis," just because it makes them happy. And boy, does it make people happy.
posted by gottabefunky at 8:08 PM PST - 17 comments

"The Dryad’s Shoe" by Ursula Vernon (as T. Kingfisher) is a fun Cinderella retelling about a girl who has zero desire to attend a ball.

It is not much use being angry when you are eleven years old, because a grown-up will always explain to you why you are wrong to feel that way and very likely you will have to apologize to someone for it, so Hannah sat on the edge of the raised bed and drummed her heels and thought fixedly about when the next sowing of beets would have to be planted.

posted by brainwane at 5:27 PM PST - 28 comments

Bonnie Fuckin' Raitt sits in with the Jerry Garcia Band for two songs at the wonderful Greek Theatre in LA, 8/30/87 (SLYT Audio) Gorgeous interplay between Jerry and Bonnie on two songs: Think (McCracklin) and Knockin' on Heaven's Door (Dylan). Listen to Bonnie's slide playing! [more inside]
posted by stinkfoot at 4:54 PM PST - 13 comments

2020 getting you down? Future of the Earth looking too bleak? Are you (or someone you love) a Millennial aching to relive the lost optimism of your youth? Come over to my home world, Planet 1999. There’s a Party in your ears and it sounds like a sad AI trained on every Cocteau Twins album at once. [more inside]
posted by Lonnrot at 4:23 PM PST - 6 comments

The pandemic has transformed playing, watching, and covering big sports. Sam Anderson on What I Learned Inside the N.B.A. Bubble (NYT) and Barney Ronay on Is it too late to halt football’s final descent into a dystopian digital circus?
posted by adrianhon at 4:11 PM PST - 15 comments

Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk.
posted by zamboni at 3:29 PM PST - 11 comments

Federal and state prosecutors investigating Google for alleged antitrust violations are considering whether to force the company to sell its browser and parts of its advertising business. Also, "The Department of Justice also is said to be preparing a separate antitrust suit accusing Google of abusing its control on the online search market, which could be filed as soon as next week." The complaint could come late next week or just after the Columbus Day holiday, two of the people said. All spoke anonymously to discuss an ongoing investigation.
posted by geoff. at 3:02 PM PST - 43 comments

snake___pit (that’s three underscores) is an Instagram account run by a tattoo artist Casper Mugridge who collects singularly horrible, creative, and bizarre tattoos. (EXTREMELY NSFW, mostly for genitals)
Brief interview with Devon Preston at Inked
Slightly longer interview with Vice
posted by Going To Maine at 1:50 PM PST - 38 comments

For McCartney, irons are not just the story of American invention. They also illustrate how technology was used to help people stay abreast of—some might say “conform to”—the social conventions of the day. Just as a band of red in the side of a sandstone cliff might indicate the presence of iron ore, McCartney’s irons are evidence of a time when ironed clothing was a sign of social status, long before the arrival of permanent-press fabrics or—heaven forfend!—shirts designed to be worn untucked. Simply put, people spent an enormous amount of their time ironing. From Sad Iron Man: A Maine Geologist Wants You To Know How We Used to Press Our Clothes
posted by chavenet at 1:26 PM PST - 11 comments

"She was born in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, in 1912, almost a full decade before women in America won the right to vote. A pioneering female drummer who banged down barriers for women in music at a time when they were mostly seen as a novelty, she landed on the cover of Billboard magazine in 1940 and even performed at President Harry Truman’s inauguration. And yet, her name is virtually unknown." [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 12:46 PM PST - 8 comments

The value of my street depends, intrinsically, on all of their streets. And the value of their streets depends, in part, on mine. A.R. Moxon, author of The Revisionaries, and anti-Nazi tweeter, explores the relationship between infrastructure and community.
posted by mecran01 at 11:17 AM PST - 12 comments

The most recent folio from literary magazine PANK is devoted to Jewish diaspora. [more inside]
posted by youarenothere at 11:04 AM PST - 3 comments

Kenneth Iverson's 1964 language, APL, won him the Turing Award. His award lecture, Notation as a Tool of Thought, argued that better notations would lead people to deeper insights about mathematics. [...] I'd like to show how some of Iverson's notations lead to a better appreciation of what we can do with programming languages. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 10:57 AM PST - 20 comments

Culinary "hot takes" slreddit.

What food faux pas do you do? [more inside]
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 8:34 AM PST - 266 comments

The Storytellers of Empire. Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie asks American writers why “Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t.” This long essay examines two perspectives of American writing - the most prominent perspective puts America at the center, as invader, as victim. The other perspective is exemplified by John Hersey and his work on Hiroshima - America as witness-bearer. It ends on a question: "So why is it, please explain, that you’re in our stories but we’re not in yours?" Her answer is not uplifting.
posted by storybored at 7:25 PM PST - 15 comments

Two scifi/fantasy stories about space exploration, fiction, lies, and exuberant adventure. "The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales" by Fei Dao, translated by Ken Liu, sort of a Stanislaw Lem-feeling yarn, and "Four Kinds of Cargo" by Leonard Richardson (disclaimer: my spouse), a bit of Firefly-ish wackiness with a touch of pathos. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:27 PM PST - 2 comments

Remember Hum? No? Okay. Remember "Stars?" Yeah. Thought you might. Hum was a very influential, very 90s shoegaze/space rock/alt metal band whose last release was in 1998. Wait, no, sorry, whose last release came out in 2020. It's called Inlet. It's pretty good! “Folding” is my favorite. [more inside]
posted by Lonnrot at 4:07 PM PST - 32 comments

@cost_n_mayor perform dance remixes to regional commercials including O’Reilly Auto Parts (remix by @Remixgodsuede), Empire Today, Education Connection, and Free Credit Report dot com.
posted by adrianhon at 4:03 PM PST - 21 comments

Thousands Of D.C. Renters Are Evicted Every Year. Do They All Know To Show Up To Court? (DCist, Josh Kaplan) By 11 a.m., Stephens was standing before Judge William Graves Simmons. He pleaded guilty, making it his second conviction for driving while intoxicated, and was accepting his sentence of community service. Stephens would subsequently claim in an affidavit that at exactly that moment, he was knocking on the door of an apartment at 2714 29th St. SE, more than ten miles away.
In all, he would later swear that he attempted to serve 16 tenants in the District of Columbia while this reporter was staring at the back of his head.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:51 PM PST - 26 comments

Video centered on drummer Danny Carey playing Pneuma from Tool's show in Boston at the end of 2019. I love how calm and centered he seems while doing something so complicated and powerful. [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 12:06 PM PST - 34 comments

"These pandemic months have been so full and fraught, so lacking the silence we foresaw with the initial shelter-in-place orders, that one of its first clichés has fallen into obscurity. Do you remember, mid-March, when everyone kept recalling that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” while in quarantine? As an inducement to write that novel or learn that new language, it felt hollow as early as April. Well, not everyone lost their focus in the discord and inundation of 2020. Amy Sillman did not. The New York painter...has had a year of unparalleled productivity, even as the coronavirus outbreak kept her from her usual studio." (NYT) [more inside]
posted by blue shadows at 11:02 AM PST - 3 comments

The pandemic meant IIHS senior crash test engineer Becky Mueller was stuck at home. She used the practice from her childhood to crash test LEGO cars. After 2 months and 1500 pictures, you can view the result. Additional camera angles and stills are available here.
posted by Monochrome at 10:53 AM PST - 12 comments

Last week it occurred to me that I have never seen a map of European cities labelled with their endonyms (names for themselves) and exonyms (external names). And so, I thought I would make one. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 10:36 AM PST - 55 comments

October 5, 1970, British trade commissioner James Cross is abducted in Montreal by a small band of Quebec nationalists, the Liberation Cell of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). October 10, Pierre Laporte, a minister in the Quebec Liberal government, is kidnapped by the Chénier cell, triggering an emergency generally known in Canada as the October Crisis, which has repercussions to this day. [more inside]
posted by zadcat at 9:49 AM PST - 18 comments

Two strangers forge a surprising connection as they climb a steep Lisbon street in a short film by Atsushi Kuwayama [AEON]
posted by chavenet at 9:27 AM PST - 3 comments

Sometimes an onion is just an onion.
posted by clawsoon at 5:00 AM PST - 31 comments

“Maybe QUEL is better than SQL. Maybe French is better than English? It didn’t matter: English and SQL were going to win.” Oracle Version 4 was a good product — certainly better than Oracle Version 3, which was released to the market with more bugs than a discarded pomelo. But it didn’t win because it was technically superior to Ingres. It won because IBM was powerful, and because Stonebraker made a mistake.
posted by geoff. at 7:21 PM PST - 43 comments

Two lovely, sweet, heartwarming short pieces of Star Trek fan fiction that take place in the reboot universe (that is, the recent films, starting with the first JJ Abrams entry). "Lunch and Other Obscenities" by Rheanna presents the culture clash between Nyota Uhura and her Orion roommate, Gaila, in their first year at Starfleet Academy. Includes a Vulcan restaurant with a fitting name, people overcoming misunderstandings, and two shared meals that make me happily tear up. And "Graduate Vulcan for Fun and Profit" by lazulisong shows us James T. Kirk at the Academy, avoiding anyone finding out just how brilliant he is, intertwined with the point of view of his Vulcan mentor. Includes amazing curses, a tour of Portland, Oregon, and someone saying to a child, "I propose to treat you as a rational being capable of rational thought."
posted by brainwane at 5:22 PM PST - 13 comments

Janelle Monae's evocative and powerful video for her anthem to racial justice and democracy, "Turntables." The song is featured on the soundtrack to the 2020 documentary about voter suppression, All In: The Fight for Democracy, directed by Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés, featuring Black politician and activist Stacey Abrams. “I started thinking about all the people on the front line. What could be my gift to them? It was this song to remind them that the tables are turning. We’re seeing that progress is being made, even in the midst of dealing with such traumatic events. We have figured out a way to be the solution. I wanted this to be my gift because revolutionaries need love too. They need inspiration, and they need an anthem. This is my stab at that.”
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 4:22 PM PST - 19 comments

Two decades ago, a local photographer began documenting political statements placed on the iconic Oakland marquee by the theater’s owner.

“This is America, every vote should be counted,” read the marquee at the Grand Lake Theatre.… A photo of that marquee message—the first of many protest statements that Grand Lake Theatre owner Allen Michaan has placed above the theater’s entrance—is part of a Flickr photo archive curated by local photographer, musician, and radio host, David Gans. For the past 20 years, Gans has religiously photographed the now-familiar messages that regularly light up the night sky on the corner of Grand Avenue and Lake Park Avenue.

posted by Lexica at 4:09 PM PST - 13 comments

Jonas Richner with a richly illustrated and reported essay on how Flash games shaped the video game industry [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 4:00 PM PST - 15 comments

"Mobility for some causes immobility for others, growth on one side means taking from another, and the ability to profit is the ability to exploit. The overriding thesis of Mimi Sheller’s Mobility Justice is aimed at gathering a deeper understanding of how progress and mobility have become detrimentally linked." Here are a few other groups working in the mobility justice space: [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 3:18 PM PST - 2 comments

Monica Roberts, a Pioneering Houston, TX based Journalist and Advocate for Trans Women, especially Black Trans Women, has died. She was a contributor to Ebony.com, The Huffington Post, and The Advocate, among other websites and newspapers, as well as her own award winning blog TransGriot, which was perhaps the first blog from the perspective of a Trans Black Woman. She was the recipient of multiple awards(YT acceptance speech). [more inside]
posted by Chrysopoeia at 3:06 PM PST - 18 comments

This is way more interesting than I would have guessed before reading it. Also, Ice Ice Baby came out in 1990? I would have sworn that we were dancing to that in college, and I graduated in 1989.
posted by COD at 1:53 PM PST - 39 comments

BABYMETAL: BxMxC [more inside]
posted by signal at 1:42 PM PST - 10 comments

This will definitely soften your heart after a stressful day. It's been a long while, I think, since Maple and Trench were last featured here, and after seeing their latest, I just had to share. A wonderful pooch and some peaceful guitar, who'd think it would be so heart lightening to watch a set of these?
posted by kmartino at 1:18 PM PST - 6 comments

Indie folk rocker Phoebe Bridgers (previously) and pop pianist Arlo Parks come together in a beautiful collaboration, performing Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" and Bridgers' own "Kyoto." [more inside]
posted by Lonnrot at 12:39 PM PST - 10 comments

Pierre Kezdy Dead at 58. He died today in hospice, of cancer. A longtime resident of Evanston (IL), his place in Chicago music history is totemic. He'd been unwell for quite some time so this was not unexpected, but it's a sad day for punk music when our heroes die. [more inside]
posted by juniperesque at 10:11 AM PST - 16 comments

Covid Times means figuring out new rules for dating. A short listicle from Time Out NY shows some of the ways dating has changed (and gotten weirder) in adjusting to the 'Rona.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:46 AM PST - 41 comments

In which Laura Currie gives a beautiful, soft rendition, ukulele of Hallelujah, though with lyrics from a much-quoted scene from the movie "Taken". Laura's YouTube channel contains more.
posted by Wordshore at 7:42 AM PST - 9 comments

HBO have released the official trailer for A West Wing Special, a reunion of the cast of The West Wing for a stage production of the episode 'Hartsfield's Landing' (season 3, episode 14). The special event, titled A West Wing Special to Benefit When We All Vote, drops on Oct. 15 on HBO Max, ahead of the 2020 presidential election and in support of When We All Vote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization co-chaired by Michelle Obama.
posted by fight or flight at 7:23 AM PST - 23 comments

The Beautiful, Insane World of ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ Parody Flags [MEL]
posted by chavenet at 5:36 AM PST - 65 comments

Until now the Nebra sky disk was deemed to be from the Early Bronze Age and therefore the world's oldest depiction of the cosmos. Archaeologists from Goethe University Frankfurt and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich have now reanalysed diverse data on the reconstruction of the discovery site and surrounding circumstances of the find. Their findings are that the disk must be dated in the Iron Age, making it about 1,000 years younger than previously assumed. This makes all previous astronomical interpretations obsolete.

New dating of Nebra sky disk [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 1:47 AM PST - 3 comments

Three scifi/fantasy stories on caretaking. "Callme and Mink" (text and audio) by Brenda Cooper (published this month) has cute dogs and an ill child: "Not lying to him meant she didn’t signal emotions she didn’t believe were appropriate. She could signal most feelings back to humans, but they were always a lie." That one feels reasonably happy, despite its implied postapocalyptic setting. Two more are more wrenching, including one by a MeFite. [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:20 PM PST - 5 comments

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced last month that social activism was no longer welcome at the “apolitical” tech company, offering severance to those who disagreed; so far, 5% of employees have accepted. Y Combinator founder Paul Graham praised Armstrong, predicting “most successful companies will follow”, while Casey Newton thinks banning politics from the workplace is easier said than done. Erica Joy believes the move is retaliation against Coinbase engineers who walked off the job in June because Armstrong wouldn’t say “black lives matter”.
posted by adrianhon at 3:58 PM PST - 73 comments

This is the trailer for Fatman, a movie that pits the unpleasant Mel Gibson against America’s sweetheart Walt Goggins.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:13 PM PST - 64 comments

How the 'girl watching' fad of the 1960s taught men to harass women.
posted by Ouverture at 11:57 AM PST - 45 comments

The simplicity of a rasam is a decoy for its depth. At first sip, you may only discern the faint sweetness of a ripe tomato. Then comes the punch of tamarind. You reel momentarily from this affront, but you will soon be soothed by the nutty richness of mustard seeds fried in ghee—called the thalippu, or tempering that crowns this trellis of flavor. For eons, South Indians of all stripes have claimed an intimate understanding of rasam, a broth (not unlike a stock) that teases complexity out of even the most minimal ingredients.

Rasam Digest, an encyclopedic book by Usha Prabhakaran, is set to give the ancient, versatile, culture-melding dish its due. [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 11:52 AM PST - 19 comments

For a third round, comedian Julie Nolke travels back in time to utter vague and disturbing prophecies to her younger self. This time, October travels back to June, and appears to be finally losing it.

Previously on the Blue, June goes to see April, and April goes to see January (links in that post).
posted by Mogur at 8:43 AM PST - 31 comments

How Germany built a prototype for online censorship In 2017 Germany adopted the ‘Network Enforcement Act’ or NetzDG. It obliges social media platforms with a minimum of 2 million users to remove illegal content – including hate speech and religious offense – within 24 hours, or risk steep fines of up to 50 million euros. [...] In May 2019, Justitia issued a report which documented that at least 13 countries (plus the EU) had adopted or proposed models similar to the NetzDG matrix. [...] Worryingly few of these countries have in place the basic rule of law and free speech protections built into the German precedent [...] [more inside]
posted by dmh at 6:26 AM PST - 6 comments

Over on Twitter that Eric Alper asks a simple question:

What album did your parents introduce you to that you love?

posted by MartinWisse at 6:17 AM PST - 160 comments

American poet Louise Glück is the Nobel Laureate for 2020. You can read her poetry in various places online, such as at the website of the Poetry Foundation and the New Yorker. Dan Chiasson profiled her for the latter in 2012. Modern American Poetry has a couple of interviews with her online.
posted by Kattullus at 4:08 AM PST - 22 comments

Tonight starting at 6 p.m. pacific time is the 2020 Vice-Presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence; there's a C-Span livestream. [more inside]
posted by cortex at 5:30 PM PST - 489 comments

Two short scifi stories about changing history, in the small and in the large. "The Day Alan Turing Came Out" by Leonard Richardson (disclaimer: my spouse), wish-fulfillment alternate history. "Turing reaches for the RUN button in the corner and my breath catches. This is the moment when I always found that I had mistyped a line and had to go through the magazine listing again, looking for errors. Turing does not worry." "This Must Be the Place" by Elly Bangs, a partially-requited romance with a "deterministic dolt." "It's probably simplest to say that I first met Loren Wells in a club in San Francisco. We'll set aside for the moment that it wasn't the first time he'd met me."
posted by brainwane at 5:19 PM PST - 9 comments

“Even as a photo historian, I look at them and think, oh, wow, that's quite an arresting image,” she says. “But always then my next impulse is to say, 'Well, why am I having that response? And what is the person who's made this intervention on the restoration actually doing? What information has this person added? What have they taken away?” Historians discuss upscaling and colorizing historical film, and ethical responsibilities of preservation versus enhancement.
posted by Lonnrot at 4:07 PM PST - 17 comments

Lewis Gordon on the increasingly HR Gigeresque designs of gaming chairs. “While the gaming chair is marketed as a medical boon, it essentially renders large parts of the body motionless except, of course, those limbs interfacing directly with the computer. These chairs emphasize their ergonomic benefits … but encourage harmful behavior — either in the short term, as in extreme gaming sessions, or the long run, as muscles gradually atrophy.”
posted by adrianhon at 3:56 PM PST - 31 comments

Did Friends predict The Matrix? [slyt]
posted by feelinglistless at 2:27 PM PST - 12 comments

As autumn has descended on the Northern Hemisphere, giant pumpkins and other cucurbitae have been (or about to be) hauled to the weigh scales. Fall fairs and competitions have had to adapt to the pandemic by holding virtual, live-streamed, and socially-distanced weigh-offs. This year, the state record in Utah was smashed. In Germany, the national record remains intact despite an impressive Bavarian effort. In Canada, a 1,939.5-pound monster almost broke the national record, while in tangentially related news, divers in Manitoba took pumpkins underwater for a carving and clean-up event. This is also an annual tradition among Finger Lakes divers in New York state. [more inside]
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:25 PM PST - 7 comments

If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down. I know people who were beaten, arrested, and went into exile. But that’s not what my photostream looks like. It was mostly food and parties and normal stuff for a dumb twentysomething. CW: wartime violence
posted by mecran01 at 12:45 PM PST - 58 comments

More than 76 activist street bands and brass and percussion ensembles from around the world are celebrating HONK! United this week (Oct. 5-11). Started 15 years ago, the HONK! Fest in Somerville, MA is an annual vibrant, raucous, free festival that has spawned similar festivals in more than 20 cities - from Austin to Wollongong. This year, with festivals cancelled, the organizers decided to host a virtual festival and invite bands to submit ideas for live and video performances and retrospectives. Now, you can enjoy HONK! United from your own home! [more inside]
posted by acridrabbit at 10:36 AM PST - 9 comments

Early voting is breaking records in 2020, fueled by a big mail-ballot lead for Democrats [more inside]
posted by NotLost at 7:03 AM PST - 230 comments

Aviation Outsider Builds Supersonic Jet for Transatlantic Flight [Bloomberg] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:58 AM PST - 55 comments

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet - "From its name, to its hazy origins, to its drug interactions, there's a lot going on beneath that thick rind."
posted by kliuless at 12:34 AM PST - 52 comments

The twitter hashtag #blacktober is likely to be a month-long pleasure scroll of artistic ability and creative reimaginings of a lot of pop culture characters as being black and not white. It's beautiful and joyous and fun, and it is sure to be the gift that keeps on giving all month long.
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM PST - 6 comments

"I wanted to say to my young self 'You’re loved. You’re beautiful. You’re complicated. You matter.' I know that by saying this to myself with each book I write, I am saying it to every reader who has ever felt otherwise." Author and poet Jacqueline Woodson has been named a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. [more inside]
posted by kristi at 9:07 PM PST - 5 comments

A powerful short film by Chris Croucher.
posted by dancestoblue at 6:20 PM PST - 5 comments

Two scifi/fantasy stories, both from 2009, about women superheroes. "Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut" by Cat Rambo is light: "They have gone through twenty-two candidates, making notes, asking questions. The twenty-third arrives, dressed in black and steel." "Origin" by Ari Goelman is alternately silly and serious: "'I should never date other supers,' I say, not for the first time. I put my hand on my stomach. Crap. I can barely keep a spider plant alive. There's no way I'm ready to be a mother."
posted by brainwane at 5:12 PM PST - 3 comments

Internet-enabled male chastity cage can be remotely locked by hackers [more inside]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:38 PM PST - 83 comments

Daniel Mertzlufft made a musical number about a break-up in a grocery store (inspired by New York Summer). Thanks to TikTok’s duet feature, it grew into a hilariously creative series as people added on more and more parts.
posted by adrianhon at 3:54 PM PST - 12 comments

Edward Lodewijk Van Halen, 65, has died after a long battle with throat cancer, per his son Wolf [twitter]. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:12 PM PST - 142 comments

Superspreader events are the key to understanding the pandemic. "By now many people have heard about R0—the basic reproductive number of a pathogen, a measure of its contagiousness on average. But unless you’ve been reading scientific journals, you’re less likely to have encountered k, the measure of its dispersion. The definition of k is a mouthful, but it’s simply a way of asking whether a virus spreads in a steady manner or in big bursts, whereby one person infects many, all at once. After nine months of collecting epidemiological data, we know that this is an overdispersed pathogen, meaning that it tends to spread in clusters, but this knowledge has not yet fully entered our way of thinking about the pandemic—or our preventive practices." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:54 AM PST - 32 comments

It looks like the law has finally caught up with the flashy, egocentric septuagenarian multi-millionaire who has spent the last few years trying to prop up his failing fortunes with a variety of business scams while paying no taxes for years and displaying increasingly bizarre, paranoid and narcissistic behaviour. ... No, not that one. This one. [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 8:13 AM PST - 34 comments

Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia. [Available as audio at the link]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:49 AM PST - 6 comments

I developed shhgit to raise awareness and bring to life the prevalence of [secrets committed to GitHub repositories].
Finding secrets in GitHub is nothing new. There are many great tools available to help with this depending on which side of the fence you sit.
On the adversarial side, popular tools such as gitrob and truffleHog focus on digging in to commit history to find secret tokens from specific repositories, users or organizations.
On the defensive side, GitHub themselves are actively scanning for secrets through their token scanning project.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:06 PM PST - 48 comments

Elections are on everyone's mind in the US, New Zealand and beyond. Advance voting has now started for the Penguin of the Year. Personally I'm voting for Flip, who "knows how to penguin well." [more inside]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 9:28 PM PST - 16 comments

@TubeTimeUS has a great twitter tear down explainer [threadreader] of a Friden EC-130. What is an EC-120? Why one of the first electronic desk calculators. Retailing for $2,100 in 1964 (~$20K today), it didn't feature any new fangled integrated circuits. Instead the entire thing ran on discreet components. And the memory, which stores 4 13 digit numbers, isn't implemented with transistors (it would have needed 520 of them) rather memory was implemented with an analogue, mechanical, magnetostrictive delay line via a coiled torsion wire. It was also the first calculator to use RPN. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 7:10 PM PST - 16 comments

Two speculative stories about romance, mourning, and life-changing journeys. "The Four Generations of Chang E" by Zen Cho starts with someone winning the moon lottery: "Chang E sold everything she had: the car, the family heirloom enamel hairpin collection, her external brain. Humans were so much less intelligent than Moonites anyway. The extra brain would have made little difference." In "Three Petitions to the Queen of Hell" by Tim Pratt, "Marla and Zufi, the reigning queens of Hell, were eight years into a meaningless spat, living more as roommates than lovers" -- but then a mortal woman successfully makes it across the Styx to save her girlfriend.
posted by brainwane at 5:04 PM PST - 6 comments

Berlin Brandenburg Airport will finally be opening at the end of this month. Billions over budget and nine years behind schedule, the airport’s woes have inspired a boardgame, UnberechenBER – Das verrückte Flughafenspie (“How much taxpayer money can you waste while designing and constructing an airport?”) and a videogame, Chaotic Airport Construction Manager (Win/Mac/Linux). [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 3:50 PM PST - 39 comments

The 100 Sequences That Shaped Animation

Animators continue to fool us into believing still images can move and breathe, and we in turn remain delighted to live between the frames. From Bugs Bunny to Spike Spiegel to Miles Morales, these are the 100 most influential sequences in animation history

Edited by Eric Vilas-Boas and John Maher, Vulture looks at the history of an art form that "continues to draw us in"
posted by jazon at 2:15 PM PST - 51 comments

Japanese fashion legend Kenzo Takada has died. The fashion designer, known for his bold, exuberant prints, passed away in Paris, where he has lived for 56 years, of complications from the coronavirus. He was 81. [more inside]
posted by kitten kaboodle at 1:37 PM PST - 13 comments

Buttery pasta, peppery vermicelli, masala sevai—noodles come in many shapes and sizes. They can provide comfort, nostalgia and a sense of belonging. This collection of personal essays, guides, recipes and deep dives serves as a little bit of a ‘food hug’ with everything that has gone on in 2020.

KQED explores noodles. [more inside]
posted by Lexica at 11:15 AM PST - 30 comments

Nobel Prizes and the sharing of credit: The 2020 Nobel Prize week kicks off with the announcement of the Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to the virologists Harvey Alter (NIH), Michael Houghton (Alberta), and Charles M Rice (Rockefeller) for their discovery of Hepatitis C. But like most science, this discovery was made possible by many more than three people... and laureate Michael Houghton has drawn attention to this by declining prestigious awards when his co-workers were not recognized. [more inside]
posted by Westringia F. at 8:21 AM PST - 17 comments

Countries across Europe set grim Covid-19 records as restrictions are reimposed. Central Europe struggles in second Covid surge after earlier success. Bars and cafes across Paris will shut tomorrow for two weeks as the city moves to the highest level of covid alert. Ireland considers a full national lockdown for one month in attempt to keep schools open and covid under control. Italy so far seems to be avoiding a second wave. Since early September over 1,000 people a day have died in India as a result of the pandemic.
posted by roolya_boolya at 5:24 AM PST - 183 comments

New Zealand's cold, damp, moldy homes lead to 28,000 children and 54,000 adults being hospitalized every year. They're also the reason New Zealand has some of the highest rates of asthma, skin infections and rheumatic fever among first world countries. Up to 40% of New Zealand homes are uninsulated and 22% have no fixed heat (and a high percentage of those have no heat). The Healthy Homes Standard which will come into effect in 2021 is slated to improve the situation. But the National Party has said they will eradicate those regulations if voted in, because of the unfair burden on landlords. [more inside]
posted by rednikki at 2:00 AM PST - 55 comments

Eight scifi/fantasy stories about people in tough situations trying to help each other, including three by Susan Palwick (previously). [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 5:03 PM PST - 7 comments

According to Thames Water, dual-flush toilets specially designed to save water are wasting more than they conserve, thanks to leaking. [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 3:46 PM PST - 63 comments

'We’re used to thinking about mass incarceration or climate change or public health or reproductive rights or immigration as singular issues. That’s why, for example, when the pandemic kicked off in the United States in earnest, there was a pernicious drop in climate coverage. As I and others pitched stories about the climate crisis, we were told, again and again, that “it wasn’t the time.” And now we’re out of time.' A powerful essay by Mary Annaise Heglar about climate grief, "climate vision" and the way crises cascade and injustices interlink.
posted by Lonnrot at 1:59 PM PST - 8 comments

Sara Varon has written many excellent graphic novels and picture books for kids but she doesn't draw people, except herself. She does draw a squid who would like to be president, a cupcake who is friends with an eggplant (and loves to bake), and (coming soon) a dog detective. [more inside]
posted by jessamyn at 1:02 PM PST - 1 comment

"Like many other Indians, Malik had less than four hours to make transformative decisions, ones that would have ramifications for himself, his family, his colleagues, and his employer, all without a road map. Yet his were more impactful than most: The product he makes is among the most universally consumed in India." Alia Allana wrote about Parle- G biscuits and the varied Indian experiences of the COVID-19 lockdown in June 2020 for the Atlantic. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 10:41 AM PST - 11 comments

A four-year university degree has become necessary for dignified work. Michael Sandel says that’s a huge mistake. "The meritocratic hubris of elites is the conviction by those who land on top that their success is their own doing, that they have risen through a fair competition, that they therefore deserve the material benefits that the market showers upon their talents. Meritocratic hubris is the tendency of the successful to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It goes along with the tendency to look down on those less fortunate, and less credentialed, than themselves."
posted by geoff. at 7:54 AM PST - 63 comments

Martin Miller Session Band perform live in studio a cover of The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd.
posted by adept256 at 5:02 AM PST - 30 comments

Working with dogs in the wilderness means negotiating countless shifting variables: snow and wind, wild animals, open water, broken equipment, each dog’s needs and changing mood. I learned that plans, when I made them, were nothing but a sketch; the only thing I needed to count on was that the dogs and I would make decisions along the way. What My Sled Dogs Taught Me About Planning for the Unknown By Blair Braverman [From the NYT's series on resilience, via Farnam Street.]
posted by chavenet at 2:54 AM PST - 9 comments

"Known Associates" by thingswithwings is a nearly 300,000-word fan fiction novel about Steve Rogers (Captain America), gender, activism, self-discovery, queer life in Brooklyn in the 1930s and '40s, sex, disability, solidarity, and the joys of making friends on the Internet. It was longlisted for the 2017 Otherwise Award.
posted by brainwane at 4:58 PM PST - 15 comments

28 minutes of raw, behind-the-scenes footage from the production of STAR TREK: THE EXPERIENCE in Las Vegas – including a lights-on view of the transporter mechanism (via @davecobb)
posted by adrianhon at 3:45 PM PST - 20 comments

Reluctant as I am to slapping a label on a subset of women making music with some stylistic similarity, let's talk about Death Gospel. This article in Metal Hammer talks about Chelsea Wolfe, Louise Lemón, AA Williams and Emma Ruth Rundle, saying "an influx of singer-songwriters has been infiltrating… and reinventing the idea of what constitutes heavy music… embracing darkness in a raw, visceral way, pushing boundaries of genre and style". (Don't be put off by the repeated use of the term 'metal', this is strong, powerful music, but not really metal.) [more inside]
posted by signal at 3:07 PM PST - 15 comments

Anthony Burgess was supposed to submit an article for Rolling Stone in 1973. But he didn't make the deadline and begged off. So editor Hunter S. Thompson wrote him a letter.
posted by storybored at 2:26 PM PST - 40 comments

After a leadership campaign which nearly doubled the party's membership, not long after an election in which it broke the million-vote barrier, the Green Party of Canada is set to choose a new leader after fourteen years under Elizabeth May. CBC's coverage will start tonight at 5:45pm EDT, with results of the ranked-choice ballot expected starting at 7pm. The race boasts nine eight candidates with a diverse, if small, party base hotly debating which direction will best suit the party’s electoral prospects and the chance to reshape Canadian party politics. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 11:44 AM PST - 35 comments

Bobby from England walks across South India, from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. His daily vlogs are about the mental struggle, against heat and exhaustion. But also a travelogue of back roads, small villages, temples and tea shops. He finds plenty of hospitality, but also the isolation of being an object of intense curiosity whatever he goes. Episode 5 is a good example, but his editing keeps improving as he goes on. [more inside]
posted by serathen at 7:19 AM PST - 6 comments

A Book Of Beasts [via mefi projects] contains illustrations of 62 strange beasts, creatures, and other things of interest, with descriptive passages to tell you everything they are.
posted by exceptinsects at 4:59 PM PST - 12 comments

“Fallback fonts are like the bus that picks up the slowest race runners when the street needs to be reopened for car traffic—at that point it’s less about finishing the race, and more about avoiding a disaster” — Marcin Wichary explains how fonts, browsers, and operating systems cooperate to ensure we almost always see the the written word as its writer intended.
posted by Monochrome at 4:11 PM PST - 12 comments

Gladys West is a mathematician and an early computer programmer who was among a small group of women who did computing for the U.S. military. When she got her first post-college job at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, she was one of only four African American employees. Her work in the late 70s and early 80s, modelling the shape of the Earth, became the basis for modern GPS systems. She mentioned this fact in a sorority newsletter contribution and this resulted in her being inducted into Space and Missiles Pioneers Hall of Fame in 2018 (the same year she earned her PhD). Listen to her briefly tell her own story here.
posted by jessamyn at 4:07 PM PST - 4 comments

A secret ‘man cave’ has been discovered in a room beneath Grand Central Station. “The supervisor of the locksmith shop – who is not a licensed locksmith – could not access the room because only actual locksmiths had access.” However, it pales in comparison to the full-sized secret badminton court discovered during the redevelopment of Kings Cross.
posted by adrianhon at 3:43 PM PST - 38 comments

Read Paper Republic publishes English translations of Chinese fiction, usually new short stories. The short story "Saint Marie" by Da Si, translated by Caroline Mason, portrays a student's gradual discontentment with a French landlady whose hospitality proves stifling (in a way that goes beyond Ask vs. Guess cultures). "If Marie had made it plain before I moved in that she wanted my company, I would never have chosen to live with her."
posted by brainwane at 3:37 PM PST - 3 comments

Do you like shoegaze? Powerpop? Alt rock? Would you list Pavement or Julianna Hatfield among your favorite artists? Do you frequently find yourself staring wistfully out of windows while listening to the Pete & Pete soundtrack wondering where that Blake Babies sound went? Do you miss the 90s? Do you wonder what the 90s is like now, in 2020? It's been a while but Beabadoobee is here to assure you the wait was worth it. [more inside]
posted by Lonnrot at 11:15 AM PST - 21 comments

German has distinct verb combinations for airing out flats and recommendations are getting more and more precise. [more inside]
posted by katta at 8:11 AM PST - 45 comments

The go-to dish for when there’s no one to satisfy but yourself, too simple or too weird to try out on guests, the house meal is a messy signature dish, and the epitome of experimental home cooking. [via]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:17 AM PST - 92 comments

Yes indeed, Trump tests positive for the Coronavirus

The “October surprise” is here

Trump and first lady Melania test positive for coronavirus

The president’s infection means he will need to cancel in-person events in the coming weeks

El presidente Donald Trump y la primera dama dan positivo por covid-19 y se ponen en cuarentena

Jetzt kommt es auf Trumps Immunsystem an

posted by bertran at 2:36 AM PST - 2952 comments

The Irish Supreme court has decided that Subway's bread is not bread. [more inside]
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 5:19 PM PST - 99 comments

Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, the University of Hawai'i, and Duke University, have examined a collection of dried, pressed seaweeds dating back over 140 years to learn what ocean conditions in the bay were like in the early 19th century. Actual paper on Pubmed.
posted by carter at 3:49 PM PST - 4 comments

Samovar "is a quarterly magazine of and about translated speculative fiction", a regular special issue of the magazine Strange Horizons. For Samovar, Brishti Guha translated a (wacky, in my opinion) 11th-century Sanskrit piece by Kshemendra about language misunderstandings and an angry scholar. "...the reason the meat was so poor was because hunters couldn’t get hold of any well-fed animals. All the animals wanted to listen to Gunadhya’s story even more than they wanted to eat!" (Previously.)
posted by brainwane at 3:35 PM PST - 2 comments

Rebecca Mead celebrates pioneering painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s harnessing of motherhood, passion, and ambition – and pushes against the notion her work was defined by surviving a rape (The New Yorker). Links to every painting referenced (Kottke). [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 3:26 PM PST - 2 comments

the lifestyle blog voter. In a followup of sorts to her BuzzFeedNews 2016 essay, Meet The Ivanka Voter, Anne Helen Petersen takes a look at what white suburban women are thinking about the 2020 election. Kicked off by an informal poll on a well-know lifestyle blogger's Instagram, Petersen digs into why some of these women are Trump supporters, and how what may be a decisive demographic slice of the electorate often gets overlooked and misunderstood.
posted by soundguy99 at 3:09 PM PST - 46 comments

Fast Food Buffets Are a Thing of the Past. Some Doubt They Ever Even Existed.
posted by box at 1:51 PM PST - 52 comments

If you’re like me, you’re not gonna read all of this article. Many of you will see the headline and that’ll be all you require to formulate your opinion and then hop on Facebook to be like, “Can you believe this a—hole doesn’t read everything he reads?!” I would castigate you for such hasty judgment, but allow me now to confess something that deserves to make me an eternal pariah: I barely ever read anything on the internet in full.

By Drew Magary.
posted by Lexica at 12:56 PM PST - 26 comments

Pikotaro is the comedian you may know from Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen or his recent collaboration with Pikachu. His PIKO-10 project consists of ten new songs, uploaded one per week to his YouTube channel, starting with a message to a father from a child inside the womb (Pikotaro is a newish dad) and wrapping up with the viral hit "Everyone must die" which he describes as "his wish for happiness and good health for everyone as they share the same journey from birth to the end of life." The song's release was timed to coincide with Obon, the Buddhist festival of the dead in Japan.
posted by jessamyn at 10:30 AM PST - 3 comments

We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.
posted by jshttnbm at 9:40 AM PST - 9 comments

The new edition of The Best American Essays for 2020 is not out until November 3rd, by which time the nation will be busy with other matters, so why not look back at the essays selected for 2019 by Robert Atwan and guest editor Rebecca Solnit? Here is the full list of the essays in that edition as available online: [more inside]
posted by bitteschoen at 9:30 AM PST - 1 comment

Four major museums - The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston - announced they are postponing their joint retrospective of the works of Philip Guston. At issue are Guston’s paintings that feature hooded Ku Klux Klan figures. The artist's daughter and other curators and critics criticized the decision, and now more than 100 contemporary artists have released an open letter that criticizes the move. "The people who run our great institutions do not want trouble," the letter reads. "They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience."
posted by PhineasGage at 9:23 AM PST - 17 comments

The Giant Panjandrum was a WW2 device developed by the British military as a method for creating a tank sized gap in the concrete coastal defenses which comprised the Atlantic Wall. The device - designed by engineer Nevil Shute (yes, that one) - was to be launched from a landing craft and would be propelled like a fiendish Catherine wheel by cordide rockets fixed to its 2 huge iron wheels. The hub between those wheels housed a drum containing a 1800kg of explosives. The panjandrum would scoot up the beach at 60 miles an hour, crush any obstacles in its path and explode when it hit the concrete wall. What could go possibly go wrong? Twitter user Dreadnought Holiday takes up the story with the help of some great contemporary film of the test runs. [more inside]
posted by rongorongo at 7:17 AM PST - 35 comments

How Normal Am I? is an art project/tech demo website by Tijmen Schep that that uses your camera and face-recognition to gauge how "normal" you are. [more inside]
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:58 AM PST - 33 comments

The majority of Americans and the majority of religious Americans are in favor of abortion rights, but the anti-abortion people are organized. This is a substantial article about statistics, beliefs, and history. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:28 AM PST - 14 comments