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Red versus blue: Why the right gum tree matters in a healthy wetland. Most of the 1000 different Eucalyptus tree varieties are native to Australia but not all belong in a pristine wetland.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:11 PM PST - 7 comments

From Erin Reed's newsletter: In a legal filing Thursday, PFLAG National sought to block a new demand from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that would require the organization to identify its Texas transgender members, doctors who work with them, and contingency plans for anti-transgender legislation in the state. The civil investigative demand, issued on Feb. 5, calls for extensive identifying information and records from the LGBTQ+ rights organization. PFLAG, in its filing to block the demands, describes them as "retaliation" for its opposition to anti-transgender laws in the state and alleges that they violate the freedom of speech and association protections afforded by the United States and Texas constitutions. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 12:34 PM PST - 40 comments

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet was the subject of a short little discussion on the BBC's Today programme this morning (1:47:10). Since it was posted to MetaFilter back in 2019 a lot has been unearthed about the track, but while a number of its fellow lostwave songs have been identified, it stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets. A week ago, Mike of All Things Lost made a video essay with a thorough recap of the evidence, theories, drama and characters and for the latest speculation and news you can dive into the subreddit r/TheMysteriousSong.
posted by Kattullus at 12:28 PM PST - 19 comments

"...it’s hard to imagine anyone being particularly precious about the character." [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 12:21 PM PST - 42 comments

"Before I get into the whys of it, let me say that having my first four colonoscopies all happen within one twelve-month period allowed me to rapidly refine my prep techniques. 'Prep', here, being the common nickname for the nasty stuff you must swallow to thoroughly clean out your guts for a proper examination. I learned that prep takes many forms, today." Jason McIntosh shares "How not to screw it up" and a preparatory technique that includes "Eight coins or other tiny objects you can use as tokens." He further recommends "the delightful 'Welcome to Colonoscopy Land' by Anne Helen Petersen" (previously) which aims to break taboos and discuss "pooping your guts, the best fake sleep of your life, and having no memory of getting a camera pushed up your butt."
posted by brainwane at 9:58 AM PST - 179 comments

From the far future of the year 1983: The Weekender or Octopus is “a single $75 device that contained a 110 camera, AM/FM radio with a telescoping antenna, flashlight, stopwatch, and clock with an alarm.” A more detailed review with sample photos.
posted by oulipian at 9:57 AM PST - 18 comments

Omelet you finish, but whipped egg dishes are popular around the world. Some that Western audiences might not be familiar with: Uganda's Rolex, Malaysia's Ramly burger, South Asia's Anda Bhurji and Akuri, Japan's chawan mushi and Turkey's Menemen, the world is ova-flowing with possibilities. [more inside]
posted by zamboni at 9:01 AM PST - 34 comments

New satellite-based research reveals how land along the coast is slumping into the ocean, compounding the danger from global sea level rise. An interactive map with analysis (previously)
posted by bq at 8:28 AM PST - 82 comments

From Britain's to Japan's, in between there is no single dish or word "curry" in its county-of-origin, India. Yet this family of dishes comprises one of world's favorite foods. It can describe anything from “a sauce or gravy—it can be with or without spices" (Raghavan Iyer, 660 Curries) to "shorthand glossing over an entire subcontinent’s worth of food. It’s the type of concept that takes what it wants from the original, and mixes in whatever else is ready-to-hand" (MyAnnoyingOpinions). Historians believe that inerudite British colonizers anglicized the Tamil கறி kaṟi, meaning "sauce," and exported it as a blanket term for any spiced dish from South Asia. Thai and Malaysian curries have their own origin. Yet, curries still have a history older than colonialism (previously). From bunny chow to monty python, what's your favorite curry?
posted by rubatan at 7:54 AM PST - 38 comments

The Story Behind 30 Rock’s Magnificently Silly Leap Day Episode Real life is for March, and nothing that happens on February 29 counts.
posted by Servo5678 at 7:26 AM PST - 8 comments

"Archaeologists in Northern Ireland have uncovered well-preserved remains of a teenage boy dating back up to 2,500 years - including bones, skin and possibly a kidney - in a rare find that may shed new light on the region's ancient history." Did you know that Wikipedia has a page entitled "List of bog bodies"? Now you do. The Finns have bog bodies, and peat bogs have a special role in Finland [PDF]. Finally, van Beek, Quik, Bergerbrant, Huisman, and Kama have conducted an exciting large-scale overview study [PDF] "of well-dated human remains from northern European mires, based on a database of 266 sites and more than 1000 bog mummies, bog skeletons and disarticulated/partial skeletal remains." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:08 AM PST - 11 comments

Though Bateson was never truly on board with Lilly’s project of teaching dolphins how to speak, he spoke vaguely but fervently of the institute’s work as somehow connected to his larger goal of healing a sick society through interdisciplinary science. “I hope from the dolphins we may learn a new analysis of the sorts of information which we need — and all mammals need — if we are to retain our sanity,” Bateson pronounced grandly to reporters at a fund-raising gala for the institute. Anyone observing his daily work at the lab might have been surprised by such claims. from Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab [Chronicle of Higher Education; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:08 AM PST - 24 comments

Good News! Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is now free on YouTube in countries where no one owns the streaming rights, with plans to upload the entire archive. This includes all of Latin America, a lot of Asia (except China, India and most Arab countries), all of Eastern Europe, plus France, Finland, Denmark and Sweden. If you want to check for sure, you can do so on this map, or you can just try watching the latest episode. And then you can join in on Fanfare discussions of the show.
posted by Kattullus at 11:49 PM PST - 9 comments

The dish known as chili, or chilli, or chile, is a land of contrasts. Let's just get that out of the way up front.

The origins of chili are not fully clear, but it seems to have come primarily from San Antonio Texas in the 1800's, where a hash or stew of beef, chili peppers, and other spices called "chili con carne" was popular. It is apparently not of Mexican origin but rather a "Tex-Mex" recipe of primarily US origin.

Anyway, on to the recipes! [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:36 PM PST - 118 comments

ANU academic and songwriter wins global Dance Your PhD competition for kangaroo socialisation music video. Australian National University academic Weliton Menário Costa's elaborately choreographed video Kangaroo Time (Club Edit) explaining his study of social behaviour in kangaroos wins the worldwide Dance Your PhD competition.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:17 PM PST - 17 comments

Ex-Boston-Street-Band Guster has a new album coming out and they've released two new songs. Keep Going has a fantastical music video. All Day is a lyric video. Their last album was 5 years ago.
posted by hippybear at 5:59 PM PST - 20 comments

'After not one but two positive reviews a day apart in The New York Times – “a warm, intimate book, a volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history” – and an excerpt in The New Yorker, the book vaulted into the NYT bestseller list. It went on to reel in a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. While The Swerve picked up these laurels in the non-fiction category, [...] Greenblatt, in essence, took a small truth and made of it a big falsehood; one that many people, given The Swerve’s critical and commercial success, are inclined to believe.' In a 2023 essay 'The Italian Job', Luke Slattery attempts to set the swerved record straight.
posted by mittens at 3:29 PM PST - 13 comments

LiMu Emu (and Doug) get dirty. [SLYT] Saturday Night Live cut this sketch for time but you should make some time to watch it.
posted by bbrown at 2:52 PM PST - 17 comments

As we have seen before with other image models like DALLE-3, the AI is taking your request and then modifying it to create a prompt. Image models have a bias towards too often producing the most common versions of things and lacking diversity (of all kinds) and representation, so systems often try to fix this by randomly appending modifiers to the prompt. The problem is that Gemini’s version does a crazy amount of this and does it in ways and places where doing so is crazy. from The Gemini Incident by Zvi Mowshowitz [Part I, Part II] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:46 PM PST - 48 comments

A surprisingly interesting case study on what the left hand does, when the other is the invisible hand of the market: How Boeing broke down: Inside the series of leadership failures that hobbled the airline giant. "It was that managerial decisions, made over a period that spanned more than 20 years and four CEOs, gradually weakened a once vaunted system of quality control and troubleshooting on the factory floor, leaving gaps that have allowed sundry defects to slip through" (non-paywall), changing Boeing from an engineering product company to the McDonnell Douglas finance machine. Previously (1) (2) (3).
posted by rubatan at 12:44 PM PST - 48 comments

Sheriff Robert Norris is speaking into his body camera. “Today’s date is April 20, approximately 7 a.m. Just want to document my visit to the Hayden Library. My attorney and I are just curious and would like to document this visit to see what kind of materials are on display here.” Norris, the sheriff of Kootenai County, Idaho, meets up outside the library with Marianna Cochran, the founder of CleanBooks4Kids, a “grassroots group of North Idaho citizens alarmed at the abundance of books sexualizing, grooming, and indoctrinating kids in our local libraries at taxpayer expense,” to search for the book Identical, which Norris says he had “seen an image [of] floating on social media.” [...]

They walk into the library, and for the next 45 minutes search for “obscene” books in the Young Adult section while Norris’s camera is rolling in one of the most bizarre police body camera videos I’ve ever seen.

404media: Police Bodycam Shows Sheriff Hunting for 'Obscene' Books at Library [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:43 AM PST - 60 comments

Writing for the New Yorker, Manvir Singh asks whether the removal of Arabic elements from the language of the Fremen by David Peterson (the creator of Dothraki and other constructed languages) has more to do with making the language "realistic" or with Hollywood's inability to portray Arabs—especially desert-dwelling Arab freedom fighters—as good guys, rather than as terrorists. [more inside]
posted by TheProfessor at 9:22 AM PST - 96 comments

Skewered meat is Middle Eastern in origin, but kebabs got their start with the Ottomans. Skewered meat is Greek in origin, from way back. Skewered meat is different when it comes to Persian Kebab. Skewered meat leads to debate. Skewered meat is from the dawn of humanity. Meats on a stick can be many things, including spread on the Silk Road, and the varieties go on and on. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:20 AM PST - 36 comments

AI is already better than you. "You cannot shame this technology into disuse any more. That only works if quality is something the people with money care about. The problem with the continuing erosion of the games industry, the dehumanisation of game workers and the brutal treatment of outsourced work, is that many roles in the games industry are already treated as if they were automated. You are appealing to the better nature of money men who do not have one."
posted by simmering octagon at 5:11 AM PST - 78 comments

I'm about as far from this record's target demographic as it's possible to get, but I know a great pop single when I hear one. And THIS is a great pop single: Caity Baser: I'm a Problem
posted by Paul Slade at 4:56 AM PST - 44 comments

Have you heard of the scaly-foot snail? The Takin? The Indian Purple FrogConsider Nature is a blog devoted to the oddballs of the animal world, combining biology, ecology, and a heavy dose of NSFW humor. [more inside]
posted by chaiminda at 3:34 AM PST - 1 comment

"The particles are zipping around in random directions, constantly entering and leaving this region. However, despite all this motion what you’re seeing here is a simulation of still air." Elaborate 14,000-word web-essay by Bartosz Ciechanowski (previously) via lobster.rs
posted by cgc373 at 3:07 AM PST - 5 comments

The Godzilla Meditation Series, lightly animated stills from kaiju movies with ambient music. From Kaijutopia. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 2:57 AM PST - 7 comments

The teasing behaviour was similar to that adopted by young human children, according to the researchers, in that it was intentional, provocative, persistent and included elements of surprise, play and checking for the recipient’s response. The human equivalent might be sticking your tongue out at someone and then running away to gauge their reaction. This style of teasing could even form the foundation for more complicated forms of humour. from Why some animals have evolved a sense of humour [BBC] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:16 AM PST - 11 comments

Major conservation park home to koalas near Brisbane to grow by 213 hectares (526 acres). The state government purchases a large parcel of land that will be added to the Daisy Hill Conservation Park, which features mountain bike tracks, walking paths, picnic areas, horse riding trails, and a koala centre.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:40 PM PST - 9 comments

I was parked in my parents’ bedroom, flipping through the channels of countless historical dramas (you can literally go through ten straight channels, and each time the screen changes, you’ll see actresses in traditional dress, fighting back tears in disturbingly clear HD), Chinese nature documentaries (run little deer, ruuuun!), and mindless extended infomercials for the best Chinese dried dates you’ll ever taste, or your money back guaranteed (…or not). Anyways, I was knocked out of my stupor when my limited Chinese vocabulary was able to detect that the latest cooking program I had settled on was featuring a professional chef explaining how to make Mapo Tofu the right way. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:01 PM PST - 30 comments

There's longer article with pictures and a video here The Collings Foundation is restoring a P-47 Thunderbolt, and inside the fuselage they found a handwritten note. It's signed by either "Sue Tharp” or “Sue Thorp," who was working on the production line of Republic Aircraft in Evansville, IN in late 1944. Can anyone help find her? [more inside]
posted by wenestvedt at 5:45 PM PST - 9 comments

A new Tortoise investigation suggests that Heard was trolled by an army of bots, some of them apparently operating from Saudi Arabia. [more inside]
posted by goo at 3:52 PM PST - 37 comments

What if we could extend those basic principles — that repair should be social, embodied, intuitive, accessible — beyond the device or object? Could we apply these logics at the scale of civic systems and public spaces?

posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:20 PM PST - 5 comments

Fast-forwarding to today, it seems that poetry no longer garners the attention that it used to. In the whirlwind of today’s society, poetry has found itself fighting for attention against newer art forms such as film and music. Movies and music have seamlessly captured the raw emotions and societal complexities that once danced within the lines of poems and they have done so in a manner that is outwardly more entertaining and approachable. All the while, poetry has taken a dramatic shift and evolved into an art form that is highly confessional and often accompanied by illustrations and other visuals. It is certainly possible that this increasingly personal style of poetry has not appealed to all enthusiasts of this genre and this may attribute to a decline in readership. from Should Modern Newspapers Publish Poetry? [The Artifice]
posted by chavenet at 3:09 PM PST - 45 comments

Here's Jacques Brel on the Dutch television program Club Domino in the early Sixties. [50m] The songs are in French and the host speaks Dutch, but wow, he does a thing with his song delivery, reminds me a bit of Sinatra or Dylan with how he's living the moment.
posted by hippybear at 2:42 PM PST - 11 comments

When bewildered by the current state of affairs in the world, I turn to things like this to brighten my day. I love beautiful tailoring and design in clothing. But the reason for my post is that a friend of mine does the soundtrack for MaxMara couture runway shows, We go back a fair bit. We both worked an artsy restaurant in Soho NYC in the late 70's. Dishwashers. $4.00 an hour cash, and one meal. This is when Soho was still affordable. [more inside]
posted by Czjewel at 1:34 PM PST - 3 comments

Almost everyone I’ve met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on. Building mental models, figuring out the explore vs exploit trade-off, and more. [more inside]
posted by osmond_nash at 1:24 PM PST - 23 comments

Chaotic off-brand Willy Wonka pop-up exhibit ends with police intervention

Obviously, when the poor Charlie And The Chocolate Factory enthusiasts showed up at Box Hub Warehouse, the event looked nothing like what the event description suggested. Instead, they were confronted with a sad-looking, mostly empty warehouse with a bouncy house and some ramshackle decorations. Jack Proctor, a dad who took his kids to the event, told STV News that “we stepped inside to find a disorganized mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears.” [...] "The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point."

The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience - More shocking pictures emerge of ‘shambles’ Willy Wonka experience - Employee contracts signed with "erasable ink" - Actor hired as Willy Wonka for cancelled event called it a place 'where dreams went to die' - 'Willy Wonka' chocolate experience boss 'truly sorry' after 'chaos' - Read the ChatGPT-generated event "script" [PDF]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:03 PM PST - 66 comments

just to tick me off. In the early 2000s, gaming magazine GameNOW spent two years sneaking the same screenshot of Final Fantasy VIII into every issue, just to needle a single irate reader.
posted by signsofrain at 12:14 PM PST - 11 comments

What kind of intelligence is valued in AI? Writing for Public Books in 2021, Natasha Stovall (previously) asked us to consider whether the claim that conceptually undergirds IQ—that "human intelligence is universal, hierarchical, measurable"—is reified in the development of AI. The answer seems clear from today's perspective; we use the same terminology to talk about AI advances as we do "gifted" individuals (e.g., verbal comprehension, perceptual reasoning, processing speed, working memory.) More provocatively, Stovall charges that such a "reductive definition of human ability" has a coherent lineage from eugenics through the popularization of IQ and on to today's version of AI—and that all of the above are rooted in whiteness.
posted by criticalyeast at 12:00 PM PST - 42 comments

Victor Glover will be the first African-American to eat maple cream cookies and smoked salmon while traveling to and from the Moon on the Artemis II mission
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:42 AM PST - 11 comments

Dying in the Truth: Self-immolation is an unthinkably costly and tragic method of last resort sometimes used by those striving for justice and freedom in asymmetric conflicts. The first person to perform this fiery protest as a modern political tactic is Thich Quang Duc, who sat in the lotus position at a busy intersection in Saigon in 1963 and set himself on fire to decry Buddhist suffering under a pro-Catholic regime. Since the birth of the tactic in 1963, the world has witnessed some 3,000 incidents of self-immolation, according to sociologist Michael Biggs. About 160 of these occurred in Tibet between 2011 and 2018, marking one of the greatest waves of suicide protests in history. Considering the extent of the practice, we, scholars and practitioners of nonviolent resistance, must ask ourselves: Why do some people prefer to die in the truth, rather than to live in a lie? And does the involvement of death, in and of itself, automatically place any tactic in the camp of violence?
posted by infini at 8:27 AM PST - 128 comments

Maureen F. McHugh (previously) wrote two short scifi stories recently in which folks navigate modern uncertainty with a fantastical twist. In "The Goldfish Man" (2022), "Before everything went to hell I was making double vases." In "Liminal Spaces" (2024) (which feels in conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin's Changing Planes), "There was a broad corridor going off to the left that she definitely didn’t remember. It shook her out of her ruminations." [more inside]
posted by brainwane at 7:44 AM PST - 6 comments

A new emergency procedure for cardiac arrests aims to save more lives – here’s how it works. New Zealand is just the second country to approve a novel defibrillation procedure for some patients. With current survival rates very low, it is hoped the new method will save many more lives.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:26 AM PST - 15 comments

The “Disney adult” industrial complex The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan. [more inside]
posted by knownassociate at 6:02 AM PST - 59 comments

The top thinkers of 1974 were gathered together in the pages of “Saturday Review,” for a special issue celebrating that magazine’s 50th anniversary. In a series of essays, each one tried to imagine their world 50 more years into the future, in the far-away year of 2024 ... The future they’d hoped for — or feared for — is detailed and debated, offering readers of today a surprisingly clear picture of the future they’d expected in 1974. from 50 Years Later: Remembering How the Future Looked in 1974 [The New Stack]
posted by chavenet at 1:46 AM PST - 49 comments

The Unique Rhetoric of Donald Trump [20m] Dr. Jennifer Mercieca, professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University, discusses the unprecedented rhetorical devices Donald Trump has used to build a cult-like following, capture the attention economy, and allowed him to avoid accountability despite major political controversies and legal challenges. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:06 PM PST - 37 comments

Pilot program using ancient cultural burning technique to prepare for future bushfires in NSW. Residents on NSW's South Coast were trapped with nowhere to flee to but the beach when Black Summer bushfires advanced on their towns, but a new cultural burning program aims to keep key roads open during emergencies.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:45 PM PST - 6 comments

On YouTube, Barney the Tv Border Collie wants to save Bella from the werewolves in Twilight.*
*My God, what is this doing to Barney's brain!?
See also, Barney the Tv Border Collie watches Dances with Wolves
same * as above
And don't get me started on skateboarding Frenchies in China
Seriously, what hath Dog Named Stella Wrought!?
posted by y2karl at 5:43 PM PST - 14 comments

"While no one place can definitively claim to be the birthplace of the Coney dog, Michigan, by sheer volume and duration of its Coney restaurants, makes a strong bid. Detroit’s famous Coney dog restaurants, American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island, followed Todoroff’s Original Coney Island in Jackson, Michigan, which dates its beginning to 1914." 'The Cult of the Detroit Coney Dog, Explained.'
posted by clavdivs at 2:36 PM PST - 44 comments

Suaerkraut balls are a hometown favorite here in Akron, so much that we even named our baseball team after them (well, for only one day), and have our own local sauerkraut ball factory. Of course you can make your own, but they're just not as good. [more inside]
posted by slogger at 2:16 PM PST - 22 comments

While reviewing the handful of 747 accidents caused by airframe failings, the narrator mentioned that the United Airlines 747-122 – which had lost its cargo door out of Honolulu on February 24th, 1989 – was repaired and returned to service... I was just curious about what became of United Airlines’ N4713U after the media intensity surrounding that fateful night. Was it was still flying? At the very least, I thought I’d find a story that got more and more “interesting” as the airliner aged. . . And I wouldn’t be disappointed. [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 12:13 PM PST - 34 comments

The short answer is… It’s complicated.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:07 AM PST - 20 comments

From Sniffles The Mouse to Bugs Bunny to The Grinch... Chuck Jones: Extremes and InBetweens - A Life in Animation [1h24m] (Originally recorded on VHS from Australian TV in 2000.) [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 6:38 AM PST - 6 comments

I have two spider plants in my office, of the just plain green leaf variety. What are you keeping green in your place? Or talk about anything you like, it's a free thread!
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:48 AM PST - 124 comments

While Minnesota sushi can ostensibly be found in restaurants, and has appeared on television, its origins are both obscure and humble. The "Minnesota" part of the claim is, however, base calumny. The European mode is another variant. The dish may share some DNA, cultural or otherwise, with molded salmon mousse. Could it be traced back to the Roman tradition of "concealed food?" Probably knot, that would be stretching it. Order falls, chaos reigns. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:14 AM PST - 31 comments

This "underground library" shows what Australia's climate was like 350,000 years ago. Naracoorte Caves study shows Australian ice age was wetter, more animal-friendly, than first thought.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:29 AM PST - 2 comments

The causes of populism are at the heart of the most significant political and social science debates. One narrative contends that economic globalization resulted in real suffering among less-educated working-class voters, catalyzing populism. Another narrative contends that populism is an adverse reaction to cultural progressivism and that economic factors are not relevant or only relevant symbolically through perceptions of loss of cultural status. Even though the evidence suggests that the generational change argument suggested by the canonical book of Norris and Inglehart does not hold empirically, the cultural narrative nevertheless seems to be particularly influential. from The Populist Backlash Against Globalization: A Meta-Analysis of the Causal Evidence [Cambridge University]
posted by chavenet at 1:41 AM PST - 57 comments

16-year old Nex Benedict died on February 8th (wiki), a day after being beaten unconscious by 3 other students in their Owasso High School bathroom. [more inside]
posted by rubatan at 1:31 AM PST - 119 comments

Todd In the Shadows undertakes an epic troll of Brits with ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
posted by rongorongo at 11:16 PM PST - 40 comments

Genevieve Hudson: "I was not feminine enough to have an eating disorder, I told myself."
Content warning for disordered eating and body dysmorphia.
I eat no muffin with my coffee. I drink no milk. I pull a tough hat over short hair. I scribble lines of tough ink over tough skin. I see thin, nonbinary bodies that have sprouted wings.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:38 PM PST - 14 comments

Terrific explaination of the evolution of the hit musical La Cage Aux Folles. Beginning with a modest British play titled "Staircase" in the early 60's to a movie of the same title starring Richard Burton and Rex Harrison a few years later. They on to becoming a hit musical decades later. Along the way we discuss Hollywood contracts, copyright laws, President Regan, Harvey Fierstein, Nathan Lane, Canadian laws regarding drag queens removing their wigs, and so much more....its a fun listen to.
posted by Czjewel at 8:05 PM PST - 5 comments

While the generative AI scene is transfixed by trillion-scale chipmakers and bleeding-edge text-to-video models, there's plenty of work being done on simpler, more efficient open-source projects that don't require a datacenter to run. In addition to homebrew-friendly text options like Mistral, Llama, and Gemma, the makers of image generator Stable Diffusion have also experimented recently with SDXL Turbo, a lightweight, streamlined version that can generate complex images significantly faster. Previously, this required a decent graphics card and a complicated install process, or at least registration on a paid service -- but thanks to a free public demo from fal.ai, you can now generate and share constantly updating images yourself in real time, as fast as you can type. The quality may not be quite as good as the state-of-the-art stuff, but DALL-E Mini it ain't. No word on what it's costing the company to host or how long it might last, but for now the real-time responsiveness makes it easier than ever to get an intuitive feel for how modern image diffusers interpret text and what exactly they're capable of. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:15 PM PST - 125 comments

Let me offer a couple examples of how the arts challenge AI. First, many have pointed out that storytelling is always needed to make meaning out of data, and that is why humanistic inquiry and AI are necessarily wed. Yet, as N. Katherine Hayles (2021: 1605) writes, interdependent though they may be, database and narrative are “different species, like bird and water buffalo.” One of the reasons, she notes, is the distinguishing example of indeterminacy. Narratives “gesture toward the inexplicable, the unspeakable, the ineffable” and embrace the ambiguity, while “databases find it difficult to tolerate”. from Poetry Will Not Optimize; or, What Is Literature to AI?
posted by chavenet at 1:41 PM PST - 4 comments

The ABCs of Book Banning [27m, MTV Documentary Films] Centenarian Grace Linn confronts a Florida School Board, opposing book banning in local schools. Children express disappointment over losing access to vital titles on LGBTQ and racial issues, wars, and the realities of growing up.
posted by hippybear at 8:59 AM PST - 11 comments

"Fortune telling is a widespread phenomenon, yet little is known about the extent to which people are affected by it—including those who consider themselves non-believers. The present research has investigated the power of a positive fortune telling outcome (vs. neutral vs. negative) on people’s financial risk taking. In two online experiments (n1 = 252; n2 = 441), we consistently found that positive fortune telling enhanced financial risk taking particularly among men. Additionally, we used a real online gambling game in a lab setting (n3 = 193) and found that positive fortune telling enhanced the likelihood that college students gambled for money. ... Thus, positive fortune telling can yield increased financial risk taking in men, but not (or less so) in women." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:03 AM PST - 33 comments

Oxygenation method usually used in emergencies trialled in Darling River to prevent mass fish kills. Tens of millions of native fish have perished along the Darling River over the past five years following a series of mass kills. In an attempt to mitigate future deaths the NSW government are trialling technology that pumps pure oxygen into the water.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:52 AM PST - 5 comments

Pangeos Terayacht: An $8 Billion Engineering Disaster (Adam Something, YouTube/Piped, 12m40s) [more inside]
posted by flabdablet at 4:30 AM PST - 42 comments

I asked Gruber himself what he would say to the whales. He said that he has been taking requests. Most people tell him that we should start by saying “Sorry,” for the bloody rampage that was industrial whaling. He agrees. “We pulled the oil out of these animals’ heads,” he said. “We used it to make lipstick.” Perhaps now we can atone. from How First Contact With Whale Civilization Could Unfold [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:19 AM PST - 18 comments

China has less than one-third the number of vets per capita as the United States or European Union. My cat had a health emergency this week and I had to call about 30 different animal hospital/clinics to see which one had a surgeon and a free OT to operate on my cat that afternoon. Thankfully, one out of the 30ish were able to take us at short notice. [more inside]
posted by antihistameme at 8:37 PM PST - 11 comments

Donald Trump may be hoping to strike a knockout blow against Nikki Haley in today's South Carolina primary, but he spent the better part of the day up north in Maryland, as the keynote speaker at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The annual right-wing gathering has declined in prestige, attendance, and relevance since its heyday in the Tea Party era, losing big corporate sponsors and seeing chairman Matt Schlapp slapped with a multi-million dollar sexual assault claim. But it still serves as a useful window into the pathology of the modern Trump-MAGA Republican Party: turning against Ukraine and towards Putin two years into the war, welcoming failed world leaders decrying the "deep state" (and current ones that are dictatorial or arguably insane), featuring Pizzagate boosters calling for the overthrow of democracy, and tolerating self-identified Nazis openly mingling with conservative influencers and spreading racist and anti-semitic conspiracy theories. Does anybody really know what time it is?
posted by Rhaomi at 3:12 PM PST - 113 comments

A new modified clay from Western Australia could help stop algal blooms. Modified clay helping reduce algal blooms by binding to phosphorus which causes phenomenon. Large-scale fish deaths caused by harmful algal blooms could be a thing of the past if positive trials of a specially developed clay that absorbs phosphorus are anything to go by. Developed by Western Australian environmental scientists, the treatment is sprayed, in a slurry form, from a boat onto the surface of estuaries, lakes and other water bodies, sinking down and taking the phosphorus with it. Even though phosphorus is a natural plant nutrient required by plants to grow, an excess of it fuels extensive algal blooms which can lead to low oxygen concentrations in the water that can harm fish and other species. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:33 PM PST - 11 comments

Here's a panel of British writers for Succession, including Tony Roche, Jon Brown, Lucy Prebble, and Georgie Pritchett. Creator and show-runner Jesse Armstrong also joins, and it is hosted by Adam Buxton. Held at Southbank Centre in Sept 2023, so after the series ended. Succession: an evening with the writers [1h42m]
posted by hippybear at 2:32 PM PST - 1 comment

Solano county librarian wants everyone to feel welcome and love the library. [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:30 AM PST - 26 comments

Legal weed in New York was going to be a revolution. What happened? (Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker (archive.is)) [more inside]
posted by box at 8:10 AM PST - 68 comments

When a student at University of Waterloo waited for a vending machine to reboot after a crash, they noted a curious error message for an app titled Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe. They posted a Reddit message "Hey, so why do the stupid M&M machines have facial recognition?" which eventually led the school to disable the vending machine software until the machines could be removed. [more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:27 AM PST - 63 comments

Yesterday, 'one of the largest UK peacetime evacuations' took place in Plymouth, Devon, after an unexploded World War 2 bomb was found in a residential garden. [more inside]
posted by atlantica at 6:22 AM PST - 20 comments

Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl, Has Died When someone vandalized his enclosure in the Central Park Zoo a little over a year ago, Flaco escaped. No one was sure if he could survive on his own, but survive he did, becoming a favorite of not only locals who went to see him in the Park but a world-wide audience who read about him. He recently moved to the Upper West Side where residents loved spotting him from their windows. Last night, he hit a building and died. Other links: NYT, Washington Post [more inside]
posted by AMyNameIs at 6:11 AM PST - 27 comments

Tarot Cards Market to grow by USD 214.34 million from 2021 to 2026 claims yahoo!finance. Over at SCAD's student-run online fashion publication, they're here for it. PW says that "publishers are attuned to the thriving marketplace for guides to the magic of crystals, flowers, elaborate tarot cards, and imaginative oracle decks." Tarot has taken on new meaning in recent times for the RPG world. Finally, Anastasia Murney has things to say about "Tarot as affective cartography in the uneven Anthropocene" [PDF]. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:22 AM PST - 54 comments

A giant meteorite has been lost in the desert since 1916—here’s how we might find it "Captain Gaston Ripert was in charge of the Chinguetti camel corps. One day he overheard a conversation among the chameliers (camel drivers) about an unusual iron hill in the desert. He convinced a local chief to guide him there one night, taking Ripert on a 10-hour camel ride along a "disorienting" route, making a few detours along the way....The 4-kilogram fragment Ripert collected was later analyzed by noted geologist Alfred Lacroix, who considered it a significant discovery. But when others failed to locate the larger Chinguetti meteorite, people started to doubt Ripert's story."
posted by dhruva at 5:10 AM PST - 6 comments

The company will be ceasing operations of Vice.com as it is "no longer cost-effective" to do so. NYT published an article recently: The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer
posted by antihistameme at 3:30 AM PST - 47 comments

Biologist Deon Gilbert says this month's Victorian release of 70 juveniles from a spotted tree frog breeding pool is incredibly heartwarming. Researchers have bred 800 spotted tree frogs from 26 they collected in north-east Victoria in 2021. They have released the first 70 of those frogs into the wild.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:47 AM PST - 4 comments

Bowmouth guitarfish amulets are just one example of the boundless number of protected wildlife products sold online, where a global Grand Bazaar of seedy vendors hawk their wildlife wares, and anyone with internet access can find products from rhino horns to exotic orchids to tiger claws with just a few clicks. With lax regulations, even weaker enforcement, and a lack of legal culpability, not only is wildlife trafficking able to fester online, but algorithms actually amplify sales, boosting the platforms’ profits. from For Sale: Shark Jaw, Tiger Claw, Fish Maw [Hakai]
posted by chavenet at 2:25 AM PST - 3 comments

Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present - WIRED. A thoughtful reply to what art means when it’s ‘personally’ generated for you with a dive into Lewis Hyde on gift economies.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:40 PM PST - 43 comments

For the past hundred years we’ve had people championing machine manufacture and value-adding design for objects that did perfectly well without it. [Yanagi] had several criteria for these everyday miscellaneous things and all of them are worth revisiting because we now know that some things are best when precision machined and manufactured and other things benefit from showing signs of a human hand at work.
posted by johnxlibris at 7:23 PM PST - 7 comments

Tiny endangered turtle twins hatch from same egg in 1-in-3000 event amid efforts to save the species. When scientists discovered seven baby Bell's turtles in a batch of six incubated eggs in the NSW Northern Tablelands recently, they were initially stumped.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:39 PM PST - 5 comments

The wealthy have different houses, different cars, different lifestyles from the rest of us. These days, they also want to breathe different air. [more inside]
posted by MrVisible at 1:54 PM PST - 37 comments

Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans continue to face censorship, backlash, and dehumanization by parties in all sectors of American life. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 1:03 PM PST - 13 comments

The Martian helicopter completed its final flight on Valinor Hills. "yeah it really could be an ocean moon" - Let's check in on humanity's exploration of space in early 2024. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 8:18 AM PST - 13 comments

"The featured filters — Images, Videos, Maps, Flights, Shopping, Perspectives, etc. — change and reorder depending on the search term, but this was different. I wasn’t seeing the News tab as an option for search after search, even if I went looking in the 'All filters' drop-down menu. I tried with 'Julian Assange,' 'public subsidies for sports stadiums,' and 'Reckon layoffs.' None showed the News filter as an option. The next day, on a different computer, my News filter was (blessedly) back. But a few other users confirmed I was not alone." Last year Google cut jobs in its news division. Where is Google putting its resources these days? Exactly where you'd expect.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:55 AM PST - 64 comments

Until the mid 1800s, pawpaws were strictly a foraged food due to their woodland abundance. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans ate them as part of their seasonal diets, and the recorded anecdotes of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Daniel Boone describe subsisting on the native fruits during their journeys through the wilderness. Eventually, pawpaws, or custard apples as they were sometimes called, were sold at market. Though cultivated by Indigenous tribes like the Shawnee, the pawpaw was relegated to a wild folk food eaten by impoverished rural people, earning nicknames like the “poor man’s banana” and the “hillbilly banana.” from Consider the Pawpaw [Belt] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:53 AM PST - 50 comments

Citizen scientists discover weird and wonderful creatures on WA coast. Experts say the WA-first sighting of a rare crab and photos of a spectacular anemone on Broome's beaches highlight the untapped wonders off Australia's coasts.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:22 PM PST - 7 comments

A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own. Nearly one in three preteens list influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. Content warning: Instagram Child Pornography [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 8:34 PM PST - 82 comments

Hello friends! It’s been a while... It’s me, Mr. Plinkett! Now, you all know I love Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’ve been watching episodes on the Blu Rays recently and I started to notice lots of little production errors. Things that the quick and dirty TV production of the 80’s and 90’s probably overlooked, didn’t notice, or didn’t care about. [Youtube, 1⁄2 hour]
posted by riruro at 7:21 PM PST - 30 comments

'U.S. lands unmanned Odysseus spacecraft on moon'. Space.com:"Update for 6:45pm ET: Touchdown! Intuitive Machines that its IM-1 lander Odysseus has landed on the moon and is transmitting a faint, but definite, signal. The exact health of the craft is unclear, but it has landed, Intuitive Machines reports." After some still unconfirmed problems, "The Odysseus lander is "not dead yet" 'Intuitive Machines' Odysseus lander is aiming for a crater near the moon's south pole. Here's why'
posted by clavdivs at 4:12 PM PST - 25 comments

Capital One announced this week that it intends to buy Discover in an all-stock deal valued at $35 billion, which would make it by some measures the largest credit card company in the U.S. While CEO Richard Fairbank covets Discover's independent payments network, consumer advocates fear a negative effect on its vaunted customer service, as well as a general trend of credit card companies squeezing customers more as they grow larger. Though there is an argument that the proposed deal will increase competition at the network level, it will still face heavy antitrust scrutiny from the Federal Reserve and Biden administration regulators. Meanwhile in Congress, criticism of the deal has already been aired by pro-regulation stalwarts, including Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, and... Josh Hawley?
posted by Rhaomi at 3:00 PM PST - 18 comments

This is not an exciting video. The presentation is not elegant, but it is informative. It probably won't interest many of you. But the title of it is Why do rollercoasters valley and how do they get recovered [55m] by Ryan The Ride Mechanic. And I know there's a subset of you who will be thrilled to watch this very fascinating video about a topic I'd never thought to learn about.
posted by hippybear at 2:13 PM PST - 6 comments

"I decided to write a sequel of sorts to a craft talk I gave in Paris last month on what I’ve been calling moral worldbuilding, which to me just means being more conscientious about the kinds of value systems we include in our work, and facing up to the fear of being called didactic or melodramatic. That talk was pretty diagnostic and focused mostly on theorizing causes of how we got there. This one focuses more on the aesthetic qualities of bad moral worldbuilding and their immediate causes. It’s pretty vibey." Brandon Taylor's new essay, living shadows: aesthetics of moral worldbuilding.
posted by mittens at 12:00 PM PST - 18 comments

Yesterday, mobile game developer Hit-Point quietly announced Neko Atsume 2, coming this summer to Android and iOS. [more inside]
posted by May Kasahara at 11:41 AM PST - 23 comments

Critically endangered bettongs survive fires, floods to double population in NSW. A program re-introducing brush-tailed bettongs to a conservation area in the Pilliga State Forest shows promise, after an east-coast extinction lasting more than 100 years.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:29 AM PST - 7 comments

Meanwhile, Rybak and Hearn say that prospective buyers regularly call or email asking for guidance in authenticating this or that painting, worried they may have sunk large sums of money on worthless imitations. Some buyers were bilked out of their life savings. For the fraudsters, of course, the scheme was nothing more than a way to make money. But the devastation to honest buyers, to Morrisseau and his legacy, to Indigenous culture, and to Canadian art writ large is incalculable. Morrisseau’s works were not meaningless paintings but precious, irreplaceable examples of the Anishinaabe experience in Canada and the world. from Inside the Biggest Art Fraud in History [Smithsonian]
posted by chavenet at 5:07 AM PST - 32 comments

"Romantasy 'allows women to have it all', says Christina Clark-Brown, who shares book recommendations on the Instagram page ninas_nook. 'There is no damsel who needs saving but rather women are allowed to be powerful, go on epic quests, and find love with a partner who is an equal to them in every way.'" The Guardian has some exciting news for you [Archive] about romantasy. Is what's described, though, a never-before-seen phenomenon? (Of course not.) [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:53 AM PST - 78 comments

Michael Idov's stellar article for GQ.com about being In Athens With Michael Shannon, the Night He (Sort of) Reunited R.E.M. And you better believe there's [more inside]
posted by Hey Dean Yeager! at 9:46 PM PST - 26 comments

Half-Life Histories (Youtube playlist link) is a mini-documentary series about nuclear and radiological disasters by Youtuber and science educator Kyle Hill. Hill's series covers both well-known and major nuclear accidents and disasters like the Demon Core at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Castle Bravo detonation on Bikini Atoll, and less well-known incidents like what happened when scientist Anatoli Bugorski accidentally put his head in a particle accelerator beam, and the only recorded death from an unknown source of radiation.
posted by yasaman at 7:30 PM PST - 11 comments

Billions of miles away at the edge of the Solar System Voyager 1 has gone mad and has begun to die
posted by signsofrain at 5:03 PM PST - 134 comments

Steve Miller, coauthor of the Liaden universe, has died at the age of 74. He wrote his own obituary.
posted by WizardOfDocs at 4:37 PM PST - 24 comments

Stone age wall found at bottom of Baltic Sea may be Europe’s oldest megastructure. They think it may have been used to help hunt reindeer. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:34 PM PST - 5 comments

The reproductive healthcare community of Alabama was thrown into turmoil this week following a shockingly theocratic state supreme court decision that defines frozen embryos as children under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Fearing prosecution, the influential UAB Health System has responded by officially suspending all in-vitro fertilization (IVF) services statewide. The controversial ruling puts Alabama at the forefront of the national fetal personhood movement, a key player in the push by conservative activists to institute unabashed Christian nationalism in a second Trump term. Unfortunately for Alabama voters, the state lacks a public referendum system, meaning any reforms must pass through the state legislature's Republican supermajorities.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:55 PM PST - 93 comments

Everything acts like a wave while it propagates, but behaves like a particle whenever it interacts. The origins of this duality go way back.
posted by ShooBoo at 3:44 PM PST - 19 comments

Shot: "The Lure of Divorce" In which Emily Gould writes: "Seven years into my marriage, I hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it." (continued inside) [more inside]
posted by MiraK at 2:01 PM PST - 50 comments

Rascal News is a new venture in tabletop games journalism. Building on the 00s' New Games Journalism for videogames, the editors/authors are Lin Codega, Rowan Zeoli, and Chase Carter. A recent interview with Kimi Hughes discusses "How Has Actual Play Changed Game Design?" [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 7:44 AM PST - 9 comments

Dexter Romweber, singer-guitarist of influential rockabilly band Flat Duo Jets, died on Sunday. He was 57. They don't make 'em like Dex anymore. Godspeed, pal. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 4:54 AM PST - 26 comments

Silicon Valley still attracts many immensely talented people who strive to do good, and who are working to realize the best possible version of a more connected, data-rich global society. Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. from The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:39 AM PST - 23 comments

Walking man, Craig Mod, writes a yearly breakdown of his membership program.

2023 was amazing, bewildering, inspiring, gnomic, exhausting, bacterial, and mostly, fun. I mean — by the end of the year I was but a swollen forearm fighting for my life (OK, maybe not quite that bad), but wow … WOW. 2023: Easily the most monumental and generative year of my life. I owe that fullness to SPECIAL PROJECTS, my membership program. Now, a somewhat unbelievable five years old. Here is everything I learned last year.

posted by device55 at 9:23 PM PST - 16 comments

Drue Langlois' (previously) plucky post-apocalyptic scavenger Plague Roach has finally left the post-apocalyptic wasteland. But how? Through death? Even deeper escapism? Or something else entirely? Find out in the seemingly final installment of Staying Positive in the Apocalypse, Veil of Cloud - or watch the entire saga here.
posted by BiggerJ at 4:33 PM PST - 9 comments

Venice Carnival 2024, masks at the Venice Arsenal and St. Mark's 4K [1h10m]
posted by hippybear at 1:58 PM PST - 9 comments

Private equity firms are utilizing public trust in long-standing publications to sell every product under the sun. In a bid to replace falling ad revenue, publishing houses are selling their publications for parts to media groups that are quick to establish affiliate marketing deals. They’re buying magazines we love, closing their print operations, turning them into digital-only, laying off the actual journalists who made us trust in their content in the first place, and hiring third-party companies to run the affiliate arm of their sites. While this happens, investment firms and ‘innovative digital media companies’ are selling you bad products. These Digital Goliaths shouldn’t be able to use product recommendations as their personal piggy bank, simply flying through Google updates off the back of ‘the right signals,’ an old domain, or the echo of a reputable brand that is no longer.

Indie air purifier review site HouseFresh does a deep dive into the incestuous world of top-ranking Google product search results. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 1:22 PM PST - 97 comments

"An alluring name, Forbidden Courses. I decided to take a look. Although my spleen is not inflamed by the culture wars, although my heart is not lifted by calls like Bari Weiss’s for a “coalition” comprised of “trads, whigs, normies,” I was curious. How plausible was their project? What ideas would they discuss? I applied to UATX last March. There was the cover letter, and the three essay questions, and the writing sample. I speckled them with Harold Bloom and Nietzsche. “Exploitation … belongs to the essence of what lives,” that sort of thing. April 6th, the letter arrived in my email inbox: “Congratulations! … UATX is extending you an offer of admission to Session I of this year's Forbidden Courses.” I flew south in June. " [Web Archive link] [more inside]
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 10:07 AM PST - 122 comments

To Become A Lion is a short, colorful video on the art and origin of Lion Dancing. (The pole jumps are nuts and for some it might be the first time you've seen a funeral lion). [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:12 AM PST - 9 comments

Who was the woman who inspired ska's ubiquitous Beat Girl logo? Joanna Wallace found a picture of the woman who inspired Hunt Emerson's iconic logo, and it led her to start digging into the history and career of Brigitte Bond. [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 6:59 AM PST - 14 comments

"Informant’s dad told it to her. She found it so funny. She likes that it’s punny and unexpected. Her dad would tell it to her over and over again. His dad told it too." An entry from the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The International Society for Folk Narrative Research points to it as one of many digital folklore archives [PDF]. If you don't have time to visit digital archives, a dad joke generator may be more your speed.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:12 AM PST - 18 comments

"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:29 AM PST - 77 comments

Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters. Author Lynée Denise on the book's genesis: I saw this video of one of her performances from 1970 and I was like who the hell is this? Who is this woman commanding the room, commanding the band with all this dignity, all this ruthless inner peace?

Thornton is sometimes overlooked in music history, but her rendition of "Hound Dog" came first, and was a smash hit to boot. More happily “Ball and Chain” became one of Janis Joplin’s signature songs with Big Mama’s blessing, after Joplin encountered Thornton singing it in a Divisadero St club in San Francisco. Dubbed "Big Mama" for her size, Thornton had raised herself out of poverty, turning professional singer at the age of fourteen in 1940. [Previously on MeFi] [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:39 PM PST - 9 comments

What Drives Us [1h30m] is a documentary about being an on-the-road rock and roll band. It's an interesting journey of self-discovery. Directed by Dave Grohl. Includes interviews with unexpected people.
posted by hippybear at 6:21 PM PST - 13 comments

Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story. Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. from Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1, Part 2
posted by chavenet at 2:24 PM PST - 52 comments

On its maiden voyage in 1628, the Vasa warship capsized and sank. Originally thought to be caused by too many cannons on too many decks, one of the leading theories now is that shipbuilders used different rulers. Four were found in the wreckage, two calibrated with the Swedish Foot and the other two rulers used the Amsterdam Foot. Not only are they different lengths (29.69 cm versus 28.31 cm), the Dutch Foot was divided into 11 instead of 12 inches. These errors multiplied over the size of the ship led to lopsided construction and potentially the inevitable sinking. [more inside]
posted by autopilot at 12:14 PM PST - 57 comments

Twenty-five years ago today, the movie Office Space premiered. Watch the original trailer. Read Roger Ebert’s 3-star review (“a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life.”) Enjoy an oral history. Read reflections on the impact of the movie from Variety, BBC, and The Guardian. Maybe you want to buy yourself a red Swingline stapler to celebrate?
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 8:24 AM PST - 73 comments

SPRINTS - Up and Comer It's your weekly free thread! Drop in, look around, let us know what's up with you.
posted by Gorgik at 8:14 AM PST - 94 comments

I discovered a gem on YouTube today, and it hides much deeper treasure. Bruce & friend Kevin: Live at the Rivoli! PART 1 [45m] is two Kids who come from The Hall doing a stage show. I don't know if Part 2 will be posted, but I hope so. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 7:16 AM PST - 8 comments

"Gorey’s approach to the representation of time is obviously variegated. His works are commonly set within a hybrid Victorian/Edwardian period and often elicit further confusion by containing comically anachronistic details. As indicated, in the examples such as The Broken Spoke, The Object-Lesson, and The Water Flowers, Gorey employs manipulations with temporal boundaries within the framework of nonsense, such as simultaneity, digression, and repetition, which lead to a suggestion of timelessness and infinity." [SLPDF] [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:31 AM PST - 12 comments

The chief and lethal irony of Fixer is that the more William persecutes the rich, the richer he himself becomes. By the end of it all, he is stranded in meaninglessness, unsure what his mission has accomplished, or for what reasons he’d been chosen to live it. “[M]y revenge,” he says, “had nothing to do with me, but instead was something I’d walked in on at just the right moment.” from Lethal Irony: On Han Ong’s “Fixer Chao” by Zoë Hu [LARB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM PST - 3 comments

Brushtail possums have not lived in this part of Australia for almost 100 years, but now they are back. Locally extinct from Western Australia's northern Wheatbelt for almost a century, a brushtail possum has been photographed out and about, signalling a landscape-scale conservation success. (If you're thinking "I've heard bad things about brushtailed possums", that's because feral [introduced] brushtailed possums are an genuine ecological catastrophe in New Zealand. Here in Australia where the brushtailed possums actually belong in the ecosystem, this is good news.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:45 PM PST - 8 comments

Redditor "whypic" has been posting daily installments to the Glorious Tom Bombadil subreddit of an original webcomic work of fan-fiction describing an adventure of the mysterious side-character Tom Bombadil from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the webcomic, Bombadil is portrayed like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, and his naive enthusiasm is contrasted with the more worldly and serious elf-king Gil-Galad who is more of a "Hobbes" figure. Who is Tom Bombadil? Let "Jess of the Shire" explain. Webcomic installments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 (Previously: Dark Bombadil) (Previously)
posted by Schmucko at 5:59 PM PST - 24 comments

Gilbert & Sullivan's Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, a highly condensed operetta by Mitch Benn [SLYT, 9:33]
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:20 PM PST - 10 comments

"There are at least a dozen Dracula ballets, beginning with the 1899 version created for the Budapest Opera." "The dancing has teeth (and so do the dancers)." The count at the Polish National Ballet (video [YT]. Dracula in Kansas City. Three Draculas to watch [YT].
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:01 PM PST - 6 comments

THE RITZ-CARLTON MALDIVES | Phenomenal private island resort (full tour) [1h12m] is a wordless tour of the resort. You won't get any perky central casting aspiring host here; it's images and music and an extremely engineered hotel resort that is basically at one with the water. I can't afford it and am not really into oceans, but if I were and could, this could be amazing.
posted by hippybear at 2:59 PM PST - 43 comments

Inside Johnny Depp's Epic Bromance with Mohammad bin Salman (Vanity Fair, archive.is)
posted by box at 2:47 PM PST - 45 comments

Paul Campos, University of Colorado law professor known for his work in exposing the law school scam, has obtained a settlement in his Title VII retaliation case. Campos has now blogged the whole sordid course of events: How I Won My Lawsuit Against the University of Colorado - Part II - Part III [more inside]
posted by Not A Thing at 2:43 PM PST - 36 comments

Introducing the most iconic short films of 2023. Sourced by our curation team from this year's Staff Picks selections, the Best of the Year awards brings you the crème of the crème de la crème. from Vimeo
posted by chavenet at 2:32 PM PST - 1 comment

Good writers are perverts. (desktop only)
posted by simmering octagon at 1:55 PM PST - 19 comments

In 2017, google said goodbye to the (controversial) blobs emoji collection to the dismay of many. More than seven years later, the blobs live on. Community efforts to extend the collection persist, including the beloved cat variant. Most notably, blobs.gg, a >30k member community designing blobs for Discord.
posted by lianove3 at 12:05 PM PST - 6 comments

The invisible substance called dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Perhaps, a new study suggests, this strange substance arises from a 'dark mirror universe' that's been linked to ours since the dawn of time.
posted by brundlefly at 10:03 AM PST - 29 comments

From NYT (ungated and nytimes.com): Fairshake revealed two weeks ago in federal filings that it and two affiliated super PACs had amassed a combined roughly $80 million in 2023, with most of the money coming from three major cryptocurrency players: Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz. It is not exactly clear what about Ms. Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.
posted by AlSweigart at 9:09 AM PST - 65 comments

Cat Yronwode is famous in the comic book world, but you might not know that she is also a practitioner and teacher of hoodoo, magic spells and herbs. In the bottom of her extensive website you will find the Arcane Archive, a plethora of Usenet posts from the 1990s (?) on Religion, Magick, Divination and other assorted stuff. [more inside]
posted by wittgenstein at 8:40 AM PST - 6 comments

Eoin Reardon is a 20-something woodworker from Crossbarry Co Cork, who makes [eg a new axe-handle] with trad hand tools for a million+ @pintofplane TikTok followers . He laments the stigma of trades in schools. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:34 AM PST - 10 comments

What is a rose, visually? A rose comprises its intrinsics, including the distribution of geometry, texture, and material specific to its object category. With knowledge of these intrinsic properties, we may render roses of different sizes and shapes, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions. In this work, we build a generative model that learns to capture such object intrinsics from a single image, such as a photo of a bouquet. Such an image includes multiple instances of an object type. These instances all share the same intrinsics, but appear different due to a combination of variance within these intrinsics and differences in extrinsic factors, such as pose and illumination. Experiments show that our model successfully learns object intrinsics (distribution of geometry, texture, and material) for a wide range of objects, each from a single Internet image. Our method achieves superior results on multiple downstream tasks, including intrinsic image decomposition, shape and image generation, view synthesis, and relighting. from Seeing a Rose in Five Thousand Ways
posted by chavenet at 2:10 AM PST - 1 comment

Hazard reduction burns increase risk of severe bushfires (forest fires), report finds. Traditional fire management strategies such as hazard reduction burns, logging, and the thinning of undergrowth have increased the flammability of forests, new research has found.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:35 PM PST - 9 comments

I lost my keys again! Do I have dementia?
Normal Aging: Having the feeling that a word is on the tip of your tongue but remembering it later.
Signs of Dementia: Mispronouncing words frequently or not understanding words that people are saying.
See also:
Are Alzheimer’s disease and dementia the same thing?
When is it time to stop driving?
posted by spamandkimchi at 7:28 PM PST - 22 comments

I hadn't heard of Nigerian charismatic pastor TB Joshua [Wikipedia] until I heard his name floating about during overnight BBC World Service radio programming recently. I looked around and found this: Disciples: The Cult Of TB Joshua, three episodes from BBC Africa Eye [~50m each, YT Playlist, CW: descriptions and depictions of religious manipulation, sexual and physical abuse, other cult leader behavior].
posted by hippybear at 7:10 PM PST - 3 comments

'Kid Auto Races at Venice' is a 1914 silent film with Charlie Chaplin appearing for the first time as 'The Little Tramp.' Here is a colorized version. (slyt. 6:51) Previous megathread
posted by clavdivs at 4:06 PM PST - 9 comments

Star Trek: Borg - Remastered is a 1996 FMV Star Trek game featuring John de Lancie remastered into HD & made playable in browser. yt trailer. A review of the original game.
posted by juv3nal at 3:13 PM PST - 31 comments

As his apartment on the Lower East Side crumbled, a former Club Kid resented the moneyed millennials who filled his building. Then he let them in on a secret that transformed their lives. (NYTimes gift link)
posted by praemunire at 1:39 PM PST - 25 comments

Twenty-seven years later, Kirsten Bakis is publishing her second novel: King Nyx. [more inside]
posted by Winnie the Proust at 11:09 AM PST - 11 comments

Australia's oldest-known platypus living in the wild discovered in a Melbourne creek. The discovery of a 24-year-old wild platypus gives researchers and conservationists a greater insight into the longevity of one of Australia's most unique animals.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:27 AM PST - 3 comments

The Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective comic strip only lasted a couple of years, from December 1978 to September 1980, though people saved individual strips, and two collections were later released. Can You Solve The Mystery? came along a few years later, which was an adaptation of the Hawkeye Collins and Amy Adams books. Cliff Hanger showed up around the same time, featuring mysteries in 1930s jungles and that sort of thing, coincident with the popularity of another 1930s-era kinda thing, though it's not "CLIFF-HANGER". [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:11 AM PST - 6 comments

I FEEL AT TIMES that I still live in the never-ending 20th century, that I’m stuck here, that maybe everyone is stuck here, even people born too late to have seen it happen. True, there are smartphones now, and new types of ugly buildings. Images are sharper, even when you zoom in. You can tell that time has passed because unremarkable things like Sweetheart Jazz cups have acquired the status of fetish objects. But some part of the American mindset is still in 1999, which feels substantially closer to us now than 1979 did then. from Heritage 2000, a review of Time Bomb Y2K in N+1
posted by chavenet at 1:54 AM PST - 30 comments

A stingray that hasn't shared a tank with another stingray for at least eight years is pregnant. First link. Second link. It is likely caused by parthenogenesis, which is a type of asexual reproduction. The mostly rare phenomenon can occur in some insects, fish, amphibians, birds and reptiles, but not mammals. Other kinds of sharks, skates and rays — a trio of animals often grouped together — have had these kinds of pregnancies in human care. To be clear, Dr Lyons said, these animals were not cloning themselves. Instead, a female's egg fuses with another cell, triggers cell division and leads to the creation of an embryo. The cell that fuses with the egg is known as a polar body. They are produced when a female is creating an egg but these usually aren't used.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:36 PM PST - 34 comments

Alexei Navalny is dead at 47, say Russian prison authorities. The crusading pro-democracy activist was a constant thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin, financing documentaries exposing Kremlin corruption and rallying support as a popular opposition leader; a documentary on his own life won an Oscar and global acclaim last year. Long persecuted by the state, he was poisoned by the notorious nerve agent Novichok in 2020 and returned the following year to face imprisonment under an increasingly authoritarian regime. While the collective West condemns the unsubtle murder of a political prisoner, liberal Russians are left without any clear successor -- though Navalny himself even in death endeavored to tell supporters "You're not allowed to give up."
posted by Rhaomi at 5:11 PM PST - 108 comments

This is completely fascinating. It's the story of the biggest Swedish export to the world, told through an unexpected lens. Stig Anderson [Wikipedia] was the founder of Polar Music, was one of Sweden's most prolific songwriters, and later was entirely intertwined with ABBA. STIKKAN [2024, 1h, Swedish/multi-language with English subtitles] tells the story of his surprising life and career, and it's worth a look! [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:39 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

The rat with the big balls and the enormous penis – how Frontiers published a paper with botched AI-generated images "These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature." Contains a mildly NSFW image. [more inside]
posted by What is E. T. short for? at 1:24 PM PST - 59 comments

Trump hit with 3-year ban from doing business in New York State and ordered to pay $364 million dollars.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 12:38 PM PST - 200 comments

Politics this, plagiarism that. Harvard is in the limelight, which means that the student journalists of the Harvard Crimson have picked up some competition.
posted by Artw at 12:00 PM PST - 23 comments

In her remarkable life, Elizabeth Gloucester embodied a new model of Black, feminist capitalism. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 7:54 AM PST - 4 comments

Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:46 AM PST - 13 comments

I am an artist, and I am a death doula. Part of working with and supporting those who are grieving or dying means that you know how precious and short this life is. You don’t take it for granted and you try not to let small things stop you from taking your dreams seriously every day. That is the phenomenal up side of doing deathwork: it makes me a courageous artist, for whom it’s easier not to compare myself to anyone else, or say that I am not artist enough, and encourages me to exist in the only timeline that matters — mine. from The Importance of Art in a “Good Death” by Brianna L. Hernández in Hyperallergic [CW: death and dying] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:38 AM PST - 8 comments

Experts, citizen scientists move 40 trapdoor spiders in mass relocation (to keep the spiders safe.) A team of conservationists and volunteers successfully relocate 40 trapdoor spiders across WA's Great Southern. Trapdoor spiders trace their ancestry on Australian land to the time of Gondwana, the supercontinent that existed up until 150 million years ago, setting them apart from many other species of spider. Their name comes from the burrows they dig, with some able to create a hinged lid cover made of soil, vegetation, and silk. The rare Cataxia bolganupensis live exclusively in the Porongurup Mountain Range. Scientists know the spiders can live for 40 years, but little else is known about the creatures. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:35 AM PST - 11 comments

She won the biggest awards in Landscape Gardening, a movie made about her, commissioned for some of the boldest landscaping projects in Ireland. She stopped being a gardener. What happened? “It’s very simple. I looked out onto my garden. A fox ran across, it was probably winter/spring last year, which isn’t that unusual. Then a couple of hares ran after him, and I thought, well that is unusual. And then a family of hedgehogs. Now, they are nocturnal, so I knew something was going on. I went for a wander and it turns out a digger had gone in across the road. It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and realized I’d done this many times in my career." [more inside]
posted by dancestoblue at 11:35 PM PST - 17 comments

Stylish woman walks down neon Tokyo street / Space man in a red knit helmet movie trailer / Drone view of waves crashing at Big Sur / Papercraft coral reef / Victoria crowned pigeon with striking plumage / Pirate ships battling in a cup of coffee / Historical footage of California during the gold rush / Cartoon kangaroo disco dances / Lagos in the year 2056 / Stack of TVs all showing different programs inside a gallery / White SUV speeds up a steep dirt road / Reflections in the window of a train in the Tokyo suburbs / Octopus fighting with a king crab / Flock of paper airplanes flutters through a dense jungle / Cat waking up its sleeping owner demanding breakfast / Chinese Lunar New Year celebration / Art gallery with many beautiful works of art in different styles / People enjoying the snowy weather and shopping / Gray-haired man with a beard in his 60s deep in thought / Colorful buildings in Burano Italy. An adorable dalmation looks through a window / 3D render of a happy otter standing on a surfboard / Corgi vlogging itself in tropical Maui / Aerial view of Santorini / OpenAI unveils Sora, a near-photorealistic text-to-video model with unprecedented coherency. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 4:51 PM PST - 181 comments

He calls me Paul, although Paul is not my name. He calls me Paul because he believes me to be Paul Auster, the American writer. This is why I can’t take him up on his invitations. He would see that I am somebody else. The first time he called me, I had just quit smoking. At first, I thought it was a ploy of the tobacco industry: to immediately phone up anyone who stopped smoking. from Streuselkuchen by Marc Lunghuss [European Review of Books; ungated; German original]
posted by chavenet at 3:57 PM PST - 12 comments

The YouTube channel Creative fest has a bunch of simple kitchen table projects, some of them little science things, some of them just fun. I was struck by their "hologram projector" projects using easy to find plastic and cell phones. The original: How To Make 3D Hologram Display with CD Cover [9m], How to make 3d Hologram Box Screen | 3d Hologram Transparent Projector [12m], More simple Way to make 3d hologram box screen [8m], How to make Transparent Hologram Screen | Hologram Projector | Easy Science Project [5m], Make a hologram projector with plastic glass cap || DIY 3D Hologram [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:15 PM PST - 5 comments

Key late '90s early '00s metal band Kittie is back: Eyes Wide Open [more inside]
posted by signal at 1:38 PM PST - 6 comments

Air Canada found responsible for having an AI chatbot that is a lying liar who lies
posted by jacquilynne at 1:35 PM PST - 47 comments

The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger

The man on the phone knew my home address, my Social Security number, the names of my family members, and that my 2-year-old son was playing in our living room. He told me my home was being watched, my laptop had been hacked, and we were in imminent danger. “I can help you, but only if you cooperate,” he said. His first orders: I could not tell anyone about our conversation, not even my spouse, or talk to the police or a lawyer.

posted by gwint at 11:22 AM PST - 136 comments

The 2023 Hugo Awards: A Report on Censorship and Exclusion by Jason Sanford and Chris M. Barkley. The latter received from Diane Lacey copies of e-mails that were exchanged between her and Kat Jones and Dave McCarty, fellow volunteer administrators of the 2023 Hugo Awards at the Chengdu Worldcon, showing that the three of them made dossiers of Hugo Award nominees deemed to be potentially troubling to local business interests and authorities. Jones, the 2024 Hugo Administrator, has resigned from her position, after releasing a statement. Diane Lacey has apologized for her part. There have been many responses to these revelations, including by Cora Buhlert, Camestros Felapton and MeFi's Own John Scalzi.
posted by Kattullus at 10:35 AM PST - 129 comments

TheTrailer for the Disney+ Exclusive X-Men '97 Animated series is out. Airing between 1992 and 1997 the X-Men animated series was a pivotal piece of X-Men Media. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 7:06 AM PST - 36 comments

"The narrative structure of Gorey Stories is as unconventional as Dracula is predictable. The show creators had difficulty wrapping the show in a recognizable narrative package, trying to present the short stories in a way that brings them together in some sort of whole. There is no discernable narrative [SLPDF]." More on Gorey and Dracula. Gorey and Dracula: playset edition. Gorey: the stage memoir. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:38 AM PST - 8 comments

I’ve always thought of artworks as a kind of CAPTCHA test I might not pass. Am I feeling the right things at the right pitch of intensity? What if I’m discovered to be lacking in some fundamental capacity—what if I’m the avatar or replicant? When I watch Pianowork 2 I’m not only moved and discomfited by my sense that Atkins’s digital model might be developing a capacity for pain, but I’m also made to reflect on the rightness or specificity of my own responses. from The Pain Artist by Ben Lerner [NYRB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:05 AM PST - 4 comments

Hopes $12 million (Australian dollars, equivalent to $7.79 million US dollars) platypus refuge can help halt decline of iconic species. A new platypus haven at Taronga Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo will aid conservation efforts by providing a home for up to 65 of the animals during drought, bushfire and flood.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:26 AM PST - 3 comments

Families are narrowing worldwide, according to a new study, and cousins are dwindling (SL CBC)
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:31 PM PST - 91 comments

What signs suggest a soft tissue infection? If your friend falls during an outdoors adventure, what's the correct treatment for an open fracture? Check out a 303-question free wilderness medicine quiz, and a 536-question EMS, EMT, and paramedic quiz. Free to play in browser, no login needed. You can modify the difficulty of questions you're given, in topics including anatomy, initial patient assessment, pediatrics, conditions caused by illness and trauma, and more. Some questions are about field-specific mnemonics or terms like MOI, AVPU, or OPQRST, but they're still informative. (Via NOLS, home of NOLS Wilderness Medicine.)
posted by brainwane at 4:17 PM PST - 13 comments

While both artists individually did their part to buck those incredible odds—several films have documented their dramatic scramble to secure permission and convince an often hostile public—it was their collaborative relationship and intuitive division of tasks according to their respective strengths that made each piece possible. from Destiny United Christo And Jeanne-Claude to Wrap the World [ArtNet] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:01 PM PST - 19 comments

Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music [1h15m] has had me fascinated and thrilled with new information since I started watching it. Even if you know nothing about musical notation, you might also find this history and evolution and dissection of those weird 🎶 fascinating.
posted by hippybear at 1:52 PM PST - 44 comments

Karima Manji wanted it all for her twin daughters, Amira and Nadya. And she found a way to help them get it: financial aid earmarked for Indigenous kids. The fact that they weren’t remotely Indigenous wasn’t going to stop her
posted by thecjm at 12:30 PM PST - 43 comments

Happy Valentine's Day! Here's four minutes of Leonid Brezhnev, the kissiest comrade.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 12:25 PM PST - 9 comments

Amazon Sued Over Prime Video Ads. A class-Action Complaint Accuses Tech Giant of ‘Immoral, Unethical, Oppressive, Unscrupulous’ Conduct. [more inside]
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:08 AM PST - 159 comments

You Can Blame Geoffrey Chaucer for Valentine’s Day
posted by ShooBoo at 8:11 AM PST - 42 comments

For its 1000th episode, BBC's tech news show Click went interactive [slBBC]
posted by otherchaz at 6:30 AM PST - 3 comments

Monarch butterfly numbers in Mexico plummet to near record low - "Biologists pin the blame for the nosedive on higher-than-usual temperatures and drought conditions where the butterfly reproduces, mostly in northwestern U.S. states like Washington, Oregon and California." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 5:38 AM PST - 9 comments

The Art Gallery of WA has meticulously curated thousands of pieces of delicate glass created by a First Nations artist, Yhonnie Scarce, to tell significant stories. Two floors of a Perth gallery have been filled with large-scale glass works that depict nuclear fallout from nuclear testing conducted at Woomera, South Australia in the 1950s, the impacts of uranium mining and intimate family history. In the largest survey of work by Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist from South Australia, the Art Gallery of WA has brought together pieces that include two 2000-piece hanging glass works.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:00 AM PST - 9 comments

"A medievalist's mind can be bizarre to behold. If you had been drudging through a cartulary — a collection of charters copied into a single volume — for the last month, what would you choose to publish:

(a) its complete text, as the last word on the matter;
(b) a simpler calendar, as a guide to its contents;
(c) a ghost story?

If your name is M.R. James, the correct answer is the last one!"
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:04 AM PST - 18 comments

For a brief moment in the Renaissance, in between the invention of the microscope, printing press, and pencils – along with other technologies that uphold modern society – upper class men were rather preoccupied with erecting another innovation: the codpiece. from How the codpiece flopped [BBC]
posted by chavenet at 1:46 AM PST - 35 comments

An Examination of Non-traditional Friendships. Ezra Klein talks with Rhaina Cohen in a wide-ranging conversation about Western friendship conventions; how we don't have words for rich platonic friendship; how these friendships can be the basis for healthy child-rearing; the high expectations of marriage culture; the loneliness epidemic. EZRA KLEIN: What happened to drain so much of the ardor out of friendship? Male friendship and female friendship alike but I think even more male friendship. I think it’s still quite common for female friends to profess a kind of love to each other. It’s not that common for male friends. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 10:01 PM PST - 18 comments

Wow, dang! Dang, you guys! There's a new Homestar Runner toon! You can watch it on the website (which now uses Ruffle to play Flash in modern browsers) or you can watch it on YouTube, if you truly must.
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:39 PM PST - 13 comments

Maybe a glimmer of hope for today... [more inside]
posted by BlueHorse at 7:15 PM PST - 26 comments

Many New College athletes had no idea they were part of Ron DeSantis’s attack on “woke ideology.” Then the semester began. (SLNYTimes, archive) [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 1:17 PM PST - 42 comments

I preferred these sensory and sensual phantasms to the everyday reality of school life, and I knew that fact was so shameful it needed to be hidden. Back then I couldn’t put my disability into words, but I felt it keenly. My habits were not just escapist pastimes. They were abnormal passions. I was a mutant, a monster of sensibility, a changeling with a freakish vulnerability to beauty. Years later I found a name for my debilitation—I was an aesthete. from The Imaginary Operagoer: A Memoir by Dana Gioia in The Hudson Review
posted by chavenet at 12:00 PM PST - 14 comments

The Elusive Red Pottery Glaze Many types of asian pottery including the beautiful chinese red glazes of the Sung Dynasty and the exquisite Japanese Imari porcelain feature red as the main colour. The early Ming red is called “Sacrificial Red” because the Ming emperor kept the red-glazed vessels for animal sacrifices in sun worship. The Chinese associate red with the Sun. The secret for this sacrificial red was lost until modern science could decode found sherds via spectrometry. In the 1970s ceramic engineers in Europe developed a new generation of non-radioactive red colours and glazes based on a zircon encapsulated cadmium pigment.
posted by Lanark at 9:12 AM PST - 21 comments

A compendium of the UK's entrances to Hell. [more inside]
posted by dmd at 5:14 AM PST - 32 comments

She found freedom from society’s limiting views by employing fantasy, or assuming the perspectives of non-human creatures and objects. “Most of all I would like to depict the world as a bee sees it, then tomorrow as the moon sees it, and then, as many other creatures see it,” she continued. “I am, however, a human being, and can use my fantasy, bound as I am, as a bridge.”
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:41 AM PST - 3 comments

You’d have heard it in gay pubs and bars, as well as being spoken on cruise ships where lots of gay men worked, up until the 1970s. You might also hear it in cruising areas: cinemas, Turkish baths, parks and public loos, although it might be more of a hissed warning: “Lily!” when the police were spotted. And you might hear it on public transport so that two people could have a conversation without others understanding. from The Secret Gay Language Still in Use Today [Huck Magazine] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:33 AM PST - 16 comments

The Hideous Spectacle of Vince McMahon Tim Marchman and Tom Scocca discuss Vince McMahon + The WWE, what makes a scandal, and what it means that the ringleader of wrestling has been an absolute monster this whole time. (SL: The Indignity on Substack) [CW: sexual abuse]
posted by wowenthusiast at 9:17 PM PST - 16 comments

Why Do Women Get More Autoimmune Diseases? Study of Mice Hints at Answers. Four in five people with an autoimmune disease are women. New research points to an RNA molecule involved in silencing one of their X chromosomes as a potential culprit.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:00 PM PST - 4 comments

Here's Jon Stewart's first episode back at The Daily Show. [21m]
posted by hippybear at 8:23 PM PST - 85 comments

Part 1: my Poochie who is sure to tell you that he only finds anti-woke rhetoric understandable. Part 2 : Charlie Kirk now believes that pretending to revere Dr. King is less useful. Part 3: the most insidious kind of bad faith—pretending to take an opposing position in order to create a normalizing debate for [white] supremacy. A.R. Moxon's Reframe, relocated off of substack! [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 6:50 PM PST - 15 comments

Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED One of the main reasons we have blue LEDs, and therefore white LED light bulbs, is that a brilliant Japanese scientist spent a miserable year working in a lab at the University of Florida, where the only thing he was allowed to do was repair an old, broken vapor deposition machine. [more inside]
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 5:21 PM PST - 35 comments

"Could you imagine if every year there was a new Muppet movie that adapted the latest Best Picture winner? That’s what Hollywood is taking away from you."
posted by Small Dollar at 3:16 PM PST - 79 comments

Heavy shelling in Rafah, the refugee camp where more than 1 million people are crammed More than 100 people, at least 42 of them children, have been killed since yesterday, with a ground offensive planned by Israeli forces. While two of the hostages have been rescued, Amnesty International is calling the offensive "unlawful" and saying that none of the buildings hit are legitimate military targets.
posted by Nibbly Fang at 2:10 PM PST - 290 comments

The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid For the last decade, Jen Glantz has worked as a bridesmaid for hire. Her life is a romantic comedy waiting to happen - by Katherine Laidlaw at The Hustle
posted by bq at 11:04 AM PST - 28 comments

Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed. No Vehicles In The Park is a little game by David Turner made to illustrate how difficult it is to to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on, even in a trivial case. Hat tip to Dan Luu
posted by vincebowdren at 8:54 AM PST - 116 comments

Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime

Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.

Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 8:39 AM PST - 107 comments

AI generated obituaries turn real people into clickbait. Searching for information on a deceased friend? Better check your sources carefully; there’s a whole shady online industry designed to profit off your loss.
posted by mygothlaundry at 6:24 AM PST - 23 comments

"As is true throughout the history of innovation, whenever there is a problem, it usually turns out that multiple people arrive at similar inventive solutions. That was the case with the development of the hex as a basic unit of division in board games." Hex maps also have been noted to have problems. The internet is, of course, full of lists of favorite hex and counter wargames. (While a counter may be gorgeous, and may be found in your kitchen, it is not a kitchen counter, which can be dangerous.) Hexcrawls have been part of Dungeons & Dragons for a long time, though they have spread to other RPGs over time, though some people prefer pointcrawls to hexcrawls. It should be noted that hexes had ludic uses[SLPDF] prior to the modern era of board wargames and RPGs.
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:51 AM PST - 21 comments

Marathon world record holder Kelvin Kiptum has died at 24. He and his coach, Gervais Hakizimana died in a car crash. Kiptum had only run three marathons, 2:01:53 in Valencia in 2022, 2:01:25 in London in April 2023, and 2:00:35 WR in Chicago in October 2023.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:27 AM PST - 24 comments

Crimes rates have plummeted in the U.S. since the mid-1990s. Most of the credit for this remarkable trend has been given to an enlarged criminal justice system—largely more police, tougher sentencing and a massive prison complex. But we have found a larger and much more powerful explanation: A drop in interest rates and, in particular, long-term interest rates. When interest rates go up, crime goes up. When interest rates go down, crime goes down. from The ‘Startling’ Link Between Low Interest Rates and Low Crime [The Crime Report]
posted by chavenet at 1:27 AM PST - 38 comments

Housemates find more than 1150 species of plants, animals and fungi in their backyard. In 2020, at the height of COVID lockdowns, three housemates decided to see how many animals lived in their house and backyard. What they found surprised them.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:52 AM PST - 4 comments

What are you reading - something you wrote last week? A Valentine's day card from scarabic? A recipe? A blog? Tax filing instructions? Safety information? A novel? Techniques? A print newspaper? The ingredients on a food product? The weather forecast? A flight ticket? Song lyrics? A job advert? Ferry times? A diner menu? A trail guide? This post? A comment you wrote? A comment you regret writing? Or talk about anything and everything in your life and your world as this is your free thread.
posted by Wordshore at 12:38 AM PST - 132 comments

The exclusive Satellaview-only broadcast tracks of Nintendo's classic SNES/Super Famicom racing game F-Zero have been recovered by fans, and are available in a romhack on the original F-Zero. The story of their recovery, and in some cases recreation, is told in an interview with the hack's main programmer on classic gaming blog Press The Buttons, which reveals that special tools were used to recreate some of the tracks from out of a VHS recording of the tracks being played when they were originally broadcast. DidYouKnowGaming (12 minutes) also has a video about the process of the tracks' recreation. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 9:15 PM PST - 6 comments

Overlooked No More: Voltairine de Cleyre, America’s ‘Greatest Woman Anarchist’ (NYT-archive link) de Cleyre was a poet of merit as told by Elizabeth King's essay on her poetry, 'Pearl of Anarchy. Voltairine de Cleyre’s radical poetry is more timely than ever.' The anarchist library has a collection of her poetry on-line
posted by clavdivs at 6:28 PM PST - 8 comments

The Yamma Ensemble -- Sien Drahmas Al Dia (I Make 100 Drachmas a Day) [more inside]
posted by y2karl at 3:45 PM PST - 6 comments

Woman fishes alligator snapping turtle out of English lake using a shopping basket. The creature, native to the US south, was spotted bathing in a lake in Cumbria by a local dog walker.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:49 PM PST - 48 comments

What does a third place designed not only for community-building, but also for climate resilience, look like? "I think anything where we’re saying, ‘Here’s an individual kit, go be an individual and care for yourself, that’s missing out on the entire essence of what resilience is." Key aspects and examples of resilience hubs, also depicted in the winning story in Grist’s Imagine 2200 contest “To Labor for the Hive.” [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:02 PM PST - 5 comments

About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter Luhn quietly changed the course of computer science ... in a 1953 internal IBM paper, he proposed a new technique for storing and retrieving information that is now built into just about all computational systems: the hash table. (article title: "Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time"). A hash table is a data structure that implements an associative array, also called a dictionary, which is an abstract data type that maps keys to values. Here's a video explaining hash tables. [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 10:26 AM PST - 52 comments

Fr. Johannes Schwarz is a Catholic priest from Austria who went on pilgrimage to Santiago as a chap, and then obtained a PhD in Dogmatic Theology. After walking to Jerusalem and back, his bishop gave him a three year sabbatical to do a pilgrimage-in-place as a hermit. He found a small-holding with basic accommodation on the side of a mountain in Piedmont, Italy. He is releasing a series of 45m videos: one for each month of 2023. Intro [6½m]. Jan - Feb etc. - Aug should be released today (they're coming at one-a-week). [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:11 AM PST - 8 comments

"Now then, this is what was happening to me: as I had worked so-called, from nature, that is, I am here and Nature is out there, whether it be in the form of a woman or an apple or anything else, the concept was broken and you faced a black canvas. Well, with the knowledge that I am nature and try to make something happen on that canvas, now this is the real transition that took place. And it took me some three years and what began to emerge in the first of these, which was around '46, were very small canvases, these things around here, what I refer to as the little image, were the first and as I gained confidence and strength, it expanded – it grew bolder in time." [Audio excerpt at link, with 45-page PDF transcript of interview] [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:55 AM PST - 3 comments

June 1, 1952, was Whitsunday, and provided the young Michael Ventris with a convenient break from his duties as an architect. At the end of the day he would write his 20th Work Note on Minoan Language Research, with the somewhat disbelieving title, “Are the Knossos and Pylos Tablets Written in Greek?” Responsibility was disclaimed: this was only “a frivolous digression”, that would “sooner or later come to an impasse, or dissipate itself in absurdities.” It became instead one of the great intellectual achievements of the 20th century. from Cracking the Code of Linear B by Theodore Nash
posted by chavenet at 2:22 AM PST - 16 comments

Women less likely to receive bystander defibrillation than men during a heart attack, study finds. A study of tens of thousands of Victorian cases finds women in cardiac arrest are only half as likely as men to receive defibrillation from a bystander — some telling investigators they feared exposing the patient's chest. (Previously: women less likely to receive CPR from bystanders.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:48 AM PST - 26 comments

Damo Suzuki has passed into the infinite. Best known for his time as the singer of Can, he also created a wealth of other music and art, as well as inspiring many other artists . See some vintage footage of him in action here.
posted by SystematicAbuse at 9:31 PM PST - 33 comments

PET SHOP BOYS - LONELINESS - A film by ALASDAIR McLELLAN is a bit lusty and very gay and probably NSFW? If you like your synthpop combined with orchestra strings, this might be your jam. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 2:36 PM PST - 4 comments

After a not very successful campaign in 2023 Ukraine is facing some difficult obstacles and tough choices in 2024. Inside is a collection of status reports and commentary on where the war is now. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 1:16 PM PST - 130 comments

Using a long-buried, 300-million-year-old coral oasis to help modern coral reefs. Once teeming with marine life, Cannindah Reef is now buried under Queensland cattle country. Could it help scientists protect the Great Barrier Reef as the climate changes?
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:41 PM PST - 0 comments - Post a Comment

The AK-X (in German) is a radical experimental flying-wing sailplane being designed and built by Akaflieg Karlsruhe. A YouTube playlist documents the progress so far (and introduces some of the many students working on it), but if you want a comprehensive overview, take in this Presentation about the AK-X at our 95th Anniversary Celebration - Let's Talk about Flying Wings (also in German with good subtitles), summarising the many engineering challenges faced. For a Wikipedia-powered glossary and some background, there's [more inside]
posted by tss at 11:27 AM PST - 9 comments

Modern slave labor at prison farms It's incredibly widespread. I wish the article had a list of all the companies that are using prison labor - the extent is shocking. CW for very upsetting read. More - ACLU report (starts with financial ask, sorry) Grauniad article less focused on food specifics
posted by leslies at 7:18 AM PST - 25 comments

Gerontocracy is as old as the world. For millennia, to greater or lesser degrees, it has been the default principle of governance, from ancient Greek city-states to the Soviet republics. Though there have been exceptions, when you look for gerontocracy today, you find it everywhere – aged men and women at the helms of states the world over. [CW: suicide, senicide, ageism] [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:55 AM PST - 79 comments

Hungarian Bookstore Evades Fine Due To Missing Comma In LGBTQ Law. [more inside]
posted by kmt at 4:10 AM PST - 7 comments

When a reading habit becomes subservient to a "need to fit in" habit, we are not setting up America's population for the type of deep, consistent thinking the country needs as the world continues to grow in complexity; we are creating a country where being seen as a part of the conversation is the goal. To be visible to our peers is more important than the value books alone provide. But perhaps this isn't a big deal, right? People are busy after all, and why should reading books take up our precious time? from Is Being Well Read Actually a Thing? Part I - Zero to One by Bram Adams [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:57 AM PST - 35 comments

These fierce, tiny marsupials drop dead after lengthy sex fests – and sometimes become cannibals. "Antechinuses are perhaps best known for exhibiting semelparity, or “suicidal reproduction”. This is death after reproducing in a single breeding period. The phenomenon is known in a range of plants, invertebrates and vertebrates, but it is rare in mammals. Each year, all antechinus males drop dead at the end of a one to three week breeding season, poisoned by their own raging hormones. This is because the stress hormone cortisol rises during the breeding period. At the same time, surging testosterone from the super-sized testes in males causes a failure in the biological mechanism that mops up the cortisol. The flood of unbound cortisol results in systemic organ failure and the inevitable, gruesome death of every male. Mercifully, death occurs only after the males have unloaded their precious cargo of sperm, mating with as many promiscuous females as possible in marathon, energy-sapping sessions lasting up to 14 hours. The pregnant females are then responsible for ensuring the survival of the species." [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:31 AM PST - 11 comments

We’ve all seen the classic cartoon juggling farce; the character wiggles their arms up and down while the balls fly in a circular pattern in front of their face, yadda yadda yadda. Most jugglers you ask will groan every time they see this. [...] Now what’s really special about juggling when compared to other inaccurately animated activities is that animation as a medium enables artists to create really creative and unique depictions of juggling that would otherwise be impossible in real life. A poorly animated drum set will still sound like a drum set, and a poorly animated piano will still sound like a piano, but quote-unquote “poorly” animated juggling can lead to some really beautiful patterns that have no real life analogue. [...] As I started diving deeper and deeper into this world of animated juggling I became amazed at the huge variety of ways in which juggling can be visually conveyed and obsessed with finding every single example that I possibly could. [...] I have learned a lot from this project, and in this video I wanted to share some of my findings as well as some notable examples that either really impressed me or even pushed my understanding of what counts as animation.

Juggling YouTuber Jasper Juggles asks (and exhaustively answers) "What's the deal with juggling in animation?" [transcript], featuring hundreds of mesmerizing examples from television, film, cartoons, video games, claymation, zoetropes, and many, many more. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 4:10 PM PST - 8 comments

Linkfest on recycling or recyclability research and approaches: Pulpatronics makes RFID tags out of scorch marks on paper. Turbine blade maker Vestas may have figured out how to recycle the epoxy in epoxy-carbon-fiber. California museum Exploratorium uses and re-uses machinery from the Bay Area's history, which become part of the exhibits. A polymer analagous to porphyrin is good at collecting gold and platinum from acid-cleaned circuit boards. A plastics-back-to-polymers technique with a new factory opening ?soon?.
posted by clew at 2:36 PM PST - 15 comments

"No-one's ever seen anything like it" as 1.5 metre (4.9 foot) long goanna winched by crane to safety out of weir. When Luke Simpson clocked in to work at Torrumbarry Weir for his early morning inspections one of the last things he probably thought he'd be doing would be winching an enormous goanna out of the water.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:23 PM PST - 42 comments

"LIGO" - Director's Cut [1h46m] is a documentary about the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory [film website] and the painstaking path taken toward realizing and releasing their first major observation. It's a lot of smart people talking about doing complex science in an accessible way. If you like this kind of think, you'll probably like this.
posted by hippybear at 1:05 PM PST - 8 comments

This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap, prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs ... afraid to build products" in the United States. In fact, throughout the entire book, Dixon fails to identify a single blockchain project that has successfully provided a non-speculative service at any kind of scale. from Molly White's reviews Chris Dixon's Read Write Own
posted by chavenet at 12:10 PM PST - 12 comments

BBC: Users of Ring video doorbells have reacted angrily to a huge price hike being introduced in March. "That subscription is going up 43%, from £34.99 to £49.99 per device, per year, for basic plan customers. The firm, which is owned by Amazon, insisted it still provided 'some of the best value in the industry.' Its customers appear not to agree." Related user discussion on the Ring Community board. [more inside]
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:24 AM PST - 28 comments

"It is almost impossible to believe that these paintings have been overlooked. The qualifying statements people often make about their so-called domesticity and how Morisot did the best she could within a limited sphere, even when meant as a defence of the work, are entirely unconvincing: what is ‘the domestic’ but the core of life, of eros, and of work?" [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:17 AM PST - 16 comments

Numbats (small insectivorous marsupial that eats termites) in the wild doing better than expected despite prescribed burn with dire consequences. There was once thought to be fewer than 1000 numbats left in the wild, but a new study in southern Western Australia suggests that number is far greater. A video of numbats.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:49 AM PST - 20 comments

This pristine Canadian river has legal personhood, a new approach to conserving nature, is a review of the documentary "I am the Magpie River". [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:35 AM PST - 6 comments

Speed and strategy at the 2024 Winter Youth Olympics in Gangwon. Boing Boing, via misscellania
posted by Gorgik at 8:00 PM PST - 20 comments

mixtapegarden.com is a collaborative mixtape making site. Make an account, make a mixtape, & then you (or anyone else!) add 7 YouTube videos to it. Once the 7th one is added, it's converted to a single, crossfaded MP3 you can stream or download! (by @tobyalden)
posted by simmering octagon at 10:57 AM PST - 37 comments

A 380-million-year old predatory fish from Central Australia is finally named after decades of digging.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:15 AM PST - 6 comments

SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court to decide whether insurrection provision keeps Trump off ballot

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Thursday in what is shaping up to be the biggest election case since its ruling nearly 25 years ago in Bush v. Gore. At issue is whether former President Donald Trump, who is once again the front runner for the Republican nomination for president, can be excluded from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. Although the question comes to the court in a case from Colorado, the impact of the court’s ruling could be much more far-reaching. Maine’s secretary of state ruled in December that Trump should be taken off the primary ballot there, and challenges to Trump’s eligibility are currently pending in 11 other states. Trump warns that the efforts to keep him off the ballot “threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans” and “promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead.” But the voters challenging Trump’s eligibility counter that “we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.”

Wikipedia: Trump v. Anderson and the 2024 presidential eligibility of Donald Trump - Politico: Who is Norma Anderson? The 91-year-old lawmaker who could have Trump disqualified - 6 key questions in Supreme Court fight over Trump’s ballot eligibility - ResetEra's annotated list of the many amicus briefs - Tune in to official live audio of oral arguments in about an hour (starting at 10 a.m. Eastern) [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:52 AM PST - 235 comments

[NSFW] "It’s just the way I am and the way I’ve thought all my life. I did a lot of reading. I’ve always been drawn towards esoteric phenomena: the illogical, the inexpressible, the impossible. Anything that is ordinary and frequent is uninteresting to me, so I have to go in a solitary and risky direction. If it strikes you as being enigmatic, well, I suppose that’s what I wanted it to do." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:19 AM PST - 13 comments

First 2 weeks of bringing home Fraggle Rock from the shelter, Week 3, and commencing Week 4: daily illustrations by an artist on Tumblr. More on their Fraggle Rock tag (the cat not the show)
posted by Pallas Athena at 3:43 AM PST - 20 comments

One reason that it’s so difficult to know what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London kid, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. from A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld by Patrick Radden Keefe [The New Yorker; ungated] [CW: Death of a teenager, possible suicide]
posted by chavenet at 1:09 AM PST - 16 comments

From the CBC article: "What it really does look like is one of those truffula trees from The Lorax," said Olivia King, one of the researchers that discovered the fossil. She referred to a famous children's picture book by Dr. Seuss that features fantastic, colourful trees decimated to produce clothing called "thneeds."
posted by sardonyx at 8:54 PM PST - 10 comments

Hungry sea otters are helping save California's marshlands from erosion. Researchers found that the return of the crab-eating sea otters to a tidal estuary near Monterey, California, helped curb erosion. Sea otters eat constantly and one of their favorite snacks is the striped shore crab. These crabs dig burrows and also nibble away roots of the marsh grass pickleweed that holds dirt in place. Left unchecked, the crabs turn the marsh banks into Swiss cheese, which can collapse when big waves or storms hit, said Brent Hughes, a Sonoma State University marine ecologist and co-author of the new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:51 PM PST - 7 comments

An oddity that YouTube decided to share with me -- Queen, 1977, using Old Grey Whistle Test as a promotional tool for their upcoming album News Of The World. The Old Grey Whistle Test Presents Queen News Of The World [2h10m] is a lengthy look into rock and roll fame decades past.
posted by hippybear at 8:47 PM PST - 2 comments

Mojo Nixon has passed away at 66, while on the Outlaw Country Cruise. [more inside]
posted by neilbert at 7:52 PM PST - 78 comments

The problem is using a one-size-fits-all system to gatekeep a profession that needs diverse people to fill a huge array of roles. Pharris, who grew up in Appalachia and saw the need for greater access to care there, wants a credentialing system that provides an array of pathways into counseling that match the array of needs. People suffering domestic violence should have access to care from domestic violence specialists. Recent immigrants might need to talk with someone who understands their particular traumas. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 2:46 PM PST - 29 comments

Singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry shot to fame with Ode to Billie Joe and had a smattering of later hits, notably Fancy, covered by artists such as Irma Thomas, Spanky Wilson, Orville Peck and Reba McEntire. Though a flop at the time, her fantastic second album, The Delta Sweete, picked up many fans since, including Mercury Rev, whose The Delta Sweete Revisited covered eleven of twelve songs, each with a different singer: Norah Jones, Hope Sandoval, Rachel Goswell, Carice van Houten, Lætitia Sadier, Margo Price, Susanne Sundfør, Vashti Bunyan & Kaela Sinclair, Phoebe Bridgers, Marissa Nadler, Beth Orton, closing with Ode to Billie Joe as sung by Lucinda Williams. Missing track Louisiana Man was released later, sung by Erika Wennerstrom. Stuart Berman interviewed Mercury Rev about it.
posted by Kattullus at 1:36 PM PST - 12 comments

A video about adorable LA hipsters building a teardrop trailer
posted by Sebmojo at 1:15 PM PST - 15 comments

Infinite Craft - from the creator of the Password Game (previously), a browser-based colossal productivity killer where you simply combine two words, over and over, to make... any/everything?! (Via RPS)
posted by protorp at 11:05 AM PST - 216 comments

Reporting from The Tyee: The B.C. government quietly announced on Feb. 1 that it had detected chronic wasting (prion) disease in two deer.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:08 AM PST - 49 comments

New Study Reveals Large Holes In America’s Ocean Protection. Here’s How We Can Fix Them (Smithsonian magazine). Thousands of marine species, and many vital habitats, have little to no coverage in America’s marine protected areas.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:00 AM PST - 2 comments

Third Place? Here’s Why I Started Exploring the Sewers "Although the sewers have everything I’m looking for in a third place (rats, a constant fear of being discovered), I can recognize that they might not be for everyone. Similarly, some third places I tried out and found lacking that you should avoid at all costs include: standing too long in one place on the sidewalk (illegal), reading a book at a bookstore without buying it (illegal), and being outdoors without your wallet (illegal)."
posted by AlSweigart at 7:01 AM PST - 19 comments

Many games and tools exist in the mysterious valley that lies between tabletop roleplaying in groups and writing fiction. Solo RPGs can be considered a creative writing practice or a generator for creative writing. Solo gaming surged during the pandemic, along with a surge in the creation of solo RPGs. (What do you know? Solo boardgaming surged, too.) There are whole kit-n-kaboodle games, as one might find on MeFi Projects and elsewhere, and then there are tools that serve as emulators for the GM/DM/referee. In the depths of the valley, or at the height of the mountain range, between boardgames and solo RPGs are to be found tabletop RPG boardgames.
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:44 AM PST - 24 comments

Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt. Elon Musk is one of those books. from Very Ordinary Men, a deliciously scathing review of Walter Isaacson's biography by Sam Kriss [The Point Magazine; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:43 AM PST - 87 comments

A helpful Adversary explains to a Sunday School class the many ways that Evangelical Christian teaching doesn't match up to what pastors learn in seminary, in the animated documentary Satan's Guide to the Bible. (1 hour 26 minutes) Watch out for that Jen!
posted by JHarris at 11:02 PM PST - 23 comments

An expansion of solidarity: Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of acclaimed works like The Sympathizer, explores what it really means to be Asian American now, and how the question of Palestine is relevant for Asian Americans. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 9:47 PM PST - 7 comments

"The composition of Opening dates back to 1979, where Glass was commissioned by the Alberta Piano Institute to write a set of varying piano pieces for educational use. It was originally published for solo piano as part of his 'Solo Piano' album in 1989, and since then has been re-recorded and re-arranged in numerous other forms. Opening was also re-contextualised in 1996 as part of the album ‘The Essential Philip Glass’ and was even re-arranged again in 2010 as an orchestral score." Phillip Glass - 'Opening' ( offical version) [slyt. 7:17]
posted by clavdivs at 9:06 PM PST - 15 comments

More than 300 endangered glassfish (olive perchlet) have been rescued from a drying lake and transferred to a nearby landholder's dam in the back of a ute (a ute is a vehicle with an open cargo area at the rear, what the US would call a pickup truck). The olive perchlet, commonly known as glassfish, is a small endangered species that was once found throughout the east coast of Australia. Only isolated pockets remain now. It is considered one of the rarest fish in the Murray-Darling Basin, with the only other population in NSW previously believed to have been in Lake Brewster near Hillston.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:56 PM PST - 3 comments

After several years of alternative playoff game broadcasts, the NFL and Nickelodeon are stepping things up with an alternative Super Bowl broadcast on the children's entertainment network. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:30 PM PST - 14 comments

On February 1rst, Sylvia Baumgarten, award-winning romance novelist, died at the age of 90. [more inside]
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 4:12 PM PST - 8 comments

Clara Belle Williams was born in Plum, TX in October 1885 [!]. She attended undergrad in Prairie View TX, graduating in 1908. After a marriage, three sons, and a widowing, she enrolled at University Of Chicato and finally at New Mexico College of Agriculture in 1928. Clara Belle Williams was [what is now known as] New Mexico State University's first black graduate [nmsu.edu link, primary text link], graduating in 1937 with a degree in English at the age of 51. She was the Las Cruces School System's first black school teacher, and she forged a path into a community that had very little black population during a time long before it was expected. Here is an interview with Clara Belle Williams and her family from 1980 [1h31m. VHS transfer, long but amazing] [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:06 PM PST - 5 comments

“I guess I should just admit that I’m not a Pilot guy. If I’d realised that earlier, I’d have saved myself a lot of money — money that I could have spent on Viscontis and Montblancs, which speak to me much more.”
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:21 PM PST - 55 comments

This past Friday, Wayne Kramer, legendary co-founder and guitarist of the incendiary and massively influential MC5, died at the age of 75. [more inside]
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 1:18 PM PST - 31 comments

Taylor Swift threatens legal action against student who tracks her jet. Jack Sweeney — who irked Elon Musk by sharing public flight data — recently posted about the environmental impact of travel tied to the Eras tour and Swift's relationship with Travis Kelce. Taylor Swift’s lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to a college student who uses public flight data to track private jet usage, suggesting his social media accounts were aiding Swift’s stalkers and threatening her safety. gated story at wapo.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 12:53 PM PST - 150 comments

President Trump has become Citizen Trump [Gift New York Times link] A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals For the District of Columbia Circuit has unanimously rejected Trump's claim of absolute immunity.

For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.

[more inside]
posted by kirkaracha at 11:48 AM PST - 120 comments

Previously limited to users by invitation only, the X (née Twitter) competitor Bluesky is now open to the public. The culture currently encourges aggressive muting and/or blocking of trolls, and there’s no single algorithm that promotes or popularizes any particular individual. Like Mastodon, it was developed with an eye toward federation, though it’s not as far along in that regard, though the paper describing the AT protocol was just published. (Previously)
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:53 AM PST - 87 comments

Toby Keith - 1961-2024 Country singer Toby Keith passed away over night in his sleep at the age of 62. He revealed he'd been battling stomach cancer in 2022 Known for his ultra patriotic songs post 9/11 (e.g. “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,”) and big hits like his duet with Willie Nelson ("Beer for My Horses"), he had more than 60 charting hits. He was also known for being aggressively outspoken and was notable for his feud with the "Chicks" after their comments regarding the war in Iraq. He billed himself a conservative Democrat, became independent in 2008, praised Obama and then played at the "Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration" prior to Trump's inauguration.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:11 AM PST - 54 comments

The identity guidelines serve as the definitive source of truth—a rubric by which we gauge the success of everything we make (from furniture to campaign ads to retail catalogs), everywhere we show up (from brick-and-mortar showrooms to digital experiences to exhibition wall copy). Each component of the visual language is outlined individually, as well as how the full system works together.
posted by infinitewindow at 9:53 AM PST - 9 comments

Though the city has survived a series of local and national recessions in recent decades, San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises. from In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit [LRB; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:42 AM PST - 69 comments

Celebrate Chinese New Year in Nanyang style with a delicious raw veggie and fish (smoked salmon can be used) salad that will bring you good luck and prosperity for the year ahead. How to Lo Hei instructions for the newbies for the Singapore (alright fine, Malaysia too) tradition also called yusheng.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 11:05 PM PST - 6 comments

Breaking news about Zoozve The International Astronomical Union's Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature has made a decision, and that decision is to accept Radiolab's suggestion to name Venus' quasi-moon Zoozve! (Why did they suggest this? Previously.) [more inside]
posted by johnabbe at 10:15 PM PST - 16 comments

No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise? via Longreads. "Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, non-crankish people at Harvard, at The New Yorker, at the New York Times, and at the Pentagon seemed to be drifting ever closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth. Everyone was being appallingly open-minded. Yet even after more than 70 years of claimed sightings, there was simply no good evidence. In an age of ubiquitous cameras and fancy scopes, there was no footage that wasn’t blurry and jumpy and taken from far away." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:15 PM PST - 132 comments

Excavating a rare 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton in Mongolia. Retrieving the remains of the long-necked Nemegtosaurus In the remote Gobi desert.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:28 PM PST - 2 comments

For the past 15 years, a crew of volunteers has been going out to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center every week to count all the crawling, flying critters they can find. So far they've identified almost 3,000 species of insect including over 50 bees, 345 flies, and over 500 different beetles. (SLTexasObserver) [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:14 PM PST - 5 comments

I'm really not quite sure who Rosie Bennet is, but somehow she ended up sitting in Brian May's kitchen talking about all kinds of things. From fame to his astrophysics degree to AI and even a bit of music! It's a lovely gentle-voiced conversation that is one of the best musician interviews I've encountered lately! Brian May on AI, Mental Health, Fame, Plagiarism and the Internet - FRET NOT EP.2 [1h5m]
posted by hippybear at 2:13 PM PST - 7 comments

The guy at the keyboard (gift link) Are you bummed you weren’t around when the Stasi ruled? Do you wish you could’ve been one of Mao Zedong’s millions of neighborhood snitches? Maybe watch the Red Guards drag off your least favorite aunt? Not to worry, the bad old days are back — thanks to Nextdoor.com.
posted by Toddles at 2:05 PM PST - 96 comments

A web development extravaganza & feel good song, Antonymph will wow you if you're a web dev and might even make your cold, numb, unfeeling heart thaw just a smidgen. (Desktop browser and HD monitor highly recommended - not really for mobile!)
posted by signsofrain at 12:30 PM PST - 23 comments

The Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize has been awarded to a team that joined forces after their earlier successes. The team provided about 5% of the first scroll, which looks to be part of an Epicurean work. The organizers also announced the 2024 goal: 90% of the first four scrolls scanned and segmented!
posted by bbrown at 12:28 PM PST - 20 comments

Behold, the bin chicken: Sydney’s stinky, grimy but (mostly) beloved bird (WaPo gift link) Meet the Australian white ibis. It's not pretty, it smells bad, it poops huge, and it's always in your trash. Of course, some humans have now become fans of it, dressed like "sexy bin chickens," and made a rude song and a fake documentary about them, previously mentioned here in 2017.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:50 AM PST - 30 comments

and the dark patterns you should try to avoid. From their description: A game review website devoted to helping you find mobile games that aren't riddled with in-app purchases, and don't use psychological tricks to manipulate you into becoming an addicted gamer. Learn about the dark patterns that game designers use to waste your precious time and money. [more inside]
posted by wowenthusiast at 10:48 AM PST - 57 comments

"Sometimes treasures are hidden in plain sight and it only takes the curiosity of an astute observer to properly identify them. Such was the case with a piece of original artwork by Edward Gorey that is on display at the F. Brooke Whiting Museum in Cumberland, Maryland." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:17 AM PST - 26 comments

What are you writing - a CV? A resignation letter? Reports? A spell? Academic papers? Job applications? A thesis? Letters to lovers? A book? A ransom note? Some code? A shopping list? Some interactive fiction? Erotic fiction? A journal or diary entry? Poetry (by Jessica Smith)? MetaFilter posts? And with what - a favorite pen? A pencil? The keyboard? Software? A stencil? A tablet? A paintbrush? A quill? Something else? Or talk about anything and everything in your life and your world as this is your free thread.
posted by Wordshore at 2:15 AM PST - 182 comments

For better or worse, the web doesn’t work like that anymore. No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos. No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? from Where have all the websites gone? [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:42 AM PST - 82 comments

There are about 50 red pandas in Australia, but none have successfully given birth in two years until now. The new cub at Altina Wildlife Park near Wagga Wagga is the first born in Australia for two years — and with only 10,000 red pandas left worldwide, breeding programs like it are key to survival of the species.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:04 AM PST - 6 comments

Do you value yourself more than a broken Macbook? (Louis Rossmann, Piped/YouTube, 17m51s)
posted by flabdablet at 10:43 PM PST - 26 comments

How British colonialism increased diabetes in south Asians (SLYT) [more inside]
posted by splitpeasoup at 9:50 PM PST - 4 comments

Link is episode 1. As of 4 February 2024, he's up to episode 1887. Ron Calverley is a retired bus worker in Winnipeg who, after the death of his wife, decided to build a model ship like he had in his younger days. Actual model-making? Discussions of model-making infrastructure? LONG digressions about videography and computing? Classic old-man musings on life? ALL PROVIDED IN ABUNDANCE! [more inside]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:20 PM PST - 5 comments

Do you like Star Wars lore? Exactly how much do you like Star Wars lore? I ask because A Very Brief Analysis: The Phantom Menace is 12 hours long and is chock full of Star Wars lore. "This is not a defence of Episode 1, nor is it an attack. The idea is a detailed, fair, and informed analysis. We'll go over the entire movie, giving credit and blame as needed."
posted by hippybear at 3:46 PM PST - 34 comments

Now, with cocktail culture saturating the country anew, we’re in the middle of a glittering renaissance of bar lingo. The most common terms thrown about today are both functional and fun; they also offer a vivid snapshot of the current state of the industry in the U.S. and the way it is evolving. Reflecting the increasing crossover between restaurants and bars, for instance, many of-the-moment twists of the tongue are pulled directly from the restaurant industry (think “86’d,” “heard” and “behind.”). At Silver Lyan in Washington, D.C., for example, bartenders address each other as “chef,” as a sign of deference and respect, an organic evolution of their in-house language that predates The Bear. And as bars continue to adopt high-level scientific techniques, the nuances of redistilling, centrifuges, rotovaps and clarification demand their own attendant terms. from The New Vocabulary of Cocktails [Punch] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:33 PM PST - 15 comments

This is one of the best Blake's 7 fan fictions that I've ever read. Rojer by x_los. Summary: Taking down the Federation might actually be easier than sorting out what's going on with Rojer's parents.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:52 PM PST - 3 comments

A week after its debut, The Smile (featuring Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood alongside drummer Tom Skinner and the London Contemporary Orchestra) has released their acclaimed sophomore album Wall of Eyes for free on YouTube, backing the record's subtle, languid, slow-burn melodies and towering crescendos with eclectic [music videos] and colorful collages: 1) Thom enjoys an unsettling night out with his selves on ["Wall of Eyes"] [lyrics] - 2) the undulating soundscapes of "Teleharmonic" [lyrics] - 3) jangling psychedelia contrasts with pockets of honey-sweetness on "Read the Room" [lyrics] - 4) silent ghosts usher in "Under Our Pillows" [lyrics] - 5) the lads perform a song about lockdowns and corruption to an unfiltered gaggle of artless children in ["Friend of a Friend"] [lyrics] - 6) the glitchy drifting landscapes of "I Quit" [lyrics] - 7) the gorgeously existential "to be or not to be" of "Bending Hectic" [lyrics] (or see the [fan video] based on the enigmatic animation of Vladimir Tarasov) - 8) ethereally beautiful closing ballad "You Know Me!" [lyrics]. More: lyrics and analysis - BBC interview with the band and Jonny - behind-the-scenes video - photos from the special edition [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:11 PM PST - 9 comments

Moving away from our bodies as machines we can fix, to understanding that healing and help is based on our bodies feeling safe. Marylsa B. Sullivan and Dr. Stephen W. Porges have published a free academic paper that maps Polyvagal theory to the yoga gunas (rajas/tamas/sattva). While there are many resources for background, perhaps the best is to start with Dr. Porges: YouTube link (SKIP Betterhelp ad) to Dr. Porges explaining the Polyvagal Theory. (And in skipping the Betterhelp ad, note that while western therapy has started with the mind, polyvagal theory starts with the body and evolutionary biology to show that there are easily accessed, free ways to help with regulation such as singing, chanting, yoga asanas, listening, working with the breath etc.) TLDR: Quick explanation of Polyvagal theory on Psychology Today .
posted by Word_Salad at 9:08 AM PST - 15 comments

WHY DON'T WE JUST KILL THE KID IN THE OMELAS HOLE, by Isabel J. Kim. An excellent Omelas riff that's just what it sounds like.
posted by Pope Guilty at 8:24 AM PST - 77 comments

Biden wins South Carolina primary (NYT, WaPo, Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), carrying 96% of the vote and gaining 55 delegates in the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary.
posted by box at 6:28 AM PST - 178 comments

"I just really like the way ink looks on paper. I like its nuances and character. In some ways drawing with ink can feel like writing – it’s that same connection with a point against paper that I find incredibly expressive. I also like the fact that there is very little room to mess up. Ink does not erase well." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:54 AM PST - 1 comment

Since the start of the pandemic, the Zinn Education Project has been hosting free monthly Teach the Black Freedom Struggle classes. Scroll down for upcoming classes, and even further down for 49 past classes. They started with The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks in March 2020. Full transcripts started with Lessons from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in October 2020. Sign language interpretation was added with Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Hip-Hop History in October 2021. The latest class is The Condemnation of Blackness: Lies We’re Told About Crime from last month. Tomorrow's class is Interracial Organizing Stories from The Sum of Us. [more inside]
posted by clawsoon at 3:53 AM PST - 1 comment

These games are critical to the Times’ business strategy in trying to reach users—and ideally, future paying subscribers—beyond its core news product. Of course, the Times is still competing for White House scoops with its traditional print and digital rivals and dispatching correspondents to war zones. But the company is also vying for people’s attention against every app on their home screen. So it’s developed products in recent years to satisfy the lifestyle needs of its audience: cooking, shopping (via what is now known as Wirecutter, acquired in a 2016 deal worth more than $30 million), sports (via The Athletic, the site it acquired in 2022 for $550 million), and audio, building on the success of The Daily with a slew of podcasts ... The products and the journalism coexist under what the Times calls “the bundle,” an offering that has turbocharged the company’s ambitious growth strategy. from Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games [Vanity Fair; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 2:17 AM PST - 24 comments

This fanvid is really clever - it uses other films/TV Michael Sheen and David Tennant have been in to stitch together a long and involved history for Aziraphale and Crowley.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:46 AM PST - 4 comments

1948 and the roots of Israeli-Palestinian conflict "In the time of the British mandate, Jews and Palestinians, and Western and Arab powers, made fundamental choices that set the groundwork for the suffering and irresolution of today. Along the way, there were many opportunities for events to play out differently. We asked a panel of historians — three Palestinians, two Israelis and a Canadian American — to talk about the decisive moments leading up to the founding of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians and whether a different outcome could have been possible." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:07 PM PST - 39 comments

Ella Fitzgerald Live 1974 is a tight 45 minutes recorded in the ZDF studios. The setlist is in the first pinned comment under the video. Tommy Flanagan, Roy Eldridge, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Joe Pass, Keter Betts, and Bobby Durham all play with her.
posted by hippybear at 8:25 PM PST - 9 comments

In 1945, Hugh Le Caine, a physicist at Canada’s National Research Council, began working in his spare time on a single-channel musical instrument he dubbed the Electronic Sackbut. He was intrigued by the fact that the three auditory sensations associated with music—namely, pitch, loudness, and timbre—had counterparts in electronics—namely, frequency, amplitude, and the harmonic spectrum obtained by Fourier analysis. To demonstrate those qualities, Le Caine created a synthesizer that mimicked, among other things, a brass horn known as the sackbut. Listen to it on Hugh Le Caine - Compositions Demonstrations 1946-1974 (full album). Oh, and Vanilla Ice Remembers The Electronic Sackbut [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 1:56 PM PST - 18 comments

Arguably the most important innovation in cocktail construction over the last few decades was the reintroduction of fresh juice. from The Cocktail Revolution by Peter Suderman
posted by chavenet at 1:18 PM PST - 31 comments

"Like a shipwreck on a seabed": How wind turbines can become homes for marine life. Experts say wind turbines can create new marine habitats for marine life.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:13 PM PST - 1 comment

Everyone’s a sellout now Vox article describing the challenge for artists, writers, musicians who just want to practice their craft: Sorry, you need to be a highly-promoted brand first.
posted by Ayn Marx at 11:04 AM PST - 30 comments

We've all seen footage of the January 6th insurrection. But do you know what you saw? A recently released short documentary, Spiritual Warriors: Decoding Christian Nationalism at the Capitol Riot, identifies and explains this movement's involvement in the day's events, and its influence in producing them. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 8:07 AM PST - 56 comments

"A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That's the essence of the "reverse sprinkler" problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they've cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters". [more inside]
posted by jedicus at 8:03 AM PST - 13 comments

Do you have trouble keeping the logical fallacies straight? Who better to explain them than Mr. Spock.
YouTuber CHDanhauser has made a series of old-fashioned PSAs of about three to five minutes each, using the ST:TOS:TAS characters to explain fallacies and rhetorical devices. Recent entries include guilt or honor by association, neglect of probability, the "if by whiskey" fallacy, and presentism -- featuring a sentient dolphin from the water planet of Argo. [more inside]
posted by Countess Elena at 7:47 AM PST - 17 comments

British sf writer Christopher Priest has died at 80. Born in 1943, Christopher Priest came to prominence in the early 1970s with works such as Inverted World, the opening line of which form the quote for this post. Over a career spanning several decades (his last novel, Airside, was published in 2023) Priest received the British Science Fiction Association Award four times between 1974 and 2011, as well as several Hugo Award nominations. His best-known work may well be The Prestige , filmed in 2006.
posted by Major Clanger at 5:57 AM PST - 25 comments

Don Murray 's work as an actor, and life as a human being, was pretty damn great, and overlooked in the US's idiot celebrity culture. There are many comments worth reading from people who knew or appreciated him following his NYTimes obit.
posted by diodotos at 5:52 AM PST - 8 comments

“Representation Matters” feels like such an overused statement these days. Discussions about diverse films on press tours and in the media almost always include the question: “What does it mean for you to be an *insert member of underrepresented, marginalized community here* in the industry? It is such a loaded, cloying question and many artists feel pressured to represent every member of their community, simply by doing their job. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:00 AM PST - 4 comments

New Green Roof Bus Stops in Utrecht Cater to Commuting Bees. Commuters in Utrecht may notice a new green tinge to their neighborhood bus stop. Local authorities in the Dutch city have added 316 green-roofed, bee-friendly bus stops to public transit routes. More than 50% of the Netherlands’ 358 bee species are endangered; the green roofs provide safe, consistent habitat for the critically important pollinators, and are planted with low-maintenance sedum.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:11 AM PST - 9 comments

The risk of Americans being held on spurious charges by a foreign government is now so widespread that the State Department warns U.S. citizens against traveling to countries accounting for nearly a quarter of the world’s population. In diplomatic parlance, those nine nations are classified “D” for the risk of detention. Classification D is America’s gathering new reality: an increasingly piratical global system where the taking and trading of foreign citizens—once the preserve of guerrilla bands or fundamentalist insurgencies—has become a tactic deployed by nuclear states. from How Snatching American Citizens Turned Into a Tool of Hostile Governments [WSJ; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:34 AM PST - 20 comments

Carl Weathers has passed away (1948-2024). Here he was on stage 10 months ago at Star Wars Celebration. From MGM on Youtube, the best of Apollo Creed. Col. Dillon's death scene from Predator. Carl Weathers on the Rich Eisen Show about his football career. "Carl Weathers" meeting Tobias Fünke at Burger King. And Din Djarin meeting with Greef Karga in the first episode of The Mandalorian. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:55 AM PST - 36 comments

TOOL - Forty Six & 2 / Drum Covered by YOYOKA. Ever see calm yet raging fire? 4:35 [more inside]
posted by Gorgik at 10:06 PM PST - 4 comments

Ron Filipkowski at the Meidas Touch Network provides an update on the latest Trucker Convoy which the Take Our Border Back press release claimed would arrive at the Texas frontier tomorrow.... but the destination has been changed. [more inside]
posted by Rash at 1:06 PM PST - 94 comments

Dwight Garner on the Long History of Writers and America’s Greatest Invention, the Martini [Lithub] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:55 PM PST - 30 comments

The number of people donating blood has fallen by about 40% over the past 20 years (in the U.S.). Contributing factors? WIth climate change impacts, extreme weather cancellations are on the rise. And before the Covid-19 pandemic, almost every high school in the U.S. hosted at least one blood drive a year. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:45 PM PST - 74 comments

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water.

Look at it. Just look.

McMansion Hell (previ-ously on MeFi) explores the arcane architecture of 354 County Road 211 in Bremen, Alabama -- a gaudy (or Guadían?) wonder known locally as the Castle at Smith Lake. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:11 PM PST - 67 comments

and Also by the Time I Was Thirty-Five I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site. I thought that I would’ve for sure given a ted talk in my thirties on “How to Unleash the Infinite Writer’s Brain.” I haven’t even given a tedx. Damn, I really wasted the morning and the afternoon and the last ten years.
posted by folklore724 at 11:34 AM PST - 32 comments

A bardcore take on Kate Bush's legendary track, here is "Running Up That Hill" in Early Middle English (credits to the many collaborators for that track in the yt description).
posted by FatherDagon at 11:25 AM PST - 7 comments

My cat don’t like old typewriters [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:47 AM PST - 16 comments

'Take Five' arranged for solo guitar by Lucas Brar.
posted by MetaFilter World Peace at 8:26 AM PST - 26 comments

Scientists race against tides to discover why 90,000-year-old footprints were made. Scientists believe footprints that were accidentally found on a Moroccan beach were made by five modern humans 90,000 years ago. The team studied the 85 footprints using optically stimulated luminescence. It's a dating method that establishes the last time specific minerals were exposed to heat or sunlight. The technique dated these footprints to the Late Pleistocene period. This era, between 11,700 and 129,000 years ago, is commonly known as the Ice Age, when glaciers covered large parts of the Earth.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:20 AM PST - 7 comments

"This is my graphic adaptation of the first book in The Chronicles of Prydain, a series of children's books by Lloyd Alexander, an award-winning American author. The Book of Three was first published in 1964. This series of five books is a coming-of-age tale using the classic monomyth framework, a high fantasy written for children but often beloved by adults, who remain the most ardent fans. My adaptation is a labor of love. It is unauthorized, and the original books are still under copyright. My only profit in its creation is the joy and satisfaction of making this world come to life in a visual format, and connecting with other fans of the series."
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:45 AM PST - 22 comments

Every year, on 2 February, Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog comes out of his burrow and if the sun is shining and he sees his shadow before scurrying back into his hole, winter will last six more weeks. But if the day is cloudy, spring will come early. Curiously, Phil is not alone. A couple of other creatures do the same job across the Atlantic – and in all instances, it is a sunny day that will herald an ironic extended winter. from Groundhog Day's European creature parallels - and surprising 3000-year-old origins [BBC] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:13 AM PST - 23 comments

Turn the Lights Back On [SLYT]
posted by one for the books at 12:57 AM PST - 50 comments

TEN YEARS AGO TODAY: What advertising do you recall from watching Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2, 2014 (where Seattle humiliated Denver 43-8)? If you lived in the Savannah, Georgia area, your answer probably would be a personal injury attorney who purchased an entire commercial block for 120 glorious seconds of melodrama and myth-making. [more inside]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 11:18 PM PST - 21 comments

How Shade Coffee Aids Conservation. When managed in the right way, the farms that provide our morning brew can be a refuge for plant and animal biodiversity. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:50 PM PST - 8 comments

It has driven a wedge between Sámi in Russia and those in Nordic countries [Foreign Policy Magazine]

Russia’s war is splitting the indigenous Sami in two [The Economist]
posted by riruro at 5:53 PM PST - 12 comments

As they become a legacy act, doing a lengthy residency in Las Vegas, and are becoming ever more deprecated across younger generations triggered mainly by their Apple Album Distribution debacle, U2 fans Bill See [Divine Weeks frontman] and Melody Muraca [early U2 Fanzine founder] have sat down to record the Into The Heart Of U2 Podcast [YouTube playlist link]. Album by album, tour by tour, with a lot of research and background information that I didn't know before... This might be the way for you to process your U2 fandom or your U2 mourning. Apple Podcasts Link. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:42 PM PST - 80 comments

A brilliant new adaptation of the classic musical, "Oklahoma" Ado Annie sings "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No". This is a clip from the Olivier awards show in London.So different from the musical I saw in the 60's. Celeste Holm portrayed Ado in the original show on Broadway.
posted by Czjewel at 2:48 PM PST - 30 comments

It would be far too dramatic to extrapolate from the disastrous week that journalism itself is dying. The New York Times is healthy. Thanks to good management and demographically vigorous readerships, the Boston Globe and Minneapolis Star Tribune carry on. Cable, network and local TV news still toss off profits. But no matter how many heroic nonprofit newsrooms like the Baltimore Banner and Daily Memphian take root, no matter how many Substack-like newsletters blossom or creators emerge to drop their videos on YouTube, you can’t deny the journalism business’ decline. from The News Business Really Is Cratering [Politico] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:58 PM PST - 38 comments

Alex Chan: I was browsing social media this morning, and I saw a claim I’ve seen go past a few times now – that there’s a maximum size for a PDF document: 381 km × 381 km... Eventually I ended up with a PDF that Preview claimed is larger than the entire universe – approximately 37 trillion light years square. [via BoingBoing][ [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 1:33 PM PST - 39 comments

Wreckage of Ellipses by Anna Della Subin is a long essay on the Sumerian-language poet Enheduana, the world's oldest named author, and a review of Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World's First Author, a new translation by Sophus Helle. He was a guest on the podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, where he talked about Enheduana with Helena de Groot, and read some of his translations. A website accompanying the book provides background information and scholarly translations of Enheduana: Temple Hymns, a separate Hymn to Inana, and The Exaltation of Inana. The last poem was the jumping off point for the essay Poet of Impermanence, about what Enheduana can mean to modern readers. And here is the Exaltation of Inana in his literary translation.
posted by Kattullus at 12:46 PM PST - 12 comments

Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, has been celebrated for modernizing the United Arab Emirates—espousing gender equality and promising to “remove all the hurdles that women face.” Building on a 2023 article describing how some women in the sheikh’s own family endured shocking mistreatment (Archive), and how foreign governments failed again and again to help them, the New Yorker has just released a new podcast telling the story of Sheikha Lafita, her sister Shamsa and their, so far unsuccessful, struggles to escape the control of their father, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 12:05 PM PST - 7 comments

What if you took EVERY DJ break Howard Hesseman ever made, as Dr. Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati, and just ...followed his lead? Would it be possible to construct a three hour radio show, with Fever as host? [more inside]
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 11:29 AM PST - 38 comments

Won't Give Up (feat. Yo-Yo Ma and Quinn Christopherson): eco-drag royalty and climate activist Pattie Gonia has released a new love song to the planet and it is a collaboration with Ahtna Athabascan and Iñupiaq trans songwriter Quinn Christopherson and … cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who all met up in Christopherson’s native Alaska... writes S. Bear Bergman. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:05 AM PST - 3 comments

A new Victorian government inquiry will examine women’s pain and treatment. How and why is it different? Women are disproportionately affected by pain in terms of how common it is and sensitivity, but also in how their pain is viewed, treated, and even researched.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:53 AM PST - 13 comments

"I grew up in a highly controlled and religious family where women’s sexuality and freedom to express oneself was highly suppressed. As I matured and recognized how women were objectified, demonized, and dehumanized by my old religion and society I wanted to take these uncomfortable issues and channel them into an artistic dialogue. One of the significant ways I found my voice was through the body. Through this vessel I began by creating a world where feminine nudity and sexuality felt free, unashamed, celebrated, and powerful." [all links in this post NSFW] [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:18 AM PST - 10 comments

Like most major retailers, GAP has piped music into its stores for as long as they’ve been open. Unlike the others, however, a substantial number of GAP’s painstakingly-curated, monthly-rotating in-store playlists are accessible for all of us today thanks to the singular efforts of a Texas schoolteacher named Michael Bise. A GAP employee from 1992 to 2006, Bise has spent the last 17 years trying to re-obtain his lost collection of the paper tracklist inserts that would come with each month’s in-store CDs and cassettes. from The GAP Playlists Edition [Why Is This Interesting?] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:53 AM PST - 31 comments