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YouTube video from Paul Birder titled "Cat games mouse hide & seek, squeaking and playing for cats to watch".
posted by amtho at 4:32 AM PST - 4 comments

"When Ms. Jones began her career in publishing in the 1950s, cookbooks and food writing in general weren’t taken seriously, often lumped in with technical manuals and textbooks. Their editing focused on the recipe instructions, without thought to point of view, cultural context or the beauty of language." [Archive]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:02 AM PST - 2 comments

Ilid Kaolo is a singer-songwriter and Outlet Drift is a three piece rock band. Both acts draw on their roots as Indigenous Taiwanese people to create wonderful fusions. [more inside]
posted by jomato at 12:24 AM PST - 3 comments

On any reasonably sunny day, the pool would by then be echoing with the names of well-known people being called to the phone, as well as with the names of unknown people being called to the phone by themselves in the forlorn hope that one day this would help them become well known, too. From his vantage in front of his cabana, Irving could not only watch the parade go by but get the parade to sit down with him and play cards. from The Man Who Spent Forty-two Years at the Beverly Hills Hotel Pool [The New Yorker, 1993; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:12 AM PST - 5 comments

Columbia Journalism Review on The New Old Liberals Neoliberalism had become a slur. A group of very online young politicos set out to change that.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 12:08 AM PST - 10 comments

A Single Mutation Gave These Fish a Sense of Curiosity And Opened Up Their World.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:26 PM PST - 1 comment

The just-before or the just-after tell a story; whether of becoming, or of letting go. For over 12 years, Mary Jo Hoffman has been taking a daily image of a gathered natural object (usually plants, sometimes dead birds and in one case, a live toad). Click on "details" at the bottom right of each object for, well, details. Hoffman on technique: "I spend a lot of time waiting for the sun to go behind a cloud so I can get softer lighting."
posted by spamandkimchi at 4:13 PM PST - 4 comments

George Boole tried to "create a calculus to reduce all logical syllogisms, deductions, and inferences to the manipulation of mathematical symbols, and to cast a precise foundation for the theory of probability. This resulted in his greatest work: An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, [on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. (Gutenberg, pdf)] a book that laid out the rules of his new symbolic logic and also outlined, in the opening chapter, his grand intention to capture, with mathematics, the language of that ghost that whispers within the tortuous pathways of our minds." [Harper’s]
posted by HearHere at 1:59 PM PST - 17 comments

Fifteen-year-old Darlene hadn’t been in a classroom since fourth grade. She worked 11-hour days at a chicken restaurant, a step up from the slaughterhouse where she’d worked when she was younger. Every paycheck went to her parents who turned it over to the prophet. Everything the hardworking people did was in service to the prophet and to build up the church. Darlene’s future was determined for her: She’d be a wife and mother, and serve the church and her husband. from This Is Not an Escape Story [Runner's World; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 11:55 AM PST - 13 comments

www.queensongs.info is your comprehensive guide to the music of Queen. [more inside]
posted by dbx at 10:20 AM PST - 10 comments

Invasive species are well known to be a threat to the native ecosystem (usgs.gov pdf titled Wild Sheep and Deer in Hawai`i—a Threat to Fragile Ecosystems). Axis deer are particularly damaging, running rampant on Maui. They were introduced to the Big Island in 2009 and it took 5 years of government sponsored effort to successfully eradicate them. One of those involved in that project, Jack Muise (long interview on the podcast The Drive with the story of his life and how he got started) has started a business humanely hunting axis deer for commercial resale. The Struggle to Contain, and Eat, the Invasive Deer Taking over Hawaii. Axis deer were first brought to the islands in the 1860s. Now they number in the tens of thousands. (Modern Farmer). How Hawaii Became the Source of a Rare and Tasty Breed of Venison (By Evan Bleier for Inside Hook) "Harvested at night across 250,000 acres from 50 to 75 yards away using surveillance drones, UTVs and long-range rifles equipped with infrared scopes, Maui Nui’s deer are killed under the watchful eyes of a USDA inspector in a manner that is designed to make the deer unaware they are being hunted."
posted by bq at 8:25 AM PST - 23 comments

Human hair and unwanted wool could be turned into a vital component for lithium batteries, researchers say. Charles Sturt University researchers say synthetic graphite made from hair and wool offcuts could help meet growing demand for the mineral, which is used to make lithium-ion batteries.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:16 AM PST - 24 comments

Made possible by an endowment offered through the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Sikivu Hutchinson has become "the first Black woman to teach a course on African American humanism," which was held at Pitzer College. [more inside]
posted by audi alteram partem at 6:52 AM PST - 3 comments

Nearly a year and a half ago, Joseph Newton did an excellent video about Cursed units. Now he's back with Cursed Units 2: Curseder Units! From fuel efficiency in square millimetres to the barrer, the definition of which has cm appear no less than four times, you're sure to encounter some weird (metric) units you'd not heard of. [2LYT]
posted by Dysk at 5:38 AM PST - 16 comments

Rebekah Peppler on Julia Child and cooking in the south of France: "The kitchen remains as one imagines it did when Julia Child built it. Tart rings, copper pots, measuring spoons, and whisks line the four walls, with outlines marking a designated spot for every single item. Market baskets pile high in a corner; the screened door bangs shut in a way that feels like many have entered through it. And many have." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:31 AM PST - 9 comments

That's Gender Dysphoria This experience of discontinuity between the societal presumed gender and the internal sense of self is what we describe as Gender Dysphoria, and is common among nearly all trans individuals, regardless of their position within or outside of the gender binary. This has at times been something of a political topic within trans communities, as different groups have their own ideas of what Gender Dysphoria is, how it manifests itself, and what qualifies a person as being trans. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 3:36 AM PST - 33 comments

Telepathy might initially seem a much softer, psychological proposition, tainted with a sense of the supernatural. Yet both Campbell and Clarke were lifelong advocates of the view that telepathy was highly probable, the scientific proof of its existence likely just around the corner. The promise of telepathy – soon to be achieved, not far off, only a few test subjects away – feels very familiar when reading Musk’s boosterish announcements on Neuralink’s latest breakthroughs. The promise that telepathy is just about to be realised is not confined to entrepreneurs and science-fiction writers alone. For more than a century, there have consistently been figures in the scientific establishment who have entertained similar hopes that telepathy would soon reach the threshold of proof, promising everything from opening a new evolutionary phase of human development to a new psychic front in the global arms race. from Tomorrow People [Aeon; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:54 AM PST - 33 comments

'Tis the week of midsummer and the solstice, when people gather for early sunrises, and late sunsets (northern hemisphere edition) impress. Bonfires are lit, and rituals to cleanse abound, in many places (anywhere you want) and not just overcrowded Stonehenge. But what was your "longest day" (and interpret that in any you see fit)? Happy, sad, epic, life-changing, life-affirming? On your own, with a loved one, a friend, or a crowd? Or just write about whatever is on your mind, in your heart, or on your plate, because this is your weekly free thread. Happy midsummer, MeFites!
posted by Wordshore at 12:12 AM PST - 69 comments

'Wanderers' A short film my Erik Wernquist . (slyt. 3:50)
posted by clavdivs at 8:25 PM PST - 12 comments

Punch Punch Forever is (currently) a two episode cartoon parody of both fighting tournament anime and fandom subbing culture, arising from out of Newgrounds (remember them?) and made by animator speedoru. It presents itself as a lost anime series from the 90s; it also goes by at 90 miles an hour. It's in Japanese with subtitles. So far there's the pilot (8 minutes) and the second episode, My Little Slasher (12 minutes). CW: juvenile humor, cartoon violence and gore. It's very silly. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 6:28 PM PST - 10 comments

A linguist shares the story of his study with the last remaining speaker of South Tsimshian As shared to r/linguistics in 2013: “Today, Violet Neasloss, aka Nanny Violet, passed away. she was the oldest resident of Klemtu BC, 99 years old, and also one of the happiest, quickest, and most caring. With her death, the South Tsimshian, or SgüüXs language is now sleeping, but because of her, and the hundreds of hours of exhausting mental work she committed to over those months, at some point in the future, members of her community will have the option to wake it up again, and some have already started. [more inside]
posted by bq at 4:49 PM PST - 7 comments

This team went guerilla-style into the British Museum to create exact replicas of the Parthenon marbles. This archaeologist and his team had a simple plan — take 3D scans of the Parthenon marbles and recreate them for the British Museum so the originals could be returned to Greece. When the museum said no, they went in anyway, guerilla-style.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:22 PM PST - 21 comments

To most people, pulling into a highway rest stop is a profoundly mundane experience. But not to neuroscientist Rita Valentino, who has studied how the brain senses, interprets and acts on the bladder’s signals. She’s fascinated by the brain’s ability to take in sensations from the bladder, combine them with signals from outside of the body, like the sights and sounds of the road, then use that information to act—in this scenario, to find a safe, socially appropriate place to pee. “To me, it’s really an example of one of the beautiful things that the brain does,” she says. from How Do We Know When to Pee? [Smithsonian; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:19 PM PST - 21 comments

The Lonely, Resolute Path of Oklahoma Lesiglator Mauree Turner (slWaPo) "Being the nation’s first Black, Muslim, nonbinary state lawmaker, let alone the first in Oklahoma, was never going to be easy."
posted by box at 10:17 AM PST - 3 comments

Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe – The rules are the same as normal tic-tac-toe, but each square has a different probability of a good (smiley face), neutral (meh face), or bad (frowny face) event happening when selected. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 9:22 AM PST - 17 comments

13 year old Lucas Jemeljanova becomes first person to be cured of DIPG, a mostly fatal pediatric brain cancer, after traveling to France to participate in a study on the effectiveness of 3 cancer drugs. The same mRNA technology that brought us the COVID-19 vaccine could also be used to create a vaccine for cancer. Microrobots made of algae can carry chemo directly to lung tumors, improving cancer treatment. The American Society of Clinical Oncology met this year to share their latest findings on ways to treat cancer: from “melting away” tumors, to more accurate cancer screenings, and clinical trials for promising cancer vaccines.
posted by toastyk at 7:47 AM PST - 9 comments

English Heritage’s Properties Curator, Win Scutt said: “These finds reveal a fascinating insight into the lives of those at Tintagel Castle more than 1,500 years ago. It is easy to assume that the fall of the Roman Empire threw Britain into obscurity, but here on this dramatic Cornish cliff top they built substantial stone buildings, used fine table wares from Turkey, drank from decorated Spanish glassware and feasted on pork, fish and oysters." 2016 excavations report. Guardian article about a truly extraordinary window ledge inscription from the 7th century. More about Tintagel for folks who've never heard of it. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:36 AM PST - 9 comments

Dentist Discovers Human-Like Jawbone and Teeth in a Floor Tile at His Parents' Home. Scientists are planning to study the specimen, embedded in travertine from western Turkey, in hopes of dating and identifying it. He found the jawbone in a tile made of travertine, a type of limestone that typically forms near hot springs. This specific tile came from a quarry in the Denizli Basin of western Turkey. The travertine excavated there formed between 0.7 million and 1.8 million years ago, which suggests the mandible did not come from a person who died recently.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:18 AM PST - 15 comments

In our technological age people are often caught between two worlds, forced to choose between what is pleasurable and what is beyond pleasurable. Activity A may be a genuinely enjoyable activity, but as an ordinary pleasure it comes with certain discomforts and limitations. Activity B, on the other hand, promises to move past those limitations, satiating our desire for maximal pleasure. Who wouldn’t want to choose Activity B, then, when the option is presented so readily? from The Rise of Hyperpleasures by Samuel C. Heard (Mere Orthodoxy; ungated)
posted by chavenet at 1:57 AM PST - 62 comments

This volume thus builds upon growing art historical, anthropological, and historical literature that argues that “art” is far from a natural category of human endeavor, but instead represents a historically specific idea and practice emerging in Europe from the Enlightenment and its aftermath [:] the radical and unprecedented bifrucation of the artist, as the genius who produces things of beauty, from the skilled artisan or crafts[person] who produces useful objects. [what’s the use of art?] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 5:49 PM PST - 11 comments

DrawingMachines.org attempts to simultaneously be scholarly, technical, engaging, inspirational, and, most of all, useful. Every attempt is made to satisfy the academic art historian, the artist, the designer, the tinkerer and the student. If you are looking for historical or technical information, this site aims to satisfy both. This is a reference site, but aimed at different audiences interested in drawing.
posted by chavenet at 1:32 PM PST - 4 comments

On March 8, 2024, the Canadian National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) provided Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with the Special Report on Foreign Interference in Canada’s Democratic Processes and Institutions (redacted pdf). On June 3, NSICOP tabled the report in Parliament. The document alleges that while "parliamentarians were unaware they were the target of foreign interference", others have been "wittingly assisting foreign state actors," though maybe not anybody currently in Parliament. [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 12:20 PM PST - 14 comments

The search for the mysterious company behind a scheme to steal Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate ended last week, not in Nigeria--where initial clues seemed to lead--but at the front door of "a grandmother in Branson, Missouri, a con woman with a decades long rap sheet of romance scams, forged checks and bank fraud totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars, for which she did time in state and federal prison."
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 10:08 AM PST - 21 comments

Scuba Diver handling Moray Eel, it enjoys it [SLYT] [more inside]
posted by slater at 9:32 AM PST - 23 comments

A Washington Post investigation found hundreds of law enforcement officers in the United States have sexually exploited kids. Many avoid prison time. From the various LinkMe requests over here, because there are a lot of bad cop stories this week. Sigh. [more inside]
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:25 AM PST - 14 comments

Justice Alito Caught on Tape Discussing How Battle for America 'Can't Be Compromised' [ungated] - "In a new, secret recording, the Supreme Court justice says he 'agrees' that the U.S. should return to a place of godliness." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 9:07 AM PST - 43 comments

There are a variety of "low-carbon" or "bandwidth-friendly" variants of news sites out there that load headlines with little styling and no images, such as CBC Lite, and much, much more. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 8:10 AM PST - 12 comments

See how a translator carries a book from one language to another, line by line. Much like a crossword, a translation isn’t finished until all the answers are present and correct, with each conditioning the others. But when it comes to literature, there is rarely ever just one solution, and my job is to test as many as possible. A word can be a perfect fit until something I try in the next clause introduces a clumsy repetition or infelicitous echo. Meaning, connotation and subtext all matter, but so does style. Below are two attempts to show the thought processes involved in the kind of translation I do. Sophie Hughes for the New York Times.
posted by bq at 8:06 AM PST - 14 comments

This outback property is home to 37 species found nowhere else in the world, many hiding in springs for millennia. Unique species of fish, snails, and crustaceans have existed on this isolated property in Western Queensland since the dinosaur age when it was deep under water as part of the Eromanga Sea.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:18 AM PST - 2 comments

We might now be on the cusp of a similar sea change, with American policymakers, especially Democrats and the broader center-Left, beginning to craft a new industrial policy and seeking to decouple economically from China. This decoupling is accompanied by an ersatz new Cold War with China—reminding us of how an earlier era of more activist liberal government required the Cold War to legitimate and underpin it. Whether such efforts will take hold is, for now, unclear. But understanding what these efforts are designed to overturn requires returning to the pivotal years of America in the 1990s. from What the 1990s Did to America [Public Books]
posted by chavenet at 1:58 AM PST - 13 comments

In which youtuber f4mi talks famiclones, bootleg software, and demake ports of popular games, long after the West had given up on the NES, with a focus on one very special demake in particular... [SLYT]
posted by Dysk at 11:24 PM PST - 4 comments

[two hours, SLYT] From a talk presented at https://cackalackycon.org/, professional physical pentester Deviant Ollam explains fire codes and fire safety systems (such as fire doors and sprinkler systems). [more inside]
posted by Cat_Examiner at 9:29 PM PST - 8 comments

The 387 Paper Model Houses of Peter Fritz
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 8:01 PM PST - 9 comments

Edward Hopper - Haskell's House - 1924. The house IRL. Haskell's House at Hopperhead. Haskell's House for the Hopper fan. Hopper previously.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:55 PM PST - 11 comments

But this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas. from research as leisure activity by Celine Nguyen [Personal Canon]
posted by chavenet at 11:54 AM PST - 19 comments

GQ: “It’s happening very fast,” said Saurabh Netravalkar, the Team USA cricket player with the world-famous LinkedIn profile ... Several fans in attendance held up signs calling Kohli a god; one held up a sign asking Netravalkar for a job reference. Guardian: As it happened: USA beat Pakistan. The Athletic: So, for a son of Mumbai to inflict such a humiliating defeat on the old enemy was a case of Netravalkar - in the words of his younger sister Nidhi on social media - “making two countries happy”. Times of India: Balancing his dual roles as a cricketer and a software engineer at Oracle, Netravalkar manages his demanding career alongside his sports commitments. Interviewed in cricbuzz: “I filed for a patent. It was an innovation algorithm that we had.” [more inside]
posted by Wordshore at 11:46 AM PST - 11 comments

An Ode to Luby's and the Southern Cafeteria (The Bitter Southerner)
posted by box at 11:38 AM PST - 39 comments

Reuters: Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic 'The U.S. military launched a clandestine program [that started under former President Donald Trump and continued months into Joe Biden’s presidency] amid the COVID crisis to discredit China’s Sinovac inoculation – payback for Beijing’s efforts to blame Washington for the pandemic. One target: the Filipino public. Health experts say the gambit was indefensible and put innocent lives at risk.' (ungated)
posted by cendawanita at 10:56 AM PST - 60 comments

Romance Writers of America continues its slow crawl towards oblivion, filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy, blaming 'disputes concerning diversity, equity, and inclusion issues between some members of a prior RWA board and others in the larger romance writing community'. Meanwhile author Courtney Milan continues to live her best life, organizing the next round of the Romancing the Vote fundraiser, self-publishing (extremely well reviewed) historical romances featuring diverse characters, and writing a chatty weekly newsletter about tea for her fans. [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:36 AM PST - 17 comments

Casey Newton & Zoe Schiffer report that The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled. The Observatory "was created to learn about the abuse of the internet in real time, to develop a novel curriculum on trust and safety that is a first in computer science, and to translate our research discoveries into training and policy innovations for the public good."

SIO and its researchers have been sued three times by conservative groups alleging that its researchers colluded illegally with the federal government to censor speech, forcing Stanford to spend millions of dollars to defend its staff and students.

[more inside]
posted by adamrice at 7:32 AM PST - 36 comments

Is autocorrect racist? The push to stamp out galling ethnic name bias on phones and computers. A new campaign — called I Am Not A Typo — is urging tech companies to fix ethnic bias in their algorithms to stop autocorrect mangling so many people's names.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:20 AM PST - 35 comments

The Grab: "a riveting new documentary which outlines, with startling clarity, the move by national governments, financial investors and private security forces to snap up food and water resources." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 7:11 AM PST - 7 comments

Over 50 small press books under the fold! (previous: 1, 2, and 3) [more inside]
posted by joannemerriam at 6:43 AM PST - 3 comments

For those who have started down the road of matrimony and remain on it. For others who left, came back, and found themselves broken, free, or enlightened. And for the many who dream of what marriage is or curse what they imagine it to be. This one's for you.
posted by gestalt saloon at 6:09 AM PST - 39 comments

Aussies taste-test the spicy ramen that's too hot for Denmark. [more inside]
posted by rory at 5:52 AM PST - 59 comments

The Microscopic Universe That Thrives in Our Sky (previously) [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 5:46 AM PST - 9 comments

Instead, to commemorate the film breaking $100 million at the domestic box office, Artisan sent each actor a fruit basket.
posted by Kitteh at 5:22 AM PST - 32 comments

To get a sense of the scale here, video games are worth more than the film industry. And the music industry. In fact, the video game industry is bigger than both of those industries combined. That’s staggeringly big. The immense size and economic power of the industry, which is largely nonunionized, creates regulatory gaps, leading to inevitable dysfunction and exploitation. This makes life miserable for employees and consumers alike, both in the workplace and beyond. [Jacobin]
posted by HearHere at 3:05 AM PST - 29 comments

There are two elements in all this that seem to be at odds with each other. On the one hand, things like a proverb, a symbol, or—as in Borges' story—a novel have some sort of universality. They transcend the ages and remain applicable in different contexts. On the other hand, they acquire a unique flavor every time, dependent on the specifics of the people and times involved. This is not a paradox, though, but a typical result of chaotic processes. from Borges on Chaos Theory [Aether Mug]
posted by chavenet at 12:55 AM PST - 3 comments

Françoise Hardy, icône de la culture pop, est morte. BBC obit. When we were all young, she was a bit of a heart-throb for Jagger, Bowie and Dylan. And a person in her own right! Comment te dire adieu? - Tous les garçons et les filles. Chapeau!
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:12 AM PST - 18 comments

Caravaggio masterpiece considered lost for centuries to be unveiled. The painting is one of only 60 known Caravaggio pieces in existence and is considered one of the most valuable old master artworks in the world.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:11 PM PST - 12 comments

When, last year, I saw in my prose that falseness and false formality, I wondered where it had come from. I seemed to be a few minutes away from using whence. I seemed to be searching for a rhythm that wouldn’t come, and reading over tatters of drafts later, I realized I was attempting to write prose in what was basically iambic pentameter, as if this classic formal constraint contained within it the key, the one key, to a sense of writing well, a sense so rare that year for me to find at all. From whence this sense of language-pressed-through-sieve? from I Cannot by Lucy Schiller [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:23 PM PST - 15 comments

Using bullshit as a term of art (as defined by Harry G. Frankfurt), ChatGPT and its various LLM cohort can best be described as bullshit machines. [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:09 PM PST - 66 comments

Imaginary Numbers are Matrices [Japanese with English captions] – If you would like to have imaginary numbers and quaternions explained in the form of a dialogue between anthropomorphized vocal synthesizers, then Zundamon and Metan are here to oblige you. Zundamon's Theorem is a channel with more of these mathematically enriching conversations.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:08 PM PST - 9 comments

Adorable knitted frogs [more inside]
posted by bq at 9:18 AM PST - 19 comments

Tasmanian devils off to the US. Tequila, Tabasco, Mouse and Mozza and four other Tasmanian devils will soon board a long haul flight to the US, where they'll settle into four zoos as part of Tasmania's ambassador program.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:57 AM PST - 5 comments

This just in: the Supreme Court has issued their opinion (.pdf) on FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, and it's unanimous. The plaintiffs lack the standing to challenge the FDA on the abortion medication drug mifepristone. Previously.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:02 AM PST - 67 comments

Inspired by JaneBrown's comment in a LinkFilter thread [⇔ Linked], I went looking for more music by vocalist Edythe Wright. Jackpot, here's The complete Edythe Wright compilation via YouTube (90 minutes)! [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:00 AM PST - 1 comment

Mark Melton nearly single handedly has created a system for providing representation to people facing eviction in Dallas When tenants don’t have legal representation, landlords win 79% of the time. With legal representation that drops to 10%. In Texas, eviction courts are handled by justices of the peace and defendants are not entitled to legal representation. Simply enforcing due process has made a dramatic difference in people’s lives. [more inside]
posted by larthegreat at 7:57 AM PST - 19 comments

"Storytelling has been a social activity since the dawn of time. Board games can add another level to it with nuanced strategies for decision-making and objectives with epic stakes." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:06 AM PST - 9 comments

People are flipping out over Leopold Aschenbrenner's gargantuan look at the current and future state of AI in Situational Awareness [PDF]. Is it the start of the world? Is it the end of the world? When? 2027! Summary by ChatGPT. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:17 AM PST - 87 comments

How To Avoid Being Eaten By A Black Bear. A recent study of fatal black bear attacks shows that hungry males are the ones to really worry about.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 9:52 PM PST - 79 comments

"wall drawings were already selling for thousands of dollars, so he wanted to have some artwork that everybody could buy" [Radius: not to be sold for more than $100] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 2:54 PM PST - 7 comments

In a flip-flop for the ages, New York Governor Kathy Hochul suddenly decided to place NYC's massive congestion pricing program (that she championed) on "indefinite pause" less than a month prior to launch. The program, set to go in effect later this month, would have charged drivers coming into Manhattan's central business district $15 during peak hours. Those funds were set to deliver $1 billion dollars a year, providing much needed infrastructure and accessibility updates to the city's century-old subway system. Was this all a cynical election year ploy? Where will the money come from now? And is this even legal?
posted by grimace636 at 2:12 PM PST - 80 comments

Dire Straits were a massively successful band; they have sold more than 100 million records worldwide, each of their albums was top-5 in the US, their hallmark record Brothers in Arms was #1 in 18 countries, and they are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Mark Knopfler is so admired by (at least some) paleontologists that he is the namesake of a dinosaur species discovered in 2001. (Ed. note: it turns out that a whole bunch of rockers are real-life dinosaurs.) With all that success, the pedestrian inspirations behind two of their biggest hit songs are a fun bit of trivia. [more inside]
posted by AgentRocket at 1:36 PM PST - 68 comments

A surprise for the subject of the photo and the band members themselves [Consequence of Sound] The mystery subject behind one of the most iconic album covers of the ’80s has finally been uncovered. For decades, fans have speculated about the identity of the inspiration for illustrator Patrick Nagel’s artwork for Duran Duran’s Rio, who has now been revealed as model Marcie Hunt. [more inside]
posted by indexy at 1:02 PM PST - 20 comments

"You Didn't See Nothin'" is a seven-part investigation of the 1997 racist assault on a Black child in Chicago's Bridgeport neighborhood. (cw for racism and violence--most of the links in this post mention or describe the assault at the center of this podcast.) The podcast is the work of Yohance Lacour, who reported on the nearly fatal assault of Lenard Clark in 1997 for the South Street News, a South Side neighborhood paper. Returning to the story 25 years later, Lacour looks into the local figures who pushed a racial reconciliation narrative on the story and details the mob ties of the primary identified assailant. [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 12:40 PM PST - 2 comments

Starring the Computer is a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it). Fictional computers don't count (unless they are built out of bits of real computer), so no HAL9000 - sorry. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:31 PM PST - 16 comments

Finally, A Definitive Guide To Automakers That Also Offered Home Air Conditioners, So You Can Stop Asking by Lewin Day at The Autopian
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 11:42 AM PST - 4 comments

Hollywood's Brief Cocaine Binge On '87-'88's Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, and Clean and Sober (Scott Tobias for The Reveal)
posted by box at 11:39 AM PST - 14 comments

The Banksy Museum does not own or display any actual Banksys but rather 167 decent-enough reproductions of them, life-size murals and paintings on panels treated to look like exterior walls that stretch through an exhibition space, designed to resemble the street. Max Lakin for the New York Times [more inside]
posted by bq at 10:53 AM PST - 10 comments

What it says on the tin. (Gift link, New York Times) Come for the cooking technique; stay for the radius, standard deviation, and not-actually-surprising ending. Previously on Metafilter: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt; onions.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 8:56 AM PST - 56 comments

Moondrop Isle – a big text adventure you can play in your browse, written by a crew of nine authors. Features: Urban exploration! - Environmental storytelling! - Puzzles! - Secrets! - Feral guinea pigs! [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 8:36 AM PST - 16 comments

“Supposedly a true book lover adores the smell of books.”
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:16 AM PST - 26 comments

Elephants call each other by name, study finds. Researchers used artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse calls by two herds of African savanna elephants in Kenya.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:06 AM PST - 24 comments

Jerry West, the inspiration for the NBA's logo, died peacefully at his home at the age of 86. One of basketball's most accomplished contributors, West was a staple of the sport across eight decades, winning nine championships as a player, scout, coach, executive and consultant. [more inside]
posted by NoMich at 7:16 AM PST - 21 comments

With legislative and social attacks against trans people across the US, you may have missed some of the more encouraging stories. Here's just a few: 1. Federal Court Blocks First State Law Restricting Health Care for Transgender Adults. The ruling in Doe v. Ladapo found that Florida SB 254 and the related Boards of Medicine (BOM) rules were motivated by disapproval of transgender people and violate the equal protection rights of transgender individuals and parents of transgender minors in Florida. [more inside]
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 2:29 AM PST - 16 comments

Today, QAnon exists in a vastly more complex media ecosystem and seems to be addressing a wider, more amorphous set of concerns. But its rough function is the same: The family order is again seen as being threatened, this time by attacks on gender norms. Q gives people a way to feel they are protecting the traditional atomic family. By devouring fresh posts from QAnon influencers, donning Q gear, or spreading word online about the impending arrest of the cabal, Q faithful felt like they were doing everything they could to support the welfare of children and usher in a new era of conservative family values that would put them in charge. from How Q Became Everything [Mother Jones; ungated] [CW: Q, conspiracy, Felonious Trump, Epstein, pedophilia etc. etc.]
posted by chavenet at 12:56 AM PST - 18 comments

Signs and Wonders: Celestial Phenomena in 16th-Century Germany "The villagers of Strasbourg may have heard about a war in heaven while reading the Book of Revelation; in 1554, they witnessed one with their own eyes. As a broadsheet published in June of that year records, a bloody, fiery ray bisected the sun, followed by a clash between cavalry — each side bearing guidons. War raged for hours, and then, as suddenly as they appeared, the combatants trotted off into the clouds. "
posted by dhruva at 10:40 PM PST - 4 comments

Why do trucks/lorries hit bridges?
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:24 PM PST - 60 comments

US banana giant ordered to pay $38m to families of Colombian men killed by death squads A Florida court has ordered Chiquita Brands International to pay $38m to the families of eight Colombian men murdered by a paramilitary death squad, after the US banana giant was shown to have financed the terrorist organisation from 1997 to 2004. [more inside]
posted by bunderful at 8:12 PM PST - 22 comments

After over a quarter century, The Jesus Lizard are releasing a new album and small tour. [more inside]
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 6:32 PM PST - 10 comments

"This is a slow moving thread of screaming and horrified city gates. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" Does what it says on the tin. (SLMastodon)
posted by doctornemo at 6:01 PM PST - 12 comments

Large pieces of the trunk structure of SpaceX's Dragon capsule have been crashing to earth following re-entry, including in NSW, Australia, Saskatchawan, Canada, and NC, US. Prof Sam Lawler is the astronomy professor at the University of Regina, so when a farmer in Saskatchawan found a piece in a field, she got the call. She has been chronicling what has happened next on Mastodon (all links should be viewable without a Mastodon account), with today's amazing chapter in which SpaceX representatives arrived in a Uhaul to pick up the pieces found by two local farmers. [more inside]
posted by hydropsyche at 5:47 PM PST - 20 comments

'Professional wrestling’s profitable use of kayfabe... offers a prism for understanding the trajectory of conservative politics today'.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:01 PM PST - 20 comments

Level Devil is a minimalist browser-based platformer that combines cruelty, accessibility, and a wicked sense of comic timing. [more inside]
posted by longtime_lurker at 3:13 PM PST - 22 comments

Occasionally, people make music, and then wildly different people cover that music with wildly different sounds and results. I like when this happens. I especially like when it happens without changing the pronouns of the original piece. “Look into his angel eyes…” hits differently when it comes from a sparsely accompanied, gravelly male voice, instead of, ah, ABBA. from Genderswap.fm by Eva Decker [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:10 PM PST - 19 comments

Lynn Conway, pioneering computer scientist and trans activist, passed away on June 9. Every aspect of computing is deeply dependent on Conway's work; DIS, which she invented while at IBM, is one of the crucial foundations of modern computer architecture, and her innovations (with Mead) to the methodology of VLSI paved the way for the entirety of modern IC design. So when you look at your phone or your computer today, say a quiet "thank you".
posted by adrienneleigh at 11:31 AM PST - 64 comments

Driver who caused deadly Humboldt Broncos bus crash denied first bid to stay in Canada (Jaskirat Singh) Sidhu was sentenced to eight years after pleading guilty to dangerous driving causing death and bodily harm in the April 2018 crash that killed 16 people and injured 13. Court was told Sidhu, a newly married permanent resident, missed a stop sign at a rural Saskatchewan intersection and drove into the path of the Broncos bus carrying players and staff to a junior hockey league playoff game. [more inside]
posted by elkevelvet at 7:32 AM PST - 60 comments

Harvard removes human skin binding from book after more than 90 years. Harvard University has removed human skin from the binding of a book held for over 90 years at one of its libraries
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:11 AM PST - 67 comments

Brittlestar, aka Stewart Reynolds is a Canadian humorist and national treasure. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:23 AM PST - 10 comments

"Lissyelle is a photographer and art director based in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California. She grew up in rural Ontario where her interest in photography began at the age of 12, spurred by an obsessive fear she would one day forget her entire life were she not to document it. Her body of work is often still inspired by this compulsion to photograph, as well as by the vivid colors of early childhood, reoccurring dreams, the blurry way we see things when we are either too happy or too sad, and the soft hands of the high renaissance." [NSFW]
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:38 AM PST - 2 comments

Leibniz’s monadology [pdf, Early Modern Texts], his last attempt to codify his philosophical system, can certainly rival Wolfram’s Ruliad for all encompassing majesty, despite its extreme brevity. Each monad is an individual that reflects the rest of the universe from its own unique point of view. The parts shape the whole and in turn, the whole back-reacts on the parts. Likewise, the Ruliad has similarity to Indra’s Net from The Flower Garland Sutra - a kind of representation of a totality in terms of bejeweled vertices which encode the whole. Each is a vista of the whole. Every possible view is present in the whole. It is interesting to see how this basic idea, in which a totality is decomposed into an interdependent parts, repeats. [arxiv]
posted by HearHere at 2:55 AM PST - 8 comments

Yesterday at WWDC 2024 Apple announced its long-anticipated machine learning effort, a Siri overhaul dubbed "Apple Intelligence." The new system employs LLMs and diffusion model image generation while attempting to maintain a uniquely high level of privacy by splitting queries across three tiers of increasing anonymity and capability: on device, private cloud compute servers, and anonymized opt-in-only ChatGPT calls. Ars coverage on Apple Intelligence, and the ChatGPT integration. [more inside]
posted by Ryvar at 1:33 AM PST - 117 comments

The North American Crash, the Atari Shock, or whatever else you want to call it, was an incredibly traumatic event for game development in the US. Most of the companies that had been making games just years prior closed their doors, laying off hundreds or thousands of people in the process. These were designers, programmers, artists, marketers, assembly workers, and more who found themselves out of work and trying to pick up the pieces. Some were able to pivot to the home computer space, find work at the surviving developers and publishers, or form new game companies. Others left video games behind entirely. In many of these cases, the projects they were working on were simply and quietly canceled, regardless of how close they were to completion, never intended to be seen again – just a failed product that didn’t make it to market. Like Tarzan. from The Long-Lost Tarzan Atari Game, Preserved [The Video Game History Foundation]
posted by chavenet at 12:55 AM PST - 20 comments

Reverend James Lawson, an architect of the US Civil Rights Movement, whom Dr. King called “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,” has died. Lawson went to prison for refusing the draft during the Korean War, and upon release he went to study with Gandhi, only to be called home to the front lines of the Civil Rights Movement by Dr. King. He led lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville that led to his expulsion from Vanderbilt University, helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, mentored the Freedom Riders in nonviolence and strategy, and was a leader in the 1968 sanitation workers' strike in Memphis (he is credited with the famous "I AM A MAN" slogan) where Dr. King was assassinated. He befriended and ministered to Dr. King's assassin, James Earl Ray. In his later years Rev. Lawson was the pastor at Holman United Methodist in Los Angeles, and led weekly nonviolence clinics there long after his retirement. His project was the civil rights of all people, and he advocated until the end for the rights of all people regardless of race, for the rights of workers, for LGBTQ people, and for reproductive rights. [more inside]
posted by kensington314 at 11:24 PM PST - 35 comments

Who knew 2024 would be the year Jim Croce releases an animated music video? (SLYT 3:49)
posted by 2N2222 at 9:31 PM PST - 12 comments

Claude the hungry koala scales fences in broad daylight to sample young seedlings at a nursery. He's a repeat offender and has attracted mates to the free feed, costing the nursery thousands of damaged plants. The nursery owner hopes new fencing and a mass planting project nearby will deter the brazen koala from repeated daylight robbery.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:05 PM PST - 11 comments

Inspired by the search for the Death Valley Germans (mefi previously), Antti Suanto and his brother decided to build themselves a remote-controlled sidescan sonar boat, and an underwater ROV, and attempt to solve two long-cold missing person cases in the waters of northern Finland.
posted by automatronic at 4:23 PM PST - 22 comments

"In terms of sheer kinetic wow factor, the most impressive Gundam to date is the full-scale moving one at Gundam Factory Yokohama..." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:16 PM PST - 13 comments

Kestrel live cam from Cornell Lab's Raptor Resource Project. See also the first Red-tailed Hawk fledgling to take flight this season and the female Kestrel feeding her chicks.
posted by spamandkimchi at 1:49 PM PST - 7 comments

ReBoot is widely considered the first all-CGI TV series (although that distinction may belong to the French show "Insektors"). Thirty years after its TV premiere, a team in British Columbia are working on a documentary (LinkTree link) about the show. But, they've run into a minor snag (Google Docs link). [more inside]
posted by hanov3r at 1:14 PM PST - 31 comments

The G-Word: The Fight for Roma Rights in America by Caren Gussoff Sumption A five minute live talk at Ignite Seattle in Town Hall Seattle from March 2022. [more inside]
posted by bq at 12:48 PM PST - 20 comments

If a superluminal—meaning faster than the speed of light—warp drive like Alcubierre’s worked, it would revolutionize humanity’s endeavors across the universe, allowing us, perhaps, to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest star system, in days or weeks even though it’s four light years away. from A Groundbreaking Scientific Discovery Just Gave Humanity the Keys to Interstellar Travel [Popular Mechanics] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:33 PM PST - 77 comments

A detective searches for a mysterious second dimension, with his ability to stand on one leg being his one asset in the quest. The only thing standing in his way is the “Donut Men”, a group who stalks our hero and poses their electric-wielding power as a threat. Simultaneously, a rock star needs to be plugged into an electrical supply so he can garner the power to create powerful music with the occasional destruction. David Lynch attempted to make Ronnie Rocket, or The Absurd Mystery of the Strange Forces of Existence his second film. Or his third. Or his fourth. Or his fifth. He never found the funding. Far Out magazine looks into the story of David Lynch's abandoned sci-fi opus. You can check out the screenplay here or listen to a reading on YouTube. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:45 AM PST - 11 comments

Could Elaine May Finally Be Getting Her Due? [ungated] - "A new biography gives a compelling sense of a comic and cinematic genius, and also of the forces that derailed her Hollywood career." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 8:25 AM PST - 26 comments

Australian airports caught thousands of travellers with biosecurity risks in 2023, including holy water from the Ganges. A live toad, holy water from the Ganges and an aphrodisiac made from donkeys are among the more unusual items detected at Australian airports and mail centres. Context: there are a lot of diseases, viruses, and parasites that are common in Britain/Europe/Asia/North America that are not present at all in Australia, and Australia would very much like to keep it that way.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:57 AM PST - 24 comments

Last week's EU parliamentary elections have resulted in big wins for right (and far-right) parties across the continent, with inflation- and migration-driven campaigns seeing late surges in support from Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy to Geert Wilder's Party of Freedom to the extremist (and Nazi-curious) Alternative for Germany. Most notable was the unprecedented success of Marine Le Pen's hard-right National Rally in France, whose demolition of the ruling centrist coalition was so complete that President Emmanuel Macron has unexpectedly dissolved the legislature and called for snap elections later this month in a high-stakes bid to disrupt the national-populist wave. Not all is grim for the left -- socialist parties held their own in multiple nations, proudly illiberal Viktor Orban's Fidesz fell short of projections against a rising Péter Magyar, and France's two-round system has reliably kept the far-right out of power. Still, this week's results have massive and troubling implications for climate change, Ukraine, and a swath of other critical issues.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:00 AM PST - 81 comments

What are the load-bearing posts of our time? Obviously 'facing god and walking backwards into hell' and 'miette' are up there. Does Ed Balls still count? PS if you can parse this you should probably log off [X] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:32 AM PST - 72 comments

Generate yourself a cat avatar with the Cat Avatar Generator for Generating Cat Avatars. (via JHarris' LinkMe submission) [more inside]
posted by nobody at 9:19 PM PST - 14 comments

50,000 Year Old Neanderthal Bones Have Remains of Human Viruses, Scientists Find. (Smithsonian Magazine.) The preliminary analysis is a first step in testing the theory that infectious diseases played a role in Neanderthals’ extinction.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:09 PM PST - 6 comments

TL;DR I used a custom-trained Large Language Model (T5) to create the world’s largest online corpus of translated cuneiform texts. It’s called the AICC (AI Cuneiform Corpus) and contains 130,000 AI translated texts from the CDLI and ORACC projects. [more inside]
posted by bq at 6:10 PM PST - 15 comments

Vampire Therapist: “Guide vampires through centuries of emotional baggage, decades of delusions and the odd bout of self-loathing with real cognitive behavioral therapy concepts and become a Vampire Therapist! Even vampires need a shoulder to cry on when a neck to bite just won’t do.” Releasing July 18, demo available now. [more inside]
posted by brook horse at 4:43 PM PST - 9 comments

The Deep Ark is an eight hour plus mix of 1990's Warp Records "Electronic Listening Music" and related beats. [more inside]
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 1:48 PM PST - 13 comments

KittyToy by Rakqoi (be sure to check out her itch.io user page for tips). Take care of and adopt stray kitties! Feed them, pet them, play with them! Inspired by Neko Atsume (discussed previously on the Blue).
posted by eruonna at 1:17 PM PST - 3 comments

“Well, the time has come to say goodbye ... It’s been an incredible privilege to be invited into millions of homes night after night, year after year, decade after decade. I always felt that the privilege came with the responsibility to keep this daily half-hour a safe place for family fun. No social issues, no politics, nothing embarrassing I hope, just a game.” from ‘The Time Has Come to Say Goodbye’: Pat Sajak Bids Farewell to ‘Wheel of Fortune’ [NY Times; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:31 PM PST - 71 comments

KIRINJI - 時間がない (Jikanga Nai) is a super-simple music video of a guy dancing. The dancer/choreographer is also on instagram.
posted by snofoam at 12:18 PM PST - 9 comments

A local twitter friend who is a geologist, archaeologist and historian has uncovered the history of a former isolated native forest that is now a town. It's quite a tale from an accidental find of an 1847 map with a coloured patch representing a forest, to a 3D virtual forest in Blender matched to an 1859 watercolour painting. [more inside]
posted by unearthed at 12:16 PM PST - 4 comments

Celtix – a daily puzzle game about making Celtic knots. [more inside]
posted by Wolfdog at 8:37 AM PST - 13 comments

New Book Blames Yuppies for Trump, Housing—Basically Everything [ungated] - "Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation is not a flattering portrait of a generation." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 8:18 AM PST - 89 comments

A playlist about Kerr Avon, from the British Science Fiction TV show Blake's 7. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:58 AM PST - 4 comments

Decker is a multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior. Remember HyperCard? Ever wish you could still make simple, scriptable, interactive presentations and applications with almost no effort? Well, with Decker, you can. It's free on itch.io
posted by bowbeacon at 5:27 AM PST - 13 comments

"We took it to the streets and asked both hardcore and novice tabletop gamers." Meanwhile, on another forum... A loosely related blending of physical and digital. Some feel that It's The Apps That Are Wrong. A D&D-focused list of dice apps. There's also Elmenreich's "Game Engineering for Hybrid Board Games" [SLPDF]. Previously [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:08 AM PST - 28 comments

The mullet is alive and well in AFL [ABC]
posted by chavenet at 1:25 AM PST - 19 comments

Google demanded of jwz a Privacy Policy for their Android port of XScreensaver, which collects no user data, despite their own privacy missteps. He's crowdsourcing a list of things XScreensaver will never do that Google does, with source links. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 12:45 AM PST - 39 comments

Translating Great African Composers. "In this mesmerising performance and talk, Derek Gripper explains how he painstakingly translated the works of the great Toumani Diabate from the 21-string kora, onto six string guitar. He gives context to the virtuosity of Diabate himself, and an insight into how African music traditions are passed down. In the process of this translation, Derek is also capturing these African masterpieces onto guitar scores, providing a new way for the works of great African composers to be preserved and interpreted by musicians worldwide." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 9:26 PM PST - 5 comments

Can You Lose Your Native Tongue? After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren’t as embedded as we think. Madeleine Schwartz for the NYT: “For a long time, a central question in linguistics was how people learn language. But in the past few decades, a new field of study called “language attrition” has emerged. It concerns not learning but forgetting: What causes language to be lost?”
posted by bq at 6:12 PM PST - 54 comments

Souvenirs. Previously on MeFi: A Brief History of Souvenir Restaurant Matches. Iconic souvenir, Kokeshi dolls from Japan. Fanfare: Mad Men: Souvenir. Ask: Modern urban Athens souvenirs; Not a souvenir, more a neat token...; What's a creative souvenir?; souvenir/souvenirs tag. MeFites, tell us about your souvenirs!
posted by kristi at 6:10 PM PST - 19 comments

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 5:55 PM PST - 118 comments

Needs washed. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America. Who says this? Murray and Simon (2002) describe the rough boundaries as Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, Northern West Virginia, and Central Indiana. Pockets of speakers may exist in places as far-spread as Kentucky and Illinois. This construction is also attested in Scots English, which might be its historical source. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:08 PM PST - 51 comments

A Tier List of Superacids (YT 13:43) [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 3:20 PM PST - 11 comments

nearly 200 emoji-like symbols found within the PI-4000, sized 12x12 pixels, were directly insertable within text and had many conceptual overlaps with the earliest 📲 [emojipedia]
posted by HearHere at 2:31 PM PST - 8 comments

When a Giftee Throws Away Your Homemade Gift In which Adam Savage relates two brutal stories of lost work while responding to a viewer question. [SLYT]
posted by Glinn at 1:57 PM PST - 36 comments

The Oklahoma City Council (NPR) voted this week (NYT gift) to clear the way for the 1,907 foot (Popular Science) Legends Tower (Master Design Statement .pdf), which would be the tallest building in the US. It may be 'impropable' (Architectural Record), a 'PR stunt' (NPR station KOSU), or even 'sheer fantasy' (OKC Free Press), especially (The Oklahoman) in a state that has seen 103 tornadoes (National Weather Service) in 2024. It would definitely be expensive--developers (developers' site) say they have $1b in financing lined up.
posted by box at 1:08 PM PST - 24 comments

IKEA wants to pay real people to work in its new store inside Roblox game. IKEA has put a new spin on remote working, seeking 10 real-life staff to work in its Roblox virtual store that opens on June 24 and becoming the first brand to offer paid work on the gaming platform. “The Co-Worker Game” will give people “a chance to immerse themselves in the working world” of the store.
posted by NoMich at 1:02 PM PST - 8 comments

Maj. William A. Anders, who flew on the first manned space mission to orbit the moon, the Apollo 8 “Genesis Flight” of Christmas Eve 1968, and took the color photograph “Earthrise” credited with inspiring the modern environmental movement, died on Friday morning when a small plane he was piloting alone dove into the water near Roche Harbor, Wa., northwest of Seattle. He was 90. [NY Times; ungated] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:13 PM PST - 29 comments

Hi, MetaFilter moderator here, posting an experimental thread, based on a recent suggestion by Rhaomi. Here's the idea, paraphrasing:

"Find a neat article, video, blog, etc. but don't feel up to the work of cobbling together an FPP, tags, title, and otherwise putting yourself out there? Just comment "LinkMe:" followed by the link and maybe a one sentence description for context. Everybody has tacit permission to turn your link into an FPP if they'd like, first come first serve, with a nod back to the original LinkFilter comment"

An example of the type of comment to make is inside, but don't feel bound to that exact format! [more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:15 AM PST - 101 comments

"Bias occurs in many algorithms and AI systems — from sexist and racist search results to facial recognition systems that perform worse on Black faces. Generative AI systems are no different. In an analysis of more than 5,000 AI images, Bloomberg found that images associated with higher-paying job titles featured people with lighter skin tones, and that results for most professional roles were male-dominated. A new Rest of World analysis shows that generative AI systems have tendencies toward bias, stereotypes, and reductionism when it comes to national identities, too." CW: stereotyping of peoples, nations, cuisines, and more [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 7:42 AM PST - 24 comments

Mikey "Darth Rigatoni" Musumeci is the current ONE Championship flyweight (135 lb) submission grappling champion, as well as a five time black belt jiujitsu world champion - but he probably doesn't match most people's mental picture of what someone like that looks like or acts like. [more inside]
posted by true at 7:22 AM PST - 4 comments

The latest: Personal disaster zone Rishi "Bring Back National Service" Sunak couldn't do an afternoon of his own, bailing on D-day commemorations to pre-record a TV interview, and is now campaigning while hiding from the media, public, and his local rival. In Scotland, unpopular referee and malevolent garden gnome Douglas Ross has picked a seat by ejecting the sitting Tory candidate, while in England the Conservative chair has been parachuted into a seat to fight. But it's not all good for the other parties; Hank Hill lookalike Keir Starmer failed to convince in a 1-2-1 debate, while in Wales the (Labour) First Minister loses a confidence vote. Also, Ed Davey continues his bizarre "Mr Blobby incident lifestyle" election campaign, while Farage continues to be a [Previously] [Countdown].
posted by Wordshore at 7:13 AM PST - 47 comments

Canada's 4th most populous city could run out of water in the coming days. [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:18 AM PST - 32 comments

The jellyfish detective who discovered the Irukandji by stinging volunteers — including his 10-year-old son. A mysterious and excruciating illness was striking down beachgoers in North Queensland until the 1960s, when a doctor and a little boy went to extraordinary lengths to solve the mystery.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:53 AM PST - 6 comments

“The defendants marketed to investors most in need of income and least able to afford a loss by advertising their schemes as a train to ‘financial freedom’ and ‘freedom from the plantation,’” the suit said. “Cynthia Petion knew that ‘it’s never the ones who grew up rich who invest in these programs.’” from ‘Jesus was the best affiliate marketer in the world’: How a ‘Reverend CEO’ allegedly stole $1 billion in a crypto scam [MarketWatch] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:13 AM PST - 21 comments

the humanities do not teach information. they teach how to change desires. and the teacher has to assume the responsibility of learning that difficult task…it is not possible to unlearn one’s privilege; and unlearn and unlearn and unlearn. i should use my privilege against the grain…: fair learning…this task is persistent … these women vote…the largest sector of the electorate in Africa and Asia…there is no specific space with the name “art” or “culture,” even when the European words are avoided, yet all of them vote [Gayatri Spivak, Vienna Festival ~2h] (second hour’s Q&A; synopsis at the split ~1h, if time’s a question) [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 11:52 PM PST - 9 comments

The Thing with Feathers podcast , hosted by Courtney Ellis, has lots of great episodes. Check out the interview with the Inept Birder (twitter) who prompted the#WorstBirdPic trend almost a decade ago and is still chugging along. @TheIneptBirder is here with vaguely reassuring words about your terrible and/or blurry picture of a bird or a bird butt! [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:24 PM PST - 4 comments

When desegregation came to Harlan County, Ky.: An oral history. Karida Brown for the Washington Post. “As we commemorate the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education this month, let us not forget: It was Black children who did the work of desegregating our schools…. The narratives in this piece come from oral histories I conducted from 2013 to 2016 with African Americans who, like my parents, remember the “colored schools” of Harlan County, particularly those in two small Appalachian coal towns, Lynch and Benham. Their experiences — revisited from the vantage point of their 60s, 70s and 80s — give texture to a complex transition from a pre- to post-civil rights era.”archive.is link
posted by bq at 2:41 PM PST - 5 comments

The Votes are in, and Narendra Modi has won a third term as Prime Minister of India. However, in a surprising upset, his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to win a majority, much less the supermajority Modi had predicted. [more inside]
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:54 PM PST - 19 comments

Thanks to (MeFi's own) Matt Muir, it's the return of the Tiny Awards, "a small prize to celebrate interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be." Nominations are open until June 23. Via the excellent Web Curios, also brought to us by Matt. [more inside]
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:17 PM PST - 8 comments

Muppet Songs: For What It's Worth (First aired in 1978, during the second season of The Muppet Show. The guest was Bob Hope.)
posted by box at 12:27 PM PST - 13 comments

The idea that food can turn you gay speaks to the depth of how food is coded. Food is used as both a signifier of the self and fuel for the body, the singular act of digestion taking what you see on the outside and literally turning it into yourself on the inside. You don’t just enjoy ice cream. Ice cream becomes you. What does that make you, and in return, what do you make it? Maybe the fear goes deeper, and finally smacks against something it’s been circling around in the dark. We know ice cream cannot make you gay. But if we are what we eat, there is the chance then, that what we eat could reflect, or affect, who we are. And could make us realize, in terror and glory, that who we thought we were is not so fixed. from The Food That Makes You Gay by Jaya Saxena [Eater]
posted by chavenet at 11:08 AM PST - 70 comments

The Killers' debut album Hot Fuss turns 20 today. Tom Breihan of Stereogum reexamines the legacy of the little album made by outsiders to the NYC glamorous indie rock & roll scene and how it took over the world (or the UK, at least). "A fascinating case study of how hard those hipster sounds could go when they were adapted by people with no interest in hipness." "I wanted to be too cool for the Killers. I was not. You probably weren’t, either." Also: "Hot Fuss Turns 10" by Ultragrrrl provides an on-the-ground eyewitness account of the same. And Tom's account of the worst-conceived alt-rock festival of 2005.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:59 AM PST - 17 comments

Guardian: Mass casualty incidents caused by the Israeli military offensive in southern Gaza are becoming normalised in the west and leading to a sense of fatalism inside Gaza itself, according to Sam Rose, the director of planning for the Palestinian relief agency UNRWA (after its school in Nuseirat was bombed by Israeli forces) || Democracy Now: “Apocalyptic”: 40 Killed in Israeli Airstrike on U.N. School Sheltering Displaced Palestinians in Gaza || BBC: US urges Israel to be transparent over Gaza school strike || Sky News UK: Experts told Sky News the [bomb] fragment [at Gaza school strike] can be identified as part of an American-made GBU-39 bomb; NPR: Israel used a U.S.-made bomb in a deadly U.N. school strike in Gaza [ground reporting that concurs] || MEMO (reporting of a Yedioth Ahronoth article): UN adds Israel to blacklist for harming children in conflict zones || ICYMI: Aharon Barak steps down as Israel's nominated judge to the ICJ case; Israel's Attorney-General urges Netanyahu to form commission of inquiry to provide legal cover from international judicial investigations such as through the ICC; Which ten countries have joined South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ? [more inside]
posted by cendawanita at 10:51 AM PST - 97 comments

How Crossbows Can Tell Us Which Genes Trees Are Turning On...and Off. (Smithsonian Magazine.) What’s a scientist to do, when you need to reach the highest leaves in the forest and a giant crane isn’t an option? Learn to use a crossbow.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:47 AM PST - 9 comments

Researcher/humorist Tom7 explores history, hype, rigor, and justification in a 22-minute tour-de-force that smoothly interpolates between computer science heroes and/or villains Donald Knuth and Lorem Epsom.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 8:43 AM PST - 18 comments

On Thursday, conspiracy monger, supplement peddler, defamation artist, and abuser Alex Jones moved to convert his bankruptcy proceedings to Chapter 7, allowing for the liquidation of his personal assets to pay off the over $1.5B he owes in legal decisions to the families of Sandy Hook victims he defamed and whose lives he upended - including his personal holdings in his conspiracy theory empire, InfoWars. [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:15 AM PST - 52 comments

[Social media] is terrible at organizing us in the kind of leadership-driven, hierarchical fashion that would be ideal for channelling masses of people into collective, unitary projects. (SLAftermath) [more inside]
posted by ropeladder at 8:08 AM PST - 4 comments

You put a dollar bill into the 'Ask The Brain' fortune telling machine and await its response. Roll a seven-sided die or use a random-number generator. One Two Three Four Five Six Seven [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 6:05 AM PST - 4 comments

Why it's never been cooler (or easier) to go alcohol-free [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:10 AM PST - 103 comments

A study from the University of Copenhagen looks at "Culturally appropriate rejections of meat reduction". Reasoning by meat-eaters includes shaming vegans and claiming they are hypocritical; outsized estimations of the climate impact of vegan options vs. meat; and as the researchers put it, “not knowing is convenient”. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd at 2:42 AM PST - 57 comments

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are surging "faster than ever" to beyond anything humans ever experienced, officials say - "Not only is CO2 now at the highest level in millions of years, it is also rising faster than ever." [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:11 AM PST - 56 comments

Unzip companies across a range of industries ... and you will find financial companies lurking inside. This week we reprise the theme and spotlight five “banks in disguise”: Starbucks, Carnival, Naked Wines, Delta Air Lines and Travel + Leisure Co
posted by chavenet at 11:59 PM PST - 10 comments

Gigantic marine reptile identified from fossil found by 11-year-old girl and father. A fossil jawbone found by a young girl and her father on a beach in England belongs to a gigantic marine reptile dating back to 202 million years ago.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:07 PM PST - 10 comments

In 1980 what appeared to be a formulaic, phoning-it-in album of contemporary radio punk and new wave music done in the style of Alvin in the Chipmunks was released, named Chipmunk Punk. The album garnered no particular critical or commercial success, and was quickly forgotten as merely one in a long line of kitchy, vaguely topical music under the Alvin and the Chipmunks brand. It turns out that it was instead a hidden monument of sludge rock.
posted by 1adam12 at 4:14 PM PST - 42 comments

Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso" is the Song of the Summer. It sounds like a genre that, in its time, was rejected by MTV and radio as 'not pop enough': '80s electro/synth funk/roller disco (Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback and Dilla Time, writing for Slate).
posted by box at 3:02 PM PST - 32 comments

On Wednesday, Boeing was finally able to launch the Starliner, their much delayed spacecraft, and dock it to the International Space Station. Meanwhile, Space X did the fourth launch of its Starship rocket, finally managing to complete its first successful return from space.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:49 PM PST - 31 comments

Wickwire recalls instances where other climbers lied about their ascents and were quickly banished. “No one would climb with them or believe what they said,” he points out. But when it came to stories about Barrett’s violence against women, people were too willing to look the other way—even after Barrett was arrested and a detailed indictment from a federal investigation was posted online. “There is a dissonance between how climbers think of themselves and what they actually do,” says Kimbrough Moore, a longtime climber, a guidebook author, and a philosophy professor at San Francisco State University. “In my experience, the climbing community has been hostile to women who have come out saying they were assaulted.” As for Barrett, Moore says: “I have never heard of anyone doing more to harm the climbing community than Charlie. He has used his status as an elite climber to hurt people for a very long time.” from How Did This Climber Get Away with So Much for So Long? [Outside; ungated] [CW: rape, sexual violence, violence to animals, stalking, harassment, enabling]
posted by chavenet at 12:30 PM PST - 20 comments

Popsci: (on the Tesla Cybertruck upgrades for police cruisers) "With the all-wheel drive Cybertruck’s current $79,990 price, it stands to reason the combined taxpayer cost for a vehicle and new UP.FIT features could easily top $90,000. While UP.FIT’s website doesn’t offer any price ranges, Unplugged Performance lists similar products on its online store. A 50-inch, 48V double row LED light bar for the Cybertruck, for example, costs $1,293.75, while a front bull bar retails for $1,995. UP.FIT details at least 25 upgrades in its standard “Patrol Cybertruck” tier as well as multiple recommended and optional additions. For comparison, a brand-new 2024 Ford Explorer 4WD Police Interceptor costs roughly $47,000." (Police Cruiser Manual Override Exit Tool: $6.29)
posted by Wordshore at 12:08 PM PST - 43 comments

Why are bears both adorable and deadly? Scientific American investigates why these apex predators are “friend-shaped."
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:54 AM PST - 60 comments

We made the Spiciest Hot Sauce Ever!? (Tech Ingredients, YouTube/Piped/Invidious, 1h5m7s)
posted by flabdablet at 10:50 AM PST - 11 comments

Confused as to the meanings and colours of various Pride Flags? Well this site tells you! That's it. That's all it does. [more inside]
posted by Faintdreams at 8:58 AM PST - 84 comments

Graduate Assistant Four Fronds Turning had made the best guacamole that Mike had ever tasted in his original or post-revival life, and it was all wrong. "The Jaxicans' Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37" by Stephen Granade is a short, bittersweet science fiction story (published in April in Strange Horizons) in which Mike makes a few meals and a few friends. Content warnings are available behind the "show warnings" button at the top.
posted by brainwane at 8:02 AM PST - 19 comments

After previously spending over an hour asking and answering the question of how many Super Mario games there are, jan misali is following up with a new too-long video asking how many Super Mario games are there NOW?
posted by Dysk at 7:46 AM PST - 18 comments

A Toronto woman all but disappeared from the home she lived in for decades and the friends she had made there. Why did she spend her final years orphaned from her Scarlett Road community?
posted by Kitteh at 7:24 AM PST - 7 comments

Multiversity Comics is saying goodbye, with many parting thoughts from many editors, columnists, etc. From Matthew Meylikhov: "If you don’t have time for yet another self-indulgent thousand word essay on the internet (and who can blame you?), then just skip ahead to the end where the last image break is and read the last few paragraphs alone. Everything else in this farewell piece was written after I wrote those, and the end sentiment is the only thing I really wanted to convey. I’m just a sucker for a long road to a simple point (it’s the journey, not the destination, right?)." Multiversity has appeared previously on the blue. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:49 AM PST - 9 comments

Study finds magpies who are bullied are more likely to be smarter than their bullies. The research tested the intelligence of the animals, and found birds who were frequently picked on had become smarter to avoid their bullies. (This is about the Australian magpie, Gymnorhina tibicen, which is not related to the European magpie, Pica pica. Basically when the British got to Australia, they went "this random bird is black and white, so we'll call it a magpie.")
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:31 AM PST - 19 comments

Eight studies document what may be a fundamental and universal bias in human imagination: people think things could be better. When we ask people how things could be different, they imagine how things could be better (Study 1). The bias doesn't depend on the wording of the question (Studies 2 and 3). It arises in people's everyday thoughts (Study 4). It is unrelated to people's anxiety, depression, and neuroticism (Study 5). A sample of Polish people responding in English show the same bias (Study 6), as do a sample of Chinese people responding in Mandarin (Study 7). People imagine how things could be better even though it's easier to come up with ways things could be worse (Study 8). Overall, it seems, human imagination has a bias: when people imagine how things could be, they imagine how things could be better. from Things could be better [PsyArXiv Preprints]
posted by chavenet at 1:19 AM PST - 21 comments

Clash Over Phone Hacking Article Preceded Exit of Washington Post Editor. In mid-May, the newsroom editor, Sally Buzbee, clashed over whether to publish an article about a British hacking scandal with some ties to the chief executive, Will Lewis. Buzbee informed Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids. Lewis stated that the case involving him did not merit coverage. When Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 9:27 PM PST - 22 comments

80 years ago President Roosevelt delivered a speech: "..."Last night, when I spoke to you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far." Franklin D. Roosevelt’s D-Day Prayer
posted by clavdivs at 8:45 PM PST - 12 comments

They have zero loyalty, even to the people who feed them every single day. Dogs napped too much and were susceptible to bribes, so the warden of a Brazilian prison turned to feathered allies to prevent escapes.
posted by Word_Salad at 4:44 PM PST - 28 comments

booking flights on a phone is crazy. that is a laptop activity

The tweet that spawned countless TikToks ("BIG purchases require a laptop screen for FULL visibility"), hot takes ("It's laptop activity when you're a beginner"), and thinkpieces ("Looking ahead, Gen Alpha will integrate AI seamlessly into all areas of their lives"). Young shoppers are indeed driving a shift towards mobile retail. But a big factor pushing things in this direction may simply be that retailers hate when you buy big things on your laptop: "People often prefer bigger screens and keyboards for pricier purchases—but merchants have more levers to pull on mobile". See also: How Each Generation Shops in 2023 [HubSpot] and Gen Z’s Device Preferences & Decision Drivers [Knit]
posted by Rhaomi at 2:30 PM PST - 67 comments

A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss The gold market is a graveyard of rubble and dog-eaten corpses. The state TV station became a torture chamber. The national film archive was blown open in battle, its treasures now yellowing in the sun..... (SLNYT) [more inside]
posted by lalochezia at 1:12 PM PST - 29 comments

Australian lab-grown meat with "perfect" texture hits the shelves in Singapore. The first product from an Australian cell-cultured meat company has gone on sale in Singapore, where the Japanese quail cell parfait can be found in high-end restaurants.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:02 PM PST - 15 comments

A look inside a tiny MEMS microphone — the kind found in every earbud, phone, etc. — using optical and scanning electron microscopy. Youtube, 9m47s.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:42 PM PST - 6 comments

Tintin inspired away kit homage to cartoonist Hergé [via Kottke] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 12:31 PM PST - 11 comments

CBS Chicago: Abby Lampe, winner of the 2022 Cooper's Hill cheese-rolling women's race, returned this year to regain her crown/cheese [Instagram]. Though absent in 2023 (won by Canadian competitor Delaney Irving, despite finishing unconscious and only learning of her victory in the medical enclosure), Abby won this year by the strategy of "...to go into the race and hurl myself down the hill and continue rolling." NYT: The race involves no sign-up form or waivers. GloucesterLive: The highest injury toll ever recorded was in 1997 when 33 contestants had to be treated. (there have actually been no fatalities or decapitations in recent times) Some footage and interviews, and pictures. Previously: 2018, 2013, 2010, 2009, 2003.
posted by Wordshore at 11:43 AM PST - 19 comments

"During a scary ninth inning, Texas manager Billy Martin, never one to back down from a fight, turned to his players in the dugout and told them to grab bats before leading a charge onto the Municipal Stadium field and into mayhem." June 4, 1974: Baseball on a warm late-Spring evening! Texas vs. Cleveland! Beer's only ten cents a cup tonight! What could possibly go wrong.
posted by not_on_display at 11:06 AM PST - 10 comments

"We must accept the complexity of positionality—and with it the privilege of “centered” and “peripheral”—or dominant and subjugated—positions and the partiality of all knowledge. Situated knowledge needs to take into account the historical context in particular locations. It can only be reached in connections, in webs, in networks, in practices of solidarity and sharing. And it must be a critical vision, power-sensitive, brought forward in the best feminist practices." [on curating]
posted by HearHere at 10:11 AM PST - 33 comments

Stone: Sturdy Tactile Object Natively Earth. Ghost: Ghouls Haunting Old Ships That Sank. Babies: Battling a Bottle in Endless Screams. Acronymy.net is a massively multiplayer collaborative online word game.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:08 AM PST - 18 comments

China File's retrospective on the 1989 student protests and ensuing massacre. Silence and heavy security in China and Hong Kong marked the anniversary. There are 47 activists and protesters who have been accused by the Chinese government of trying to "overthrow" the government in Hong Kong 3 years ago. In Hong Kong, US and EU consulates marked the anniversary with candles. Taiwan's President William Lai Ching-te has promised that the anniversary would not be forgotten. Previously.
posted by toastyk at 8:45 AM PST - 6 comments

ZIGSAM - The Austrian Cigarette Collection is in fact a database of 35,290 cigarette packs from around the world. You can search by country or by brand in glorious Web 1.0 style.
posted by gwint at 8:21 AM PST - 8 comments

"I Spent Three Years Talking to Boys. Here’s What I Found" This is not to say that people who aren't male aren't struggling. It just says, people who are male are, and in these specific ways. [more inside]
posted by reality_is_benign at 6:01 AM PST - 299 comments

"Colorado publishers have experienced double digit year-on-year rises in printing and delivery costs, with the sharpest increases in the past two years. This has been exacerbated by decreasing supply of printing options across Colorado. The state’s unique geography, with mountain passes closed over the winter, and distance from printers decrease the affordable options available to many publishers." A white paper on the future of printing from the Colorado Media Project. Previously. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 4:52 AM PST - 12 comments

A twenty minute youtube video with a bit of history and a breakdown and restoration of a Geochron Global Time Indicator, possibly the most comprehensive and over-engineered electromechanical clock and map assembly in history!
posted by Dysk at 3:17 AM PST - 15 comments

Meanwhile, there is an ethical conundrum to consider here - and with it a charge of hypocrisy. Many in the West, myself included, have enjoyed the fruits of the post-war travel boom, exploring far flung parts of the world without thinking of the unwanted consequences of mass tourism. So who are we now to preach to younger generations for whom gap years and backpacking are almost a rites of passage and indeed life enhancing experiences? And who are we to lecture people from developing economies who can only now afford to do the same? from Global tourism is booming. These people would rather it wasn’t [BBC] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:06 AM PST - 77 comments

A shark vomited up a human arm. It led to an unusual criminal case seen at the New South Wales Supreme Court. For two centuries, the Supreme Court of NSW has heard countless cases. Here are some of the most historically significant or strange ones. (Note for people outside Australia, in Australia there are three levels of courts; each state has it's own Supreme Court, then beyond that there is the High Court for all of Australia. This is because the Supreme Courts existed and were named before Federation happened in 1901.)
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:42 PM PST - 10 comments

Actor William Russell, best known these days for his role as Ian Chesterton, one of the original companions of Doctor Who from 1963-1965, has passed away aged 99. [more inside]
posted by jjderooy at 5:09 PM PST - 25 comments

“There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either,” Robert Graves famously said. While there have certainly been numerous poets throughout history who have been “professional poets” (poets supported by patrons or sponsors in classical times or poets whose main income comes from their books, readings, etc., in more contemporary times), still larger is the number of poets who had surprising or unorthodox occupations outside of their literary careers...
posted by jim in austin at 12:12 PM PST - 36 comments

Thread of fashion designs inspired by art by James Lucas [X; Threadreader version]
posted by chavenet at 11:11 AM PST - 12 comments

Metaflora: “The family tree of the plant kingdom (which scientists call Viridiplantae) is broad and beautiful... but also complex! Metaflora is a game that tests your green thumb by seeing how well you can navigate its leafy branches. Your goal is to figure out today's Mystery Plant in as few guesses as possible. Wrong guesses will narrow down the answer by taxonomic rank (kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.) The more your guess has in common with the answer, the more you will learn about the Mystery Plant.” Previously and related: Metazooa.
posted by Wordshore at 10:09 AM PST - 22 comments

"Books are an important part of our lives but many of us still struggle with what to do with old books. When we decide it’s time to part with them, we want to know they are going to a nice home where they can continue to enrich and improve other people’s lives." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 8:42 AM PST - 45 comments

If you want to pop into a no-shame-no-blame-if-you-can't-do-it, trounce the rich boycott with heart, enjoy this continuing saga. Background below the fold. The Loblaws boycott was set to take place in May, but continues, and rumour has it that it's had an impact. Alt.grocery is up and running with crowdsourced information. (Reminds me of Vaccine Hunters.) Executives are posting replies to social media complaints on LinkedIn. Some folks are creating posters in satiric support -??? - of Galen Weston grocery overlord. Support for the boycott crosses political lines. And oh yes, there's swag for sale (one example of many.) [more inside]
posted by warriorqueen at 8:09 AM PST - 42 comments

Spiders and frogs return to cotton farms as industry cleans up its act. Once devoid of insect life, Australian cotton paddocks are now teeming with spiders and other animals as the cotton industry moves further away from pesticide use.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:31 AM PST - 12 comments

Canada's horniest newsletter is changing the way we think about sex, desire, & queer culture. (NSFW for content; the pics chosen are spicy but not THAT spicy. It's still the CBC, after all.) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 5:31 AM PST - 7 comments

German computer user discovered that programming is much easier on an American ANSI keyboard than his native German ISO-DE keyboard... in most programming languages except HTML (which is a Markup language, but I digress). His research lead him to several realizations, as he attempts to code his open source programming project that will appeal to a world-wide audience...
posted by kschang at 3:28 AM PST - 69 comments

Classically trained Indigenous chef says native Australian ingredients key to creating uniquely Australian cuisine. Indigenous chef Jack Brown is trained in traditional French cuisine, but he's on a mission to get more native Australian ingredients into everyday cooking.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:25 PM PST - 7 comments

Secret to flipping eggs. (slyt)
posted by clavdivs at 2:52 PM PST - 32 comments

This is a song from the second series of We Are Lady Parts. I like it a lot. Here's some context in a scene from the show (including a cameo which may surprise you) and some Previously.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:45 PM PST - 11 comments

Well, not exactly. For nearly five decades, the corner of Castro and 18th Streets has been an important site for San Francisco’s LGBTQ community: Hibernia Beach. While Hibernia Bank no longer occupies the property at the plaza, the current owners, Bank of America, have learned the significance of the space to the community.
posted by majick at 11:18 AM PST - 8 comments

The Man Who Couldn't Stop Going to College (SLNYT)
posted by sy at 10:28 AM PST - 52 comments

Nineteen percent of cotton on the U.S. market still sources back to the forced labor heartlands of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), according to a new analysis from Applied DNA of 822 cotton-containing products sampled from February 2023 to March 2024.... More info on enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits the importation of goods produced wholly or in part from the so-called Xinjiang Autonomous Uyghur Region unless it can be proven that they are not the fruits of coerced labor.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:59 AM PST - 20 comments

We've known about Genyornis newtoni for quite some time. The species, which died out around 45,000 years ago, was first described in 1913. An imposing bird standing up to 2.25 meters (7.4 feet) tall and weighing up to 230 kilograms (510 pounds), Genyornis newtoni would have been a formidable presence in the grassland habitats it preferred across a vast swathe of the Australian continent. But a new discovery suggests that we may have misinterpreted the bird.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:23 AM PST - 14 comments

After yesterday's rosin-fest, I thought it would be useful and uncontroversial to post definitive information about how* to bake a potato. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:51 AM PST - 49 comments

Spending the last couple of weekends late spring cleaning required confronting the dozens of books I've held onto over the years, jammed on dusty shelves and closet boxes, with the oldest dating all the way back to summer reading favorites from grade school. Some of these I keep not so much because I love the story itself (I'm a big fan of ebooks and have most of my reading history digitized), but because the book as an object holds special meaning. Do you have any physical books you keep around more for the memento libri than for the text inside? Tell us about them (or anything else) in our weekly Free Thread!
posted by Rhaomi at 5:29 AM PST - 163 comments

Transporting billions of tonnes of freight generates huge emissions. What if it was moved by rail not road? About 4 billion tonnes of goods are delivered across Australia each year, mostly by road, but one train can carry the same freight as 54 trucks. So why doesn't more freight go by rail?
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:28 AM PST - 30 comments

Quine Clock – code that displays itself as a digital clock.
posted by Wolfdog at 3:54 AM PST - 18 comments

South African election results. What happens next? For the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994, the once-dominant party will need to make a deal with other parties to form a coalition government. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 1:02 AM PST - 7 comments

Ben Myers posted to X last year about his grandmother's reading list, and followed it up a year later after her death. This My Modern Met article summarises the tweets.
posted by paduasoy at 12:41 AM PST - 12 comments

Since then, the myth of Nickelback's awfulness has only grown through gifs, worst-of polls, clickbait articles, comedian punchlines, and YouTube mashups. But why is Nickelback the internet's punching bag of choice, and what seeded this collective animosity? Is there a quantifiable explanation for all of this Nickelback hatred? from Why Do People Hate Nickelback So Much? A Statistical Analysis [Stat Significant]
posted by chavenet at 12:14 AM PST - 79 comments

Copacabana Dollmation [3m50s] is THAT song with a video made with stop motion dolls. That is what it is.
posted by hippybear at 6:50 PM PST - 24 comments

This 130,000 Year Old Decorative Bear Bone May Be the Oldest Known Neanderthal Art. Researchers say the carved artifact was not a utilitarian item and instead served a symbolic purpose.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:42 PM PST - 14 comments

In 1994 the Pet Shop Boys were invited to perform 'Go West' at the Brit Awards. They agreed and brought with them 3 separate choirs of miners. Some of those miners had marched with the gay and lesbian members of LGSM in the 1980s. It is one of the great, near-lost music moments [Vimeo, via John Bull, via MetaFilter's own JScalzi]
posted by chavenet at 1:05 PM PST - 42 comments

The Moral Economy of the Shire is an analysis by Nathan Goldwag of how hobbit society is structured in Middle Earth, explaining what models Tolkien drew on, and how its shown in the books. This is one of a series of posts about Tolkien’s works, which range from an alternate history of a victorious Sauron to a consideration of whether dwarves are analogous to Jews and the metafictional nature of Lord of the Rings.
posted by Kattullus at 11:25 AM PST - 49 comments

“CuriousMarc” talks to Oscar Vermeulen about his scale replica of the PDP-10, the MIT AI Lab, and the Incompatible Timesharing System. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:55 AM PST - 17 comments

Rosin is highly flammable, and its fumes are noxious. So what better way to cook a potato? Boiling potatoes in molten rosin - a byproduct of pine sap distillation - seals in the flavor. "You get the most intense potato flavor you've ever experienced." If you're not up for boiling rosin yourself (Joy of Cooking, probably wisely, removed its recipe in the '98 edition), head to the Catface Country Turpentine Festival in Portal, Georgia, a "Rockwellian small-town festival replete with event-themed floats and beauty queens". (Catface refers to the scars left behind by the extraction of resin.) Alternatively, you can hop in your DeLorean and head to Cracker Barrel, which served rosin potatoes in the 80s. Or Doctor Potato (not a real doctor, but a team of potato experts) notes you could try coating your spud in a jacket of salt and egg. Previously...
posted by dmd at 8:17 AM PST - 56 comments

New Scientist writers pick their favourite science fiction books of all time - some classics, some obvious modern picks, and some genuine surprises.
posted by Artw at 8:16 AM PST - 24 comments

In his memoir, “The Way of the Hermit,” Ken Smith dispels myths about the solitary life off the grid. Review by Laurie Hertzel The first half of this book is a rip-roaring read, filled with death-defying adventures — fighting off grizzly bears; avoiding a charging bull moose; nearly freezing in an ice-encrusted tent. Smith falls into a raging river, loses his supply pack and nearly drowns. Still, he loved it all: “It was intoxicating, invigorating, and utterly liberating.”
posted by bq at 8:14 AM PST - 12 comments

As teenagers in 1974 Phil Buehler and Steve Siegel rowed out to explore the ruins of Ellis Island. They made a film (NY Times gift link), one of the first picks for the NY Times OpDocs “Encore” series. The filmmaker-photographers reflect on the symbolic power of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, as they revisit the ruins that remain and the restored main Registry hall that now draws millions of tourists a year. [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 7:21 AM PST - 1 comment

The sex worker who fought debanking and got his EFTPOS (Electronic Funds Transfer At Point Of Sale) machine back. Sex workers can now fight debanking in some parts of Australia, but others are left hiding their jobs and battling financial discrimination.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:08 AM PST - 3 comments

Who will claim the king’s throne? RenFaireHBO, a 3-part HBO Original Documentary Series which chronicles a fantastic and farcical succession battle of Shakespearean proportions at the Texas Renaissance Festival, premieres June 2 TRAILER [SLYT] (Warning: language.)
posted by Glinn at 7:00 AM PST - 22 comments

The Hollywood Reporter's Full Comedy Actress Roundtable: Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Quinta Brunson, Michelle Buteau and More [Ego Nwodim, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Lacey Rose (host) 55m] is full of mutal support, deep sharing, and honest stories that you don't expect from this kind of round table. However, the women are usually like this, and they are always my favorites.
posted by hippybear at 6:05 AM PST - 3 comments

"Nevertheless, we have shown that a candle flame at roughly 2.6 km would have an apparent brightness comparable to a 6th magnitude star. Could the keenest human eyes on the planet see a candle flame at 10 miles? We have provided strong evidence that the answer is No, for it would be as faint as a star of apparent magnitude 10, and that would require a pair of 7 X 50 binoculars mounted on a tripod, even for experienced observers with good night vision." [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 5:30 AM PST - 9 comments

Before you go "Aw, this is programmer b***s***!" and huck (maybe "huque" if you're Canadian) (or French) your laptop out the window, just hang on. TLDR: Python Notebooks for Fundamentals of Music Processing [more inside]
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 5:09 AM PST - 12 comments

Earlier this week, a giant dump of Google documents revealed how the search advertising seller linked up adverts bought to pages they're on; then Wired published an excerpt from a book explaing the link between the advertising auctions and the disinformation sites taking money to display those adverts: How Advertising Funds Disinformation (archive). [more inside]
posted by k3ninho at 3:49 AM PST - 10 comments

Lore Olympus, the biggest name in WEBTOON's catalog, has come to an end after 280 installments since beginning six years ago. It retold the story of Hades and Persephone, with subplots of every other Greek myth you can think of, and won the Eisner, Harvey, and Ringo awards multiple times. Also available in print at your local library or comic book store.
posted by one for the books at 2:55 AM PST - 6 comments

Can you reach net zero by 2050? Play the Climate game by the Financial Times
posted by chavenet at 2:02 AM PST - 17 comments

At the end of the nineties, technology and the Internet were a playground for young engineers and ‘hackers’. Some of them regularly gathered in the w00w00 IRC chatroom on the EFnet network. This tech-think-tank had many notable members, including WhatsApp founder Jan Koum and Shawn Fanning, who logged on with the nickname Napster. In 1998, 17-year-old Fanning shared an idea with the group. ‘Napster’ wanted to create a network of computers that could share files with each other. More specifically, a central music database that everyone in the world could access. This idea never left the mind of the young developer. Fanning stopped going to school and flanked by his friend Sean Parker, devoted the following months to making his vision a reality. That moment came on June 1, 1999, when the first public release of Napster was released online. Soon after, the software went viral.

Napster Sparked a File-Sharing Revolution 25 Years Ago [TorrentFreak] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 9:59 PM PST - 39 comments

Major League Baseball has incorporated the statistics of former Negro Leagues players into its historical records on its website, meaning legendary leaders in some categories like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb have now been replaced in the record books by players who were not allowed to play on the same fields as them during segregation. Josh Gibson, one of the greatest sluggers in the history of the Negro Leagues, is now listed as MLB’s new all-time career leader in batting average at .372, moving ahead of Ty Cobb at .367. The MLB website shows Gibson also overtaking Babe Ruth in career slugging percentage. [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:59 AM PST - 28 comments

Many authors have written stories or novels inspired by RPG campaigns. There is debate about whether or not tabletop RPGs should be used as writing tools. Plenty of folks give the idea a thumbs-down, but save some room in your heart for the LitRPG. B&N has you covered with, of course, a list of novels that started life as RPGs. [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 11:55 AM PST - 51 comments

This is the story of how a low-budget Australian film – The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – changed the course of history, loudly and proudly bringing a celebration of gay culture to the world that continues to resonate 20 years on. Narrated by Terence Stamp, Between a Frock and a Hard Place [57m] is also a social history of gay culture in Australia, drawing on footage from the famous movie as well as Sydney in the 80s. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 8:48 AM PST - 14 comments

Once extinct in central Australia, this little kangaroo-looking marsupial is now thriving in a remote desert safe haven. The number of brush-tailed bettongs and burrowing bettongs surveyed at Newhaven Wildlife Sanctuary in central Australia has nearly doubled since last year.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:42 AM PST - 8 comments

“Me and monotropism : a unified theory of autism,” suggests that attentional differences explain not only the diagnostic criteria for autism, but better yet, they explain the internal phenomenology: inertia, sensory and social overload and insensitivity, stimming, and particularly hyperfocus and intense interest.

Test yourself here.
posted by anotherpanacea at 5:52 AM PST - 125 comments

This gown, from one of Kahlo’s long hospital stays, is stained with both paint and [content note:] blood. It is a garment that portrays a very different image than the technicolor Tehuantepec dresses that were the artist’s signature style in public. [getty.edu] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 5:46 AM PST - 3 comments

Intelligence analysis is a notoriously difficult craft. Practitioners have to make predictions and assessments with limited information, under huge time pressure, on issues where the stakes involve millions of lives and the fates of nations. If this small bureau tucked in the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters has figured out some tricks for doing it better, those insights may not just matter for intelligence, but for any job that requires making hard decisions under uncertainty. from The obscure federal intelligence bureau that got Vietnam, Iraq, and Ukraine right [Vox]
posted by chavenet at 12:53 AM PST - 23 comments