January 23, 2020
It's later than you think
Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock past the two-minutes-to-midnight mark for the first time in its 73-year history. It is now 100 seconds to midnight.
Previously on the Blue:
2016: A few seconds closer to Midnight?
2015: Do you know the time?
2007: I swear it was 7 just a couple of minutes ago...
This is very dumb
Daniella Emmanuel at Buzzfeed: “Guys On TikTok Are Putting Soy Sauce On Their Testicles And Claiming They Can Taste It, So I Spoke To A Doctor”
Canéla Lopez at Business Insider: “TikTok users are dipping their testicles in soy sauce ‘to taste it,’ but testes don't have tastebuds”
Whitney Kimball at Gizmodo: “TikTok Teens Are Dipping Their Balls in Soy Sauce and Lighting Their Houses on Fire”
Canéla Lopez at Business Insider: “TikTok users are dipping their testicles in soy sauce ‘to taste it,’ but testes don't have tastebuds”
Whitney Kimball at Gizmodo: “TikTok Teens Are Dipping Their Balls in Soy Sauce and Lighting Their Houses on Fire”
Before they found the body behind their sorority house...
Her Sorority Sisters Suspected She Was Pregnant. What Did Emile Weaver Know? For months, Emile Weaver denied her pregnancy. A gruesome discovery forced her to confront the truth. (Elle by Alex Ronan)
Into each life some rain must fall …and fall …and fall …and fall
10 years of US weather radar in two hours [YouTube]. This time-lapse movie, starting from January 2010, shows ten years of precipitation in a mosaic of all the NEXRAD radar sites in the contiguous states. NEXRAD is a network of 159 high-resolution Doppler radars maintained by the National Weather Service. Besides precipitation intensity, Doppler radar can also detect the direction and velocity of wind inside a thunderstorm, making it invaluable for tracking tornadoes and detecting straight-line winds caused by downbursts. Many commenters on the YouTube page have identified specific timecodes in the movie where you can see noteworthy instances of severe weather such as tornado swarms, derechos, hurricanes, and nor’easters [see the end of this post for a partial list]. [more inside]
we will be represented as the 'other' people, the ones you have to kill.
A How-To Guide for Muslim Representation in Video Games [Discussion at GDC from 2018][24:30] “Islam has an image problem. And it's not just recent world events that have led to an undue level of scrutiny and prejudice. The media has been pigeonholing Muslims for years. You need only watch a few episodes of 24 or Homeland to see that Muslims, particularly those of Arab descent, are almost always painted as the enemy. "The current political and cultural climate is the reason in media we are the bad guys right now," said Rami Ismail, a co-founder of Vlambeer, an independent game studio based in the Netherlands. The same broad brush, he says, applies to video games too. The Call of Duty franchise, for example, is rife with Muslim villains -- like Khaled Al-Asad in Modern Warfare. "That's Call of Duty, over and over. Shoot all the Arabs," said Ismail. "Muslim blood is the cheapest in the world." Ismail spoke last week on a panel at the annual Game Developers Conference about Muslim representation in video games. The presentation's tone was a sombre one. [via: Engadget] [more inside]
Why would someone build an entire factory for making abandoned buttons?
A photograph supposedly showing “millions” of colorful buttons littering a dilapidated staircase has been circulating on social media for several years, attached to the claim that the image was taken inside an abandoned button factory. Snopes checked out the claim, tracked down the original Instagram post from an urban explorer, and an extensive Greek article with another explorer's photos (Google auto-translation), and the actual factory in Google streetview. The Greek article names the button company/ factory as Nina, that it started manufacturing buttons in the 1940s, and that buttons produced by this company “were placed on the clothes of half of Greece in the 1960s and 1970s.” [Via Mltshp]
can be little nuisances when not frozen
Train Daddy has left the station for good
Andy Byford, Cuomo’s popular subways chief, resigns (for good this time) Andy Byford, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority transit chief credited with leading the turnaround of the New York City subway system, is resigning again, the MTA has confirmed to POLITICO.
You have to turn on the subtitles to fully enjoy this
A Frisbee, pushed by the wind, rolling on a frozen lake in Maine. I repeat: you have to turn on the subtitles to fully enjoy this.
Rupa's Proto-Balearic Bengali Beats
Despite never having set foot in a nightclub, Rupa Biswas made a Bengali disco album on holiday in Canada in the early 1980s, which sank without trace. Decades later, her son discovered that copies were selling online for hundreds of dollars and that one track in particular had racked up millions of views on YouTube. Now the singer is receiving proceeds from the Numero Group reissue and corresponding with fans around the world. [more inside]
Rise of the Dancefluencer
What if you mixed modern NIN with Talking Heads with Eddie's voice?
Pearl Jam: Dance Of The Clairvoyants. New single ahead of a new album. It's unlike anything they've done before. Music video: Dance Of The Clairvoyants (Mach I). [more inside]
“Can I copy your homework?” “Okay, but don’t make it too obvious.”
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