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7 October brings the debut of Series 11 of Doctor Who with Jodie Whittaker as The Doctor and Chris Chibnall as showrunner. The changes have been greatly anticipated and warmly received: Doctor Who Season 11 Marks a New Era — and It's Been a Long Time Coming (Maureen Ryan, TV Guide); How Doctor Who could change the way women are portrayed in sci-fi (Danush Parvaneh, Vox); and The unimaginable joy of finally seeing a woman as 'Doctor Who' (Kelly Lawler, USA TODAY); [more inside]
posted by ZeusHumms at 6:57 PM PST - 63 comments

How about some curated animal posts by MeFi's own Miss Cellania?

Dog Has Conversation With Rubber Chicken
Catwalk
Baby Rhino Wants to Play
Great Dane Does Lunges
Senior Cat Loves These Little Girls More Than Anything
Cow Plays Fetch
and for something more interactive:
Make Your Own Hybrid Animal with the Hybridizer
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:31 PM PST - 26 comments

Safe, efficient self-driving cars could block walkable, livable communities. Ready or not, here they come.
posted by aniola at 2:52 PM PST - 118 comments

In 2010, Wolfire Games decided to try "an experiment" in selling indie games online: they called it a 'Humble Bundle'. The initial bundle of games sold out, spawning several imitators and many more Humble Bundles. Now, Humble is their own store, competing with Steam and GoG— and they've just moved into publishing.
posted by Quackles at 12:44 PM PST - 9 comments

Tool-manufacturer Ryobi noted that boat builder Louis Sauzedde wields one of their electric planes (albeit well-used) from time to time on his "Tips from a Shipwright" YouTube channel. Unprompted, they sent him a new one, requesting he "unbox" it in a video. I wonder what they think of the segment? [more inside]
posted by maxwelton at 12:42 PM PST - 39 comments

This is the story of a man with an amazing talent and chutzpah. He may or may not be a Saudi prince. According to some in this article, he seems to believe he is.
posted by Alensin at 12:14 PM PST - 9 comments

Thurston Moore interviews Beck on MTV's 120 Minutes in 1994 [YT VHS rip | 3m46s] [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 10:13 AM PST - 27 comments

“Illuminati theory helps oppressed people to explain our experiences in the hood. Society throws horrible stuff in our faces: our family members get locked up for bullshit. Our friends kill each other over beefs, money or turf. Our future is full of dead-end jobs that don’t pay shit. We struggle to pay bills while others live in luxury. On TV, we see people all over the world dying in poverty, even though we live in the most materially abundant society in history. Most people act like none of these terrible things are happening. Why does this occur? We start looking for answers, and Illuminati theory provides one.

We believe Illuminati theory is wrong, and we wrote this pamphlet to offer a different answer. “ How to Overthrow the Illuminati: How conspiracy theories thrived in the aftermath of the Black Power movements and how to combat them.
posted by The Whelk at 10:02 AM PST - 26 comments

In 1968 general Westmoreland asked for nuclear weapons to be sent to Vietnam. The story was contained in a cable declassified in 2014, but only now being written about in a new book. (SLNYTimes) [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 9:49 AM PST - 7 comments

Deer hears something coming, oh lord (sound on for this)
posted by griphus at 9:28 AM PST - 31 comments

Innovative animator Will Vinton, who coined the word "Claymation," has died at the age of 70, following a long illness. Vinton animated popular and toyetic advertising mascots, such as the California Raisins and the Noid, but he was also capable of eerie, dark work, as with the stones in Return to Oz and the appearance of Satan in The Adventures of Mark Twain. Children of the '80s will remember his work vividly for its rich, uncanny, lifelike qualities.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:10 AM PST - 30 comments

On September 18, 2013, in a working class neighborhood of Piraeus, Greece, Golden Dawn nazis, attacked and stabbed to death 34 year old rapper Pavlos Fyssas [previously]. His murder precipitated, albeit belatedly, the seminal and ongoing trial of the organization. A guilty verdict on charges of forming a criminal organization would lead to Golden Dawn being outlawed in Greece.
At the trial, which has been dragging on for 4 years now, the prosecution invited Forensic Architecture, a "multidisciplinary research group based at the University of London that uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world", to sort through the evidence and recreate what happened the night of Pavlos Fyssas murder. The findings where damning for both the police and the Golden Dawn thugs. The police is shown to have lied about the time of their arrival at the crime scene and about their proximity to the crime, standing next to Fyssas as he was being stabbed. The Golden Dawn members' mobile phone calls corroborate that there was a chain of command that ordered the killing.
Forensic Architecture's video on the murder summarizing their analysis, presented to the court along with their full report, is a masterpiece of analytic exposition and impressively recreates the events surrounding the murder based on available data sources.
posted by talos at 8:54 AM PST - 10 comments

An eight-year-old girl has pulled a 1,500-year-old sword from a lake in southern Sweden. [The Guardian] ““I felt something with my hand and at first I thought it was a stick,” Saga Nevecek told the local Värnamo Nyheter newspaper. “Then it had a handle that looked like it was a sword, and then I lifted it up and shouted: ‘Daddy, I found a sword!’” The find, made in July but announced only this week for fear it would trigger a summer stampede to the site at Tånnö on the shore of Lake Vidöstern, felt “pretty cool and a bit exciting”, she told the Swedish public broadcaster Sveriges Radio.”
posted by Fizz at 5:17 AM PST - 35 comments

An original, authenticated Banksy painting was sold for more than a million pounds -- and then it shredded itself.
posted by Etrigan at 2:13 AM PST - 115 comments

The shortlist for the 2018 Architectural Photography Awards has been announced.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:57 AM PST - 4 comments