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Grant Holloway's Head Stabilized Through the Hurdles. It looks unreal. I think this is the run.
posted by Gorgik at 9:43 PM PST - 32 comments

A short history of Flash & the forgotten Flash Website movement. A transcript of a talk by Nathalie Lawhead about the era of Adobe Flash and the loss of cultural memory that came with the death of Flash as a medium. [more inside]
posted by Kybard at 6:01 PM PST - 66 comments

For all your raccoon-watching needs. A Nova Scotia man gets mobbed by over two dozen raccoons during a nightly feeding session. Toward the end of the video he dons a crocheted raccoon hat. In this video, he introduces the raccoons to (non sugar-based) whipped cream in a can. (That section starts around the 9:30 mark. It takes the furballs a while to get used to having dairy products sprayed into their mouths, but they do get the hang of it, especially one guy. Earlier in the video, he explains there are no local laws prohibiting him from feeding the animals.)
posted by sardonyx at 1:37 PM PST - 94 comments

Praised by Italo Calvino as “one of the finest essays in English literature”, Thomas De Quincey’s 1849 The English Mail Coach describes his opium-tinged perceptions of riding on the coach (which at the time represented the ultimate in speed and power); a near-accident with a young couple on a “frail reedy gig”, and a lengthy dream fugue. Commentary by Robin Jarvis (Public Domain Review) and Dan Chiasson (The New Yorker). Previously.
posted by adrianhon at 1:22 PM PST - 12 comments

When New York City Ballet cancelled their in-person Fall 2020 season, they asked five choreographers to choreograph site-specific works for small groups of New York City Ballet dancers. new song by Andrea Miller. pixellation in a wave by Sidra Bell. Solo for Russell by Pam Tanowitz. Water Rite by Jamar Roberts. Thank You New York by Justin Peck. [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 12:39 PM PST - 3 comments

In addition to being a “duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, egg-laying aquatic [venomous mammal]”, platypii are also bioluminescent! Vice, National Geographic, The New York Times, Phys.org, The Cut, and Science News have reportage on the forthcoming paper in Mammalia
posted by Going To Maine at 12:35 PM PST - 35 comments

Matthew Rayfield, a programmer who makes mobile and web-based toys, created 3,000 new Pokémon using open-source AI models. Via Vice
posted by chavenet at 11:31 AM PST - 11 comments

Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one? (SL CJR)
posted by toastyk at 9:21 AM PST - 30 comments

Fergal Scahill's fiddle tune a day, Day 86 "The New Mown Meadow" Reel. Joined by Emma O'Sullivan, the mighty sean-nós dancer from Renvyle in Connemara.
posted by Cozybee at 8:18 AM PST - 13 comments

How Artificial Neural Networks Paved the Way For A Dramatic New Theory of Dreams “ The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting, and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning. That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures.”
posted by dhruva at 5:56 AM PST - 64 comments

Ancient squid-like creature with paperclip-shaped shell may have lived for hundreds of years - "D. maximum was a large, squid-like creature (its shell was over 1.5 meters tall), an ammonite that was part of a now-extinct group of tentacled cephalopods. It went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs, presumably for the same reason: the Chicxulub asteroid strike. What made D. maximum stand out was the unique shape of its shell. The top portion bent back and forth, resembling a paperclip."
posted by kliuless at 4:44 AM PST - 26 comments