MetaFilter

Change - "Think about how you think. You can fluidly look at something, identify and modify it in your head, move it around, describe it ... What we call understanding isn't the sum of knowledge, it's the sum of the relationship to all of that information. Knowledge is the layer above information, which is transformative." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 11:56 PM PST - 32 comments

Solomon Perel, a German Jew who outwitted the Nazis by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II, an extraordinary story of survival that was dramatized in the 1990 film “Europa Europa,” died Feb. 2 at his home in Givatayim, near Tel Aviv. He was 97. [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 3:49 PM PST - 39 comments

In Feb. 1927, Justin Spafford and Lucien Esty published Ask Me Another [alt.], a trivia book that let readers compare scores with Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, John B. Watson, Ruth Hale, Alice Duer Miller, and others. Interview with Esty and Spafford (cont.; cw: stereotyping). By March, 100k copies were in print. By April, a second volume was in print, appearing later in an omnibus. By May, it inspired a comedy song and parody book (or two). The same year, it inspired music history / theory quizzes with scores from prominent musicians. Newspapers ran brief quizzes supplanting the crossword puzzle rage, itself deeply rooted in trivia puzzles (see also 19th C. question books or Renaissance memory / conversation games such as "Vittorie d'Hercole"). Last month, before passing away, Mefi's Own eotvos described a planned project for an online edition.
posted by Wobbuffet at 3:38 PM PST - 12 comments

Former Del Fuego, NYU professor and Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen biographer Warren Zanes shares his opinion about the Grammys. Are they outdated? Useless? Do they ever actually award the right people? Well, Zanes feels there may be some value to the Grammy Awards.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 3:07 PM PST - 12 comments

Hillel Wayne interviewed 17 people with experience in both software and “traditional” engineering to answer the question: “Are we really engineers?” [more inside]
posted by learning from frequent failure at 2:46 PM PST - 78 comments

The Live-Service Game Bubble Looks Ready To Burst [Gamespot]

“Fortnite is several weeks into the first season of its fourth chapter. In real time, it's been going strong since the summer of 2017, and though Epic doesn't share player counts, by any available metric it seems to still be doing incredibly well. But in the live-service world, Fortnite's success feels increasingly rare. While there do exist other major successes in the pocket of the games industry where studios operate one game for years on end, many others are closing their proverbial doors for good, which is extremely scary both for players worried about gaming history and future developers concerned with the trends they may be tasked with chasing. Can live-service games survive modest successes, or must they all be as massive as Fortnite to make it?”

Amid a host of live-service games announcing their shutdowns, it's starting to feel like there's no safe middle ground between Fortnite and foreclosed. [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 1:35 PM PST - 47 comments

So Norway has now removed all religious status and related state subsidies from the Jehovah's Witnesses. This on the heels of a recent move in which Norwegian courts reversed a disfellowship decision the Church made. [more inside]
posted by Meatbomb at 11:35 AM PST - 36 comments

Chawne Kimber on constructing quilts and speaking history. "The name of that quilt is 'The One for Eric G'; it says “I can’t breathe” nine times, and it’s meant to look like graffiti scrawled on the wall in a dark alleyway. But the background fabrics are all Civil War–era prints in black... So you can’t miss that I’m making commentaries about then and now at the same time." Virtual Studio Tour with Artist Chawne Kimber, Smithsonian American Art Museum (Sept 22, 2022) Title of the post (and this quilt): "In essence, I am a sophisticated cotton picker" is an Eartha Kitt quotation. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:27 AM PST - 7 comments

Even as Opel’s fifteen minutes ticked down, his quest for exposure was just getting started. The Oscars were not his first or his last brush with history, and five years later he’d be dead. from What Became of the Oscar Streaker? [The New Yorker; ungated] [CW: references to antiquated 1970s language about homosexuality]
posted by chavenet at 8:42 AM PST - 14 comments

Will Steffen's "ideas were grounded in his view of the Earth as a complex, interconnected, evolving system" .. "Viewing the world in this way helps us understand what we have done to our environment – and how to begin fixing the problems." (see also the Climate Council and his talks on youtube) [more inside]
posted by jeffburdges at 6:36 AM PST - 5 comments

Is this poison ivy?
posted by swift at 6:15 AM PST - 93 comments