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A Record of Our Meeting with the Grand Faerie Lord of Vast Space and Its Great Mysteries, Revised. A not-strictly-linear Science Fantasy short story by A.T. Greenblatt, from Issue #350 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
posted by signal at 8:07 PM PST - 6 comments

April-June 2022 in humanity's exploration of space. Stand by for rocky passengers, glitches, amazing images, a very French rocket name, Earthly politics, and lots of asteroids.

On the Earth In the Himalayas, a liquid mirror telescope came online. France joined the Artemis accords for sustainable space exploration. BRICS nations announced a new space agreement: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. [more inside]
posted by doctornemo at 5:42 PM PST - 12 comments

A bunch of random people making a baby's day better (note, vid plays twice) h/t Laughing Squid
posted by Gorgik at 2:04 PM PST - 7 comments

Running Up That Hill is a track from the 1985 Kate Bush album "Hounds of Love". The song was approved and heard in the recent "I'm still here" scene in Stranger Things (lyrical relevance), resulting in new fans, social media uses, and some chart reappearances. More in The Irish Times, and some words from Kate. (From the same album: Hounds of Love, Cloudbusting, The Big Sky)
posted by Wordshore at 1:04 PM PST - 68 comments

Here's an interesting 25-minute video essay from Mike Rugnetta on dirt on camera lenses, questioning the principle of suspension of disbelief, Descartes vs. Spinoza on evaluating truth, and the nature of our internal engagement with fiction.
posted by cortex at 12:16 PM PST - 5 comments

Researchers’ number-one fear from Syria to Afghanistan is not war or terrorism but the coming shifts in nature itself. [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 11:42 AM PST - 6 comments

Blake Lemoine works for Google as an AI ethicist and has been suspended for a whistleblower complaint: he alleges that they have created an AI that claims personhood and could pass a Turing test (archive.is of WAPO link). The full interview with LaMDA.
posted by fight or flight at 9:43 AM PST - 196 comments

The 1976 Los Alamos Conference: The Woodstock of Computing. For five summer days in 1976, the first generation of computer rock stars had its own Woodstock. Coming from around the world, dozens of computing’s top engineers, scientists, and software pioneers got together to reflect upon the first 25 years of their discipline in the warm, sunny (and perhaps a bit unsettling) climes of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, birthplace of the atomic bomb. After a multi-year recovery and restoration process, the Computer History Museum is delighted to announce it is making available 21 never-before-seen video recordings of this unique conference. You can watch them here.
posted by Westringia F. at 9:35 AM PST - 8 comments

The budget culture blueprint has been copied over and over by financial experts who think they’ve pinpointed the problem keeping us all poor, from lattes to avocado toast to mindset mistakes. But they all really have just one secret to getting rich quickly: aggressive investing. And you can invest as aggressively as you want with $1 or $5 at a time — tons of apps will help you do it! — but you won’t quit your day job that way. The only sure way to make money is to have money, but no personal finance expert wants to admit their wealth is built on anything other than a solid foundation of hard work and self-control — not their degrees in finance, Ivy League educations, middle class upbringings… or their ability to sell you a fantasy. Dana Miranda writes in Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study on why budget culture fails so many Americans.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:00 AM PST - 94 comments

It's Sunday, which means it's time to gear up and hit the twisties! Step inside, we have 99 awesome motorcycles to choose from, ordered by engine displacement. So let's ride! (Our Kickstarter.) [more inside]
posted by swift at 5:28 AM PST - 27 comments

Julee Cruise, best known for her ethereal dreampop songs in the soundtrack of David Lynch's Twin Peaks TV series, passed away on Friday after a long illness. [more inside]
posted by acb at 5:04 AM PST - 38 comments

In 2022, it’s no longer fashionable to be fashionably late, a change that seems to have arisen from a pandemic now in its third year. [NYT / Archive]
posted by ellieBOA at 3:05 AM PST - 45 comments

"This is a sweet little innocent autistic 9-year-old boy who saw a flag and a bunch of signs with his name on it — and he really thought people were rooting for him," Brundidge said. "He got brave. He got courageous. He did stuff he thought he would never do. Because he thought he saw a sign of support." Last week, Brandon got another nudge of support from someone with experience in "Let's Go Brandon" messaging — President Joe Biden.

How nine year old autistic Brandon found courage through an insult thought up by people too gutless to just say fuck Joe Biden.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:01 AM PST - 19 comments