MetaFilter

Eric Topol explores in detail the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.5 variant and our response to it.
posted by eotvos at 8:58 PM PST - 296 comments

"It’s better to use your heart. It's where the love is, and that was what you were supposed to spread instead of money. Except here, love came at a price."
posted by blue shadows at 6:29 PM PST - 27 comments

It doesn't matter if you hate Slack or love Slack, we just need to talk about that dusty stick emoji.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:09 PM PST - 22 comments

Some details about legal issues of Musk backing out "Legal experts have said Musk can’t just walk away from the deal. His April agreement to buy the company included a commitment to go through with the acquisition unless there’s a major change to the business, and legal experts say nothing has happened to meet that threshold. Musk has previously threatened to scuttle the deal if Twitter didn’t give him more data to run his own analysis on how many spam bots it has, while Twitter has said it can’t give up personal information on its users like their names, emails and IP addresses, which it uses to come up with its own bot numbers."
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:14 PM PST - 182 comments

Former Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos dies at 79 ... Won Angola's war and took the spoils [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:07 PM PST - 3 comments

Dave Isay talks about StoryCorps and shares three heartfelt true stories. Since 2003, StoryCorps has made more than half a million audio recordings of people's conversations and memories for the Library of Congress. In the talk Isay also shares his newest initiative One Small Step, that he sees as critical to getting through the polarization crisis brought by "the hate industrial complex". [more inside]
posted by storybored at 2:02 PM PST - 7 comments

"Go Ask Alice" is a 1971 novel about teenage drug use, purported to be the "found diary" of a real teenage girl (but almost certainly a complete fabrication) and a contributor to the moral panic of Nixon's war on drugs. It has never been out of print. Carmen Maria Machado is the guest in a 3-part You're Wrong About podcast series with host Sarah Marshall and guest Rick Emerson (author of Unmask Alice) to talk about the book's influence on American culture. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 [more inside]
posted by AlSweigart at 11:18 AM PST - 69 comments

A new law will require the school day to start later in California — and other states may soon follow.
posted by Etrigan at 10:43 AM PST - 56 comments

"And every minute you spend with me is a minute that they too get to look for beauty." "The Unweaving of a Beautiful Thing" by atb depicts a battle between a witch and Death. It was posted to the Effective Altruism forum but is much more about character than calculations. 'There were two words that Superman lived by, and they were “pay me”.' Over on Archive of Our Own, "A Common Sense Guide to Doing the Most Good" by cthulhuraejepsen is an unfinished narrative of "Clark Kent, effective altruist" that addresses "the Crank Problem".
posted by brainwane at 6:56 AM PST - 23 comments

Xiao Qian Feng, a maker from Guangdong, China, recorded the process of building her own home and studio from scratch over the course of 300 days. The end result: a calming, satisfying, beautiful nearly-wordless video featuring both the beauty of her surroundings and the very cool process of building her own space from start to finish. [more inside]
posted by Stacey at 6:26 AM PST - 25 comments

Today is the first International Day of Og(h)am, an Irish alphabet mainly found on Ogham stones (pdf) and the subject of two projects using digital tools to understand more. Ogham in 3D was an Irish project which produced 3D images of some of the Irish Ogham inscriptions, whereas OG(H)AM is an ongoing collaboration between the University of Glasgow and Maynooth University, which expands the scope to outside Ireland, and beyond stone monuments. [more inside]
posted by scorbet at 4:38 AM PST - 9 comments

Histography: Timeline of History - "Histography is an interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions."[1,2,3] (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:49 AM PST - 5 comments