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When Sixto Rodriguez released his albums Cold Fact and Coming From Reality in the late 1960s, his music was unheralded in his home land. He became a folk hero in apartheid-era South Africa, and he received a late-career boost as the result of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man [FanFare]. After a stroke, Sixto Rodriguez died this morning. He was 81.
posted by pxe2000 at 5:20 PM PST - 28 comments

Robbie Robertson, front man for The Band, has died at 80. Additional obits from Rolling Stone and The LA Times.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 2:03 PM PST - 95 comments

The Next Front in the GOP’s War on Women: No-Fault Divorce. Steven Crowder is part of a growing right-wing chorus calling for an end to modern divorce laws. [more inside]
posted by hydra77 at 1:29 PM PST - 167 comments

David P. Anderson, founder of volunteer scientific computing software BOINC, looks back at its successes and failures. BOINC is still available and providing researchers with PetaFLOPS of computing power, but maybe hasn't achieved what Anderson wanted: "I thought that volunteer computing would become an important paradigm for scientific computing, and that it would last forever. But somehow - in spite of the efforts of me and lots of others - it doesn't look like this will happen."
posted by Tehhund at 12:48 PM PST - 29 comments

The Legal Assault on Corporate Diversity Efforts Has Begun [WSJ gift link] "Employment lawyers say it is likely a matter of time before one of these cases reaches the Supreme Court." Last month, a group of GOP state attorneys general sent a letter to Fortune 100 companies warning them against "race-based preferences in hiring, promotions and contracting." [gift link] The Democratic Attorneys General Association responded with their own letter "pushing back against claims that common efforts to diversify workplaces violate state or federal discrimination laws." [more inside]
posted by mediareport at 11:58 AM PST - 19 comments

A practical explanation of how weak entropy can ruin your day - and your savings. Short version: A popular tool used to generate private keys for cryptocurrency wallets used 32 bits of system time as its random seed. "A 32 bit key space is 2^32, or 4,294,967,296 different unique combinations... Spoiler: That’s not as many combinations as it sounds. With enough optimizations, a decent gaming PC can do a brute-force search through 2^32 wallet combinations in less than a day... Attackers are actively exploiting this and have been draining funds..."
posted by clawsoon at 11:52 AM PST - 55 comments

Karawynn Long on looking for the reason why the ability to recommend a book to your library’s buyers disappeared from all OverDrive web portals. On the KKR sale: the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction, and the ones like my friend, a NYT business journalist, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream emoji. (SL Substack). Bonus: a librarian on their experience purchasing for a single branch library that is part of a state wide consortium.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:55 AM PST - 40 comments

With his combative style and a business model centered on grabbing revenue that would otherwise go to big drugmakers, Sherman had accumulated his share of enemies in the pharma industry. In an interview for Prescription Games, a 2001 book by Jeffrey Robinson, Sherman had said he wondered why a big drug company didn’t “just hire someone to knock me off.” He’d continued: “Perhaps I’m surprised that hasn’t happened.” from Murder, Money and the Battle for a Pharmaceutical Empire [Bloomberg; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 10:07 AM PST - 18 comments

Soap Bubbles, mid-winter Quebec. Explanation: "When a liquid freezes, it releases excess energy as heat. In freezing conditions, a bubble's bottom freezes first, releasing heat that warms the adjacent liquid. This causes water to flow to the top of the bubble, where more heat is released, creating stress on the freeze front. This stress leads to the formation of tiny ice crystals that slide across the bubble's surface. Despite the appearance of multiple freeze fronts, it's actually just one freeze front."
posted by storybored at 8:41 AM PST - 6 comments

Fade in the water. The Alabama Sweet Tea Party. Malice in Montgomery. A massive brawl between white boaters and Black bystanders in Montgomery, Alabama, has gone viral, leading to some of the best jokes, memes, and videos Black Twitter has to offer. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan at 7:24 AM PST - 89 comments

'Hearts Aglow' is a video for a song from Weyes Blood's album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow.
posted by box at 6:59 AM PST - 5 comments

"Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder. Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it’s creative coding and simulated cities, code poetry and bulletin board systems. It’s websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart sing. And it’s sometimes even spreadsheets, coerced to dance and do all manner of weirdness." Samuel Arbesman aggregates these quirky bits of old web joy in the Garden of Computational Delights.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:25 AM PST - 4 comments

A new clue to the reason some people come down with long COVID (NPR)
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:41 AM PST - 12 comments

13-Foot Endangered Sawfish Spotted in Northern Florida Hints at a slow recovery. Scientists tagged the rare animal farther north than any such fish in decades, suggesting the species is returning to areas it once lived. (Smithsonian Magazine).
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 2:01 AM PST - 7 comments