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Human beings drive close to 100 million miles between fatal crashes, so it will take hundreds of millions of driverless miles for 100 percent certainty on this question. But the evidence for better-than-human performance is starting to pile up, especially for Waymo. It’s important for policymakers to allow this experiment to continue because, at scale, safer-than-human driving technology would save a lot of lives. from Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers? [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 11:13 PM PST - 101 comments

Neil Cicierega edited a bunch of George Lucas and Panasonic-related Japanese things together into THE GEORGE LUCAS EGGSPERIENCE. (4 minutes)
posted by JHarris at 10:29 PM PST - 10 comments

Fish once thought extinct released into wild. Native southern purple-spotted gudgeon fish (once thought to have been extinct for two decades) have been released into a Victorian wetland.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:05 PM PST - 5 comments

OK I heard you like bees. So what better than this speed-run of a forgotten bee-themed game for the Commodore 64. [more inside]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 6:15 PM PST - 6 comments

Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters
“They’ll throw something out into the public sphere, which will get a little bit of press, and then before you know it, a new law has been written, possibly by one of them. And now you have the criminalization of what was previously seen as legitimate civil protest.”
Atlas decribed as a think tank that creates think tanks.
All the usual culprits: AFD in Germany, Agribiz in Brazil, US evangelicals, The IEA in UK, Koch, & Murdoch in Australia, Big Oil, etc etc
posted by adamvasco at 5:16 PM PST - 42 comments

Then leave complaints: fools only strive / to make a great an honest hive. Attacked by his critics as the "Man-Devil", Bernard Mandeville, an Anglo-Dutch social philosopher, caused a scandal in 18th-century Europe by arguing that “Bare virtue can’t make nations live...Thus every part was full of Vice / Yet the whole mass a paradise”. [more inside]
posted by Tarn at 2:45 PM PST - 3 comments

Bee orchids mimic the shape and scent of bees in order to lure them into ‘pseudocopulation’, where the male insect attempts to mate with the flower. While the bee gets nothing but a wasted effort, the orchid transfers some of its pollen to the bee. (previously)
posted by sammyo at 2:11 PM PST - 4 comments

Sylvia Plath and the Bees....in February 1963, Sylvia Plath wrote a cluster of extraordinary poems about Bees. She had taken up beekeeping that June and wrote excitedly to her mother in America to describe the events of attending a local beekeepers’ meeting in the Devon village of North Tawton", Sylvia Plath and the Bee Poems
posted by clavdivs at 12:07 PM PST - 6 comments

Thomas Seeley is the Horace White Professor Emeritus of Biology at Cornell, where he has been studying honeybees for 40 years. Initially he was interested in how a hive allocated its strongest foragers to the most productive foraging sites, but this has led into a general investigation into swarm intelligence and decision making, and how individual bees in a hive function similarly to neurons in a brain: "[...] even though each unit (bee or neuron) has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective decisions." [more inside]
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 11:31 AM PST - 3 comments

Dark, smelly and 'completely bonkers': Welcome to the world of bog snorkeling [CBC]
posted by readinghippo at 11:19 AM PST - 12 comments

Steam, Valve Software's massive online PC gaming store and platform, turns 20 years old today. PC gaming site Rock Paper Shotgun has posted a thoughtful article about this milestone.
posted by May Kasahara at 11:08 AM PST - 12 comments

Florida and Oklahoma have just approved PragerU Kids for use in public school classrooms. In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,” a young girl learning about climate change decides to stand up for fossil fuel energy. Though ostracized by her peers, she is supported by her family members, who compare her bravery to that of the Polish Jews in the Warsaw Uprising.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:05 AM PST - 41 comments

The oldest known depiction of the bee in art is The man (or woman) of bicorp an (at least) 8000 year old cave painting in the Coves de l'Aranya in Bicorp, Valencia, Spain.
posted by donut_princess at 10:12 AM PST - 2 comments

When Twitter Died, So Did Independent Journalism
posted by Artw at 9:40 AM PST - 31 comments

Tim Scott's Girlfriend (slWaPo)
posted by box at 9:10 AM PST - 23 comments

Honeycomb Hotel (gameplay video) is a traditional logic puzzle: given a honeycomb of 7, 19, or 37 cells, determine which icon should appear in each cell, and which nonbranching path connects every cell. There are ~65000 different puzzles, each with only one right answer. Clues are simple ones like "Mouse is in the same diagonal as Tulip" or "there's a wall between Cherry and Cat," but graphical: from these individual clues you solve the entire puzzle. Solving shows a brief animation of bees flying around, like in Solitaire. No time limit, no storyline, no microtransactions, only pick-up-and-play logic puzzles by Everett Kaser, one of the nearly 40 different logic games he has made since 1991: [more inside]
posted by one for the books at 8:08 AM PST - 7 comments

I'm not always a fan of Drew Gooden's videos. His style is a bit irritating at times. But the video Buying the weirdest cat toys on the internet [20m] really made me laugh out loud a couple of times. Plus, it's about cats. And toys. Always a great combination.
posted by hippybear at 6:33 AM PST - 3 comments

Eddie Izzard talks about growing up trans and coming out in the 80s at the 2022 Utah Equality Allies Gala.
posted by Kattullus at 5:39 AM PST - 11 comments

BBC: Patrick Grant, best known for being a judge on the BBC's The Great British Sewing Bee, has launched a campaign to reignite underwear manufacturing in the south Wales valleys ... Welsh stars, including singer and radio presenter Wynne Evans and comedian Kiri Pritchard-McLean, have joined Patrick to be photographed in their pants for the Hello Boyos! campaign, a nod to Wonderbra's Hello Boys campaign from 1994. Nation Cymru: Not many people know this but until not that long ago the best pants in the world were made in Wales. They made the world famous Wonderbra in Pontllanfraith. But then one by one the factories closed and a proud manufacturing tradition was lost. BBC: The Great British Sewing Bee, and trailer.
posted by Wordshore at 2:51 AM PST - 10 comments

Betty Lou Music offers uncluttered chord guides to thousands of songs behind several attractive low-resolution pictures of shaggy dogs.
posted by solarion at 12:00 AM PST - 12 comments