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There’s a viral and ironic trend that i’ve been lately noticing in and beyond my TQPOC community: my wealthier friends own everything but their class privilege. I couldn’t “be myself” in a space built for people like me. I couldn’t identify with people I shared identities with. The identity that significantly affects my daily life was erased in a culture that consumes identity politics. The only times my anti-capitalist housemates mentioned class was when it was theoretical and not about them personally, as if being marginalized makes you entitled to know how every kind of oppression feels. It’s easy to hide behind your oppression.
comment posted at 4:07 PM on Sep-29-16
comment posted at 4:48 PM on Sep-29-16

Some monospaced fonts with ligatures for common mathematical and programming symbols: Hasklig, Fira Code, Monoid (a small “why” from the creator), Iosevka, DejaVu Sans Code, and Fixedsys Excelsior. Take them (and a bunch of no-ligature monospaced fonts) for a spin at app.programmingfonts.org!
comment posted at 5:20 PM on Sep-29-16

House of Memories is a Danish living history museum created to stimulate the memories of people with dementia through sight, sound, smell and touch. A living history museum usually conjures up images of butter churns and anvils. At Den Gamle By (The Old Town) Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, you'll find all that. But tucked away in one corner of this museum, there's also something different — an entire apartment straight out of the 1950s. The "House of Memories" is not usually open to the public, and it's not aimed at schoolchildren sent to learn about a distant and exotic past. Rather, this exhibit is intended for visitors living with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. And the history they've come to experience is their own.
comment posted at 12:50 PM on Sep-25-16

Sixty-One Glimpses Of The Future
comment posted at 6:17 PM on Sep-23-16

DEEP WEB - kinetic audiovisual installation The generative, luminous architectural structure weaves 175 motorized spheres and 12 high power laser systems into a 25 meter wide and 10 meter high super-structure, bringing to life a luminous analogy to the nodes and connections of digital networks. Moving up and down, and choreographed and synchronized to an original multi-channel musical score by Robert Henke, the spheres are illuminated by blasts of colourful laser beams resulting in three-dimensional sculptural light drawings and arrangements in cavernous darkness.
comment posted at 10:31 AM on Sep-10-16

Andrea Liu seeks to problematize this continually deferred relationship in her essay entitled, the Top Ten Words I Am Sick Of Seeing On Artist Statements.
comment posted at 3:42 PM on Sep-2-16

This exhaustive list of useful mental models from the founder of DuckDuckGo, drawing on Charlie Munger's concept of mental models is well worth exploring. It contains a surprising amount of interesting jumping-off points to rules-of-thumb and insights from various fields, from Hanlon's Razor to the critical concept of BATNA in negotiation; and including such useful startup ideas as technical debt, organizational debt, and hunting elephants or flies.
comment posted at 7:33 PM on Aug-4-16

BBC: "There are strong social divisions in how young people use digital technology , according to international research from the OECD. The economics think tank found that in many countries wealthy and poor pupils spent similar amounts of time online. But richer youngsters were much more likely to use the internet for learning rather than games. The study argues that even with equal access to technology a "digital divide" persists in how the internet is used.""
comment posted at 4:50 PM on Jul-28-16

Big Dumb Objects: Science Fiction's Most Mysterious MacGuffins by Damien Walter [The Guardian] “When the unknown is also alien, the mystery only grows more magnetic. Think of that iconic opening to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: a family of apes wake one morning to find a black monolith looming over them; that had its origins in Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Sentinel. Did some super-advanced civilisation intercede in the early evolution of intelligent life on earth? Or was the monolith just filming a very special edition of Life on Earth? We don’t know, and never find out. But this shiny, looming thing is just one of many Big Dumb Objects [wiki] that have turned up in science fiction over the decades.”
comment posted at 6:44 AM on Jul-23-16
comment posted at 6:14 AM on Jul-24-16

"What do you say to a police officer who tells you to stop when you are legally and not obstructively filming their interactions?"
comment posted at 4:38 AM on Jul-14-16

Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing - Part 1 Consider the lyrics of metal music as a dataset. What can we learn?

Behold a word cloud of an awful lot of metal lyrics, swear words plotted against readability, and a denogram of metal bands' comparative lyrical groupings. Brood upon lists of most and least metal words. Wonder at the term frequency -Inverse document frequency of "Orgasmatron." And don't miss the lurking haikus. (via)
comment posted at 4:12 PM on Jul-3-16

someone on imgur is making lists of Films You May Not Have Seen:
Actual Films You May Not Have Seen
Actual Films You May Not Have Seen (#2)
Actual Films You May Not Have Seen (#3)
Actual Films You May Not Have Seen (#4)
Films You Actually May Not Have Seen (#5)
Films You Actually May Not Have Seen (#6)
Films You Actually May Not Have Seen 7
comment posted at 6:51 AM on Jun-26-16

Bill Cunningham, the street fashion photographer who rode his bike all over NYC in that functional blue smock, has died. If you haven't seen this 2011 documentary (previously) you've missed a gem. See also his video channel at the NYT and this New Yorker profile from 2009. His assistant posted this photo to Instagram 2 days ago, saying that Bill was under the weather, but some reports are saying that he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke recently.
comment posted at 6:59 AM on Jun-26-16

Watch NYers' Hearts Break As They JUST Miss The Subway Train (SL YouTube)
comment posted at 5:38 PM on Jun-21-16

As urged by creators and luminaries of the Web at the recent Decentralized Web summit, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert asks the question, Wordpress founder (MeFi's own™) Matt Mullenweg agrees, and Twitter&Medium founder (MeFi's own™) Ev Williams mulls extensively.
comment posted at 1:28 PM on Jun-18-16

How To Cook Shad

Shad no longer enjoys the favor it once did. The world’s greatest herring, its Latin name, Alosa sapidissima, means “the best shad to eat.” whole books have been dedicated to singing shad’s praises. George Washington was fond of the fish, and Thomas Jefferson always had it on his spring menus. Every restaurant from the Canadian Maritimes down to Florida would feature shad and its wonderful roe on spring menus; a few still do. Then, in the 1870s, we brought shad West, and the species surpassed anyone’s wildest dream of success. The Columbia River run numbers 3 million or more, even today. In 1917, the commercial shad fishery netted nearly 6 million pounds of shad here in Sacramento. ...So what happened? The fish stocks are fine here in the West, and, after a long struggle, are recovering in the polluted East. What happened was, in a word, laziness.

comment posted at 3:14 PM on Jun-16-16

De-dimension, the graduation project of Design Academy Eindhoven student Jongha Choi, is a different take on flat-pack furniture. It's a bit more practical than his Cigarette Chair.
comment posted at 9:23 AM on May-29-16

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
comment posted at 4:12 PM on May-19-16
comment posted at 3:29 AM on May-20-16
comment posted at 4:19 AM on May-20-16
comment posted at 5:09 AM on May-20-16

In 2000, shortly after the death of his first wife (anthropologist Yvonne Presswerk), Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz set up a series of cafés mortels, or death cafes--informal gatherings where ordinary people could talk openly about death and dying. Crettaz inspired Jon Underwood and his mother, Sue Barsky Reid, to begin hosting death cafes in the UK ; eventually they put together a guide [pdf] for those wanting to host their own. Death cafes have now been held in 35 countries. They are not meant to be grief or bereavement support groups; instead, Underwood says, their purpose is “to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives."
comment posted at 1:40 PM on May-16-16

There's a name for the kind of mindset that mistakes depression for profundity, that associates an inability to feel or express joy, or sadness, or any emotion other than anger, with heroism and manliness. In 2015, it informed the shape of most of our blockbuster movie villains, from Immortan Joe to Kylo Ren. In 2016, it seems, it also afflicts our heroes. The actual villain that both Batman and Superman need to fight in this movie isn't Lex Luthor, or Doomsday. It's toxic masculinity. -- Abigail Nussbaum dissects Batman v Superman.
comment posted at 3:18 PM on Apr-18-16
comment posted at 3:44 PM on Apr-18-16

Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls. Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux".
comment posted at 3:33 AM on Apr-1-16

Podcat allows you to explore podcasts and their episodes. People, production companies and podcasts can be searched and are cross-referenced.
comment posted at 7:42 PM on Mar-16-16

Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician, author, and critic, has died at age 84.
comment posted at 6:02 PM on Feb-19-16

Strunk & White's Elements of Style, rewritten by a predictive text generator by Jamie Brew. Follow along at @elementstrunk.
comment posted at 9:47 AM on Feb-13-16

Atlas Obscura brings us the story of the mid-20th Century "Peanut Butter Hearings", where the Peanut Butter Manufacturers Association faced off with the FDA (and the Peanut Butter Grandma, a.k.a. Ruth Desmond, head of the Federation of Homemakers) to hammer out the exact percentage of peanut butter that had to be peanuts. (via Mental Floss)
comment posted at 4:19 PM on Feb-10-16

MetaFilter is long familiar with the dichotomy between Ask Culture and Guess Culture. Alice Maz, a programmer writing for the new group blog Status 451, has described another common dichotomy between “harmonious emotional experience” and “information sharing”, and what happens when the two meet. (In short: “Harsh words may be exchanged, and everyone exits the encounter thinking the other person was monumentally rude for no reason.”)
comment posted at 11:21 AM on Jan-16-16

Actor Alan Rickman, active in theater and film for 30 years and known for roles such as Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter, has died at age 69 from cancer.
comment posted at 4:08 PM on Jan-14-16

Passphrases That You Can Memorize — But That Even the NSA Can’t Guess. It turns out, coming up with a good passphrase by just thinking of one is incredibly hard, and if your adversary really is capable of one trillion guesses per second, you’ll probably do a bad job of it. If you use an entirely random sequence of characters it might be very secure, but it’s also agonizing to memorize (and honestly, a waste of brain power). ... But luckily this usability/security trade-off doesn’t have to exist. ...
comment posted at 4:05 PM on Dec-16-15

"I'm taking pictures of things I find beautiful..." (slyt)
comment posted at 12:54 PM on Dec-5-15

Before Pinterest and Evernote and Tumblr, there was the humble commonplace book, a space for gathering and reflecting on ideas, quotations, observations, lines from poems, and other information. "How and Why to Keep a Commonplace Book" is a brief introduction to a venerable tradition of idea curation.
comment posted at 3:35 AM on Dec-3-15

This Is Not Porn (.net) (previously here) has been showing "rare, candid, funny, beautiful, strange and awesome celebrity photos" for five years. But now the site has added a category for debunking fake celebrity photos, whether through a frivolous use of photoshop, a malicious use of photoshop, or simply a misidentification. Also, don't miss the collection of gifs.
comment posted at 6:53 PM on Nov-28-15

The new Raspberry Pi Zero is so cheap and so small the first 10000 of them are being given away free on the cover of a magazine.
comment posted at 8:09 AM on Nov-26-15

The Writers Guild of America has released their list of The 101 Funniest Screenplays.
comment posted at 7:40 PM on Nov-14-15

What the numbers say as a neighborhood gentrifies. New research is finding that gentrification, contrary to popular belief, doesn't actually force poorer residents to leave areas at atypical rates—though that doesn't mean the changes don't have negative consequences.Relatively reliable data over a period of 12 years.
comment posted at 3:50 PM on Nov-10-15

Three more years have passed in a blur of deadlines and I still don’t know anybody who isn’t connected to my work. If I nip out to buy wine on Saturday evening, I pass pubs full of people who look like they’re having fun. I see groups of men often catching up one-to-one, and I experience pangs for when my weekends were like that. Everybody except me has a fulfilling social life. Or does it only look like that? The difficulty of forging friendships in your adulthood on MeFi, previously and previouslier.
comment posted at 3:26 AM on Nov-10-15

What 12,000 Emails Tell Us About Being Hillary Clinton “… right now I’m fighting w the WH operator who doesn’t believe I am who I say I am and wants my direct office line even tho I’m not there and I just (g)ave him my home # and the State Dept # and I told him I had no idea what my direct office # was since I didn’t call myself and I just hung up and am calling thru Ops like a proper and properly dependent Secretary of State – no independent dialing allowed.”
comment posted at 5:21 PM on Oct-22-15

"Our findings provide compelling evidence for the existence of fungal infection in the central nervous system from Alzheimer's disease patients, but not in control individuals." Nature magazine just published a study that claims that Alzheimer's disease is caused by fungi. If this is true, this is amazing and incredibly exciting. (By the way, I've just noticed that our very own cstross was the one who shared it on Twitter.)
comment posted at 7:21 PM on Oct-17-15

After a drunk man pummels a Pepper robot greeting customers at a store in Japan, robotics ethicists call for a new type of legal protection that would apply specifically to robots.

As more-advanced robots can already react to basic stimuli, navigate complex environments, and use specialized “intelligence” to accomplish narrowly defined tasks, they present themselves as far from human but also as something rather different from a toaster or basic tool. Weng calls for a set of laws to guide human interaction with robots as they become more common and more social. He argues that they are a “third existence,” after people and property, deserving of their own legal protections.

comment posted at 3:51 AM on Oct-9-15
comment posted at 3:58 AM on Oct-9-15

Here's The Daily Meal's list of 10 favorite regional soft drinks (SLIDESHOW). And here's Mental Floss's stories behind 11 regional soft drinks. More info follows....
comment posted at 1:14 PM on Sep-20-15

For those workers that currently earn the state’s minimum of $8.75 per hour, there are no neighborhoods in which median asking rent could be paid affordably. The extent to which rent growth has outpaced income growth in New York City means low-wage workers face three options: find several roommates to lower their personal rent burden, take on more than one job, or move out of New York City.

The High Burden of Low Wages: How Renting Affordably in NYC is Impossible on Minimum Wage
comment posted at 3:56 PM on Sep-9-15

While work-life balance is generally seen as an issue mostly affecting women, many men also struggle with balancing work obligations with family. In companies which expect an "ideal" worker to produce 60-80 hour work weeks, men use a number of strategies to conserve time and shorten work weeks--with vastly different consequences depending on transparency.
comment posted at 5:28 PM on May-7-15

In the late seventies and early eighties TV stations embraced the video game craze by granting lucky viewers the chance to play them on the air by shouting POW! into their phone.
comment posted at 3:46 PM on May-1-15

This is a blog about all things pencil. Sometimes pens. Paper, too.
comment posted at 5:13 PM on Apr-23-15