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Forest fires due to slash and burn farming in Sumatra, Indonesia have led to unprecedented air pollution levels in Singapore and Malaysia. In Singapore particularly, Facebook and Twitter are aflame as well. For a country used to very clean air, the sudden pollution has led to public outcry, with air purifiers and face masks being snatched off the shelves. So far, no stop-work-order has been issued, and there are complaints that the government is not tackling the situation rapidly enough. Indonesia is working to put out the fires and is considering cloud seeding; their response to pressure from Singapore to do more was that Singaporeans should stop behaving like children and not disturb their domestic affairs. While image macros about the 2013 haze continue to fill up Facebook feeds, some people are taking the whole affair in a more irreverent way.
comment posted at 4:03 AM on Jun-20-13
comment posted at 6:17 AM on Jun-20-13

Picture this. You're one of the 3 million-ish users of Duolingo, doing online Italian lessons so you can talk to your Italian boyfriend in his own language. Halfway through one of your daily lessons, you're given the sentence "Lui ti ama" to translate. "He loves you" -- cute coincidence. But then it starts getting stranger.
comment posted at 8:10 PM on Jun-17-13

India to send world's last telegram
comment posted at 4:51 PM on Jun-17-13

Brutal police crackdown on protesters against a bus fare rise in São Paulo and Rio, as well as other cities.
comment posted at 4:30 AM on Jun-15-13

What happened to Jim Thompson?
comment posted at 8:36 PM on Jun-14-13

David and Jason are a married bi-national couple fighting the Defense of Marriage Act which denies gay Americans over 1100 federal rights. This includes preventing gay Americans from gaining green cards for their foreign born spouses. Since meeting in the Spring of 2007, Jason has returned to LA over a dozen times for expensive lengthy visits but is now being warned he will no longer be allowed to visit as a tourist.
comment posted at 4:22 AM on Jun-13-13

In an interview with Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, claims that the US is "trying to bully the Hong Kong government" into extraditing him, and provides new documents which describe the NSA's routine hacking of targets in Hong Kong and mainland China since 2009, including regular access of large backbone networks.
comment posted at 5:53 PM on Jun-12-13

Domestic violence becomes news - only when it turns into a mass murder As the report points out, there's a glaring flaw in Washington State's protection-order system: "With very few, recent exceptions, law-enforcement agencies did not have protocols in place to remove firearms from protective-order respondents or convicted domestic-violence offenders."
comment posted at 2:58 AM on Jun-13-13

The recent Netflix House of Cards series starring Kevin Spacey was a remake of a very popular British political thriller of the same name that aired during the 90's. The show begins by tracking the dark political machinations and skullduggery of an urbane Chief Whip of the Conservative Party, who is conspiring to become Prime Minister after Margaret Thatcher's resignation.
comment posted at 5:53 PM on Jun-11-13

John Oliver, a standup comedian from Birmingham in England, takes over from Jon Stewart as host of the Daily Show for the summer from tomorrow. The Guardian profiles him.
comment posted at 8:28 PM on Jun-9-13

RIP Iain Banks.
comment posted at 1:07 AM on Jun-10-13

Debarghya Das, an Indian student at Cornell, wanted to impress his friends by obtaining their examination marks for the Indian Certificate of Secondary Examination and the Indian School Certificate and, thanks to some poorly written javascript, discovers the entire database containing the grades for 200,000 Indian students, as well as potential evidence of widespread tampering.
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Several members of the Philadelphia Orchestra were on a flight from Bejing to Macao that got stuck on the tarmac for three hours. With nothing better to do, the musicians resorted to doing what they do best...
comment posted at 7:04 PM on Jun-7-13

Certain corners of Twitter are abuzz today over a video of actor Jesse Eisenberg's vicious dismantling of an unprepared and annoying young junket interviewer. (Her attempts to defend herself did not go over well with the internet, either.)
comment posted at 3:18 AM on Jun-4-13

Cinematic historians trying to pinpoint the place where Shyamalan's hubris outgrew his oeuvre would be well advised to hit up YouTube; there, they'll find a weird, misbegotten 2004 Sci-Fi channel pseudo-documentary titled The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan that hints at the problems to come. Built to lead up to the heavily hyped release of Shyamalan's film The Village, this bizarre special follows documentarian Nathaniel Kahn as he begins to profile Shyamalan for what’s ostensibly an authorized puff piece ...
comment posted at 8:57 PM on Jun-2-13

"This morning, Turkish police surrounded protesters in Taksim Gezi park, the central square in Istanbul, blocked all exits and attacked them with chemical sprays and teargas. An Occupy-style movement has taken off in Istanbul."
comment posted at 7:16 PM on May-31-13
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"A fundamental shift in the relationship between the government and the governed is taking place: by restricting access to the law, the state is handing itself an alarming immunity from legal scrutiny. There are several aspects to this: the partial or total withdrawal of state financial support for people who lack the means to pay for legal advice and representation; and for those who can pay, a restriction on which kinds of decision by public bodies can be challenged. In the area in which I work, criminal law, defendants who receive legal aid will lose the right to choose who represents them in court. Specialist criminal barrister Francis FitzGibbon on the impact the UK government's legal aid reform plans are having on the English & Welsh justice system.
comment posted at 7:58 AM on May-31-13
comment posted at 8:05 AM on May-31-13

What kind of Asian are you?
comment posted at 5:12 PM on May-29-13

"In 1872 two men began work on a lexicon of words of Asian origin used by the British in India. Since its publication the 1,000-page dictionary has never been out of print and a new edition is due out next year. What accounts for its enduring appeal? Hobson-Jobson is the dictionary's short and mysterious title."
comment posted at 4:34 AM on May-28-13

Where are you from? Or, how I became a Pakistani?
comment posted at 11:36 PM on May-25-13

How Apple Used Shell Companies to Save $44 Billion in Taxes
comment posted at 3:22 AM on May-22-13

io9: "After making a mere $84 million at the U.S. box office, Star Trek Into Darkness is considered by some to be a disappointment. Perhaps the problem is that it was a touch confusing. To help our readers better understand it, we've compiled and answered these Frequently Asked Questions about the movie." (Maximum Possible Spoiler Warning)
comment posted at 4:57 AM on May-22-13

Many languages have "high" and "low" layers of vocabulary. But in most other languages, the two sets are drawn from the same source. By contrast, contact between Old English and French, Dravidian languages and Sanskrit, Japanese and Chinese, Persian and Arabic, and other pairings around the world have created fascinatingly hybrid languages. These mixed lexicons are, for linguistic and social historians, akin to the layers of fossils that teach paleontologists and archaeologists so much about eras gone by. Some people even think English is descended from Latin, or Kannada from Sanskrit. That’s frustrating not only because it’s wrong, but also because the reality is far more interesting. - The Economist, Unlikely parallels (via)
comment posted at 9:14 PM on May-15-13

The longest-delayed reveal in television history has been unveiled: I give to you: the mother from How I Met Your Mother.
comment posted at 10:54 PM on May-15-13

Joseph Tomaras reflects on the Mauna Loa data and concludes that the main tasks of the moment are neither political nor economic, but ethical or moral.
comment posted at 7:28 AM on May-15-13

Jason Richwine has resigned from the Heritage Foundation. Richwine is the author of a the Heritage report, "The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer." In 2009, Richwine earned his doctorate from Harvard University, and his dissertation was titled "IQ and Immigration Policy", which argued that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQ than white native immigrants.
comment posted at 10:55 PM on May-14-13

In August of last year, mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki reported that he had solved one of the great puzzles of number theory: the ABC conjecture (previously on Metafilter). Almost a year later, no one else knows whether he has succeeded. No one can understand his proof.
comment posted at 5:57 PM on May-10-13

After 10 years Adobe is retiring it's Creative Suite, and boxed versions of Photoshop, InDesign and other CS programs along with it. it will be replaced by the subscription only Creative Cloud.
comment posted at 2:35 AM on May-7-13

Back in the day, Ken Segall helped create Apple's Think Different campaign and helped name the iMac. More recently he worked on JC Penney's Yours Truly, commercial, before JCP ousted Ron Johnson as its CEO. He writes a sharp, entertaining blog called Ken Segall's Observatory, where he offers opinions on advertising and design geekery. His take on Ron Johnson's failure is interesting, as is this post on what it takes for an advertisement to stand out in a crowd. He calls attention to surprisingly decent ads from Microsoft and Dell, critiques terrible ads (from Microsoft and JC Penney and even Apple, and comments on whether skeuomorphism has its advantages. He's also fond of discussing product names. Give this one a skip if advertising gives you hives, but for those of you who're interested in things like this Segall's blog is especially choice stuff.
comment posted at 10:41 PM on May-3-13

How I Became a Hipster (SLNYT)
comment posted at 8:27 AM on May-2-13

Continuously exasperated Tumblr Jesus Christ, Silicon Valley really lets loose [NSFW] at a Vanity Fair profile of Dave Morin, creator of the hip alternative social media app Path.
comment posted at 10:52 PM on Apr-30-13

Endbahnhof , a collection of photographs of every U-Bahn station in Berlin, organised by line and showing the variety of architectural styles in the system. There is an interview with the photographer, Kate Seabrook, here.
comment posted at 7:49 PM on Apr-28-13

They wash dishes in restaurants, clean toilets and look after elderly incontinent people in the West. That makes the majority of the 30 million who have emigrated from Africa. Some are much luckier, they work in subaltern management positions in corporate America or in public institution in Europe. Few are real stars, successful with high pay and social status. Regardless of their current fate, they all share one thing in common: most of them want to return to Africa. The recent medias’ drumbeat about “Africa is Rising” is making them restless and hopeful because most of them have quite a petty life in the West. They are constantly harassed by the state police, crushed by daily racism from their neighbors and strangers, economically and politically isolated, and with very little hope for a near-future improvement. Unfortunately their dream to return home is painfully held back by deep fears and unanswered questions. Here are the top 10 fears of the African diaspora about Africa, and also the top 10 questions most of them are confronted with.
comment posted at 7:26 PM on Apr-28-13

"Women get flustered under fire. They're too fragile, too emotional. They lack the ferocity required to take a life. They can't handle pain. They're a distraction, a threat to cohesion, a provocative tease to close-quartered men. These are the sort of myths you hear from people who oppose the U.S. military's evolving new rules about women in combat. But for women who have already been in combat, who have earned medals fighting alongside men, the war stories they tell don't sound a thing like myths"
comment posted at 2:18 AM on Apr-26-13

Pew Research and Smithsonian Magazine recently performed a survey, looking at the American public's knowledge of science.

Pew: The public underestimates how well American high school students perform on standardized science tests compared with students in other developed nations. A plurality (44%) believes that 15-year-olds in other developed nations outrank U.S. students in knowledge of science; according to an international student assessment, U.S. 15-year-olds are in the middle ranks of developed nations in science knowledge.

An examination of the results from Smithsonian Magazine.
comment posted at 11:33 PM on Apr-24-13

"Each prime number is represented by a bright, white square, whereas a non-prime ("composite") is grey. Visitors can select difference spatial arrangements of these numbers, ranging from several variants of the well-known Ulam Spiral, over the Archimedian spiral, to the more sophisticated 3D Hilbert curves."
comment posted at 10:22 PM on Apr-22-13

What would a poverty map of India look like?
comment posted at 3:40 AM on Apr-15-13

The first reviews of Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise, are in!
comment posted at 7:28 PM on Apr-11-13

Yolanda Spivey was unemployed for two years, but job offers only started coming in after she changed her race - and name - to White. She wrote about her experience; she's also been interviewed by The Current's Young Turk (video).
comment posted at 7:45 PM on Apr-11-13

More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power. - The Spy Who Lost Pakistan (SL NYTIMES Magazine)
comment posted at 8:14 PM on Apr-9-13

Margaret Thatcher has died following a stroke her spokesman Lord Bell has said. Details are still coming out but the Iron Lady of British politics was and is a divisive figure even today. She will probably be best remembered for her role in the coal miner's strikes and the Falklands War. Her life in pictures is already online. The obituaries have been written for some time.
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comment posted at 8:35 PM on Apr-8-13