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So I was out yesterday and listening to the NPR show World Cafe, as I do if/when I'm out at that time, and the host starts going on and on about the voice of the featured artist that day, about how stunning it is, and I'm thinking, come on, don't oversell it. They weren't overselling it. [more inside]
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:04 PM - 4 comments

Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.

Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019 [more inside]
posted by zenon at 11:40 AM - 42 comments

Little Workshop is an award-winning French studio specializing in high-quality immersive 3D experiences for the web. Their portfolio contains many charming and fun projects you can try out yourself, including endless city generator Infinitown, cute procedural dungeon crawler Keep Out!, pulsing geometric music visualizer TRACK, and Arde Madrid, a multi-scene recreation of Ava Gardner's home in Francoist Spain. Their latest and most ambitious project: EQUINOX, a slick, stylized adventure game set in a failing starship in deep space, complete with a full soundtrack and voice acting in a mobile-friendly interface. Read the case study on their website, or check out their other projects (including the dearly-departed Mozilla MMORPG BrowserQuest).
posted by Rhaomi at 9:57 AM - 1 comment

New ant species discovered recently in Western Australia's Pilbara region, now named after Voldemort due to visual similarities
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 4:47 AM - 23 comments

The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. from Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads [The Atlantic; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:53 AM - 63 comments

"To be online today is to constantly walk a tight-rope between the longing to be known and the dread of being perceived." [more inside]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:37 AM - 11 comments

For a generation of British people, it represents the vanishing landscape of their childhoods, tied into ideas of nostalgia and even hauntology.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:35 PM - 15 comments

By our count there are 29 tunnels you can drive through in New Zealand, and we have ranked them all, so if a shit one is on your route, you can take the other way around.
posted by Sebmojo at 8:28 PM - 17 comments

Elle Griffin's report on the testimony from the Justice Department's 2021 antitrust lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House with Simon and Schuster reveals a disheartening truth: practically nobody buys books. [more inside]
posted by dis_integration at 8:10 PM - 72 comments

Genesis -- The Last Domino? PBS documentary [55m], about their final tour from a few years ago. Genesis The Last Domino? tour previously, which wasn't the end, I saw them in November of 2022.
posted by hippybear at 7:52 PM - 3 comments

Junna's drumcover of Babymetal's Doki Doki Morning (It's your weekly free thread!)
posted by Gorgik at 6:59 PM - 24 comments

The Poetry of Actor William Smith. You may be familiar with William Smith as a "that guy" from hundreds and hundreds of movie performances, usually the heavy, such as bare-knuckle brawler Jack Wilson in 1980's Any Which Way You Can. But his poetic contributions have gone largely unnoticed, and courtesy of his still-up website -- Williams passed in 2021 -- you can read poems like The Reaper or thrill to these poems read in Williams' own roadworn voice.
posted by Shepherd at 3:01 PM - 9 comments

Brightline West is ready to start breaking ground this week, according to The Washington Post. The southwest endpoint will be in Rancho Cucamonga, where it will connect to Metrolink. (Which is definitely better than Victorville, which had been suggested a few years ago.) Connecting to the existing lines here will make it simpler to build than trying to connect all the way to Los Angeles proper. (gift link) [more inside]
posted by KelsonV at 12:44 PM - 51 comments

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth reports NASA. After pinpointing the issue with the space probe, the mission team have devised a workaround. Previously, previouslier, many more previouslies.
posted by Kattullus at 12:24 PM - 36 comments

H5N1 bird flu has begun spreading between mammals, leaving coastlines dotted with the bodies of birds, seals, and sea lions. Agriculture increases human- animal contact. On the bright side, the human history of infection with other flu viruses may confer some resistance to H5N1. (Gift NYT article)
posted by Sleeper at 12:09 PM - 20 comments

Previously: the official New York City tree map. Earlier this year: Kieran Healy created visualizations of "the relationship between the median diameter of street-trees (i.e., trees not in parks) and median household income for New York City neighborhoods" (for example, Park Slope versus Bushwick), dendograms of "New York City’s street tree species clustered by similarity of neighborhood profiles" (and, conversely, "the neighborhoods clustered by tree profile similarity"), and "a Principal Coordinates Analysis of New York City NTA neighborhoods and their street tree species". (NTA means Neighborhood Tabulation Area.) "I don’t really know anything about trees. I do know how to draw pictures, though."
posted by brainwane at 10:44 AM - 3 comments

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's introduction of Bill 18 is ostensibly meant as a corrective against federal overreach. The bill is widely described by observers and critics as unnecessary. It will result in the addition of a layer of bureaucracy and oversight between federal monies and programs, and the Albertan municipalities and public institutions that stand to benefit. [more inside]
posted by elkevelvet at 8:05 AM - 10 comments

Pro-Palestinian orgs at universities across the world protest in support of "Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment" Columbia Spectator, the newspaper run by undergrad Columbia University students, published an editorial asking if Columbia University is in crisis, stating: Columbia’s crisis is not as the committee has attempted to define it—a characterization stemming from the belief that the University has become a hotbed of antisemitic thought and behavior. Rather, the crisis is rooted in a lack of genuine community engagement on the part of the administration, as well as a failure to fulfill its duty of care to all affiliates. [more inside]
posted by toastyk at 7:20 AM - 172 comments

As Congress has finally passed the Ukraine aid bill, hope is returning to the frontline, where Ukrainian troops are increasingly struggling to hold out against a numerically superior Russian force that also has a lot more ammunition to spend. This post has some status updates and commentary on the war at present. [more inside]
posted by Harald74 at 6:32 AM - 91 comments

17-year-old Gukesh Dommaraju has become the youngest challenger for the world championship title in history by winning the open section of the FIDE Candidates 2024 (previously). Other highlights of the tournament including Tan Zhongyi steamrolling the women's section, and Vaishali Rameshbabu winning five games in a row to lift herself from last place to shared second. The saddest moments came after the draw between Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi that gave Gukesh his historic victory: "I'm very sorry." "My fault."
posted by clawsoon at 6:21 AM - 7 comments

Exactly as it says on the tin (50ish min). Jo Brand, an English standup comedian, talks psychiatry, comedy and what swear word is her favourite with Jamie Laing, ex-Made in Chelsea star.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:18 AM - 5 comments

Writer Andrew Chapman on having Crohn's and how food connects us to being human. (slLongreads)
posted by Kitteh at 5:24 AM - 11 comments

Jeremy Parish, dedicated game journalist and Retronaut, and creator of design deep dives, has been covering Gameboy (1989, gaiden), Game Boy Color (1998), Game Boy Advance (2001), NES (1985, 1986, 1987, 1998, 1999, gaiden), SNES (1991, extra, gaiden), N64 (1996), Sega, Virtual Boy and Metroidvania games now for ten years! His terrific and scholarly videos don't get nearly the views that much less worthy series get, so please give them a try if you have any interest in this area.
posted by JHarris at 1:08 AM - 15 comments

Flying aircraft carriers show up in steampunk, dieselpunk and atompunk fiction so often, we can consider them a genre trope. From Castle Wulfenbach in Girl Genius to the British aircraft carriers in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the helicarriers of S.H.I.E.L.D., here is a look at these behemoths of the sky. from Flying Aircraft Carriers [Previously]
posted by chavenet at 12:28 AM - 17 comments

Scientists discover extinct marsupial double the size of the red kangaroo. (Male red kangaroos grow up to a head-and-body length of 1.3–1.6 m (4 ft 3 in – 5 ft 3 in) with a tail that adds a further 1.2 m (3 ft 11 in) to the total length.) Researchers from Flinders University have described three new species of extinct kangaroo, helping to solve a nearly 150-year-long scientific mystery.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:05 PM - 2 comments

QWANJI is a fun, minimalist little webtoy for converting the patterns drawn on QWERTY-based swipe keyboards like Swype (RIP) and Gboard into visible glyphs reminiscent of handwritten kanji (hence the name). Experiment by typing text (using spaces to break up glyphs) to see instant results, and share by copying either the resulting URL or the gibberish text, which you can drop into the text field to see them sketched out. No word on when DVORAK support is coming (or T9, for that matter -- but there's a simulator for that).
posted by Rhaomi at 9:45 PM - 8 comments

Willie Nelson Outlaw Tour 2024

I would have posted this to IRL if I knew how. Considering the principals and the age of some, this presents a last chance opportunity to see them. And as someone here I've already notified said about the front row tickets, those are stupid cheap prices.

Indeed, indeed.
posted by y2karl at 1:29 PM - 57 comments

Image without metaphor in Dune 2: Because in 2024, I don't find it hard to believe that people are incredibly excited by the vision of an anti-colonial guerilla movement driven by Islamic faith defeating a massive and technologically dominant empire... I do find it hard to believe that more people in 2024 aren't outraged that Dune Part Two literally features a talking embryo.

Civil War, a piece of radical-centrist, middle brow bothsideism is not only sure to be the most successful film he has made, it is also by some margin the worst. But to my pleasant surprise, it's not a completely terrible and evil film. It is just a deeply mediocre one. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:53 PM - 105 comments

Jenny Livingstone has cystic fibrosis. She was not supposed to live beyond her mid thirties. But a new treatment is adding decades onto her life and she's having to consider the future in a new way now. Here's an interview with Jenny and Max Fisher from Pod Save America [~45m] about her life and her treatment and what this new extended lifespan means to her.
posted by hippybear at 11:17 AM - 6 comments

Enclosed within its rugged mud brick walls the temple precincts at Dendera seem to be an island left untouched by time. Particularly in the early hours of the morning, when foxes roam around the ruins of the birth house or venture down the steep stairs leading to the Sacred Lake. Stepping into the actual temple is like entering an ancient time machine, especially if you look up to the recently cleaned astronomical ceiling. This is a vast cosmos filled with stars, hour-goddesses and zodiac signs, many of which are personified by weird creatures like snakes walking on long legs and birds with human arms and jackal heads. On the columns just below the ceiling you encounter the mysterious gaze of the patron deity of the temple: Hathor.

It might not have the iconic status of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, but the Dendera temple complex north of Luxor boasts some of the most superbly-preserved ancient Egyptian art known, ranging from early Roman times back to the Middle Kingdom period over 4,000 years ago. Most breathtaking is the ceiling of the temple's grand pronaos, which is richly decorated with intricate astrological iconography. But you don't have to travel to Egypt to see it -- thanks to photographer and programmer José María Barrera [site], you can now peruse an ultra-HD scan of the fully-restored masterpiece in a slick zoomable scroller. Overwhelmed? See the captions in this gallery for a deep-dive into the symbolism, or click inside for even more. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 9:52 AM - 10 comments

Negative Space - "a short film by Ru Kuwahata and Max Porter, was nominated for a 2018 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film." [more inside]
posted by pracowity at 4:37 AM - 4 comments

Implicit in the art of noise is a promise of resistance. For millennia, music has been a medium of control; noise, it follows, is a liberation. from What is Noise? by Alex Ross [The New Yorker; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:04 AM - 23 comments

Researchers train goannas not to eat cane toads in Western Australia's Kimberley region. The cane toad is spreading in northern Australia, but researchers have found a way to protect predators from the toxic pest and it's all a matter of taste.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 11:07 PM - 3 comments

'Small pizza delivery shop.' (slyt. 4:12)
posted by clavdivs at 6:40 PM - 18 comments

‘We went from naive, hippyish protesters to hardcore anarchists’: the criminal justice bill protests, 30 years on. The criminal justice and public order bill aimed to criminalise “sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. “It was almost like a surrealist prank,” Harry Harrison, co-founder of DiY sound system, says now. “I said: ‘Is this real?’ It was a crazy mixture of the sinister and the absurd.” [from The Guardian]
posted by goo at 2:38 PM - 12 comments

A century ago saw the premiere of Jean Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony, the culmination of decades of experimentation and refinement of the form, as Alex Ross explains (with musical examples). A few years later, he started work on an eighth symphony, which he never completed to his satisfaction, and eventually he burned his manuscripts of it. In 2011, after sifting through the Sibelius manuscript archive, it was possible to record roughly two and half minutes of the thirty minute work. Despite some subsequent hints from correspondence with Sibelius’ copyist, no further fragments have been uncovered, and the Eighth Symphony remains lost.
posted by Kattullus at 1:55 PM - 13 comments

Over on gRubiks.com, they've come up with an interesting puzzle solving guide:

If you have an old scrambled [Rubik's] cube just lying around the house, if you’re trying to learn how to solve it on your own and just need a “reset”, if you're looking for algorithms for patterns, or even if you just want to impress your friends—this solver is perfect for you.

Just take your scrambled Rubik's Cube, place it in front of you, and color the squares on the screen as you see them on your cube. Then press "solve", and it will walk you through the solution.
posted by not_on_display at 12:50 PM - 25 comments

Over on Mathstodon.xyz, Alexandre Muñiz comes up with an interesting puzzle game:

I call it Reverse the List of Integers. How it works is, you start with a list of positive integers, (e.g. [7, 5, 3]) and your goal is to make the same list, in reverse ([3, 5, 7]). You have two moves you can make:
     1) Split an integer into two smaller integers. (e.g. [7, 5, 3] → [6, 1, 5, 3])
     2) Combine (add) two integers into a larger one. (e.g. reverse the last e.g.)
There are two restrictions that seem natural for making this into an interesting game:
     1) You can never make an integer greater than the largest integer in the original list.
     2) You can never make a move that results in the same integer appearing in the list more than once.

User @ch33zer chimes in with a basic web implementation (followed by other attempts, including a visual version), and @GistNoesis offers some code for exploring the problem space to brute-force solutions. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 11:19 AM - 3 comments

How Phish turned Las Vegas’ Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer "Some moments last night felt like you were seeing enormous versions of the old visualizers from Winamp or iTunes. Others brought the crowd into intricate, dazzling scenes."
posted by dhruva at 3:15 AM - 57 comments

It’s 2008. Though a San Francisco resident, I crave “Girl in New York” stories. Felicity Porter, Lena Dunham, Eileen Myles—in books and TV shows, I’ve watched them come of age in their frothy version of Brooklyn. As a black man, I have to tell myself this fascination isn’t me idolizing whiteness. No, this must be, like Venus Xtravanganza before me, a rational envy for those society deems valuable. A desire to chase my dreams through a maze of hangovers and strange lovers and suffer mere embarrassment for my mistakes. It seems I’ve found another such fantasy in this Reagan-era relic about itinerant artists—provided I steal it. Bohemian behavior for a bohemian book. So, Slaves in hand, I keep walking. from The Time I Stole Tama Janowitz’s Slaves of New York and Couldn’t Stop Reading It by Elwin Cotman
posted by chavenet at 12:17 AM - 6 comments

Unlikely friendship between cockatoo and lorikeet bamboozles wildlife sanctuary visitors. A red-tailed black cockatoo and a musk lorikeet have become inseparable, with the smaller bird often found under the wing of the cockatoo at Tasmania's Bonorong Wildlife Sanctuary.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:13 AM - 18 comments

A short fantasy story about a beastkeeper and what happens after the royal palace lets them go. By bixbythemartian.
posted by brainwane at 7:49 PM - 4 comments

A database of 589 math problems posed by Paul Erdős, mostly in combinatorial geometry and number theory, only 159 of which have been solved. Get to work!
posted by escabeche at 7:34 PM - 15 comments

The NLRB announced tonight that UAW won a historic union election at Volkswagen in Chattanooga Tennessee. The union won by a margin of more than 70% as votes [continued] to be counted. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there. “It’s a totally different ball game,” [Renee Berry] said. “The atmosphere is different. You see more pro-union than anti-union [workers]. A whole lot of people who were anti-union in the past have switched.”
posted by 2N2222 at 7:22 PM - 19 comments

The materialist world view is often associated with despair. In “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the novel’s hero, stares into the night sky, reflects upon his brief, bubblelike existence in an infinite and indifferent universe, and contemplates suicide. For Dennett, however, materialism is spiritually satisfying. [...] “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” Dennett writes, is that Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens “all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life,” which “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” He asks, “Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”

Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 3:29 PM - 39 comments

The maker of a "Fuck the LAPD" t-shirt received a takedown notice from the Los Angeles Police Foundation on the grounds that the shirt infringed its trademark on "LAPD". Their lawyer's response was nothing if not concise. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:14 PM - 24 comments

K-pop fans organized by KPOP4PLANET pressure Hyundai into ending a greenwashed dirty energy aluminum deal in Indonesia. Will the collective action of snackers and ramen slurpers end PepsiCo's reliance on palm oil from deforested areas? PalmWatch is a brand new tool to trace palm oil supplies from the ground level (% of tree cover area lost by country), to the processing mills, to middleman parent corporations, and to the consumer brands that use the oil in their products. [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi at 12:03 PM - 5 comments

Heliophysics Big Year [24m] is a video from NASA Edge about, well, apparently a big year for heliophysics, or the study of the Sun. The Solar Observatory at Sunspot NM is a pretty interesting place to visit. If you're ever in the vicinity of White Sands National Park, you're only a couple of hours' drive from Sunspot, in a completely different environment from the desert floor below. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 11:39 AM - 12 comments

In “A Proposal for the Unification of Psychotherapeutic Action Understood as Memory Modification Processes”, Bruce Ecker lays out the case for a unifying account of therapeutic processes, and why that matters. (Link is to a publicly available pre-print copy of the article.) [more inside]
posted by concinnity at 10:39 AM - 11 comments

Claire Rousay has gained prominence [NYT, archive link] as an experimental, ambient musician, but her most recent album, Sentiment, [Bandcamp, Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music] is closer to lo-fi indie pop. Her website has links to her whole discography.
posted by Kattullus at 8:32 AM - 6 comments