Bookmarks (1013)

"When we initially reached out to scores of chefs, recipe writers, historians, and food luminaries for nominations for their most important American recipes of the past 100 years—Which written recipes were the most influential, pivotal, or transformative for American home cooking between 1924 and 2024?—we expected strong opinions, but we didn't anticipate the philosophical quandaries that adjudicating and assembling them would bring up." The...

Last week, bible scholar, author, vlogger (and owner of one of the finest t-shirt collections in town) Dan McClellan posted a video asking the question Did God choose an adulterous man to rule his nation? Apparently some viewers took issue with Dan's message, so he immediately posted a followup video, On the intersection of some of my research & politics making abundantly clear what...

Cormac McCarthy's Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: "I Loved Him. He Was My Safety." by Vincenzo Barney"I loved him more than anything. He kept me safe, gave me protection. He was everything to me. Everything. He was my anchor. He was my world. He was my home, even when we didn't live together anymore. Those things that happen to you,...

In the sixteenth century, new printing technology meant that the works of one author could be bound, identified, and replicated. The idea of an autonomous, original creator became central to our culture. Gone were the collaborative days of monks accreting their manuscripts collectively. A century or more of audio-visual technology has slowly eroded that idea. Ever since radio, we have become increasingly less bound...

Oculi Mundi is a digital heritage destination: the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge. The project now includes a podcast, What's your map, which starts with William Dalrymple's exploration of an 18th century Jain cosmological map.

Enter your date of birth and a guess at your life expectancy, then choose from a list of movies. Memento Movi then shows a frame from that movie that represents your place in your lifespan. So, for instance, a twenty-year-old who selects Star Wars will likely get a frame from Tattooine, but a sixty-year-old who selects Jaws will be on the boat. [via condour75's...

Soundac Film Productions was a small company that produced animation for television. they made info cards and maps for use on news broadcasts, short bits for use as station IDs and over 4,000 commercials. They're perhaps best known for producing Colonel Bleep, the mostly-lost first color cartoon made for TV, and fitness cartoon Mighty Mister Titan. Ziggy Cashmere tracked down Scott Schleh, the son...

Dockyard in Kent, England searching for chief scorpion wrangler. The Blue Town Heritage Centre on the Isle of Sheppey is advertising for a chief scorpion wrangler to keep an eye on a colony of scorpions which have been living in the walls of Sheerness Dockyard, opposite the centre, for more than 200 years.Centre boss Jenny Hurkett, 75, said: "They are one of our island's...

First, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America encouraged the people to be virtuous, in recognition that corruption is a problem that cannot be solved by law.Second, James Madison, author of Federalist Paper 10 intended that the government discourage any one faction from seizing power by managing the sizes of groups that govern and are governed. Too few people leads to monarchy...

April this year saw the premiere of History... by Mary Lou Williams, completed forty years posthumously by composer Anthony Kelley [transcript]. Williams grew up in Pittsburgh, was instrumental shaping the sound of 1940s big bands and later bebop, for instance writing In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee. She went on to release celebrated solo albums, such as Black Christ of the Andes, and larger compositions,...

I can't think of a single role where I would say, Man, that's me. Entirely me? No, no. First of all, they're lines that you read and you learn, and that's how that person talks. Sure, there has to be pieces of what you've done in who you are, and hopefully there's pieces of who you are in what you've done. My mother used...

TWENTY YEARS AGO TONIGHT -- Malice at the Palace, November 19, 2004: The Detroit Pistons, former champs of basketball from the 2003-04 season, were hosting the Indiana Pacers in their home arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills, for an early game of the new season. The Pacers took an early lead and held it, thanks mostly to 6'11" center Jermaine O'Neal and well-known hothead...

During the pandemic, the town of Bremerton, Washington installed a little Take A Poem, Leave A Poem box. Liminal Garrett bemoaned the fact that there's never any poems to take. So they took the box's plight to the internet: use this form to send them a poem, they'll print it out and put it in the box for others to take!

Tarantula venom study could help epilepsy patients like this toddler who's had 50 ambulance rides before her third birthday. The study will test spider venom molecules against brain tissue made from the blood of individual epilepsy patients.

The Colour Literacy Project "The Colour Literacy Project is a 21st century initiative that recognizes colour as a meta-discipline. Our mission is to provide state-of-the-art educational resources that strengthen the bridges between the sciences, arts, design and humanities in order to meet the challenges and opportunities of the future. " [via: Is color even real?]

Dan Gardner on Henry Ford, his son Edsel, and unpasteurized milk. "Intellectual arrogance cripples the powerful but it is a danger to us all."

RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation They built an RAG tool using Page Rank, the basic algorithm that Google built Web Search on. They are offering 100 free trials using their tool. See below for a typical task analyzing Dicken's "Christmas Carol". RAG:Retrieval Augmented Generation is a technique that grants generative artificial intelligence models information retrieval capabilities. It modifies interactions with a large language model (LLM)...

The U.S. real estate market has become a money-laundering haven for corrupt officials and criminals across the world, a place to hide their cash behind opaque shell companies. from The mysterious Virginia mansion allegedly bought with stolen Nigerian money [The Washington Post; ungated]

Firstly, Poppy's new metalcore album Negative Spaces dropped. Wikipedia says: "Musically, the album has been described as Nu Metal,metalcore, industrial,pop metal, arena rock, electropop, synth-pop, and hyperpop, with elements of grunge, emo, space rock, and tech-metal." It was produced by Bring Me The Horizon's Jordan Fish and has gotten a lot of good reviews.Secondly, Spiritbox announced a new album, Tsunami Sea, for March 2025,...

Woman discovers dog-sitter used her house for OnlyFans content. (slCBC)This is posted more for "uhhhhh, well huh. I guess that is a thing that you could do whilst dogsitting." But a reminder: sex work IS work, but perhaps do not do said work when dogsitting.

A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala [archive link] is the text of a lecture about the portrait of 18th Century Jamaican polymath Francis Williams, the first Black man to be proposed for election to the Royal Society, which became the subject of popular interest last month when it was revealed that the painting celebrated Williams' great scientific triumph. In his lecture,...

Saxophonist and composer Colin Stetson performs 5 tracks off his latest and first non-soundtrack solo album in 7 years: The Love It Took To Leave You (SLYT, [warning for flashing lights])Colin Stetson previously on the blue.

Murder for Dummies is a 6-part horror-comedy whodunnit series in the form of a true crime mockumentary about the murder of ventriloquist Keith Flapp. Created by comedy troupe Casual Violence. Youtube playlist. Trailer.

However, the calculator differs from the personal computer in one very significant way: calculators slid directly down the market from pricey machines owned by organizations to birthday gifts handed out by middle-class parents. At incredible speed (far faster than computers) calculators became as commonplace as wristwatches; indeed, it wasn't long before manufacturers put calculators in wristwatches. Though the market leaders changed rapidly as the...

TALKING SMALL.[slyt]if it's not small talk, best not talk at all." A small Brian David Gilbert sings about small talk

World is watching as endangered turtles are moved to new home outside natural habitat. A rare Western Australian turtle species will be introduced to a new habitat in the state's South West, in a last-ditch effort to bring the reptiles back from the brink of extinction.A rare Western Australian turtle species in dire straits is set to be introduced to a new habitat in...

The change will be the equivalent of going from navigating a library with the Dewey decimal system, and thus encountering related books on adjacent shelves, to requesting books for pickup through a digital catalog. It could completely reorient our relationship to knowledge, prioritizing rapid, detailed, abridged answers over a deep understanding and the consideration of varied sources and viewpoints. Much of what's beautiful about...

Why creativity is the new currency of success As AI gets better at handling traditional productivity tasks, human creativity - not efficiency - will become the real differentiator. The piece suggests we're moving from an era where "doing more, faster" was the key to success, to one where making original, emotionally resonant work matters most. Maybe the tendency to think differently, make unique connections,...

An Argentinian ghost story, climate fiction for a better future, guidance on writing and the writing life, a satellite murder mystery, a resource for parents of children undergoing gender affirming care, the 2024 GG's, and more: a roundup of more than 50 new and forthcoming small press books (previously).NEW: The Articulations / Amouroboros by Elizabeth K. Switaj & Amelia K. (Kernpunkt Press, 12 Nov...

"The idea of calling our music 'alt K-pop' also started as satire. 'We're not K-pop idols, but let's make some K-pop anyway,' that idea. But as you do it more, you kinda become more aligned with it and believe in it. Even though it started as a joke, it became our reality." Balming Tiger Is Re-Writing the Rules of K-PopBrighten your day with and...

R.U. Sirius interviews Jeremy Braddock about his new book Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as told in Nine Comedy Albums and the place of the seminal comedy group The Firesign Theatre in 20th century technoculture.LARB review by MetaFilter's own Colin Marshall

Some fantastic and eminently quotable quotes from this ABC piece - Australia's Cassowaries EXPOSED: The Truth Behind the World's Most Dangerous Bird - Dr Ann Jones. A quick sample - "Just give it your sandwich", "That white bread'll probably make him constipated; just sayin'", "I mean you no harm", "Look at those wattles, they're like testicles..."From Wikipedia Cassowaries (Indonesian: kasuari, Biak: man suar 'bird...

Let's talk board games! What do you like that's new? What do you like that's old? What games get better if you start selectively ignoring the rules? Or ignore that suggestion, and treat this post as a #freethread! Link unrelated.

The 100 Greatest Movie Musicals of All Time ...just what it says on the tin.Before we're awash in year end top ten lists here's another solid top 100 for your palaver pleasure.

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth's total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since.

For those who suffer from recurrent UTIs, there's a vaccine. Urinary tract infections can be extremely painful and some women experience them frequently. Now there is a vaccine to help prevent UTIs.

"Walking amid a tangle of ancient Sitka spruces and cedars on the island of Gwaii Haanas in British Columbia, Robert Moor wonders how being in the presence of old-growth trees can help us feel, rather than intellectualize, not only the deep past, but also our responsibility to the future."

I don't know if it was the lack of tourists or the subdued surroundings, but when we hit the Ocklawaha, time seemed to dilate, to spread out along the edges, to submerge into the river's unseen depths. More or less, it came to a creeping halt. As we floated up through central Florida along the Ocklawaha's surface, I imagined something about the river led...

I had one cultural advantage. I owned a 1955 Ford Fairlane, which I had bought for $100. Gas was twenty cents a gallon. Jim and I drove all over Southern California, which is admittedly something teenage boys don't mind doing, to attend free concerts and performances. It was the age of high print-culture, each Sunday the Los Angeles Times listed every forthcoming concert in...

Valve has just updated and rereleased Half-Life 2 in honor of it's 20th anniversary. Included are the add-ons Episodes One and Two, many bugfixes, developer commentary and much more. There's also a 2 hour documentary. And it's free on Steam.

Wildlife rescuers say virtual fence saving hundreds of kangaroos on Victoria's Surf Coast. Removing wildlife carcasses from the road is a usual morning for Jason Cichocki but he says a new technology has more than halved the number of animals colliding with vehicles.

"we opened a portal and were blessed, and on that journey we received the name 'two-spirit.' A lot of people think it refers to sexuality or gender, but over 34 years now, it's more than that. For me, my community's knowledge about history, tradition, language, and philosophy is [one] spirit. The second spirit is about love: nurturing for my siblings, my parents, my grandparents,...

An enterprising MFA student at East Tennessee State University created a Baba Yaga "collectible figurine" as a thesis project. Ariel Adams' project involved designing the character, building it, and painting it, using a variety of analogue and digital tools. Her style and interpretation of the figure are interesting, not a 1:1 with the conventional depictions we most often see of Baba Yaga, and her...

Violet said that those first sessions in the library at Pakenham Hall marked the start of a conversation that lasted for the rest of their lives. They had spent roughly three weeks together when they decided to get married, which they did shortly afterwards with minimal fuss, throwing a boozy party for their many friends the night before. Parties were Violet's natural element. from...

Having an extra thumb on one hand may massively boost your manual dexterity, but wouldn't it be hard to learn to use? Not according to a new study, which found that the majority of a wide variety of people got the hang of the thing in just one minute. Study in Science: Evaluating initial usability of a hand augmentation device across a large and...

For a young couple at risk of homelessness, a community garden is helping hope bloom. Residents at an affordable apartment complex in Adelaide are taking part in a greening project intended to improve the wellbeing of young people who have spent time in state care, and reduce the amount of heat trapped in urban spaces.

As weed resistance to herbicides is becoming widespread, there is an urgent effort to find new solutions. [MIT Lab Review] These could range from high tech methods like using AI and lasers to more traditional ways of working with nature.

Refuge In Kakistocracy "... in a month with few bright spots, here is a glimmer of hope: Team Trump's most human failings may thwart some of their most evil plans."

PBS explains the cozy mystery. Cozy mystery is alive and kicking. Cozy mysteries, serially. Katharina Vester's "Bodies to Die for: Negotiating the Ideal Female Body in Cozy Mystery Novels" gets to the bones of the matter.There are many posts touching on cozy mysteries on MetaFilter, but no actual posts on the blue so tagged.