Bookmarks (1009)

Jacob Collier, Laufey and dodie perform a stunning rendition of the Scottish/Irish folk song "Wild Mountain Thyme" together with the National Symphony Orchestra and some delightful audience participation, for the series Next at the Kennedy Center, in an episode presented by Ben Folds.

Amazon Go, "a new kind of corner store," that company's futuristic storefront where you installed an app on your phone, and could shop for things just by picking them up off of shelves and walking out the door with them, is being shut down. Some random internet person called "Matt Haughey" described his experience with the store, and how it wasn't nearly as magical...

Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree. "In a bizarre turn of events, NBA star Klay Thompson has been accused of vandalizing multiple houses with bricks in Sacramento. Authorities are investigating the claims after several individuals reported their houses being damaged, with windows shattered by bricks. Klay Thompson has not yet issued a statement regarding the accusations. The incidents have left the community shaken,...

On Monday, I described Facebook as a "data holding pen for advertisers to harvest," but it's not just Facebook and it's not just advertisers. Every social network — Reddit, Tumblr, X/Twitter, TikTok — is now primarily an AI training pool. Though, I've reached the point where I don't even really care about that anymore. The real issue with Airchat is that it's boring as...

They come here for the promise of a good education and a better future. Then they discover the target on their backs. (slTorontoLife)The mere existence of international students is currently a hot button issue here in Canada; they're being blamed for a lot of our current housing/job woes despite being handily exploited by just about everyone who can do so.

The Problem with Adam Savage's Favorite Pencil: Former Mythbuster and MeFi's Own asavage goes on a surprisingly emotional tear about tool acquisition in the maker space, Blackwing 602s, Jeff Tweedy's pencil nerdery (), and the "encheapening the product to increasening the profit" that has befallen his beloved PaperMate Sharpwriter #2. (It's not really about pencils.)Transcript (click to expand)Hey everybody, Adam Savage here in my...

New regulations around the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) went into effect earlier this year. Some institutions are scrambling to comply by removing and rethinking exhibits (The American Museum of Natural History to Close Exhibits Displaying Native American Belongings) - others already had solid processes in place to comply with the spirit of the law, enacted in 1990 (Some Museums Scrambled...

"Before 2024, the FAFSA was a Frankenstein's monster, with all kinds of different forms grafted together to create a confusing and demoralizing process that left far too many eligible students unable to access their aid. This year, the Department of Education rolled out major revisions that are, in fact, much better — but only if they work. Right now, they don't." David M. Perry...

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has confirmed that Victoria's (in Canada) favourite stair-climbing, beach-lounging elephant seal is back in town, less than a week after he was relocated.The two-year old juvenile seal known as Emerson was corralled into a van and taken to an undisclosed beach on west Vancouver Island on April 5. It was the fifth time Emerson had been relocated by...

Great video of Tom Francis singing "Sunset Boulevard" as he makes his way into the Royal Albert Hall for the 2024 Olivier Awards show.

Hosting a lavish banquet or ordering lobster is no longer a sufficient signifier of status; today, a sign of true wealth is the ability to forgo food entirely. Eating essentially betrays a person's most basic human needs; in an era obsessed with 'self-optimisation', not eating suggests that a person is somehow 'beyond' needs and has achieved total mastery of their body with a heightened...

NPR, the great bastion of old-school audio journalism, is a mess. But as someone who loves NPR, built my career there, and once aspired to stay forever, I say with sadness that it has been for a long time. Alicia Montgomery talks about the history of NPR and how things came here, especially regarding her former NPR colleague Uri Berliner's commentary blaming 'wokeness' and...

69 percent of the global diet is "foreign," says a study that pinpoints the origin of 151 food crops (interactive map) Since the mid-20th century, diets around the world have become more diverse and more homogenous, with supermarkets and other retail outlets the world over increasingly offering a similar range of food options.Research into the origins and patterns of diversity of food plants has...

Rico Wade of the Organized Noize production team has died. Operating from Wade's mom's dirt-floor basement in the early 90s, Organized Noize convened a group of artists that came to call itself the Dungeon Family. That group gave the world the first couple Outkast albums, the first Goodie Mob album, and several great singles. It's not an exaggeration to say that Rico Wade made...

I believe it was a mistake to give away journalism for free in the 1990s. Information is not and never has been free. I devoutly believe that news organizations need to survive and figure out a revenue model that allows them to do so. But the most important mission of a news organization is to provide the public with information that allows citizens to...

A rather large drama unfolded a couple of weeks ago when it was discovered that someone had installed a backdoor into an installation utility used by much of the Open Source community. Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections [Ars Technica] This was found by accident, a worker was maintaining his own code and found discrepancies in computer performance and...

Interviews with the author of Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right, Neil J. Young, on the podcast Conspirituality & at the Culture Study newsletter: The handful of lesbian Republicans contended that supporting reproductive freedom was consistent with gay Republicans' belief in personal autonomy and limited government, "when we say the government should stay out of our wallets and out of our...

The prevailing philosophy about public facilities of all kinds is that they must be indestructible and require minimal upkeep, since that is what they will get. Fighting the forces of disintegration is too costly and requires too much vigilance. These are the arguments of a society driven by self-disgust.The Tokyo Toilet Project Explore all seventeen Tokyo Toilet projects How Toilets Got a Starring Role...

"The Anarchist's Tool Chest" is now available as a free download! Written by Christopher Schwarz and first published in June 2011, "The Anarchist's Tool Chest" is revered by many as a philosophical tome as well as a how-to book. The book includes instructions for building your own tool chest, as demonstrated here by MetaFilter's Own™ and JimCoin™ creator bondcliff!

Faith Ringgold passed over the weekend. A crafter, an artist, a thinker, a mentor. I am maybe not the best person to eulogize her, but her life and work have touched so many and deeply influenced generations of Black artists. Her passing is a loss, her memory will be a blessing.Where have you seen her work? Here's one I can see regularly. Here's one...

Sheep are much cannier than we give them credit for. These ovine facts may surprise you. The humble sheep might be considered by some as the perfect embodiment of docility. But they are not mundane mindless mammals — not in the slightest.

In her article Th'infernal Drone: In Praise Of The Hurdy-Gurdy Jennifer Lucy Allan notes that in "Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights the soundtrack to hell is a giant and infernal hurdy-gurdy". She discusses, among others, Stevie Wishart, who can be seen here giving a quick introduction to the hurdy-gurdy, and performing her composition Vespers for St. Hildegard and duoing with daegeum player Hyelim...

What does free will / autonomy / self agency mean to you? The right to choose your own destiny, to make your own mistakes, and to feel the consequences of your actions? Or talk about anything you like, it's your weekly Free Thread!

Muptown Funk (previously) keeps rolling along, recently with two longer videos concerning Sesame Street: ranking every Waiter Grover sketch (50 minutes), and a deep dive into the stomach history of the Cookie Monster (20 minutes)!

It's now loved all over the world, but who really invented the flat white? This is the little-known story of how Italian sugar growers in the Sunshine State are said to have inspired the invention of the flat white (a type of coffee) — a drink that would go on to become a global sensation

In the wake of SPD shutting down (previously), here is a books roundup focusing this time on recent releases from small presses.And Yet Held by T. De Los Reyes (Bull City Press, 6 Feb 2024): Knowing it takes a certain amount of gumption and surrender to lean towards vulnerability, this book is meant to be held by someone who is looking for poems about...

The first criminal trial of a former US president is set to begin on April 15. Attorney Teri Kanefield lays out the timeline of events and provides extensive background, with a special focus on Michael Cohen.Kanefield is a former appellate defender and has written legal analyses for The Washington Post, USA Today, NBC News, and CNN. She is also a noted author of children's...

Apex Twin's 2001 double album drukQs is an unusual blend of Richard James' characteristically intricate, intense, and chaotic electronic soundscapes and a smaller set of more subdued neoclassical pieces performed on prepared pianos -- performed, that is, by computer. One piece in particular, Avril 14th, became a breakout hit for James -- at barely two minutes, its gorgeous, evocative rendition of a delicate Satie-esque...

56 Cheeses, 56 Grilled Cheeses: Which One is Best? [25m] sounds like a stunt post from some random YouTuber, but it's actually from Epicurious, and is by a professional cheesemonger. It's more educational and entertaining than you might expect when you first start.

What if your Wordle strategy was to always start with the same 4 words, all with unique letters? That would use 20 letters, with the exception, of J, K, Q, V, X, Z. Slate's "The Fastest Wordle Winning Strategy Ever" (archive).(Figuring that one way for Wordle to foil this strategy would be for the word to include three letters from J, K, Q, V,...

Why do some people always get lost? "While it's easy to show that people differ in navigational ability, it has proved much harder for scientists to explain why. There's new excitement brewing in the navigation research world, though. By leveraging technologies such as virtual reality and GPS tracking, scientists have been able to watch hundreds, sometimes even millions, of people trying to find their...

Cool suburban dads can ask for nothing more: Adam Granduciel, genius frontman of The War on Drugs is touring with The National this fall and really loves to golf (registration-free version).

"The History of Sci-Fi Film from 1900 to the Present." Under the title Robots and Rayguns, Mars Wants Movies [YT channel] is methodically reviewing the history of sci-fi on film – the classics along with the forgotten. (At the time of posting, it is at Episode 16, for the year 1936.) From Episode 1: "In this ongoing series, I will delve into the history...

"The toughest reservation in France, it turns out, is not at a Michelin-starred destination like Mirazur or Septime. It's at an all-you-can-eat buffet situated in a municipal rec center in the smallish city of Narbonne." Not exclusive, but exclusively serving French cuisine, it served 380,000 people last year for €52.90 each (plus drinks, sold at retail price), but there are 9 types of foie...

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name A review by Maria Popova on her blog The Marginalian.

Five Canoes Discovered Northwest of Rome Are the Oldest Boats Ever Found in the Mediterranean. The 7000-year-old vessels offer evidence of advanced seafaring technology and an extensive regional trade network, a new study suggests.For more than 30 years, one of Italy's most well-hidden archaeological treasures has been an underwater village called La Marmotta. The site, with well-preserved artifacts, was discovered in 1989 in a...

As further argued by the authors in a forthcoming Berggruen Press volume, "the Planetary as a scientific concept focuses on the Earth as an intricate web of ecosystems, with myriad layers of integration between various biogeochemical systems and living beings — both human and non-human. Drawing on earth system science and systems biology, this holistic understanding is being enabled by new planetary-scale technologies of...

"So when I started working on the story that turned into All Systems Red, I realized right away I wanted to write an AI that didn't want to be human...I was thinking a lot about what an AI would actually want, as opposed to what a human might think an AI would want.... I think it would want that connection to other systems, that...

I'm the Draft List at This Brewery, and No, You Can't Have a Light Beer "Sure, we made a 'normal' IPA once. But then we were like, why make a beer that's enjoyable to drink when we could make a beer that's not?" [McSweeneys]

Here's a summary of various studies that look at dogs and language. A couple of videos are included, one of them is this video: Dogs understand words as we do [2m20s] which is a summary of this paper, one of several linked in the first link in this post.I once lived with a chihuahua where you could tell him to find a specific toy...

Voices of Mourning by Hannah Gold. An interesting personal essay on the book About Ed by Robert Glück, exploring grief and mourning. It also raises the question - whose life is allowed to be remembered for the person they were rather than their surrounding political context?

Learning to milk wild camels is just one challenge for this dromedary dairy. When you think of camels, you probably imagine them in a desert. But in lush, green Hunter Valley paddocks, Michelle Phillips keeps 50 — and their milk is in high demand.

OpenAI Training Bot Crawls 'World's Lamest Content Farm' 3 Million Times in One Day "If you were wondering what they're using to train GPT-5, well, now you know," Levine wrote in his post.