~metafilter | 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.