~metafilter | Bookmarks (1009)

Rather than migrants displaced by war or natural disaster, she likens Canada's encampment residents to economic refugees, internally displaced by an acute cost-of-living crisis and a housing shortage. She also notes that refugee camps are supposed to be temporary. But of course they can last for years, as long as the emergency that creates them, and Canada's affordability problems appear only to be worsening.The...

Sharks smash sea urchins in discovery that could help in battle with invasive pest. Researchers uncover unexpected findings after sharks munch far more voraciously on the spiky sea creatures left out "on a platter" for the invasive creature's known predators, lobsters.

"There's not going to be a fair (shoe), no one product that affects everyone the same," says Yong. "Everyone's biomechanics are different. Unfortunately, this is a part of the sport. If you really wanted to be fair, everyone should be running naked in bare feet. You don't have any expensive clothes or shoes, but that's obviously not where we're at." from How 'shoe doping'...

Via Allan Rose Hill at boingboing.net and r/vintageobscura, the following musical performance submitted for your approval...In 1979, York Community High School's Road Show Swing Choir recorded and self-released a vinyl LP of their Jazz Show performance. The Elmhurst, Illinois high school's musical director Robert Stone tossed a cosmic surprise into the program, a rousing rendition of Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like An Eagle."

Photographers looking for Aurora Australis capture mysterious phenomenon Steve instead. People looking for the Aurora Australis have been surprised to see another phenomenon lighting up the night sky — and it goes by the name Steve.

Comics Art Against Project 2025 is a collection of comics summarizing some of the policy ideas laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025.Share links directly to the policies that matter most to your friends and family: Anti-Trans Discrimination Children Climate Cronyism Education Environmental Protection Agency Executive Orders Extreme Weather Health Care Immigration Internet Freedom Libraries Police Abuse School Lunch Taxation Teachers And more...

When it comes to biological superlatives, we typically focus on individuals: The largest tree in a forest, the oldest organism on the planet. After visiting the Hoh Rainforest, however, I began to wonder about superlative communities. What are the oldest existing ecosystems on Earth, and what can we learn from them? [nautilis] (previously)

For years, the typical story about governments, politicians, or public figures showing up on Reddit focused on the unlikeliness of that match. Reddit was rowdy, weird, or nerdy, and it was sort of interesting or fun or strange for people with big platforms to show up there. In recent years, Reddit has grown from a large cluster of online communities into a sort of...

Hint: All you'll need is a public library card or an university email. Create a Kanopy account. Check out all the movies offered. Be happy.Are there limits to the number of films I can watch per month? Yes, Kanopy does not offer unlimited streaming. After signing up, you can stream up to 10 titles per month. Your 10 play credits will renew at the...

Most of us could name a favorite book, movie, or album and talk for ages about why we love them so much. But how did you come to find these things in the first place? Is there a special person who introduced you to your favorite band, or did you happen upon your favorite TV show through pure chance? Maybe a MetaFilter thread clued...

A four-tonne machine just printed a house in the US. Texas just opened its biggest 3D-printed neighbourhood as a solution to its acute housing problem.

Records of Pompeii's survivors have been found—and archaeologists are starting to understand how they rebuilt their lives.Mount Vesuvius didn't kill everyone. Refugees from Pompeii fled to towns along the nearby coast, where the Roman government seems to have stepped in to provide support. There's evidence that survivors formed Pompeiian communities+ in their new home towns, no doubt passing on to their children and grandchildren...

"Hi. We're a group of comic book writers & artists who are furious about Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation's plan to consolidate power under authoritarian rule. So we made a bunch of comics to explain their agenda and move you to vote against it." stopproject2025comic.org (quote from Bluesky) 15 comics up now on Internet freedom, taxation, the environment, anti-trans legislation, and other issues; more...

Pokémon developer Game Freak suffered a server breach recently, leaking an enormous amount of unseen assets, including diagrams of the universe's pantheon, frightening concept art (YT 15:02) and some quite unusual lore.

Black on Both Sides is the best Rawkus Records album ever (OkayPlayer, archive.is).The indie hip-hop label, founded in 1995, would release albums by, among others, Company Flow, Reflection Eternal, and Jurassic 5. Black on Both Sides, the solo debut from Yasiin Bey (pka Mos Def), following his work with Talib Kweli as Black Star, released 25 years ago this week. The singles were 'Umi...

Tell me if you've heard this one before: a curious young bug hunter discovers a major software vulnerability, tries to report it, and is ignored and gaslit. Today's villain is Zendesk, which you've probably used if you've interacted with customer support tickets.

Visual Effects channel the Corridor Crew (previously) look at AI scams and how to identify them (25 minutes)

Apple Intelligence engineers don't think that LLM's reason, and have described their tests to see if the reasoning is reliable and predictable (and useful for an Apple-style 'it just works' product). Here's a summary rolled up from exTwitter by Threadreader, and this is the arXiv.org pre-print. More analysis at why this is a bad thing at Gary Marcus' substack: LLMs don't do formal reasoning...

I always try to live by what Thoreau said, which is that it's very important not to let your knowledge get in the way of what's more important—which is your ignorance. As long as I know that I'm ignorant, I can learn something. from SPIN DNA: William T. Vollmann on Journalism

Queensland's Houdini crocodile to remain in popular lake, but mystery remains about how it got there. An elusive freshwater crocodile that has been the talk of an outback town for months will not be targeted for removal after wildlife authorities deemed the "shy and timid" animal no threat to human life. Context: No human fatalities are known to have been caused by this species.Wildlife...

On October 13, Space X launched Starship 5 and several minutes later, caught the first stage ( called Super Heavy Booster) when it returned to the launchpad from whence it came! Scott Manley has great commentary about the feat, including the separate return of Starship itself into the ocean.

"According to my notes, Netscape went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994 . We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. — jwz (Jamie Zawinski) reminisces on his blog about releasing the first public version of Netscape.jwz previously, describing the making of the Mozilla logo, recreating Borges's...

While scanning these files I came to realise that timezones were even more complicated than I had originally understood, with the rules in a constant state of flux. I was intrigued to see what patterns might emerge if I could visualise this dataset in its entirety ... from Exploring 120 years of timezones [Scott Logic, 2021]

A paper to be presented at Siggraph 2024 examines the geometric properties of tightly curled Black hair and creates algorithms to model it for computer graphics. This is essentially the first formalized description and algorithm for rendering tightly curled hair in the decades long history of computer graphics.