~metafilter | Bookmarks (989)

Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic Crits-Christoph et al in Cell. Highlights: Common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 linked to Huanan market matches the global common ancestor • Wildlife mitochondrial DNA identified in samples from stalls positive for SARS-CoV-2 • DNA from raccoon dogs, civets, and other wildlife species detected in market samples • Genotypes of potential hosts...

Kris Kristofferson, legendary songwriter, actor, and poet died today at age 88. Born in 1936 in Brownsville, Texas, Kris led a fascinating life. What I have always liked most about him, however, was how good he seemed to be.Kris started writing at Pomona college in the mid 1950s, was Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude in literature. After Pomona, he was a...

Given these strategic roles, any threat to Klaipėda, whether from mismanagement of a dangerous cargo or a deliberate act, has far-reaching implications for regional security and energy stability. The Ruby episode underscores how hybrid threats can potentially evolve to include kinetic elements. The complexity of attribution, combined with Klaipėda's strategic significance, makes it a potential flashpoint for regional security. from Floating Megabomb Heaves to...

Lulu Garcia-Nevarro of The New York Times podcast "The Interview" sits down with HBO host John Oliver for about 40 minutes for one of the most honest interviews I've seen from him: John Oliver Is Still Working Through the Rage. There's a depth to this conversation that you might not be expecting. I found it informative and illuminating; perhaps you will too.Be sure to...

This 12-minute short is a taste of the full 80-minute documentary that will premiere in the summer of 2025, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Space: 1999.Jeffrey Morris' YouTube channel has more videos on this project. The most comprehensive is the panel with Morris and Space: 1999 actor Nick Tate from WonderFest 2024 in Kentucky (which starts with the same short as...

Last summer, the 30th anniversary of Guyville was attended by retrospectives, special reissues, and a celebratory tour. This month, Whip-Smart's anniversary came and went without fanfare. But it's a remarkable album full of expertly crafted songs, and I'd argue that its story is as important, when considering the alternative rock explosion of the 1990s, as that of its more-lauded predecessor. I spoke to Phair,...

Eight years ago, I posted about a new supernatural webcomic called The Strange Cases of Oscar Zahn. The name changed slightly, but the comic continued to 2019. Oscar is the world's greatest paranormal researcher, and an inventor of devices that can detect and affect the spirit world. Oscar is also a talking skull floating above a body. All of them can still be read...

This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google's success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can't compete with free video made by content providers. It's no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They...

The Top Score podcast from Emily Reese is interviews with videogame composers that ran from 2011 to 2015. It was followed in 2015 with a new series, Level With Emily Reese, that is still recording episodes this year. If you enjoy hearing people who create music talk about how and why they've created that music, these are podcasts for you. Even if you aren't...

Øyvind Thorsby, that creator of gloriously weird and weirdly glorious comics full of strange species, decidedly specific spells and gizmos, and lots and lots of farce (previously, previouslier), has begun his seventh comic, My Other Brain is an Idiot (front page currently shows the first of ten pages so far; navigate with the arrow icons). His sixth comic and an updated link to another...

Invasive weed dubbed thorny horror eradicated from Queensland after 15-year battle. The karroo thorn can overrun landscapes and make farmland unproductive, so farmers and biosecurity officers are rejoicing at this eradication achievement.

Scone geography (languagelog). Include the geographically distribution of cream first or jam first scone eaters. For North Americans, how do you pronounce pecan (mefi's own languagehat)? Bonus post on regional pronunciation: Lima, Ohio and Cairo, Ohio.

Neuroscientist Dr. Eliezer Masliah was prolific, publishing around 800 papers on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. His work good enough for long enough that in 2016, he was appointed director of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging. Yesterday, Science published a report casting substantial credible doubt on 132 of those papers, and on Masliah specifically, as the sole common author among the...

Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when readers stopped being able to keep up with their favorite genres? Nicoll concludes: "Was there ever really a time when people actually could read the whole field? Or is that just a story older readers tell themselves, with the line between "fully known" and "too big for one person" drawn at the moment the reader became...

In the decades since Hanson's death, the United States has invested ever more in deportation and border militarization in pursuit of an illusory "security." This criminalization generates black markets—"smuggling networks are the clearest products of efforts at border control," Weber writes—which systematically beckon border agents toward corruption. The racial politics of border enforcement, now as ever, engender abuse. If Donald Trump is reelected in...

NotebookLM is a deceptively simple tool from Google that at first glance looks like a fairly straightforward demo of their Gemini AI platform. Upload pasted text, a link (including YouTube), audio files, or up to 50 documents/500k words (which aren't used for training) and after a brief analysis it will produce various text interpretations -- summaries, tables of contents, timelines, study guides. It even...

The world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. The core issue is the fight between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress.

Two very different short stories about romantic relationships and change. "The Manifesto" by Ilse Eskelsen, published in Lunch Ticket Summer/Fall 2024: "Elizabeth sucked her bottom lip. She sprinkled cheese over another pizza. Eventually, she asked, 'How do you make guys think you're smart?'" A girl reads The Communist Manifesto to impress a boy; it works, at first. "Transmogrification" by R.M. Pérez-Padilla, fantasy, published in...

Passes away at the age of 89. With a career starting in the 1950's until just recently, Dame Maggie Smith roles understandably spanned the gamut from her first Oscar win for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" to more recent years as the acerbic Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey and of course, the stern, but winking Professor McGonagall. A NYT piece of roles to...

A short description of the types of segmented Roman armor. In Latin. If you'd like to learn more, there is an english-langauge wikipedia page.

Meredith Whitaker of Signal talks about the AI economy with FT. A brief profile and interview of one of the few voices within tech willing to speak out about the relationship of surveillance technologies and AI. "I was just trying to figure out how do we support the community that is effectively building prophylactics to the business model I'm beginning to understand?"I'm sure there's...

Access the library here. From thequietus.com: "The extensive archive was initially opened to the public in 2018, with around 16,000 sounds initially made available online. It has now more than doubled in size to stock over 33,000 samples, which are available to download for free as a WAV or MP3 file. The BBC's library features recordings dating back to the 1920s, and comprises sounds...