~metafilter | Bookmarks (989)

AP/PBS investigative series (part one, part two, interactive; full length documentary)on how (esp in the 1970s & 80s) the international adoption agencies, the governments of South Korea AND the receiving countries (esp. in Scandinavia and North America) met the demand for adoptable children by turning children with families into "abandoned" kids available for export. Though the stated intention of adoption was to spare children...

It's natural to focus on successful teams: Winning is, after all, the point of every game, the reason we have scoreboards in the first place. But we remember the truly great teams far more than we remember the regular everyday champions: to be the best at something will make you immortal. It thus stands to reason that being the best at losing is also...

The brazen heist, which made international headlines, occurred during a COVID-19-related lockdown in Ottawa some time between Christmas Day 2021 and Jan. 6, 2022, the hotel determined. No one was in the building during that period. The photo had been gifted to the hotel by Karsh himself and had been on public display at the Château for decades until it was removed from the...

A person has died for the first time in euthanasia campaigner Dr.Philip Nitschke's suicide machine, the Sarco, in Switzerland. The Sarco machine is in effect a mini gas chamber which fills with nitrogen, an inert non-poisonous gas, after the person who wants to die has entered, closes the lid and presses a button, leading to a painless drug-free death without medical assistance. Nevertheless, several...

Nari Nari Tribal Council looks to wind farm to restore culture and country in New South Wales. A traditional owners' group strikes an agreement that could see it become an equity partner in a renewable energy project proposed for their land in the state's south west. Only one per cent of renewable developments in Australia involve Indigenous ownership, compared with 20 per cent in...

Highlighting all the small but powerful steps you've taken to conserve energy over the past few months (and how that energy has instead been used to fuel the insatiable beast that is AI).

Nowadays, we have a different appetite or tolerance for scientists who had mystical beliefs. We have become increasingly tolerant of his heretical views, which have seemed less problematic. Sometimes, people can still get very upset about the alchemy. But there's actually very little that he left of his own work in alchemy. Most of it is copies of other people's stuff that he indexed...

UFO 50 is an anthology collection of 50 games made by the fictional company UFO Soft in the 8-bit era.The project (official website) was conceived by Derek Yu of Spelunky (prev) and Jon Perry (best known for work on board games, including Air Land and Sea, with the team growing to six during development. Genres span include the traditional (point-and-click horror adventure Night Manor,...

I'm sorry, but this fart by horse Sven is epic in a way that will delight 3-year-olds for hours. And probably a few adults too.

The U.S. military's admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history. "Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield's historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign "other," a feature drawn...

"Wendy and Lisa are veteran composers and singer-songwriters. They were integral members of Prince's Revolution ...They talk with us about their 40-plus year partnership, and their Emmy award-winning work as composers. They'll reflect on their childhood friendship and the work their fathers contributed as members of The Wrecking Crew. And of course, what it was like to collaborate with Prince, and work on some...

Mirrors in Movies: How Filmmakers Make Cameras Disappear. When a camera takes a shot full-on of a character facing a mirror, you don't see the camera in the reflection. How do they do that? An entertaining look at the tricky techniques.Part 2

Singer Halsey, nee Ashley Frangipane, did a lengthy interview with SHE MD about her pregnancy and its complications. Halsey Part 1: Endometriosis, Lupus and The Unfiltered Truth About Living With Chronic Illness [50m] and Halsey Pt 2: Overcoming Postpartum Depression and Clinical Ketamine Therapy That Changed Everything [40m] were illuminating to me as a gay man with no experience of pregnancy at all. I...

Legalized Sports Gambling Was a Mistake (slTheAtlantic) (archive here)But wait -- there's more! Ontario, Canada legalized virtual casinos and well, that's not going great either. (slTOStar) (archive here)

over the past few weeks and months, the talk around Lichtenstein been more about his appropriation of the work from comic artists and less about his impact on the art world. Jonathan Bailey, Plagiarism Today, 2023The reason for that is the release of a new documentary entitled Whaam! Blam! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation. Though released in November 2022, the documentary has...

John Baez: "Once there was a thing called Twitter, where people exchanged short messages called 'tweets'. While it had its flaws, I came to like it and eventually decided to teach a short course on entropy in the form of tweets. This little book is a slightly expanded version of that course." [PDF, 129 pages]

Intellectual giant Fredric Jameson has died. The LRB has a brief obituary, with links to his reviews. His most famous work--at least the one most frequently seen popping up in graduate English courses--is 1991's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (read a selection here, or the whole thing at the internet archive), but he was a prolific author who kept writing (and...

The neo-modernist faith in the future assumes the potentiality of the not-yet as an ideal; it credulously takes the bait of hype, assuming that technological innovation will continue to produce new aesthetic paradigms, and ideally market value. These cycles of hype go from boom to bust with predictable regularity—see, for instance, the spectacular death of NFTs—but to the believers, individual fads matter less than...

Malicious data sharing to be outlawed in Australia as part of privacy law update. The malicious release of personal data online, known as doxxing, will be outlawed and attract up to seven years in jail under new legislation being introduced to Federal parliament.The bill will impose a maximum six years' imprisonment for publishing private details such as names, addresses and numbers, with the intent...

With recipes, trivia, history, cooking tips, poems and an extensive listing of festivals by US state, country and month, Chef James' 25-year-old, daily-updated foodreference.com is a comforting survival from the early web. (Previously [2002], pointed out by Brian Jeffears on Mastodon)foodreference.com is one of those sites that, every so often, someone links to in passing as part of a different post, but doesn't seem...

Scientists have argued that recursion, a technique that allows chunks of language such as sentences to be embedded inside each other (with no hard limit on the number of nestings) is a universal human ability, perhaps even the one uniquely human ability that supports language. It's what allows us to create—literally—an infinite variety of novel sentences out of a limited inventory of words. from...

"Candy came from out on the Island / In the back room she was everybody's darling" Beautiful Darling [1h26m] is a documentary about the life of Andy Warhol Factory participant Candy Darling. You've heard the lyric, but probably don't know the story.