~metafilter | Bookmarks (1003)

"In his best run, Jammy had become the richest person in the world in eleven years, three months, eleven days, and twenty-three hours (in-game timer)..." "Any Percent" by Andrew Dana Hudson asks: "Imagine you could play a video game that let you live a whole human life in a matter of minutes. What would it mean to 'win' in that game? What would it...

...in the Shadow of the Berlin Wall. [BBC] "Named 'Operation Trap', the Stasi's attempted to crush a group fighting for a cleaner environment – and for the right to speak out. The secret police's tactics ranged from interrogations and jail to bizarre mind games. In one incident, informants who managed to infiltrate the environmental movement covertly took coffee from a shared pantry without putting...

Of course, it's possible that an AI's thoughts could never stand in for observations made by a human, in which case Wigner's paradox will continue to haunt us. But if we agree that such an AI could be built, then detailing how such an experiment could be run helps to reveal something fundamental about the universe. It clarifies how we can determine who or...

"It seemed too good to be true": Why this couple built their house out of hemp. Having never built a house before, Dan decided his first would be his dream home — a sustainable, off-grid hemp house in Tasmania, rendered with a horse poo mix and with an outdoor composting toilet.

The vaccine and antibiotics available to treat tuberculosis have curbed cases, but more innovations are needed to halt its spread and counteract drug resistance.

Haymarket Books is offering 10 free ebooks on a range of topics relating to anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist thought and action, alongside an 80% off sale, making all of their other ebooks only $2 each. The free bundle features Angela Davis and Rebecca Solnit, along with others (list in the readmore). While the sale ends on November 15th, the free ebooks should be available...

DeFlock is a crowd-sourced map of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) around the world. Want to post an ALPR in your town? Logon to Open Street Map and follow these handy instructions! (via 404 Media)

Forget about Hendrix, Beck, Clapton, Page and Van Halen; we want to highlight the guitarists who have made an impact outside of the usual rock'n'roll axis of axes. It's a list full of invention, customs passed down through generations and a focus on rhythm as much as volume. These are the musicians who defined soukous, bossa nova and Touareg desert blues, who soundtracked revolutions...

"I got interested in percussion — tapping on tin cans, boxes, knees. I sang. I whistled. Though, `Girls don't whistle,' my mother told me." Recognized with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement award in 2004, she was known by generations of children for her folk songs, featuring simple tunes and call and response lyrics. Among her many honors, she is a featured artist in the Smithsonian...

NASA's Juno spacecraft has just released stunning images of Jupiter, captured during its 66th flyby of the largest and oldest planet in our solar system. The Juno mission has been studying the Jovian system—Jupiter, along with its rings and many moons—to learn about the giant planet's formation and evolution with the hope that it might shed light on the development of the entire solar...

"Let's Go Back" Jungle, previously And from that post, and another previously, in case you didn't see it, a 6-year old B-Girl named Terra. That sequence starting around 3:00 where she puts on her pads...awesome.

Everybody needs a happy place. What's yours? What's a place you can visit or even just think about that gives you a sense of calm and relaxation? If yours is the semi-regular #freethread on MeFi, boy do I have good news for you... You are there.

"Just a month before its debut on Hulu, the first trailer for Interior Chinatown has been released. Based on the 2020 novel of the same name by Charles Yu, who won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the series will follow Silicon Valley's Jimmy O. Yang as Willis Wu, who accidentally witnesses a crime and starts to discover family secrets and Chinatown's criminal...

It's dark, it's late, you're drunk, and you're ready to admit to MetaFilter that you're really a famous cult filmmaker. But if you're not sure, follow this handy flowchart by Adam Fromm: Which Contemporary Film Snob Director Are You? It's funny, it's clever, it's easy to navigate, it's a giant JPG image.Here's a discussion on the Criterion Collection subreddit about an earlier version of...

Charlet Takahashi Chung, voice actress for Overwatch and other video games as well as films, documents and recounts (TW: trauma, PTSD, racism, misogyny, classism) in a series of Instagram posts her recent harrowing ordeal aboard a 4+hour long, Canada-U.S. flight on WestJet Airlines, where in the first-class cabin she was subjected to implicit racism and misogyny perpetrated by its entire flight crew and the...

The Microscope Museum is an on-line 'collection of antique microscopes and other scientific instruments' (also available in Portuguese).

"Disinhibition" is a word that has recently migrated from the lexicon of psychology into that of American politics. It refers to a condition in which people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their impulses and urges, and this year it very obviously applied to Trump's increasingly surreal, vituperative, and lurid rhetoric. But it now must also apply to the institutions of American...

Hundreds of modified trees on outback property in outback New South Wales described as a national treasure. You may have heard of scar trees, but how about trees-in-trees? These different types of modified trees tell a story about Indigenous culture, if you know how to read them.It was Gamilaroi elder Allan Tighe who would first point out what Jane calls a "tree-in-tree" on one...

But making a breakfast cereal was not the original intention of Charles William Post, the founder of the Postum Cereal Company (better known these days as Post). After a stint at the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Post started his own local company to sell health drinks, namely the caffeine-free coffee substitute called Postum. Grape-Nuts were actually intended to become a beverage, as well....

February, 2003: Following the smashing, console-defining success of Halo: Combat Evolved, developer Bungie was facing a conundrum. Fan and media interest in the long-anticipated sequel was at an all-time high, thanks to the release of an epic cinematic teaser in September. But despite a veteran team of top-tier designers bursting with new ideas, the game was not in a remotely playable state... and a...

Ancient Egyptian Wooden Funerary Figures Utilising stylistic traits to create a taxonomy of ancient Egyptian wooden funerary figures."This online catalogue aims to record all known examples of ancient Egyptian wooden funerary figures found in UK institutions as part of an ongoing PhD research project undertaken by Sam Powell at the University of Birmingham."