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Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.

Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019
posted by zenon to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:40 AM
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Enclosed within its rugged mud brick walls the temple precincts at Dendera seem to be an island left untouched by time. Particularly in the early hours of the morning, when foxes roam around the ruins of the birth house or venture down the steep stairs leading to the Sacred Lake. Stepping into the actual temple is like entering an ancient time machine, especially if you look up to the recently cleaned astronomical ceiling. This is a vast cosmos filled with stars, hour-goddesses and zodiac signs, many of which are personified by weird creatures like snakes walking on long legs and birds with human arms and jackal heads. On the columns just below the ceiling you encounter the mysterious gaze of the patron deity of the temple: Hathor.

It might not have the iconic status of Giza or the Valley of the Kings, but the Dendera temple complex north of Luxor boasts some of the most superbly-preserved ancient Egyptian art known, ranging from early Roman times back to the Middle Kingdom period over 4,000 years ago. Most breathtaking is the ceiling of the temple's grand pronaos, which is richly decorated with intricate astrological iconography. But you don't have to travel to Egypt to see it -- thanks to photographer and programmer José María Barrera [site], you can now peruse an ultra-HD scan of the fully-restored masterpiece in a slick zoomable scroller. Overwhelmed? See the captions in this gallery for a deep-dive into the symbolism, or click inside for even more.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 9:52 AM
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NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth reports NASA. After pinpointing the issue with the space probe, the mission team have devised a workaround. Previously, previouslier, many more previouslies.
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 12:24 PM
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The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:

I express greetings and most joyful salutations!

I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!

posted by brainwane to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 9:21 AM
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The backside of the moon as it transits across Earth. That is all.
posted by Tell Me No Lies to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 1:32 PM
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G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 6:59 PM
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As Congress has finally passed the Ukraine aid bill, hope is returning to the frontline, where Ukrainian troops are increasingly struggling to hold out against a numerically superior Russian force that also has a lot more ammunition to spend. This post has some status updates and commentary on the war at present.
posted by Harald74 to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 6:32 AM
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For a generation of British people, it represents the vanishing landscape of their childhoods, tied into ideas of nostalgia and even hauntology.
posted by Fiasco da Gama to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 11:35 PM
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Emil Dziewanowski is a technical artist in the gaming industry who excels at using inventive techniques to create compelling visual effects. His latest blog post, Flowfields, walks you through the process of animating the complex whorls and vortices of Jupiter without using traditional fluid dynamics, using lessons learned from such prior art as Contra's color-cycling, frame-by-frame animation, and the trippy lava effect in Quake, ultimately using a combination of clever tricks to design a "universal" flow simulator that can render appealing fluid effects in just half a millisecond.
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 12:04 PM
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Writing for Defector, Asher Elbein talks about the evolution of the character of Magneto, who is (yet again) back from the dead and the shift of meaning in "Never Again," from inclusive aspiration to its violent modern application.
posted by Ghidorah to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 4:13 PM
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“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” - Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
posted by Artw to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 1:34 PM
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When you often notice people "why-don't-they-just"-ing their way into a proposed solution to a gnarly problem, you might turn your criticisms into a checklist. "Your post advocates a [( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante] approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work." These templates often offer a summary of the problem space and a glimpse of experts' frustrations. Solution rejection checklists exist for fixing the housing crisis, beating the CAP Theorem, protecting against DDOS attacks, improving pharmaceutical drug discovery success rates, creating new programming languages and distributed social networks, and (MeFi comment!) saving journalism.
posted by brainwane to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 7:30 AM
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The NLRB announced tonight that UAW won a historic union election at Volkswagen in Chattanooga Tennessee. The union won by a margin of more than 70% as votes [continued] to be counted. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there. “It’s a totally different ball game,” [Renee Berry] said. “The atmosphere is different. You see more pro-union than anti-union [workers]. A whole lot of people who were anti-union in the past have switched.”
posted by 2N2222 to MetaFilter on Apr 19 at 7:22 PM
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Little Workshop is an award-winning French studio specializing in high-quality immersive 3D experiences for the web. Their portfolio contains many charming and fun projects you can try out yourself, including endless city generator Infinitown, cute procedural dungeon crawler Keep Out!, pulsing geometric music visualizer TRACK, and Arde Madrid, a multi-scene recreation of Ava Gardner's home in Francoist Spain. Their latest and most ambitious project: EQUINOX, a slick, stylized adventure game set in a failing starship in deep space, complete with a full soundtrack and voice acting in a mobile-friendly interface. Read the case study on their website, or check out their other projects (including the dearly-departed Mozilla MMORPG BrowserQuest).
posted by Rhaomi to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 9:57 AM
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Life After Running Athletes are often defined by their physical strength. Who are they when they lose it?

It is not a replacement for running, but to live with a chronic condition is to become an expert at negotiating between one’s wants and one’s capacities. It means constantly hacking away at the richness of one’s life—there is nothing casual about it.

posted by hydropsyche to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 3:57 AM
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Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
posted by chavenet to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 2:05 AM
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Pro-Palestinian orgs at universities across the world protest in support of "Columbia Gaza Solidarity Encampment" Columbia Spectator, the newspaper run by undergrad Columbia University students, published an editorial asking if Columbia University is in crisis, stating: Columbia’s crisis is not as the committee has attempted to define it—a characterization stemming from the belief that the University has become a hotbed of antisemitic thought and behavior. Rather, the crisis is rooted in a lack of genuine community engagement on the part of the administration, as well as a failure to fulfill its duty of care to all affiliates.
posted by toastyk to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 7:20 AM
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The Coddling of the American Parent by Mike Masnick (TechDirt) debunks Jonathan Haidt's panicky new book on teens & the internet. Developmental psychologist & scholar Candice Odgers' article for Nature: The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.
posted by spamandkimchi to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 12:58 PM
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“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” "It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club."
posted by mecran01 to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 3:06 PM
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Elle Griffin's report on the testimony from the Justice Department's 2021 antitrust lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House with Simon and Schuster reveals a disheartening truth: practically nobody buys books.
posted by dis_integration to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:10 PM
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[more posts]

(Apologies, this got long) Oh this hits so close to home. Not for me, but for my wife. We both came to running later in life (I was 35, she was ten years older than me and started a few years later when she was almost 50). When we were first married, running meant running to the store to buy a pack of cinnamon rolls to split. But after we... [more]
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:22 AM
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Here are pictures of our last 5k costumes, and our 5k in Juneau. [view]
posted by gmatom to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 8:20 AM
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As all the search engines fail into enshitification and needless AI wackiness, Yahoo! sees their opportunity and blows the dust off their old web directory that's been sitting in a closet forgotten. [view]
posted by Clever User Name to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:09 PM
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The only thing that's costing lives is the war continuing. Russia's shown it's happy to grind up whoever Ukraine sends to the front for however long it takes for Ukraine to sue for peace. Cool, so let's give up and let Ukraine get steamrolled. At least more people won't die, right? Because, you know, people in Russian-occupied Ukraine... [more]
posted by Method Man to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 12:27 PM
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MetaFilter: the room full of old nerds [view]
posted by hippybear to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:49 PM
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It was always conventional wisdom that Google could fuck up as many products and launches as they wanted and they'd still always be fine as long as they didn't fuck up search. It's been fascinating to watch them fuck up search. Both the speed and breadth of the fuckup is astounding. Search went from "eh, this seems less good than it once... [more]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 11:58 AM
51 users marked this as a favorite

gmatom - I just want to thank you for sharing that with us. With me. I don't have the presence of mind to unspool all the ways in which it's connecting to me but please just know that it's beautiful and this internet stranger is sitting in a coffee shop feeling very emotionally full. Thank you so much for this gift. [view]
posted by Tomorrowful to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 6:51 AM
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<Moe Szyslak voice> You know what I blame this on the shutdown of? Reader. </Moe Szyslak voice> [view]
posted by Kattullus to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:27 PM
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Yesterday I might have read that Civil War thinkpiece, but having seen it last night, today I won't. I'm Team DirtyOldTown from our FanFare thread on this. I came out of it wondering what on earth people are thinking when they say that it lacks context or is centrist or "bothsideism". The context for the movie is the entire last... [more]
posted by rory to MetaFilter on Apr 21 at 2:28 PM
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tl;dr "Any Salad Can Be A Caesar Salad (if you stab it enough)" [view]
posted by lalochezia to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 8:26 AM
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This is as badass as computer engineering gets. Programming a nearly 50 year old 64k computer that's outside the solar system with a lag time of almost a day. Simply amazing. [view]
posted by indexy to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 1:40 PM
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This is interesting but I have a problem with the framing of heroic software engineers against evil management/consultants. Not that management isn't evil but there's nothing inherently ethically or morally pure about software development. It's some old school Silicon valley/Microserfs philosophy. [view]
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:36 PM
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and also WHY IS THERE NOT MORE GOTH FOR AND BY OLD PEOPLE. WHY DO ONLY YOUNG PEOPLE MOAN ABOUT DEATH. GOTH SHOULD BECOME MORE INTENSE AS YOU APPROACH THE GRAVE, NOT LESS. WHAT THE FUCK [view]
posted by phooky to MetaFilter on Apr 26 at 5:31 AM
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{looks around the room at literally thousands of books} Shit. [view]
posted by metametamind to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:18 PM
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Wouldn’t it be great if you could pay $9.99 a month and read all of the books you want? Just like you get all the movies you want from Netflix? Or all the music you want from Spotify? I'm sitting here trying to figure out what that $9.99 a month would get me that my library card doesn't. (Faster access to new titles, I suppose. Is that a... [more]
posted by aws17576 to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 10:31 PM
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Clearly, the wombat heard about sea level rise and is working on evolving to the aquatic life. It could be the first mersupial! [view]
posted by GenjiandProust to MetaFilter on Apr 24 at 9:00 AM
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I heard a long interview with Haidt and got pretty suspicious, sure enough he thinks transgender kids are infected by social media/peers and is supportive of his colleagues who refuse to use a student's correct pronouns, under the guise that "truth" is more important than "social justice." [view]
posted by muddgirl to MetaFilter on Apr 25 at 1:17 PM
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I generally try to avoid lambasting people for not doing the right thing soon enough, since it rarely does any good, but man, I can't help but think that this could simply have happened six months ago when the momentum was still on Ukraine's side (albeit rapidly waning) instead of now when the momentum is back with the Russians. There was no reason... [more]
posted by Method Man to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 8:44 AM
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Large portions of this article were debunked, a year ago, by Lincoln Michel. [view]
posted by Happy Dave to MetaFilter on Apr 23 at 12:33 AM
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Good thing we spent all that money upgrading our ventilation systems in response to COVID, right? /padme [view]
posted by Horace Rumpole to MetaFilter on Apr 22 at 2:22 PM
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[more comments]