June 18, 2015

Make a little bird bath in your soul

What better way to relax than to see a guy creating a bird bath in his hands for his pet finch?
posted by MartinWisse at 11:15 PM PST - 29 comments

Kennewick Man has Native American DNA

Kennewick Man - or the Ancient One - has a contentious history (previously and previouslier) that inspired a long legal and moral battle between scientists who said he probably wasn't Native American and wanted to study him, and local tribes who insisted that he was an ancestor and wanted to re-bury him. The scientists won in court in 2005, and a study has now determined from DNA evidence that Kennewick Man "was most closely related to DNA from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, one of the five tribes who originally claimed Kennewick Man as an ancestor."
posted by clawsoon at 8:50 PM PST - 21 comments

BRO HARDER!!!

BROFORCE is a multiplayer patriotism simulator. Defeat bad guys, devil-horned dudes, giant saw blades, and other... things... while paying homage to your favorite sweaty, bandana-wearing, minigun-totin', chaw-chewin, salty-talkin' action heroes and heroines from the 80's! [more inside]
posted by mrbigmuscles at 8:34 PM PST - 29 comments

Turns out humidity is good for something after all

"Researchers [at Columbia University] have built devices that harness changes in atmospheric humidity to generate small amounts of electricity, lift tiny weights, and even power a toy car. In the grand scheme of things, that captured energy is not free, but it’s pretty darn close."
posted by Quietgal at 8:15 PM PST - 21 comments

StarWarsStarWarsStarWars StarWarsStarWarsStarWars

All 6 Star Wars films at once. Has an amazing art-house-like quality. More watchable than the prequels.
posted by schmod at 7:17 PM PST - 34 comments

Hipster New York Health Advice

Living Simply With A Flip Phone [more inside]
posted by aloiv2 at 7:01 PM PST - 94 comments

Everyone Thinks I’m On The Mend

On Amy Winehouse, Four Years After Her Death [more inside]
posted by beisny at 6:25 PM PST - 32 comments

"At this point, I started banging my head against my desk..."

"What’s compression in the first place? At its most basic, compression is a way of representing data using less space. An emoji is a good metaphor: it represents an entire word or even several words using a single character. Our minds then 'decompress' the character back into the word it represents.

"When hackers see a magical plot-driving compression algorithm, it’s hard to chalk it up as simply a narrative device. After all, universal lossless compression sounds pretty sweet. So, at a recent hackathon, I decided to get to the bottom of middle-out compression."
I Hacked the Middle-Out Compression from 'Silicon Valley' - Alexander Gould, Major League Hacking (Silicon Valley is on FanFare)
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:04 PM PST - 50 comments

Is the US justice system up for sale?

Reasonable Doubts About the Jury System Trial consultants allow the affluent to manipulate the biases of those who judge them, putting our justice up for sale. via The Atlantic
posted by robbyrobs at 4:32 PM PST - 32 comments

USA: All 50 states fall short of standards on police use of force

USA: All 50 states fall short of international standards on police use of lethal force. An Amnesty International report today highlights that all US states fail to meet both international standards and often US constitutional standards. Additionally, nine states and the District of Columbia have no laws on the use of lethal force (Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming). Key findings (pdf, 45kb). Executive Summary (pdf, 500kb). Guardian report.
posted by biffa at 1:16 PM PST - 14 comments

Grey day

I Read The New “Fifty Shades” Book (SLBuzzfeed) (NSFW)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:56 PM PST - 121 comments

Tim Gill, reacting to Rove, pushes for full LGBT equality in Red States

In 2004, George W. Bush initiated a war over gay marriage when he was running against Kerry, and Karl Rove helped to extend that battle to states in 2004 and 2006, according to Bush Campaign Chief and Former RNC Chair, Ken Mehlman (previously, twice). GWB won in 2004, and voters passed all 11 bans on gay marriage. The latter shook Tim Gill, a quiet and successful software entrepreneur, who had been a political activist since 1992.
Gill became radicalized. “I got depressed and angry,” he says. “But, in the end, my response was to say, ‘Well, how am I going to fix this? These were political defeats. The way you fix political defeats is through politics. And so I thought, ‘These people are in office. We can’t have that. How do we go about undoing it?’ ”
Bloomberg Politics: America’s Gay Corporate Warrior Wants to Bring Full Equality to Red States. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 12:36 PM PST - 8 comments

Grexit

What's happening in Greece? Explaining the Greek Debt Crisis. Latest developments: In the Eurozone, growing support for a Greek Exit. while Greeks are stashing €10,000 bundles in their homes. preparing for what the Greek Central Bank calls a financial collapse.
posted by storybored at 11:05 AM PST - 136 comments

Raptors & walruses & chickens & penguins & dolphins & camels, oh my!

"Actual zookeepers taking photos of themselves doing Chris Pratt's Jurassic World velociraptor taming move is a thing."
posted by Jacqueline at 10:46 AM PST - 55 comments

The Mind Meld Theory of Wasp Cognition

Do insect societies share brain power? The society you live in can shape the complexity of your brain--and it does so differently for social insects than for humans and other vertebrate animals. [more inside]
posted by Michele in California at 10:45 AM PST - 19 comments

The Earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth

This is an extract from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. Here are some of the early analyses.
posted by infini at 9:56 AM PST - 86 comments

Baseball and Caviar

The Los Angeles Angels baseball team found themselves embroiled in controversy recently when Robert Alvarado, the team's Vice-President of Marketing and Ticket Sales, brushed aside concerns about decreased attendance at the ballpark this season by stating, "We may not be reaching as many of the people on the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, but those people, they may enjoy the game, but they pay less, and we’re not seeing the conversion on the per-caps,”. This statement by Alvarado prompted this OC Weekly blog headline: Anaheim Angels: We Don't Need Poor Fans, and We Don't Want Them. Alvarado resigned yesterday from the Angels organization.
posted by The Gooch at 9:34 AM PST - 58 comments

Number one in the hood, G.

A day inside Adult Swim: the craziest TV network in America (slTheGruaniad)
posted by Kitteh at 8:46 AM PST - 42 comments

Suggested link between anxiety and hypermobility of the joints

"Joint flexibility is an oft-coveted trait that provides a special advantage to dancers and athletes, but there can be too much of this good thing. A growing body of research suggests a surprising link between high levels of flexibility and anxiety. A study published last year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is among the most recent to confirm the association, finding that people with hypermobile joints have heightened brain activity in anxiety regions."
posted by SeedStitch at 8:46 AM PST - 55 comments

There's no fake hair in T-ball

How do you get your Frozen-obsessed daughters to try softball? Give the team a Frozen theme..
posted by aabbbiee at 8:00 AM PST - 46 comments

Giant Lumbering Beasts

Since April three of the biggest movies in history have opened: Furious 7 (with a worldwide gross of 1.5 billion dollars), Age of Ultron (with a worldwide gross of 1.3 billion dollars) and Jurassic World (with a worldwide gross of half a billion after just one weekend, and heading towards a likely record). With Star Wars down the pike in December, we're looking at a record setting year for the box office, largely on the backs of franchise action/adventure films. Mark Harris writes about the new franchise film economy in Park Effects, and relatedly, Alex Pappademas considers the efforts to create a farm league of indie directors for these new billion dollar movies in Mr. DNA.
posted by codacorolla at 7:28 AM PST - 63 comments

nothing between the body and the earth

At rest in the fields. "Celebrating childhood's end" at Eloise Woods Community Natural Burial Park, in Cedar Creek, Texas. [more inside]
posted by zarq at 6:35 AM PST - 4 comments

Tragedy at Emanuel AME...again.

At least nine people are dead in a shooting at Charleston, South Carolina's historic Emanuel AME church. Among the victims is Clementa Pinckney, church pastor and SC state senator. The gunman sat with the church for a while before shooting, and told a survivor that he was letting her live so she could tell the story. [more inside]
posted by Pater Aletheias at 4:50 AM PST - 1223 comments

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