You can build a complex society on that pairing, and many times over the course of human history, people have. In the ancient Middle East, lentils were one of the main sources of protein, far more important in most people's diets than meat or animal products. from How the lentil was tamed – and helped human societies thrive [BBC]
posted to MetaFilter by chavenet at 1:37 AM on March 8, 2024 (37 comments)

John D. Clare of 'Facts and the teaching of History' posits: "EH Carr's What is History?...Carr - very correctly - argues that 'the belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively independent of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy." Then it unravels into historiographical relevance of fact. Nearly 20 years later, the methodology of History/ historiography is changing. 'How AI is helping historians better understand our past' and 'Digital doping for Historians: Can history, memory, and historical theory be rendered artificially intelligent'
posted to MetaFilter by clavdivs at 9:59 PM on August 5, 2023 (6 comments)

Thirty-five years ago, a fantastic movie came out that starred four Hollywood legends, three of whom were Oscar winners. It was directed by one of the most important and influential visual artists in film history, and the plot foretold the invention of virtual reality decades ahead of its time. The script was written as a showcase for a new technology designed to change the way we see movies. One of the Hollywood legends died before the movie was finished, a mysterious death, and this ended up being her last movie—And you’ve never heard of it. The True Story of the Lost Sci-Fi Movie 'Brainstorm,' Natalie Wood’s Last Film By Ryan D'Agostino and Eleanor Hildebrandt for Popular Mechanics, Dec. 21, 2018 [original trailer]
posted to MetaFilter by filthy light thief at 9:57 PM on January 12, 2019 (59 comments)

I've successfully culled my wardrobe, bookshelves, furniture and clutter. But I'm haunted by boxes of paper ephemera. What systems do you use to sort/cull the paper detritus of a life?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by happyfrog at 1:29 PM on December 27, 2022 (26 comments)

I'm working on a biography and I don't know anything about how these things are done. I've written graduate-school level papers on a completely different topic, but this is for a general audience. I'm not even sure what I need to know.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by nezlamnyy at 2:15 PM on January 2, 2023 (9 comments)

A specialist on medieval manuscript noticed a possible case of plagiarism. They started looking into it, and found out that nobody is real and nothing is real. The rest of the are worth looking into as well.
posted to MetaFilter by Pyrogenesis at 6:38 AM on December 28, 2022 (64 comments)

Night Mind on YouTube brings us his exploration of one of the most labyrinthine novels, Mark Z Danielewski's House Of Leaves. In three parts: Secrets In Sound [1h39m], Labyrinth In Letters [1h37m], and Rest In Roots [1h46m]. It's a great round-up of the book if you've read the work. If you haven't it's full of spoilers but leaves SO much unexplored that you might be driven to crack the book yourself. It's a difficult book to describe, but this comes pretty close.
posted to MetaFilter by hippybear at 7:20 PM on December 21, 2022 (19 comments)

Lyre's Dictionary generates new English words based on existing roots and patterns. I found it through its Mastodon bot but it also has a Twitter bot (for now) and an RSS feed.
posted to MetaFilter by gentlyepigrams at 10:28 PM on November 17, 2022 (10 comments)

An Economic History of the ('Long') Twentieth Century - "Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall."[1,2,3]
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 6:42 AM on October 28, 2022 (13 comments)

A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century. twitter summary
posted to MetaFilter by latkes at 10:38 PM on September 20, 2022 (53 comments)

My dad is in the hospital again and things don't look good, while my mother can hardly see. I'm an only child and I've been driving down to my (hated) hometown to help them a few days per week and doing as much for them as I can from home, but I have my own health issues and my parents simply need more than I can give. They haven't said it in so many words, but I feel like the pressure is mounting for me to move in with them to help. This can't happen.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Anonymous at 5:48 AM on January 26, 2022 (36 comments)

For our new Metatalktail chat, please please me by telling stories of misunderstood / misused words or phrases: eggcorns, spoonerisms, malapropisms, mishearings, misunderstandings, mondegreens or any other humorously muddled Miss Peking — either your own or others you've personally encountered irl.
posted to MetaTalk by taz at 3:21 AM on March 5, 2022 (168 comments)

How do you manage when other people's success makes you unhappy, but it's not jealousy, it's just that all you see is your own failure?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Anonymous at 3:43 AM on March 1, 2022 (22 comments)

Twelve years on, Ted Chiang remains perhaps the finest author in contemporary science fiction -- and the most rarefied. A technical writer by trade and a graduate of the distinguished Clarion Writers Workshop, Chiang has published only eighteen short stories in the last thirty years, one and a half dozen masterpieces of the genre whose insightful, precise, often poetic language confronts fundamental ideas -- intelligence, consciousness, the nature of God -- and thrusts them into a dazzling new light. His collected works, mostly available in the anthologies Stories of Your Life and Others (2010) and Exhalation: Stories (2019), have cemented his reputation as one of the greatest SF storytellers of all time (and inspired one of the best SF movies of all time). Click inside for a complete listing of Chiang's work, with links to online reprints or audio versions where available, as well as a collection of one-on-one interviews, links to his other writings, video essays, movie clips, and lots more.
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 2:42 PM on February 21, 2022 (34 comments)

It was as if a “Seinfeld” plot met John le Carré. Kristin Zawatski, 44, who works in information technology, in a department of about 70 people, was helping to conduct a virtual job interview. She said she was impressed by the candidate’s sharp understanding of the technical skills required for the position. But about 15 minutes into the conversation, one of her colleagues muted the video call. “The person answering the questions isn’t the person on camera....."
posted to MetaFilter by Toddles at 8:29 PM on February 18, 2022 (131 comments)

I am wrapping up my MA in history at a UK university and my dissertation is due on the 1st of April. I should have used the last couple of months to finish my 10,000 word dissertation but a bunch of random health issues plus my wonderful ability to procrastinate have left me in a terrible position. I have cleared up my scheduled, adjusted my workload so I can focus entirely on my dissertation until the end of March. Is it possible to write a decent dissertation in 40 days (I will be travelling for work last week of March onwards)? More details under the fold.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by bigyellowtaxi at 5:03 AM on February 13, 2022 (24 comments)

I would love to hear recommendations for self help books (of any kind) that you genuinely feel helped you to improve something in your life. Appreciate that it's about the effort you put in, but is there any book that inspired you, gave you useful advice or guidelines that you successfully made use of to make real tangible and long lasting improvements in your life?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Sunflower88 at 2:31 PM on February 9, 2022 (38 comments)

How do I grow out of being self-righteous? This is kind of hard for me to ask - you know, being right all the time about everything and all - so be kind, please.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Anonymous at 5:05 PM on January 29, 2022 (42 comments)

Economists Behaving Badly. A senior economist at Stanford submits a paper to the Journal of Political Economy. It gets rejected. The story doesn't end there. Featuring: the University of Chicago free speech policy, "I do not negotiate with terrorists," uncertainty quantification. Via Andrew Gelman's blog.
posted to MetaFilter by escabeche at 7:27 AM on January 25, 2022 (41 comments)

The Last Design You'll Ever Make. "Designers were brought up to design from cradle to grave. Our new challenge is to postpone that grave as long as we can. How can we design the last product our customers will ever need buy? This is how to design for a right to repair."
posted to MetaFilter by storybored at 5:02 PM on January 18, 2022 (29 comments)

Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike weighs in on web3: When people talk about blockchains, they talk about distributed trust, leaderless consensus, and all the mechanics of how that works, but often gloss over the reality that clients ultimately can’t participate in those mechanics. All the network diagrams are of servers, the trust model is between servers, everything is about servers. Blockchains are designed to be a network of peers, but not designed such that it’s really possible for your mobile device or your browser to be one of those peers.
posted to MetaFilter by Cash4Lead at 8:50 AM on January 12, 2022 (144 comments)

When, how and how often do you read [books]?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by simmering octagon at 6:16 AM on January 12, 2022 (60 comments)

Every now and again, while out walking round the city, I find a cyclist zooming past me with very loud, very clear music blasting from somewhere on their person (or perhaps mounted on the bike itself). Whatever device they're using is too small for me to see it as they flash past. There's no tinny distortion or loss of bass. What device are they using, and how does it achieve such impressive results? Can this really be just a simple cellphone?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Paul Slade at 4:45 AM on January 12, 2022 (12 comments)

This AskMe post blows my mind in a minor and enjoyable way. Who knew? It turns out a lot of people have a Tourette's-like response to embarrassing memories.
posted to MetaTalk by ottereroticist at 10:12 PM on July 22, 2008 (74 comments)

Glass: the most underrated medieval technology? (threadreader) - "Venice sought desperately to keep its monopoly. If a glassmaker left without permission, he would be asked to return. If he refused, his family would be imprisoned, and if he still persisted, an assassin would be hired to kill him off."[1]
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 10:32 PM on October 31, 2021 (21 comments)

In ways both large and small, American society still assumes that the default adult has a partner and that the default household contains multiple people. Many who live by themselves are effectively penalized at work too. “Lots of people I interviewed complained that their managers presumed they had extra time to stay at the office or take on extra projects because they don’t have family at home,” Eric Klinenberg, the author of the 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone and a sociologist at NYU, told me. “Some said that they were not compensated fairly either, because managers gave raises to people based on the impression that they had more expenses, for child care and so on.”
posted to MetaFilter by folklore724 at 9:32 AM on October 24, 2021 (146 comments)

What are your all-time favourite Dungeons & Dragons channels and/or campaigns that can be watched online?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by eagle-bear at 7:37 PM on October 10, 2021 (14 comments)

What useful unknown website do you wish more people knew about? This Reddit Thread Of The Most Useful Websites That Most People Might Not Know About Will Make You Fall Down The Ultimate Internet Rabbit Hole. via digg
posted to MetaFilter by dancestoblue at 7:40 AM on October 12, 2021 (75 comments)

Facebook is down, along with Whatsapp and Instagram. Post your conspiracy theories here.
posted to MetaFilter by mpark at 2:40 PM on October 4, 2021 (176 comments)

Over the years in China, “little fresh meat” celebrities and male beauty bloggers have disrupted the traditional image of what it is to be a man. But recently, Chinese cultural authorities have announced a purge of “morally flawed celebrities.” Setting the frame was a widely promulgated blog essay on the "grit and valor" returning to Chinese culture that “will no longer be a paradise for effeminate stars, and the press will no longer be a place for the worship of Western culture.” Previously on this massive, multi-sector crackdown.
posted to MetaFilter by spamandkimchi at 2:32 PM on September 13, 2021 (22 comments)

DUST is a YouTube channel featuring short science fiction films. They post a new film every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Most are live action, some pure CGI, and there are a few animated films as well.
posted to MetaFilter by maxwelton at 3:41 PM on September 10, 2021 (11 comments)

Three Simple Policy Heuristics - "The most important thing to understand is this: Harm ripples, kindness ripples. People you hurt go on to hurt other people. People who are treated with kindness become better people, or more prosperous people, and go on to help others. Yes, there are exceptions (we'll deal with those people), but they are exceptions." (via)
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 11:42 PM on September 6, 2021 (15 comments)

Me and my wife own a house in LA. We're sort of tired of city life, for now, and want to spend most of our time outside of the city. We have enough money for a down payment for a (modest) place in the Joshua Tree area. However, paying two mortgages would be ridiculous and beyond our means. What we want to do is make both homes AirBnB ready, such that we could move back and forth as desired, while recouping the mortgage on the property we weren't staying at. What could go horrifically wrong here?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by insteadofapricots at 4:45 PM on August 18, 2021 (19 comments)

The founder of socialist magazine Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson, has fired most of the staff for trying to start a worker co-op.
posted to MetaFilter by PhineasGage at 12:44 PM on August 18, 2021 (81 comments)

How to best ensure a house is secure and nothing damaging is going to happen after a sneaky and angry resident departs?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by letahl at 2:47 PM on August 13, 2021 (40 comments)

I'm looking for examples of "low-tech sites" in this modern world: Daring Fireball, Paul Graham, Derek Sivers, Philip Greenspun, and so on. Content and viewpoint don't matter. I'm simply interested in modern implementations of minimalist websites to use as inspiration for reverting one of my own sites to something much "purer". (My site is a modern Wordpress blog with thousands of pages from the past fifteen years. Oy vey!)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by jdroth at 7:26 AM on August 14, 2021 (14 comments)

An essay about Briseis's story, and yours. The academic part of your brain knows that no text is about one thing. The Iliad is about a million things, but for you, right now, it’s really just a story about how women have to pay terrible prices for what men want. (cw: sexual assault)
posted to MetaFilter by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 10:32 PM on August 13, 2021 (9 comments)

The Paris Review on librarian porn (nsfw).
posted to MetaFilter by twirlip at 12:41 PM on January 30, 2012 (52 comments)

Tiffany Ferguson (tiffanyferg) discusses [SLYT] influencer smiles, the rise of veneers, dental tourism, class implications and stigmas of our teeth, dental care as a human right, and what we can do to fix dental care in America.
posted to MetaFilter by AlSweigart at 7:34 PM on August 3, 2021 (38 comments)

I feel that I have no right to make art because I didn't go to art school and am just a amateur dabbler with delusions of grandeur who would look foolish to others.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whitelotus at 9:06 PM on August 1, 2021 (48 comments)

In America, losing a job means making a hundred phone calls to a state unemployment-insurance system. Getting hit by a car means becoming your own hospital-billing expert. Having a disability means launching into a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce–type legal battle. Needing help to feed a toddler means filling out a novel-length application for aid. ...at some point, I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the “time tax”—a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them.
posted to MetaFilter by latkes at 2:39 PM on July 27, 2021 (74 comments)

I'm interested in studying and understanding a particular community as an outsider. I understand that this is what anthropologists do. What resources would you recommend for someone who is planning to do anthropological work, but doesn't have any formal training?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by wesleyac at 2:24 PM on July 21, 2021 (10 comments)

Bo Burnham started out as a geeky kid writing parody songs in his room, but the success of his work on YouTube soon launched him into a career in comedy, where he quickly won the respect of comics thrice his age. Three innovative specials and one acclaimed coming-of-age film later, Bo seemed to disappear from the scene for years... only to return in spring 2021 with INSIDE [trailer], a striking one-man/one-room pandemic comedy masterpiece, inventively cinematic in style, which devolves from clever social media parody to incisive sociopolitical critique to dystopian internet horror to a heartbreaking elegy for a dying world as it parallels his own emotional breakdown. Two months later, with six Emmy nominations and a nationwide theatrical release this weekend, there's plenty of Content to chew on -- a full track breakdown, lyrics, commentary, analysis, and beyond. Want it? Good. There's
posted to MetaFilter by Rhaomi at 12:17 PM on July 21, 2021 (56 comments)

"Need a fun way to learn about computational text analysis for digital humanities?" Well, "we should tell you about The Data-Sitters Club, how it works, and who we are. It all started one day when Quinn Dombrowski was on vacation in Las Vegas and started getting nostalgic about Ann M. Martin’s iconic series about girlhood in the upper-middle-class American suburbs of the 1990s." Start with "Quinn's Great Idea" to read a series of colloquial narratives chronicling research using the Baby-Sitters Club corpus. For example: Curious about what we can learn from the series's formulaic "Chapter 2" duplications?
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 11:28 AM on July 19, 2021 (10 comments)

Financially Hobbled for Life (Free link to WSJ article.) Columbia and other top universities push master’s programs that fail to generate enough income for graduates to keep up with six-figure federal loans.
posted to MetaFilter by mono blanco at 5:38 PM on July 8, 2021 (123 comments)

I have trouble getting my chores and studying done in the evening after I get off work and just want to vegetate.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by whitelotus at 6:06 PM on July 6, 2021 (37 comments)

Where can one get that "extended family" feel that can fill the gaps? Churches are the first to come to mind but for non-believers they don't fit. Snowflakes ahead.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Coffeetyme at 11:48 AM on June 28, 2021 (15 comments)

When I make pasta sauce it tends to turn out pretty well but all my pasta sauces tend inexorably toward the same flavor profile. I want new and exciting sauces, mostly vegetarian.
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Frowner at 9:15 AM on June 29, 2021 (38 comments)

I'm looking for a few podcasts that are similar to Ideas, is there anything you'd suggest. The CBC describes Ideas as "deep-dive into contemporary thought and intellectual history. Anchored in a powerful legacy and expansive archive spanning over five decades, its topics are boundless. The nature of consciousness. The history of toilets. The roots and rise of authoritarianism. Near death experiences. No idea is off-limits."
posted to Ask MetaFilter by VirginiaPlain at 6:24 PM on June 15, 2021 (17 comments)

My eyes are bothering me, so I think I'll try a podcast for the first time. I'm interested in something stand-alone and not too heavy or dramatic, but not comedy and not an interview. Maybe some type of story, or an exploration relating to music, movies, science, history or culture ...
posted to Ask MetaFilter by NotLost at 8:30 PM on June 29, 2021 (27 comments)