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It is the late 1800s. You are an innovative fireworks manufacturer in Yokohama, Japan, with an increasingly international audience (including, on at least one occasion, Ulysses S. Grant). But how to demonstrate to your worldwide customers what, exactly, you have on offer? Introducing the beautifully minimalist Hirayama Fireworks' Illustrated Catalog of Night Bomb Shells. [more inside]
posted by nobody on Apr 19 at 5:33 AM - 24 comments

In an internal memo Wednesday, Google announced the firing of 28 employees in connection to a protest of Project Nimbus. The previous day inside Google offices in New York and California, a couple dozen employees staged a sit-in to bring awareness to the $1.2 billion Israeli government contract. It began in 2021 and provides cloud computing services to Israel—specifically, we’ve recently learned, to the Israeli Ministry of Defense—and though it has faced internal criticism since its inception, efforts against it have naturally intensified since October 7th. The memo from Google’s global head of security Chris Rackow was ominous. “If you’re one of the few who are tempted to think we’re going to overlook conduct that violates our policies,” he wrote to the company’s thousands of employees, “think again.” From Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna on Apr 19 at 4:13 AM - 74 comments

Forestry England has built rope bridges for hazel dormice in the Forest of Dean, so that the mice can get from tree to tree, their routes having been interrupted by felling caused by ash dieback. [more inside]
posted by paduasoy on Apr 19 at 2:39 AM - 13 comments

One Minute Park allows you to visit parks from around the world for one minute each. These are just one minute videos, not webcams. Eventually the project will fill in all the minutes (1440) in a day. You can create your own One Minute Park to help achieve this goal.
posted by chavenet on Apr 19 at 12:32 AM - 5 comments

Neltris is a small in-browser game by Hempuli, creator of Baba is You, Environmental Station Alpha, and scores of tiny indie games as seen on that itch.io page. It's just Tetris, but with additional Tetris.
posted by wanderingmind on Apr 19 at 12:03 AM - 12 comments

First we got the title track, Dark Matter thick and meaty, grown out of a drum riff. Something was a'brewin'. Something more powerful than in the recent past, with a blistering guitar solo. Running was the second single, maybe even more intense than the first. Then the miracle review: Pearl Jam Dig Deep and Find a New Light on ‘Dark Matter’ [Rolling Stone] But the band is also excited: [more inside]
posted by hippybear on Apr 18 at 8:51 PM - 18 comments

Adult Swim is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Space Ghost: Coast To Coast by showing all the episodes in no particular order on YouTube right this very moment. Relive the early days of Cartoon Network's dimwitted dadaist superhero insanity, or become enthralled for the first time.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta on Apr 18 at 8:45 PM - 26 comments

The two flat “blades” of a feather on either side of the main shaft are called vanes. In living birds that fly, the feathers that arise from the hand, known as the primaries, have asymmetrical vanes: the leading vane is narrower than the trailing one. It stood to reason that vane asymmetry was important for flight. And because fossils of Microraptor and its kin show asymmetrical feathers, some researchers argued, these animals must have been able to fly.

Recent work by flight biomechanics experts, including me, has overturned this received wisdom about feather vane asymmetry. Our research shows that feather shape is largely optimized to allow the feather to twist and bend in sophisticated ways that greatly enhance flight performance. Merely being anatomically asymmetrical doesn’t mean much. What matters is that the feather is aerodynamically asymmetrical, and for this to be the case, the vane asymmetry must be at least three to one—that is, the trailing blade needs to be three times wider than the leading one. Below this ratio, the feather twists in a destabilizing rather than stabilizing way during flight.

Scientific American: Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions [includes helpful illustrations -- and some truly stunning 4K+ photography] [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi on Apr 18 at 6:43 PM - 18 comments

Singer, song writer, guitarist Dickey Betts has died. A driving force and original member of the Allman Brothers Band, Dickey Betts was an early pioneer of two part guitar harmonies in rock music.
posted by BigHeartedGuy on Apr 18 at 3:04 PM - 44 comments

These dramatically-coloured bright yellow and dark black frogs were thought close to extinction, but they've reappeared in a park blackened during Black Summer. (Black Summer was the massive and far reaching 2019-2020 Australian Bushfires/Forest Fires that were on a previously unprecedented scale, size, and scope.) For the first time in five years, northern corroboree frogs have been detected in Namadgi National Park. Almost 40 of the critically endangered species were spotted across the park by government ecologists. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 18 at 12:10 PM - 1 comments

Being early investors in tech wasn’t something that had historically been available to the average person in Turkey. The instant millionaires and billionaires and unicorns pretty much lived elsewhere. Now, Faruk Özer saw a possibility. People in Turkey could shelter their money in what was clearly going to be the next big tech boom. But the biggest opportunity wasn’t in trading coins—it was in running a cryptocurrency exchange. Exchanges collect people’s money and, for a commission, invest it; that gives people who don’t have the time or skills to invest directly into the blockchain a pathway to crypto. from He Emptied an Entire Crypto Exchange Onto a Thumb Drive. Then He Disappeared [Wired; ungated]
posted by chavenet on Apr 18 at 11:44 AM - 13 comments

The Kiffness x Cala - I Go Meow [3m]
posted by hippybear on Apr 18 at 9:50 AM - 9 comments

The Deaths of Effective Altruism [archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.
posted by Kattullus on Apr 18 at 8:11 AM - 82 comments

His real name appears to have been John McCarthy. And he was the con man who sold the Brooklyn Bridge. By Dean Jobb. (Previously on selling landmarks)
posted by bq on Apr 18 at 7:38 AM - 13 comments

Want to see the "Devil Comet" at its brightest? If you miss it, you’ll have to wait another 71 years. Australians will be able to see comet 12P/Pons-Brooks aka the "Devil Comet" this week even without a telescope or binoculars. Here's how to spot it and snap a photo.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on Apr 18 at 12:49 AM - 10 comments

It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action’, and that is Shock and Awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it. Ask no questions, tell only lies, and double down, triple down, quadruple down. The ineffably stupid ‘move fast and break things’ that has so much to answer for in our time. Our new ‘Innovation Hub’ has an asinine three-word slogan: ‘Grow Ignite Disrupt’. It would make just as much sense to have ‘Paper Scissors Stone’ for a motto. And rather more to have ‘Smash Grab Run’. from In Florida by Michael Hofmann [London Review of Books] [CW: DeSantis]
posted by chavenet on Apr 18 at 12:35 AM - 53 comments

'on the Tories' (slyt. 1:00)
posted by clavdivs on Apr 17 at 8:55 PM - 6 comments

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Real or Cake? [37s, CW]
posted by hippybear on Apr 17 at 7:56 PM - 46 comments

Jacob Collier, Laufey and dodie perform a stunning rendition of the Scottish/Irish folk song "Wild Mountain Thyme" together with the National Symphony Orchestra and some delightful audience participation, for the series Next at the Kennedy Center, in an episode presented by Ben Folds.
posted by yasaman on Apr 17 at 2:09 PM - 32 comments

Amazon Go, "a new kind of corner store," that company's futuristic storefront where you installed an app on your phone, and could shop for things just by picking them up off of shelves and walking out the door with them, is being shut down. Some random internet person called "Matt Haughey" described his experience with the store, and how it wasn't nearly as magical as it seemed: as it turned out it was a kind of technological sleight-of-hand, instead of using RFIDs and weight-sensing shelves and other techno-devices, they just had a whole lot of people watching cameras. Another random person on Mastodon points out the whole-lot-of-people part was probably a bunch of subsistence contractors in other countries. A third random person notes, even doing that, the store concept couldn't be made to work. Meanwhile the important gigantic hovering electronic head of Jeff Bezos floats above us all, unmoving but watching, silently.
posted by JHarris on Apr 17 at 1:24 PM - 72 comments