By leveraging a unique large dataset and new techniques for exploring this dataset, our paper highlights the diversity of moral dilemmas experienced in daily life, and helps to build a moral psychology grounded in the vagaries of everyday experience. from A Large-Scale Investigation of Everyday Moral Dilemmas, in which Philosophers are studying Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” [Vox]

For many people, the first time they tried to take control of a computer centered around learning to program in BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), a simple, interpreted programming language designed around easily-understandable keywords and syntax. BASIC turned 60 a couple of days ago, so find one of the many online BASIC interpreters and write yourself a little bit of history.

In 1963, a clean-cut Frank Zappa appeared live on the Steve Allen show playing a musical composition on bicycles. The entire 16:28 is worthwhile to watch for the conversation and interaction between the two, but the performance with the show's orchestra starts at 11:56. The show's talent coordinator Jerry Hopkins discusses how the young musician's debut performance came about. [more inside]

“It wasn’t the second helping on all-you-can-eat, but the third“ an executive explained. After losing $3.3 million in seven weeks during a 2003 all you can eat crab leg offer, Red Lobster makes the same mistake in 2024. By turning $20 all-you-can-eat shrimp into a permanent menu item, the chain suffers a further $11 million loss. “We have to be more careful,” an executive noted.

The Media Matters study of tradwife influencers and the rabbit hole to far right conspiracies.

The blogging platform Cohost (previously) has launched a new section: Artist Alley, where members pay to advertise their podcasts, zines, art, games, and other creations (many of which are free to enjoy). Or sometimes members advertise just to play around - the "#doing a bit" tag is replete with Rickrolling, "Hey check out this picture of a pileated woodpecker I took", a silly survey, etc. Artist Alley is "a take on user-to-user ads we feel good about — a dedicated space which users can access to see promotions from other users, like an artist alley at a convention" and "a revenue product" for Cohost, which had a poor financial forecast in March which has since improved.

🎥 "That Summer" 🎥 Peter Beard (and his then girlfriend Lee Radziwill) was the impetus for the June 1972 meeting of the Beales and the Maysles - culminating in Grey Gardens the documentary the impetus for the June 1972 meeting of the Beales and the Maysles - culminating in Grey Gardens the documentary (and later the musical and film). In 2007, a film lab accidentally returned a rough cut of 1972 Maysles footage of The Beales to Peter using an old label on a film cannister. It was part of the Maysles Films archives digitization project and was supposed to be returned to Maysles directly, but had been paid for by Peter and Lee in 1972 and had Peter's still-current address on it. [more inside]

Why have philosophers had so little to say about Descartes’s stove, and so much to say about his dreams, his resolve, and his conception of analytic geography on that winter’s night? Suppressing the agency of the stove makes it easier to tell a simple story about the agency of the individual thinker. But it has made it that much harder to discern the subtle yet powerful ways in which modern air conditioning technologies condition thought, culture, and social experience. from Descartes’s Stove by the author of Air Conditioning, Hsuan L. Hsu

Sumatran orangutan becomes first wild animal seen using medicinal plant to treat wound. [more inside]

Buttonwood Zoo (in Massachusetts, USA) has a Red Panda Cam.

What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers? In Louisiana in 2000, 2-year-old James Leininger would wake screaming, repeating the same phrases to his baffled and disturbed parents: “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following year, a story unspooled in memories and drawings: He was a World War II pilot whose plane took off from a boat, and he died when he was shot down by Japanese forces. James offered names of people and places, and his account would ultimately become one of the most prominent and thoroughly documented “cases of the reincarnation type,” or CORT, ever recorded.

Patrick Gill discusses Helldivers 2, Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, and satire. And how satire of fascism can be missed by viewers, undermined by its medium, or embraced by genuine fascists.

Menswear writer Derek Guy compares UK TV personality Piers Moron's fashion style with that of Kermit the Frog. That is all. [a thread on X]

The only thing that can be improved under self-evacuation is the flow of information towards people in emergency. This leaves us with eyesight and hearing to work with. Visual aids are greatly more flexible and easy to work with. However their huge drawback is their usefulness expires quickly once the smoke sets in. 2500 dense Lisp programming words from Eugene Zaikonnikov via lobste.rs, whence this YouTube ad.

Slippery Slope: How Private Equity Shapes a Ski Town (Nick Bowlin for Harper's)

Dad Baby is an episode from season two of Bluey, the Australian children’s cartoon, which Disney has refused to make available for streaming, has been uploaded in full to the official Bluey YouTube channel. If you are unfamiliar with the hijinks of the Heeler family, you can watch a selection of episodes on YouTube, either as one long compilation or individually: [more inside]

Waluigi sings "Rainbow Connection." It'll consume two minutes and 44 seconds of your day, but no more than that. That's all. That's enough. [more inside]

77,000 Young Salmon Were Dumped Into the Wrong Creek After a Truck Crashed in Oregon. The spring Chinook salmon smolts should still be able to find their way to the Pacific Ocean and help boost the threatened population of the fish, officials say, though another 25,000 salmon died in the accident.

Boston Dynamics two latest bangers All New Atlas and Sparkles. For once, sort by “top” and definitely read the YouTube comments. [more inside]

People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. (Noema sl) [more inside]

A bookshop in East Sussex has launched an early morning initiative to help writers. Kemptown Bookshop, in St George's Rd, Brighton, opens its doors at 05:00 BST on the first Wednesday of every month for a silent writing session. [more inside]

In this episode we'll look at how production notes flat out lie about the making of a film, we'll look at two different sides of Gran Turismo, and we'll check out the history of CGI and why it fell from grace. We'll bust some common misconceptions about CGI, and we'll look at the most notorious "no CGI" project that I know of. the 4th and final episode of "NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI [more inside]

What the heck bro! Here are 16 videos of avalanches (no audio needed). Just for fun. [more inside]

Skeleton of famous whale-hunting Orca "Old Tom" reassembled for new museum display. The orca known for working alongside human whalers has been given a new exhibit that museum curators hope pays better homage to its legacy.

Nathan Heller on the secretive Order of the Third Bird: There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally considered valuable because it was capable of bestowing value. “By paying attention to something as if it’s interesting, you make it interesting. By evaluating it, you valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a mere market currency, he thought, was to undersell what it could do.

His Book Was Repeatedly Banned. Fighting For It Shaped His Life. (Robert Cormier and The Chocolate War, NYT gift)

Biden administration forgives $6.1 billion in student debt for 317,000 former Art Institute students [more inside]

You could call them “sky flowers,” but that doesn’t really make sense either—after all, the faded blue behind each squiggle is water, not sky, and the squiggles themselves don’t represent solid objects in any tangible, meaningful way. But they look right. The reds and greens and yellows add life and color in a way that a flat blue might not. Those odd shapes, suspended motionless with no clear reason or value, establish a tone. There are a lot of things that don’t make sense on SpongeBob SquarePants. But there’s a clear and coherent vision that runs through the entire show, from the design of SpongeBob’s kitchen-sponge body down to the squeaky-balloon sound of his footsteps. It’s a perspective, and a warm, specific, crazy little world. Of course it has sky flowers in it. What else would be up there?

Today marks 25 years since the original broadcast of "Help Wanted" -- the pilot episode of marine biologist Stephen Hillenburg's educational comic that became a delightful romp of "relentless optimism and fundamental sweetness", a hothouse flower of inventive and absurdist imagination, a cultural touchstone for multiple generations, and one of the most iconic and beloved animated franchises of the 21st century. Are you ready, kids? [more inside]

Remember back in 2017-2020 when everyone was aglow with the warmth and camaraderie of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen? And then, well, Milkshake Duck happened. But not all is lost.... [more inside]

Palm OS and the devices that ran it - a retrospective on the popular PDA and precursor to the smartphone.

Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77. [NY Times; ungated] [more inside]

As part of Secret Base's Patreon based restructuring, Internet video troubadour and oddity explainer Jon Bois has ressurected his long defunct Pretty Good series with a three part video on the rise and fall of Henry Ross Perot's political party/personal vehicle - the Reform Party. [more inside]

Part 1: From the S Dynasty to the Chin Dynasty. Part 2: From the Chu-Han contention, through the first Chinese golden age of the Han dynasty, to the Warring States, and the Northern and Southern dynasties. To clarify, this YouTube series is NOT about the actual history, but how Chinese history is interpreted through Chinese cinema. This is a continuing series from Accented Cinema. Previously from AccentedCinema. For those interested in the actual history, he recommends Cool History Bros.

Endangered Ocelots May Be Expanding Their Range in Texas. DNA testing of an ocelot killed in 2021 raises the possibility that the creatures may be roaming outside their established South Texas territory, which is currently their only stronghold in the country.

At the frame shop there is so much beauty, it can’t be real. Maybe this is the afterlife, I think. Or purgatory. ... When my boss stomps up from his frame-building cellar and sees me, he always barks: Are you still here? Which is literal, because I’m new and only working part time, but also existential because how am I still here—or back here? It’s been a year since I returned to Chicago, but it still doesn’t feel like real life from Don’t Bleed on the Artwork: Notes from the Afterlife by Wendy Brenner [Oxford American; ungated]

Shockingly, the 20th Anniversary of Marillion's album Misplaced Childhood is over twenty years ago! Anyway, FISH - Return To Childhood 20th anniversary tour of misplaced childhood [3h12m] is an odyssey, with Fish's solo career dominating the front half and a full playthrough of Misplaced Childhood and a rundown of other Marillion songs in the second half. It's a really delicious feast of this particular style of prog rock. If you're a fan of early eighties Genesis and don't know about Marillion/Fish, check this out. It's what you're looking for. [more inside]

Hundreds of properties bought after Queensland floods start new life as green space. The collective size of the new green space being added to Brisbane's suburbs in the wake of 2022 floods is the equivalent of about 25 rugby league fields.

The long, strange, ridiculous saga of the NHL team formerly known as the Arizona Coyotes. Emily Kaplan and Greg Wyshynski of ESPN chronicle the poor decisions, bad luck, and outright chicanery that led to the NHL forcing the owner of the Coyotes to sell the team, which is moving to Utah.

The California man who hid for 6 months in a secret room inside Circuit City

You might call this kind of defiantly ahistorical setting the Magical Multiracial Past. The bones of the world are familiar. There is only one change: Every race exists, cheerfully and seemingly as equals, in the same place at the same time. History becomes an emoji, its flesh tone changing as needed. [more inside]

A New York State forest ranger who worked in the Adirondacks, she died after falling about 1,000 feet from a peak at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska. (SLNYT gift link) [more inside]

Ken Klippenstein resigns from The Intercept. In his announcement released through his newsletter, Ken details some of the machinations between the management class controlling journalism, and the journalists out there trying to do the work. Klippenstein will continue publishing his work independently along with legendary editor and national security researcher William Arkin, as well as FOIA specialist Beth Bourdon.

"So when you say judging, it’s not, this soil is great. This soil is bad. It’s classification and analysis, right?" (scroll to bottom for transcript). To prepare for the National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest, they spent three intensive practice days describing soils derived from glacial till, outwash, lacustrine sediments, and loess. They braved freezing temperatures, snow and sleet, high winds, pits partially filled with water, and muddy conditions before the weather finally cleared up for the two competition days.
By the way, did you know there are state soils? (folder of pdfs for all states & PR & VI) and New Jersey’s is named Downer. [more inside]

The Jazz Lincoln Center Orchestra feat. Wynton Marsalis [1h43m] "The South African Songbook is a musical celebration of South African democracy, 25 years after apartheid's end. With special guests Nonhlanhla Kheswa, Melanie Scholtz, Vuyo Sotashe, McCoy Mrubata, Nduduzo Makhathini and Thandi Ntuli." [more inside]

The Top Six Lessons I Had to Learn From Reality TV Because Chabon Said No About the Couch Thing

Keep truth human - take this short quiz from the Canadian Journalism Foundation to find out if you recognize AI generated, false news content.

A discovery about how a circular trough filled with lighter fluid can create looping mini-flames leads to a fascinating set of experiments and an explanation of excitable media. [more inside]

Jerry Seinfeld is a Lazy Hack Out of Touch with the Real World - and Who Can Blame Him? Paste Magazine's brief riposte to the New Yorker's Jerry Seinfeld interview in which Mr. It's About Nothing feels that comedy has been killed by "the extreme left" and "P.C. crap."

JZD Slušovice was a collective farm established in 1952 in the village of Slušovice in the south east of Czechia, at the time in central Czechoslovakia. When 27 year old František Čuba was appointed chairman of the coöperative in 1963, he decided to use the pretext that the farmland wasn't productive as a reason to branch out into alternative. And so, over the next 25 years the small village turned into an industrial powerhouse, developing amongst other things, a holiday resort and the first Czechoslovak Personal Computer. [more inside]

A Doctor at Cigna Said Her Bosses Pressured Her to Review Patients’ Cases Too Quickly. Cigna Threatened to Fire Her. Nurses in the Phillipines are doing the initial reviews, and making major mistakes. Cigna wants their reviewing doctors to take about four minutes to check the reviews and decide if warranted, or if it should be approved, and penalizing doctors who do the work to know what's really going on. [more inside]