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a video review by Patrick Boyle Well, what it says on the tin...
posted by mumimor on May 7 at 12:57 PM - 42 comments

Koala briefly runs through a triathlon. [more inside]
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on May 7 at 4:51 PM - 11 comments

360 Video: NASA Simulation Plunges into a Black Hole answers the question of what it would look like to fall into a black hole. If you’d rather not, NASA also released 360 Video: NASA Simulation Shows a Flight Around a Black Hole. They also released videos explaining what is going on in the visualizations for the dive into the black hole as well as the flight around it. The press release has more information.
posted by Kattullus on May 8 at 3:44 AM - 4 comments

The Chair is a 24-minute NSFW short horror film with a strong sense of the uncanny which begins when a man picks up a chair from the street. [more inside]
posted by whir on May 7 at 9:13 PM - 4 comments

Who Has the Right to “Disrupt” the University? Perhaps the most egregious example of the administrator-as-disruptor is Gordon Gee, currently the president of West Virginia University (WVU), whose administration pushed through extraordinarily deep cuts to the institution’s academic offerings last fall. During a meeting of the faculty senate, Gee said “I want to be very clear that the university is not dismantling higher education. We are disrupting it . . . And many of you know I am a firm believer in disruption.” [more inside]
posted by spamandkimchi on May 6 at 3:38 PM - 25 comments

Dashing around the course on a single wheel at speeds that seem very unwise, taking hairpin turns while trying to maintain position, driver camera footage as well as drone footage... I have never seen anything quite like Monocycle Mayhem: Epic Battles Unleashed | 12 Thrilling Laps on Spanish Asphalt | Electric Unicycles [10m] It feels a bit chaotic at the start but by the midpoint I found it much easier to follow the narrative of the race. It's quite a thing to witness!
posted by hippybear on May 7 at 6:59 PM - 7 comments

Tom Walker tries desperately, with halting success, to complete some very basic missions in Grand Theft Auto 4 while all the cars on the map lose their fucking minds. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Come for the comedy car deaths, stay for the slow evolution of a "this is a horror stealth game" playstyle that makes it at all possible to make progress.
posted by cortex on May 6 at 9:37 AM - 24 comments

Motown Junkies is a blog where Steve Devereux is reviewing the entire Motown singles discography in sequential order from the beginning. You can also browse tracks by songwriter, label and artist. He’s currently up to 1966, though he’s been on hiatus for a few years. He also used to present Discovering Motown on Radio Cardiff, and the archive is on Mixcloud.
posted by Kattullus on May 6 at 9:05 AM - 20 comments

On a patch of earth big as a Bunnings car park, renters get to join in on the solar boom. A five-hour drive from Sydney, a community garden of sorts has sprouted. But instead of sharing tomatoes or lettuce, "gardeners" harvest solar energy. And it's already a hit with people otherwise excluded from the rooftop solar boom.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on May 5 at 11:22 PM - 16 comments

I used resume spammers to apply for 120 jobs. Chaos ensued. (ungated, archive)
posted by ShooBoo on May 7 at 10:51 AM - 43 comments

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]
posted by Kitteh on May 2 at 5:19 AM - 53 comments

Because of that decision made in Mountain View, we now have a huge accidental archive of our collective past. Awkward flirtations, drunken rants, earnest pleas; friendships fraying or rekindled, personae tried on and discarded, good jokes and bad decisions; every dumb or brilliant or anguished thing we wrote below the subject line — we have an instantly searchable record of it all. To mark the anniversary of this revolution, the editors of New York asked some of our favorite writers to excavate their individual archives and tell us — with dismay or pride or chagrin — what they saw. from How Gmail Became Our Diary [Intelligencer; ungated]
posted by chavenet on May 5 at 3:01 PM - 27 comments

Originally published in 1979, 'The Akhenaten Temple Project and Karnak Excavations' is a nice shapshot of the projects overview. "Akhenaten built the Gem-pa-Aten in the third year of his reign to celebrate his jubilee festival (the heb-sed). By year six of his reign, however, Akhenaten had moved the court and royal palace to a new city in Middle Egypt, modern Tell el-Amarna. The extent to which the Gem-pa-Aten and the other structures dedicated to the Aten at Thebes functioned during the king’s hiatus is unknown." from Digital Karnak, A nice index for the history and archeology in Karnak. (Digital Karnak previously)
posted by clavdivs on May 7 at 2:44 PM - 2 comments

The process of making a mirror ball. The last remaining mirror ball manufacturing factory in Japan. [14m30s] Depicts making a mirror ball. Actually pretty interesting.
posted by hippybear on May 6 at 5:39 PM - 32 comments

It’s weird because the correct answer to the query “what is the best printer” has not changed, but an entire ecosystem of content farms seems motivated to constantly update articles about printers in response to the incentive structure created by that robot’s obvious preferences. Pointing out that incentive structure and the culture that’s developed around it seems to make a lot of people mad, which is also interesting! Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.

Best printer 2024, best printer for home use, office use, printing labels, printer for school, homework printer you are a printer we are all printers / After a full year of not thinking about printers, the best printer is still whatever random Brother laser printer that’s on sale. [Previously]
posted by Rhaomi on May 5 at 11:45 AM - 67 comments

A friend shared this on Facebook. I am so blown away: Whales saving Whales

How cool is this? indeed
posted by y2karl on May 7 at 3:04 PM - 12 comments

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.
posted by hanov3r on May 3 at 9:25 AM - 98 comments

At an incredible 461 feet (140.53 meters), the baguette baked on Sunday, May 5 has officially exceeded the previous record held by Italy. The municipality of Suresnes now holds the Guinness World Record. (SLNYT)
posted by donut_princess on May 7 at 6:50 AM - 29 comments

Rare oceanic phenomenon brought on by heavy rainfall. When Terry Dixon took his usual walk around the Tathra headland on the New South Wales far south coast, he encountered a rare phenomenon brought on by heavy rainfall.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries on May 6 at 9:19 PM - 13 comments

What happens if a US presidential candidate dies? Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the two oldest candidates in US history. If either needs to be replaced, what next? from the Guardian [more inside]
posted by lalochezia on May 5 at 3:25 PM - 125 comments