3118 MetaFilter comments by rory (displaying 1 through 50)

Four years on from Britain's exit from the EU, how's it going? Swimmingly, say its supporters, who argue that we should stop blaming Brexit for our economic ills. Most people in the UK have more of a sinking feeling about it, but the prospects for repairing or reversing the damage are unclear.
comment posted at 6:20 AM on Mar-18-24
comment posted at 6:39 AM on Mar-18-24
comment posted at 6:49 AM on Mar-18-24
comment posted at 7:08 AM on Mar-18-24
comment posted at 7:32 AM on Mar-18-24
comment posted at 8:35 AM on Mar-18-24


Shigeichi Negishi, the inventor of the world's first commercially-available karaoke machine, has died in Japan. He was 100 years old.
comment posted at 5:58 AM on Mar-16-24

This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. from The Great American Novels [The Atlantic; ungated] [CW: a list which almost by definition lacks your favorite American author or novel]
comment posted at 7:16 AM on Mar-16-24
comment posted at 7:23 AM on Mar-16-24


RIP Karl Wallinger. [NYT, ungated] Keyboardist for The Waterboys [Wikipedia] and creative force behind World Party [Wikipedia], he passed of undisclosed reasons this past Sunday at 66. He was well known for Put The Message In The Box, Private Revolution, and Ship Of Fools. The Guardian has a truly lovely write-up about Wallinger.
comment posted at 3:25 PM on Mar-13-24

How SARS-CoV-2 contributes to heart attacks and strokes. The virus that causes COVID-19 can infect coronary arteries and increase inflammation in atherosclerotic plaques. An NIH-funded research team, led by Dr. Chiara Giannarelli at New York University School of Medicine, analyzed coronary artery tissue samples from people who died of COVID-19 between May 2020 and May 2021. Results appeared in Nature Cardiovascular Research on September 28, 2023.
comment posted at 10:17 AM on Mar-12-24
comment posted at 2:51 PM on Mar-12-24


One of the most dreaded diseases in early modern London was plague. Starting in 1603, government officials published weekly plague mortality statistics in a broadside series known as the Bills of Mortality. The bills grew to include not just plague deaths but also dozens of other causes of death, ensuring their continued publication for decades after the final outbreak of plague in England. Between 1603 and 1752, almost 8,000 different weekly bills were published. Death by Numbers aims to transcribe and publish the information in these bills in a dataset suitable for computational analysis.
comment posted at 6:55 AM on Mar-4-24

Things Unexpectedly Named After People. For example: Main Street in San Francisco is named after Charles Main. By Roland Crosby. Via.
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Mar-2-24
comment posted at 3:42 AM on Mar-3-24
comment posted at 2:25 AM on Mar-5-24
comment posted at 3:20 AM on Mar-5-24


Chaotic off-brand Willy Wonka pop-up exhibit ends with police intervention
Obviously, when the poor Charlie And The Chocolate Factory enthusiasts showed up at Box Hub Warehouse, the event looked nothing like what the event description suggested. Instead, they were confronted with a sad-looking, mostly empty warehouse with a bouncy house and some ramshackle decorations. Jack Proctor, a dad who took his kids to the event, told STV News that “we stepped inside to find a disorganized mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears.” [...] "The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point."
The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience - More shocking pictures emerge of ‘shambles’ Willy Wonka experience - Employee contracts signed with "erasable ink" - Actor hired as Willy Wonka for cancelled event called it a place 'where dreams went to die' - 'Willy Wonka' chocolate experience boss 'truly sorry' after 'chaos' - Read the ChatGPT-generated event "script" [PDF]
comment posted at 2:55 PM on Feb-27-24
comment posted at 1:43 AM on Feb-28-24

Todd In the Shadows undertakes an epic troll of Brits with ONE HIT WONDERLAND: "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood
comment posted at 12:47 AM on Feb-26-24
comment posted at 1:15 AM on Feb-26-24
comment posted at 3:03 AM on Feb-26-24
comment posted at 2:54 AM on Mar-4-24


Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present - WIRED. A thoughtful reply to what art means when it’s ‘personally’ generated for you with a dive into Lewis Hyde on gift economies.
comment posted at 2:59 AM on Feb-24-24

"The featured filters — Images, Videos, Maps, Flights, Shopping, Perspectives, etc. — change and reorder depending on the search term, but this was different. I wasn’t seeing the News tab as an option for search after search, even if I went looking in the 'All filters' drop-down menu. I tried with 'Julian Assange,' 'public subsidies for sports stadiums,' and 'Reckon layoffs.' None showed the News filter as an option. The next day, on a different computer, my News filter was (blessedly) back. But a few other users confirmed I was not alone." Last year Google cut jobs in its news division. Where is Google putting its resources these days? Exactly where you'd expect.
comment posted at 6:50 AM on Feb-23-24

Until the mid 1800s, pawpaws were strictly a foraged food due to their woodland abundance. Indigenous people and enslaved Africans ate them as part of their seasonal diets, and the recorded anecdotes of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Daniel Boone describe subsisting on the native fruits during their journeys through the wilderness. Eventually, pawpaws, or custard apples as they were sometimes called, were sold at market. Though cultivated by Indigenous tribes like the Shawnee, the pawpaw was relegated to a wild folk food eaten by impoverished rural people, earning nicknames like the “poor man’s banana” and the “hillbilly banana.” from Consider the Pawpaw [Belt]
comment posted at 1:14 AM on Feb-23-24
comment posted at 1:24 AM on Feb-23-24

"Informant’s dad told it to her. She found it so funny. She likes that it’s punny and unexpected. Her dad would tell it to her over and over again. His dad told it too." An entry from the USC Digital Folklore Archives. The International Society for Folk Narrative Research points to it as one of many digital folklore archives [PDF]. If you don't have time to visit digital archives, a dad joke generator may be more your speed.
comment posted at 5:42 AM on Feb-20-24

"For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” from 'Humanity’s remaining timeline? It looks more like five years than 50’: meet the neo-luddites warning of an AI apocalypse [Grauniad; ungated] [CW: Yudkowski]
comment posted at 12:47 PM on Feb-20-24
comment posted at 6:16 AM on Feb-21-24
comment posted at 1:38 AM on Feb-24-24

Captain Ahab’s ivory leg, carved from the jawbone of a whale, stands as one of the most iconic pieces of imagery in all of literature. Draw a man with a peg leg next to whale and he’s instantly recognizable as Ahab, as is the general idea of what happened to the leg and the less than amicable relationship he has with that whale. It’s all in the leg; and the leg tells the whole story. Which is why it’s so maddening, so confounding, that although Melville provides the minutest details about every last person, animal, and object in Moby-Dick, he fails to tell us which leg Ahab is missing. from Ahab's Leg Dilemma: Part 1, Part 2
comment posted at 2:46 AM on Feb-21-24
comment posted at 8:30 AM on Feb-22-24

Alexei Navalny is dead at 47, say Russian prison authorities. The crusading pro-democracy activist was a constant thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin, financing documentaries exposing Kremlin corruption and rallying support as a popular opposition leader; a documentary on his own life won an Oscar and global acclaim last year. Long persecuted by the state, he was poisoned by the notorious nerve agent Novichok in 2020 and returned the following year to face imprisonment under an increasingly authoritarian regime. While the collective West condemns the unsubtle murder of a political prisoner, liberal Russians are left without any clear successor -- though Navalny himself even in death endeavored to tell supporters "You're not allowed to give up."
comment posted at 4:57 AM on Feb-17-24

Many an ancient road is a sunken road. They are formed by the passage of people, animals, and vehicles over time. Things of beauty, they are found hither and yon, including in Middle Earth. They should be considered as critical sites of the Anthropocene, signature human impacts on the land that are important, perhaps vital, and still not wholly understood. Also known as holloways, they have inspired literary and artistic reflection, conjuring images of fantastic landscapes. Note that, per Wikipedia, a holloway is not the same thing as a tree tunnel, an excavated road, or a gully.
comment posted at 9:35 AM on Feb-16-24


Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.
Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it.
comment posted at 9:37 AM on Feb-12-24

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