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A United Nations commission of inquiry says Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. [more inside]
posted by deeker at 1:32 AM - 2 comments

This impulse is not limited to moments of national trauma. It is the default setting for how we navigate the world. Our contemporary culture favors other, more seemingly certain ways of knowing: the parsimonious models of economics, the predictive ambitions of political science, the data-driven certainty of algorithms. We are conditioned to seek simple causes, generalizable rules and clear, predictable outcomes. Yet in the realms of statecraft, strategy and societal decision-making, this craving for certainty is a dangerous vulnerability. from The Lost Art Of Thinking Historically [Noema]
posted by chavenet at 12:02 AM - 1 comment

Wombat makes home in main street bowls club amid habitat loss. A wombat has made its home in the main street of Robe, evidence of an influx of the animals in the South Australian fishing town.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 5:43 PM - 2 comments

Wokeshop is a concept project in development at MAV [Multicultural Arts Victoria]. It reclaims the meaning of “woke” and transforms it into wearable and shareable art, building an economy that values, rewards and celebrates the creativity of culturally and marginalised artists.

Working with students from the Master of Communication Design program at RMIT’s School of Design, MAV set forth provocations to be explored through visual design and typography. Developed within the Experimental Typography Workshop led by Dr Fayen d’Evie, the students moved beyond surface-level multiculturalism, experimented with code-switching, and embraced joy as a radical act. The resulting works include experimental typefaces, alphabets, and merchandise concepts that carry stories of memory, migration and exchange.

posted by creatrixtiara at 2:43 PM - 4 comments

"This barbaric incident will leave a lasting stain on Korea-US relations." [more inside]
posted by mrjohnmuller at 1:30 PM - 25 comments

Before the turn of the millennium, photographer Adrienne Salinger noticed that a creative, opinionated cohort were underrepresented in wider conversations – Gen X teens. Pictured in their home sanctuaries, they form a luminous portrait of subcultures and styles of the time. from Teenagers in their Bedrooms [Huck]
posted by chavenet at 1:01 PM - 6 comments

Take something quite disturbing, which is the explicit fusing of the Republican Party apparatus and the corporate media. After Skydance bought Paramount, David Ellison [son of Larry Ellison] sought to make conservative Bari Weiss the ideological minder of CBS. Warner Bros. Discover owns the iconic CNN, which means this deal would put both CBS and CNN under the control of the Republican Party. [more inside]
posted by subdee at 9:41 AM - 19 comments

Thirty years ago today Zero Cool, Acid Burn, Phantom Phreak, Cereal Killer, Lord Nikon and Joey hacked the Gibson with the help of Razor and Blade, while rollerblading through Central Station to avoid The Plague and Secret Service. (Previously on the 25th and 20th anniversary)
posted by autopilot at 8:52 AM - 23 comments

The Washington Post has fired its only remaining full-time Black opinion columnist, Karen Attiah. Her crime? Quoting Charlie Kirk's own words, ""Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person's slot".

Aside from the political implications, this leaves the Post with an all-white opinion section in a city that's majority Black. The firing compounds the loss of Black journalists at the post, including two Pulitzer Prize winners, and cements a numbers of changes occurring since owner Jeff Bezos announced a focus on "free markets and personal liberties."
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 8:28 AM - 75 comments

Evidence points to remains being South-East Asia's earliest known homicide victim. It was on a sweltering morning in 2018 in a cave in northern Vietnam when Chris Stimpson and his team uncovered what may be the oldest cold case murder in South-East Asia.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:06 AM - 6 comments

astrological shift ? [nyt] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 2:30 AM - 79 comments

This lineage of (mostly) working systems is easily forgotten. Instead, we prefer a more flattering story: that complex systems are deliberate creations, the product of careful analysis. And, relatedly, that by performing this analysis – now known as ‘systems thinking’ in the halls of government – we can bring unruly ones to heel. It is an optimistic perspective, casting us as the masters of our systems and our destiny. from Magical systems thinking [Works in Progress]
posted by chavenet at 1:48 AM - 17 comments

Today, the 15th of September, is the birthday of Agatha Christie, Fay Wray, Tommy Lee Jones, Sophie Dahl, Tom Hardy and Prince Harry. Some party. Which birthday - of you or someone else - do you especially remember, and why? Or chat about things going on in your life, your neighbourhood, your world, your head, because this is your free thread.
posted by Wordshore at 11:42 PM - 53 comments

Daniel Schreiber believes the correlation between people living alone, sans partner, and being lonely has traditionally been overestimated. "Society understands better now that romantic love is not the only model to live by, or something to wish for," he adds. "There are different ways of life, and it's not as necessary to be in a traditional romantic relationship." from 'Humans need solitude': How being alone can make you happier [BBC]
posted by chavenet at 2:23 PM - 53 comments

Mizohata-Takeuchi Conjecture dates from the 1980s something something Fourier something something harmonic analysis something something partial differential equations. Earlier this year autodidact Hannah Cairo found a counterexample; then simplified her proof to make it more generally applicable and send more mathematicians back to their chalkboards. The Fourier restriction conjecture of Elias Stein (1931-2018) is wobbly for example. [more inside]
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:34 PM - 10 comments

AI and sonar croc detection trial to begin in far north. Boat ramp users could soon be alerted to nearby saltwater crocodiles by a state government-backed warning system using sonar and artificial intelligence technologies.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 1:20 PM - 4 comments

The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber, read by Lauren Bacall. Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn't go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. [more inside]
posted by Zumbador at 11:21 AM - 13 comments

Post-rock titans Tortoise are back with a new album! [more inside]
posted by deeker at 9:55 AM - 8 comments

The woodpecker’s pulsing cadence shifts the mood from transcendent to urgent. At moments of their choosing, these birds demand to be noticed. They raise crowns of gold or scarlet as they bob, sway and scream, and find the most resonant objects to strike, drumming signature beats with their impressive bills. (archive) [more inside]
posted by ShooBoo at 6:53 AM - 7 comments

So does this mean that AI researchers have finally found a core concept whose meaning everyone can agree upon? As a famous physicist once wrote: Surely you’re joking. A world model may sound straightforward — but as usual, no one can agree on the details. What gets represented in the model, and to what level of fidelity? Is it innate or learned, or some combination of both? And how do you detect that it’s even there at all? from ‘World Models,’ an Old Idea in AI, Mount a Comeback [Quanta]
posted by chavenet at 2:31 AM - 21 comments

Did a Couple Poison a Neighbor’s Trees for a Better View? In 2017, a home furnishings artisan and an interior designer/writer bought a summer house in Rockport, Maine. At $320,000, the small, 19th-century clapboard house was among the lower-priced properties on Mechanic Street, known for its stately homes overlooking the town’s scenic working harbor. This house had no such vista. Although there was a lot behind their house in sight of the harbor, it was thickly wooded and owned by a woman who lived next door. Almost immediately, the couple asked the woman about clearing her land of the trees that blocked their view. She refused.... [more inside]
posted by Toddles at 5:25 PM - 40 comments

City lights turn Australia's magpie-lark into an extra early morning bird. A worldwide study of more than 4 million birdcalls has found that birds are singing for nearly an hour longer each day because of light pollution.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 3:37 PM - 4 comments

Insurance company denied the claim. AI delivered the win. (San Jose Mercury News gift link)
posted by dfm500 at 2:56 PM - 8 comments

It opens with a chickadee flying onto a sunflower head, or maybe a man fixing a minivan. Or maybe it starts when he "got high and found the family's bird guide book. And [...] thought about how crazy it would be if you knew all the birds in that book. Just how insane that is.". Either way, it documents them finding (and beautifully filming) a significant proportion of those birds. [1:59:09, YouTube]
posted by ambrosen at 2:38 PM - 9 comments

Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai (2000), has a "new" book coming out on September 23: Your Name Here (Kirkus review), by DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff. Celia Bell has a longread essay/review at The Rumpus. Stick to the first third to remain spoiler-free and just hear about DeWitt and her prior work(s). [more inside]
posted by pjenks at 1:22 PM - 11 comments

There's a curious relationship between time and conversation quality. Most great conversations are long ones; they unfold over hours, meandering through topics with the leisurely pace of a river finding its course. Yet duration alone doesn't create greatness. We've all endured endless conversations that felt like watching paint dry, where minutes stretched like hours and we found ourselves calculating escape routes. The mystery isn't that great conversations take time, but why some long conversations achieve transcendence while others become endurance tests. from On Great Conversation [Second Voice; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:13 PM - 4 comments

Brazilian photographer Marcos Alberti has an intriguing and utterly charming project with a simple premise: take photos of your friends sober, then after one, two and three glasses of wine. [more inside]
posted by deeker at 12:54 PM - 16 comments

... you don't got to take it from a hungry kid's plate." Tesla Town is a new song from Detroit's one-man gutbucket blues explosion Jawbone (aka Bob Zabor). Good stuff, in my view.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:48 AM - 4 comments

"We reveal errors that reveal technologies, learning how they affect our lives." The Revealing Errors weblog spotlights moments when users accidentally get indications of underlying, often hidden, processes - glimpses of human fingers in book page scan images, mistaking email auto-responses for translations, and more. The most recent post is from 2010, but some of the errors are evergreen.
posted by brainwane at 9:09 AM - 8 comments

Researchers at the University of Florida have outfitted 40 furry toy rabbits with motors and tiny heaters that work together to mimic the movements and body temperature of a marsh rabbit — a favorite python meal. (archive)
posted by ShooBoo at 7:30 AM - 12 comments

In other words, patients who can “pay” for care with [a] narrative [of what is wrong and how to fix it] will receive treatment, while those who cannot “pay” will not receive adequate care despite the moral and clinical imperative not to deny them. The word responsibility is the dog whistle here... Not only does this alleged irresponsibility result in so-called chaos for the patient, but it afflicts the medical establishment with the anxiety of hearing about it. After all, “the very poor and the very sick have only a marginal place in the case load of the professions,” Frank writes, “which prefer what can be fixed.” In what sense, and to what extent, can these stories crafted for the benefit of others be said to represent the experiences of illness and of pain? [more inside]
posted by sciatrix at 7:30 AM - 14 comments

What's it like to read Moby-Dick when you're Ahab's age? There are probably a number of things I no longer see as acutely as when I had young eyes, but some elements are now in sharper focus. When young, I had only the vaguest sense, in any given chapter, where Ishmael was, geographically speaking. For me then, the important seas to be swimming through were of metaphor and feeling. Now I see that Melville is actually pretty careful to map the Pequod's journey; in late middle age, my internal GPS module keeps better track of where I as a reader am supposed to be—so much better track that it's a bit of a comedown to realize that the epic events of the novel happen in specific actual places, not just in elemental spheres. from Another cruise by Caleb Crain [Leaflet]
posted by chavenet at 2:04 AM - 14 comments

The British ambassador to the USA, Peter Mandelson, has been fired following revelations about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. This just a week after the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, resigned over her tax affairs in buying a new property. For the first time, serious voices within Labour are questioning Kier Starmer's judgment and asking how long he will last as Labour Leader and Prime Minister. [more inside]
posted by deeker at 1:45 AM - 49 comments

An 1858 lighthouse in Bressay, Shetland, is for sale for offers over £350k. The light was automated in 1989, and the Shetland Amenity Trust has owned the lighthouse since 1995. The property has made space available for artist residencies; Caroline Hack wrote about her work there on Scottish Artic Whaling.
posted by paduasoy at 12:25 AM - 12 comments

Ninajirachi (First name + Pokemon) is an up and coming Australian DJ. Her recently released debut LP I Love My Computer (Bandcamp, Youtube) is an absolute banger, hearkening back to 2010s EDM, while painting an intimate portrait of her intimate relationship with her closest companion: her computer.
posted by Alex404 at 11:48 PM - 8 comments

How Arkansas’ secretive plan for a new state lockup angered people in a deep red corner of rural America—and changed how some see incarceration.
posted by toastyk at 8:53 PM - 8 comments

Make very tidy boxes, drawers, hinges out of corrugated cardboard. Carve little stamps from pink rubber erasers; make a tiny book of the tiny prints. Make a nice envelope out of scrap paper. [more inside]
posted by clew at 6:00 PM - 7 comments

AP reports: Albania’s prime minister on Friday tapped an Artificial Intelligence-generated ‘minister’ to tackle corruption in his new Cabinet, a project launched with the help of Microsoft. Officially named Diella — the female form of the word for sun in the Albanian language — the new AI minister is a virtual entity. Diella will be a “member of the Cabinet who is not present physically but has been created virtually,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said in a post on Facebook. Rama said the AI-generated bot would help ensure that “public tenders will be 100% free of corruption” and will help the government work faster and with full transparency. Also reported by BBC and Politico.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:55 PM - 39 comments

These frogs are tiny, but their very existence is a huge sign of hope. For the first time, researchers have been able to successfully breed and release into the wild an endangered species of mountain frog.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 12:32 PM - 2 comments

Welcome to the LGBTQIA+ News Post for September 12. It's been a hell of a time. Oh, I realize / It's hard to take courage / In a world full of people. [more inside]
posted by mephron at 12:16 PM - 9 comments

The prospect of time itself being wielded as a weapon has transformed the once-rare field of advanced horology into a strategic priority. from Inside the battle to protect time [Financial Times; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 11:21 AM - 16 comments

Japan advances embryo research without eggs or sperm.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 9:05 AM - 14 comments

Die Spitz has a new album out: Something to Consume (order | bandcamp) and released a video for Riding With My Girls. [more inside]
posted by signal at 8:35 AM - 9 comments

In Scotland, one guest at a wedding was curiously unidentifiable: "It wasn't until I got the first few photos back from the photographer and me and my husband were looking at them that we went 'who's that?'," recalls Michelle, who lives in Kilmarnock. "We started asking our parents first of all, then going through my aunties and the rest of the family, then my friends. Absolutely no-one knew who he was. "Then we got on to the Carlton Hotel if they had an idea, but nope. We wondered if this was someone who had been helping bring the register down, but not a single person knew who he was."
posted by Wordshore at 8:22 AM - 21 comments

A Love Letter to (Making) Little Guys "Make little guys out of clay, out of wood, out of felt, out of iron, out of paper, out of pixels and code, but little guys have to be the work of your hands and the work of your heart." By (mefi's own) Shing Yin Khor
posted by moonmilk at 8:20 AM - 23 comments

As Spotify announce their long-trailed lossless audio streaming, it's worth looking at why many artists are quitting the platform altogether. (It's not just the royalties thing this time.) [more inside]
posted by deeker at 6:26 AM - 50 comments

As Australia prepares to host the 2032 Olympics, some canoeists are getting salty. In common with many other games, some of Brisbane's Olympic events will be held hundreds of kilometres from Brisbane itself: in the case of canoeing and rowing, on the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton, Central Queensland. The problem? Rocky and the river are nowadays within range of the saltwater crocodile, which can grow up to six metres long and weigh hundreds of kilograms. Salties kill one or two people every year in Australia's Far North.
posted by rory at 2:58 AM - 11 comments

Humanity has been wondering about Mars for ages, inspiring a spirit of exploration and curiosity that's encouraged a perseverance to sojourn there in search of life.

Now that we've found our best evidence of ancient microbial life on the red planet, all we need now is the opportunity to bring that evidence back to Earth for more testing.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:53 AM - 14 comments

For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. from A Lyric Nation: On the Uncollected Dream Songs [The Paris Review; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 12:04 AM - 4 comments

The MetaFilter Community Foundation ((MeFiCoFo) is holding a board election. Today begins the campaign period, when candidates can share their vision, plans, and approach with the community. The campaign period will last two weeks (ending September 26th at 11:59pm ET), followed by a few days for administration. Voting will kick off on October 1st.

If you have any questions about the election or voting process, please post them in the MetaTalk post that lists all of the candidates.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:29 PM - 6 comments