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Hidden women of history: Enheduanna, princess, priestess and the world’s first known author. "The world’s first known author is widely considered to be Enheduanna, a woman who lived in the 23rd century BCE in ancient Mesopotamia (approximately 2285 – 2250 BCE). Enheduanna is a remarkable figure: an ancient 'triple threat', she was a princess and a priestess as well as a writer and poet." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 10:55 AM - 3 comments

“...Jayapal’s bill joins a crowded mess of at least eight other healthcare policies being bandied about among Democrats. I couldn’t fault anyone for getting confused when candidates talk about “Medicare for All,” or “Medicare Extra for All,” or “Medicare for America,” or the “public option.” The relatively simple problems of health finance have been made very complicated by people who make money off of healthcare. So what are all of the issues being discussed and what do they mean? What’s really “Medicare for All” and what’s not? How do existing bills stack up? And why does this matter?” The Only Guide To ‘Medicare For All’ You’ll Ever Need by Tim Faust (Splinter)
posted by The Whelk at 10:37 AM - 4 comments

The Energy Policy Solutions Simulator " lets users test different policy options and see the results instantly" for carbon dioxide emissions reduction in Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland and the United States
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:55 AM - 4 comments

Vox's Eliza Brooke asks the question "Why do so many book covers still use the phrase 'A Novel' for works of fiction?" and finds some answers, linking to a 2008 Ask MeFi thread in the process, and points out that often "A Novel" is added to the cover of book-length works of fiction when they cross over from the UK to North America.
posted by sillygwailo at 9:14 AM - 14 comments

After months of public outcry and demands for transparency, Amazon has cancelled its plans to build a corporate campus in Queens. Activists and community groups who swore they would crush the deal are elated; real estate brokers, not so much.
posted by showbiz_liz at 8:02 AM - 112 comments

What does ‘I love you’ mean? It depends on where you say it and what language you speak. Translators, scholars, and dating coaches from various countries discuss expressions of love. -- Alice Robb for the Washington Post.
posted by Hypatia at 7:09 AM - 10 comments

What kind of person sticks a ferret down his pants for more than five consecutive hours? "Ay lad," said the 72-year-old champion, "no jockstraps allowed. No underpants—nothin' whatever. And it's no good with tight trousers, mind ye. Little bah-stards have to be able to move around inside there from ankle to ankle."
posted by calamari kid at 6:53 AM - 35 comments

Two years after global economy crashed in 2008, austerity politics swung into action. Using Greece as its example, a transatlantic alliance of right-wing fearmongers, conservative political entrepreneurs and centrist fiscal hawks abandoned stimulus and instead turned the screw. Adam Tooze reconstructs the spread of the austerity epidemic and recalls how decision-makers in Europe ploughed their course even after the US had begun to pour money back into the system (Eurozine). (This is an extract from Tooze’s book "Crashed", London: Allen Lane 2018.)
posted by sapagan at 6:16 AM - 3 comments

[New Yorker]The best surfer in history made a machine that creates perfect conditions on demand. Will his invention democratize surfing or despoil it? Surfing on Kelly Slater’s machine-made wave [Video] Previously.
posted by ellieBOA at 2:16 AM - 16 comments

Cat and squirrel play-fight Sorry, those looking for a despair, outrage or poop fix, there's none of that in this post. TW: Do not search the web for this topic, most end very badly.
posted by zaixfeep at 10:51 PM - 28 comments

Jeremy Dutcher is a First Nations classically trained tenor, musician, and composer whose debut album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa [Youtube playlist], sung entirely in the "severely endangered" language of Wolastoqey, won the 2018 Polaris Prize, which is awarded annually to the best full-length Canadian music album. You can watch him perform a stunning medley of his album at the Polaris Gala, and accept the prize. Dutcher is a Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) member of the Tobique First Nation, and his album is based on traditional Wolastoqiyik songs, often sampling century-old wax cylinder recordings of his ancestors' singing, to devastatingly beautiful effect. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 10:22 PM - 13 comments

We’ve trained a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text, achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks, and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question answering, and summarization — all without task-specific training. [more inside]
posted by latkes at 9:03 PM - 36 comments

The weird things dogs do when they poop serve a purpose. Afterwards, be sure to monitor the color of their poop to keep abreast of their health. And don't be too upset when they eat poop. It's probably an ancient pack-survival behavior. They'll even venture outside the species and eat cat poop—it smells like cat food to them.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:24 PM - 36 comments

The Achewood Tarot
posted by griphus at 7:23 PM - 11 comments

Tri-State man mistakenly gets wife turnips instead of tulips
posted by JeffL at 6:37 PM - 31 comments

In 2009, a secret Facebook group called the Ligue du LOL (The League of LOL), led by young French male journalists, started harassing fellow journalists, writers, bloggers and activists - predominantly targeting women and minorities (also NYT), disrupting the lives and ruining the careers of their victims through barrages of sexist, racist and homophobic insults, pornographic montages, prank calls, and Twitter-coordinated attacks, online and IRL. The existence of the group was revealed last week, resulting in a flood of heartbreaking testimonies (megathread on r/feminisme (in French)), and in an intense bout of soul-searching in the progressive French media: not only the victims had been ignored before last week, but most of the Ligue members are now prominent journalists in major left-wing publications. [more inside]
posted by elgilito at 4:57 PM - 58 comments

bassiter on tumblr creates specific music edits [more inside]
posted by blithers at 3:33 PM - 12 comments

This Person Does Not Exist is a single-serving website that does only one thing: algorithmically generate fake human faces. Refresh for more. [more inside]
posted by penduluum at 2:34 PM - 88 comments

If you're sick of the simpering sweetness of this supposed saint's day (Catholic.com), you might enjoy some Victorian vinegar Valentines, as recounted by Atlas Obscura, with more from Collector's Weekly (previously). If you want to copy some salty prose or rather precise, personal poetry, The Satirical Valentine Writer (circa 18xx, via Archive.org) could be your new friend, itself a response to the earlier Valentine Writers, such as Richardson's New London Fashionable Gentlemen's Valentine Writer or, the Lover's Own Book (1828, Archive.org) and the new and improved Sentimental Valentine Writer, containing a selection of the best and newest Valentine Poetry (1850, Archive.org). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 1:48 PM - 5 comments

Estudio del movimiento gasterópodo: A snail traverses a person's face [more inside]
posted by not_the_water at 1:40 PM - 7 comments

“Lawyer up!” each future divorcée is exhorted, by those who’ve been there. The call to arms is a directive, not a suggestion. But what if the future divorcée—like me, like so many—cannot afford a lawyer? (SL The Atlantic)
posted by devrim at 1:10 PM - 25 comments

Bald eagle named Justice missing from nest in D.C.: Things appeared to be going fine at the nest, with a hint of spring and new life in the air. Liberty and Justice mated Saturday, experts said, and fertilized an egg. But in that afternoon, a new, younger male eagle showed up at the nest. [more inside]
posted by peeedro at 12:43 PM - 5 comments

Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu wanted a hopeful African love story she could adapt into a film. She found what she was looking for in Jambula Tree, a Caine Prize-winning short story by Ugdandan author Monica Arac de Nyeko about the love and courtship of two young women. Kahiu's film is named Rafiki--Swahili for "friend"--which, as Kahiu frequently states in interviews, "is how queer Kenyans need to introduce their partners in a society where it is not yet safe to name their love directly." The film premiered at Cannes in 2018 (trailer here), but the Kenyan Film and Classification Board banned it back home. After suing the government, Kahiu won a 7-day suspension of the ban to allow Rafiki to qualify for the Academy Awards; the theaters were packed, breaking box office records, but the Kenyan Oscars selection committee declined to submit Rafiki for consideration. Africa Is A Country has more on the film, which plays against the backdrop of Kenya's expected February 22nd Constitutional Court ruling on colonial-era laws that criminalize homosexuality.
posted by duffell at 12:11 PM - 4 comments

"It Is Definitely Pee": The Ecstatic, Pedialyte-Fueled Art of Performing Squirting in Porn
posted by Etrigan at 11:58 AM - 36 comments

“The defenders of authority dread the advent of a free motherhood, lest it will rob them of their prey. Who would fight wars? Who would create wealth? Who would make the policeman, the jailer, if woman were to refuse the indiscriminate breeding of children? The race, the race! shouts the king, the president, the capitalist, the priest. The race must be preserved, though woman be degraded to a mere machine, — and the marriage institution is our only safety valve against the pernicious sex-awakening of woman. But in vain these frantic efforts to maintain a state of bondage.” - Anarchist agitator Emma Goldman, “Marriage and Love.” 1914
posted by The Whelk at 10:25 AM - 8 comments

In the coming decades, the climates of North American cities will shift to those of locations that are hundreds of miles away or, in some cases, to climates "with no modern equivalent in North America”. An interactive map shows what the climates of 540 urban areas in the US and Canada will feel like 60 years from now. [more inside]
posted by theory at 9:54 AM - 41 comments

There's a detailed walkthrough of the process with photos. The shape is a Menger sponge.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:20 AM - 29 comments

NPR spent nearly a year talking to high school students about their attitudes about guns. Here is their reporting in a 20 minute video -- Senior Spring: How Teens Feel About Guns In America.
posted by hippybear at 8:20 AM - 16 comments

Did you ever wonder where the rollerblades you had in the 90s are now? If you donated them to a charity shop, there's a good chance that they ended up in a container of secondhand clothing exported to Africa (a trade known by the Swahili word mitumba, meaning “bundles”), made their way to a skate shop in central Nairobi, and right now are in the possession of a stylishly attired young Kenyan, racing deftly down a busy street in Kenya's inline skating craze.
posted by acb at 7:40 AM - 5 comments

Kids YouTube Star Blippi “Regrets” The Viral Video In Which He Poops All Over His Friend (Buzzfeed)
posted by josher71 at 7:36 AM - 42 comments

She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed: pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying foundation with a hardboiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, white women’s pictures of their bruises – the world pressing closer and closer, the spider web of human connection so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk. Patricia Lockwood writes about being online.
posted by theodolite at 7:28 AM - 9 comments

THE LONELY LIFE OF A YACHT INFLUENCER: Alex Jimenez (aka TheYachtGuy) might look like he’s comfortably residing in the lap of luxury on Instagram, but the truth is, he’s kinda lost at sea.
posted by gen at 6:51 AM - 34 comments

Does reading on the toilet help you poop? references a 2011 Guardian article (previously). If you don't have a serious need to go, and you haven't overdone it on the cherries, then maybe. Science says that 52.7% of Israeli adults indulged, to no effect either way. Other issues abound e.g. is it offensive to read the bible while on the toilet? Does also being naked help? Or phoning your cable company? Or wearing a hat while reading? What potty-prose is most suitable? Moby Dick? Otherwise, perhaps some oats? Serious point: read if you want, but always look back.
posted by Wordshore at 5:07 AM - 35 comments

Reimagining the Suburban Yard to Reverse Pollinator and Insect Decline
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:48 PM - 35 comments

This dog is very excited. Perhaps he has heard of solutions to a problem he contributes to.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:05 PM - 31 comments

A comprehensive case made for accusations of image theft.
posted by unliteral at 5:13 PM - 31 comments

But there’s no word for “dinosaur” in Zulu. Nor are there words for “Jurassic,” “fossilization,” or “evolution.” [more inside]
posted by clew at 5:06 PM - 13 comments

The hardest part of video game Scum was learning how to pee/poop. [Polygon] “Tossing turds around is nothing new in the survival genre. Ark: Survival Evolved launched with poo for you and your dinosaur mounts to boot, but their flavor of feces didn’t really serve much of a purpose. In Scum, however, everything matters. By simulating human frailty, they’re trying to bring competition and fairness back to one of gaming’s most competitive multiplayer genres. And they’re doing it with an absurd amount of complexity. [...] The developers say that they’ve created the most realistic simulation of the human metabolic system ever made, the end result of which is a fairly regular requirement that my avatar urinate and empty his bowels. But why?” [YouTube][Gameplay Footage][NSFW] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 4:29 PM - 29 comments

Ryan Adams dangled success. Women say they paid a price. Multiple women, including ex-wife Mandy Moore, and one whose interactions with Adams began at age 14, "described a pattern of manipulative behavior in which Adams dangled career opportunities while simultaneously pursuing female artists for sex." Adams responds.
posted by waitingtoderail at 3:17 PM - 86 comments

For Will Pemble, it all started when his son asked "wouldn't it be awesome if we had our own roller coaster." Five seconds later, he thought "Yes, yes it would," and that's the origin story of CoasterDad, the guy who built a roller coaster in his back yard (Wired Video, YouTube alt. link), and his front yard, and another friend's back yard, and for the Maker Fair in San Francisco. He has more videos on his YouTube account, specifically in the the CoasterDad Project playlist. If that's all a bit too loosey-goosey for you Coaster 101 talks to Paul Gregg about building and testing safe back yard roller coasters, as he discusses on his website Backyard Roller Coasters dot org, which has his two books about DIY coaster-making.
posted by filthy light thief at 1:46 PM - 8 comments

Here's an interactive map of the 2,032 sounds humans use to communicate without words. Based on new research [PDF] that found brief vocal bursts can convey at least 24 distinct kinds of emotion. Previous studies had estimated the number at around 13.
posted by not_the_water at 1:34 PM - 24 comments

"To the robot who turned 90 days into 15 years of exploration: You were, and are, the Opportunity of a lifetime. Rest well, rover. Your mission is complete. (2004-2019)"
Sarah Kaplan, WaPo: Opportunity, NASA’s record-setting Mars rover, is declared dead after 15 years. Opportunity’s mission was planned to last just 90 days, but it worked for 5,000 Martian “sols” and traversed more than 28 treacherous miles — two records for NASA. (Previously, and more at NASA's Mars page.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:25 AM - 155 comments

Saskatchewan resident Dave Assman, denied a personalized license plate, finds a backdoor solution.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:44 AM - 39 comments

How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t do it. Here's a transcript of the interview.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 9:00 AM - 58 comments

LOOK FOR ME, PLEASE: How indigenous women work to help each other when authorities turn a blind eye. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 8:57 AM - 3 comments

[NYT] Nutrition experts have long debated whether there is an optimal diet that humans evolved to eat. But a study published this month adds a twist. It found that there is likely no single natural diet that is best for human health. The research, published in the journal Obesity Reviews, looked at the diets, habits and physical activity levels of hundreds of modern hunter-gatherer groups and small-scale societies, whose lifestyles are similar to those of ancient populations. They found that they all exhibit generally excellent metabolic health while consuming a wide range of diets.
posted by ellieBOA at 7:26 AM - 78 comments

Day Care for All - "Free public college, health care for all, a living wage: These are all important causes that will improve life for millions. But there's another proposal that belongs on the progressive to-do list: universal affordable high-quality child care. In fact, I would put it ahead of free public college: It would help more people and do more to change society for the better." (via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:11 AM - 82 comments

As 'LeftTube' becomes a thing (Previously) you might've heard of Olly Thorn/Philosophy Tube (Previously heard in the Contrapoints Video "Incels", previously) He has his own channel where he discusses Witchcraft, Marxism, and the history of being anti-feudal and anti-capitalist. (27:25) Systems Of Vulnerability is Why The Left Will Win (12:30) How to Fix the Housing Crisis as a Superhero Battle (20:36) When will Security Go Back To Normal and national systems of control (26:12) What Was Liberalism? (9:47) 2 3 4. Steve Bannon and Neofascism: An Explanation (44:57), drawing heavily on Max Frisch's play the Arsonists/The Firebugs.
posted by The Whelk at 11:23 PM - 16 comments

I raced a T. Rex so you don't have to. Dustin Growick loves dinosaurs, museums and running around shirtless. In this YouTube cinematic feat, he runs a theoretical race against a T. Rex, amongst other important Science.
posted by jillithd at 9:24 PM - 7 comments

"Non Sequitur" artist Wiley Miller included an "Easter Egg" in the Sunday, February 10th comic strip. Many of the 700+ newspapers that carry the syndicated strip were not pleased.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:25 PM - 68 comments