April 8
Othering Heights
Bringing more data and analysis to the question of "is it economics or race," University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, analyzed the demographics and home county characteristics of the 377 Americans arrested or charged in the Capitol insurrection. He found that counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists who now face charges. "Put another way, the people alleged by authorities to have taken the law into their hands on Jan. 6 typically hail from places where non-White populations are growing fastest." [more inside]
what is 70 meters long and has 93 penises
Its existence has been marked by turbulent periods when it was in danger or at serious risk of being damaged. After being rescued many times, the Tapestry has survived and continues to reveal its secrets today. The full Bayeux Tapestry is now accessible on every computer screen and tablet. For the first time, you will be able to freely explore the entire Tapestry with a never seen quality of images. [more inside]
WIRED offering non-journalists a residency program
"Between a pandemic, climate change, and advances in technology that continue to reshape almost every way of life, the past year has been a bellwether for work in the US. At WIRED, we believe some of the people best situated to cover this rapid evolution—from growing pains to genius pivots and everything in between—are the people who know those industries from the inside. That’s why we’re launching a new program called the WIRED Resilience Residency." Last month Wired magazine announced that it is "looking for new voices to provide an insider perspective on rapidly changing industries." [more inside]
"Are you doing good?" "No. Irreparable damage has been done."
What would happen if I tried to explain what's happening now to the January 2020 version of myself? Julie Nolke is back, doing "one year later."
Most recent video discussion here.
US tech company hiring and decarceration
"What I learned going from prison to Python" by Shadeed "Sha" Wallace-Stepter: "Total strangers with a very different background and life from my own had connected the dots in a way that led to me learning to code." One of those strangers was engineering leader Jessica McKellar, who speaks at tech conferences to ask: "Mass Decarceration: If We Don’t Hire People With Felony Convictions, Who Will?" [more inside]
Hypogene speleogenesis: hydrogeological and morphogenetic perspective
DON'T BLOW THIS FOR US, GENE
“Every time I heard ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ by Blue Öyster Cult, I would hear the faint cowbell in the background and wonder, ‘What’s THAT guy’s life like??’” — Will Ferrell
Twenty-one years ago today, "More Cowbell" aired on SNL.
Twenty-one years ago today, "More Cowbell" aired on SNL.
April 7
stagnant waters made us uneasy with their silence
A geologist summarizes the legends and science of bottomless pits, bogs, and lakes at Spooky Geology. [more inside]
The Coen Bros. knew, so did Denzel and everybody else.
"Everyone Just Knows He's an Absolute Monster" Scott Rudin's ex-staffers speak out on abusive behavior. [more inside]
Photo ID
Remi Wolf's new clip (yt) has all the makings of a summer hit. This is the track's second vid (yt) though, and is probably worth your time.
"It is, by far, the easiest way to write a tune as you can clearly see"
Exuberant composer Guy Michelmore demonstrates how to write a tune using dogs, how to use inversions to improve your chord progressions (featuring an impressively impractical visual aid), how to write music while trapped in the boot of a VW Polo. Or if you you're in a hurry, how about music theory in 16 minutes? Bonus: Guy introduces the people of Britain to Cabbage Patch dolls in 1983. [more inside]
The Lives of Others
When Clar told her his age, Tracey’s next words came tumbling out: “Where were you born?” “Come By Chance Cottage Hospital,” Clar said. Tracey stood stock still for a second, her mouth agape. Then she ran, leaving her mop and cart behind. Clar shivered. In that moment, a secret began to worm its way into the light.Two women gave birth on the same day in a place called Come By Chance. They didn’t know each other, and never would. Half a century later, their children made a shocking discovery. A long read about serial baby mixups, "Nurse Tiger", and mid-century life in rural Newfoundland, written by Lindsay Jones.
The Tamagotchi in its many forms has never shied away from death
A Very 90s Death: The Tamagotchi Cemetery (Burials And Beyond): While many parents bought their offspring Tamagotchis as toys, others thought that a child taking responsibility for a digital creature would be an ideal pre-pet investment, to see if they were mature enough to understand the needs of another living thing. While this is an ideal moralistic exercise, what occurred in reality was a pocket of brief generational trauma where young children woke up to find that, after sleeping though muted midi cries of hunger at 3am, their new toy had perished overnight. You killed your first pet. This culpability for death is one of the strangest qualities in toy history; even the death of shoals of Sea Monkeys failed to elicit such a primal reaction of grief and blame from the very young. In the new world of portable digital pets, they were expected to entertain, but not truly die. [more inside]
April 6
This is not who I am.
A Christian “purity” movement in the 90s promoted a biblical view of abstinence before marriage. But two decades later, followers are grappling with unforeseen aftershocks. RetroReport has the story.
Fotomat's Greatest Hits
The Internet K-Hole is back: A vast amount of very amateur snapshots taken from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, with absolutely no other context provided or needed. Mostly a whole bunch of people I've never seen before... but if I scroll long enough—hours maybe—I will see an image of myself somewhere, I am sure of it. NSFW warning: a minute amount of lite smut compared to the gargantuan size of the collection; however, the second picture in the latest post happens to be of a butt. The one after that it is Lemmy in a hotel room. Then comes the panopoly of randos. [ previously | via ]
OMG, why is #DionneWarwick trending on twitter?
Dionne Warwick asked twitter earlier today, "Do you have an unusual pet? Send me a picture with my hash tag #dionnewarwick. I want to see how strange this can get." Twitter responded, which is why she's trending. The replies are full of ALL kinds of pets!
Eternal Sunshine of the Monetized Ghost Life
"I want a chisel, not a sledgehammer, with which to delete what I no longer need. I don’t want to have to empty my photo albums just because tech companies decided to make them “smart” and create an infinite loop of grief." I Called Off My Wedding. The Internet Will Never Forget (Lauren Goode, Wired). [more inside]
... dooby dooby ...
Parry Gripp (of Nerf Herder "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame) – Dump Truck (SLYT). (If you need something to have running through your head for 10 years.)
It’s kind of long but full of suspense
The trailer for Zola was released recently. If you’re missing some context, check out MetaFilter’s previous coverage on the original viral tweetstorm.
16,000 kilometres on a 50-cc pedal-start moped
In the summer of 2018, Austrian Stephan Regensburger went on a 13,000-kilometre journey from Ulaanbataar - where he had shipped his Puch Maxi a few months earlier - back home to Innsbruck. This journey, documented in this 14-video YouTube playlist, took 92 days across Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia. The next year, Stephan's wanderlust took him on a 3000-km trip from Austria to Tunisia on the same valiant little bike. Read more about his adventures on his blog here.
For ye have the rich always with you
Forbes’ 35th Annual World’s Billionaires List: Facts And Figures 2021 — Despite the pandemic, it was a record-setting year for the world’s wealthiest with a $5 trillion surge in wealth and an unprecedented number of new billionaires. The number of billionaires on Forbes’ 35th annual list of the world’s wealthiest exploded to an unprecedented 2,755 (660 more than a year ago). Altogether they are worth $13.1 trillion, up from $8 trillion on the 2020 list. Forbes, April 6, 2021.
This should not happen more than once
"I keep coming back to the detail in CNN’s report that this wasn’t something Matt Gaetz did a single time, but repeatedly. Because if it happened more than once — if it happened twice, even — that is because the first time went better than it should have."
Metafilter fave Alexandra Petri turns down the humor and sharpens her scalpel for a column on Matt Gaetz and, more importantly, his enablers. (SL Washington Post)
They're good Muppets, Brent
Go with the Flow
Even a pandemic couldn't hold them back: it's time to honor the 2021 Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team. [more inside]
Paths to Nazism
Talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not
Academia is often a family business.
A new study quantifies how underrepresented people like Flake are in academia, at least in the United States, finding that tenure-track faculty come from homes wealthier than the average population and are 25 times more likely than the general population to have a parent with a Ph.D. Compared with the wider population of their Ph.D.-holding peers, tenure-track faculty are also nearly twice as likely to have Ph.D.-holding parents.[more inside]
American Genocide: wiping out The Native Americans, one child at a time.
Described as the greatest Holocaust in History, the systematic slaughter of the Indigenous People of the Americas, over centuries, finally culminating in the eradication of their youth. (pdf 1, 2)
April 5
Grieving, loss, futility, diaspora, and broken connections
Two melancholy short scifi and fantasy stories, new this year, about grieving the loss of parents. "Comments on Your Provisional Patent Application for an Eternal Spirit Core" is by Wole Talabi: "So you’ve been using the money they left us to develop this thing?" "All Worlds Left Behind" is by Iona Datt Sharma: "I, uh, used to come here with my dad? I don't speak the language as well as he did."
Хранители
Guardian: Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years. Parts one and two of the 1991 TV movie are now available on Youtube. Although there are no English subtitles, the visuals are not to be missed. [more inside]
Heavy Meadow
Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986), the infamous classic short underground documentary by Jeff Krulik and John Heyn, has an hour-long prequel! Shot in 1985 in the woods somewhere in Maryland, released in 2010, and free on youtube since August 2020—HEAVY METAL PICNIC! Trailer | Full Documentary | Krulik documentaries previously on MeFi
A super complicated automatic solution that doesn’t work that well
But what if I’m yelling and I want to show the proper regard for your humanity by capitalizing the first letter of your name? Then I want the [first letter of your name] to be upper-er case, even more upper case than before. Similarly, I might want to be super casual and disregard your humanity with a lower-er case letter. So that’s what this video is about… Now I’m definitely not going to blow you away with the results here, but they’re kind of interesting - and I think some of the story of we get there is fun and interesting as well. But this will be an example of derp (sic) learning.
tom7 previously
tom7 previously
Market index funds are... "worse than Marxism"?
Money manager bigwigs are ironically complaining that government may need to rein in passive, low-fee or no-fee index funds. [more inside]
How Is Babby Deplatformed?
Lost Tapes of the 27 Club
An AI writes songs by musicians who died at 27 to raise awareness of mental health in the music industry "As long as there’s been popular music, musicians and crews have struggled with mental health at a rate far exceeding the general adult population. And this issue hasn’t just been ignored. It’s been romanticized, by things like the 27 Club—a group of musicians whose lives were all lost at just 27 years old."
New? Tracks from Amy Winehouse, Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison written by an AI.
A radical notion born
Mastery of blaseball is in the blood. And the peanuts.
Love the *idea* of Blaseball, but can't quite be arsed to actually follow the mutant-surreal fantasy baseball process in real time? Quinns from Shut Up and Sit Down has you covered! A quick and jaunty recap of the last 14 seasons, with illustrations. Part 1 (The Discipline Era) and Part 2 (Peace and Prosperity) [more inside]
Google v. Oracle
The United States Supreme Court has decided in favor of Google [pdf] in the case of Google v. Oracle, essentially resolving a case begun 11 years ago. The 6-2 majority* avoided deciding whether or not the Java API was copyrightable. Rather, it held that, even if the API is copyrightable, Google's use of the API for Android was fair use. SCOTUSblog has more. [more inside]
from a personal responsibility to a public good
Anne Helen Petersen's latest piece for Vox, in her series on "the hollow middle class," is April 2's One weird trick to fix our broken child care system. [more inside]
April 4
Streetsblog NYC
Pure insanity outside of the St. Louis City Justice Center
“We’ve had people locked up for well over half of the year without a preliminary hearing,” ST. LOUIS (KMOV.com) – A group of detainees rioted at the Justice Center in downtown St. Louis Sunday night, the second time such an uprising has occurred in recent months.
Videos from the scene show detainees breaking windows, throwing items out of the windows, and setting items on fire on the third floor of the building. [more inside]
"Fill World With Gentleness"
Hitoshi Yasui makes music as "chair house", and is currently working on the "Piano Ten Thousand Leaves Project" (Soundcloud). Each day, chair house improvises, records, and uploads an original piano composition. They're generally quiet and gentle pieces. He started the project in 2014, and aims to create 4,536 songs in total to match an 8th century anthology of Japanese poetry. If he stays on track, he will finish in mid-2026.
Harmonies, beatboxing, and a voice from the basement
아카펠라 나린_Narin are a Korean acapella group with a focus on cover versions plus the occasional original. IU(아이유) - LILAC X COIN. ITZY(있지) - Not Shy. Somewhere Over The Rainbow (IZ ver.). Lil Nas X - Old Town Road. Billie Eilish - bad guy. Charlie Puth Medley l 찰리푸스 메들리. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. [more inside]
"I glanced back one more time, and that's when I noticed his legs moved"
Danny Stewart, 34, was late for dinner with his partner, Pete Mercurio, 32. The couple had met three years earlier through a friend in Pete's softball team. Later Danny had moved in with Pete and his flatmate, but on this summer evening he had been back to his sublet apartment in Harlem to pick up the post. As Danny was hurrying out of the station something caught his eye. "I noticed on the floor tucked up against the wall, what I thought was a baby doll," he says.– 'We found a baby on the subway - now he's our son' by Lucy Wallis. BBC Outlook episode on this story.
Next Bubble Pop When?
If you sell a house these days, the buyer might just be a pension fund. Yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family homes, competing with ordinary Americans and driving up prices. This bubble might be different due to the expansion of rents as opposed to mortgages, but the effects mirror the growth rates seen in 2005.
Who Slams, Who Jams, Who Tells Your Story
The world was rocked this week – not by the Space Jam 2 trailer but the release of Psynwav's Slamilton mashup album (Bandcamp/YouTube/Soundcloud) featuring such instant classics as Alexander Slamilton and The Court Where It Happened (Previously)
Advice on taking up quarantine's hottest new hobby.
Stop Motion Lego Chocolate Cake
Lego in real life Like Lego? Like cake? This video is for you.
April 3
SLYT
Celui Qui Tombe -- six people on a rotating platform.
Jemaine Clement interview
Jemaine Clement turned up on his bicycle for his interview with Moana Maniapoto, for this week’s Te Ao with Moana (19'11). And no one at Toi Whakaari, the New Zealand Drama School in Wellington, where the interview took place, seemed to recognise him.
Or maybe they just didn’t want to make a fuss, this being New Zealand and all. Extended transcript.
el-Sisi is watching, intently
The The Pharaohs Royal Golden Parade happened in Egypt yesterday.