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Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic Crits-Christoph et al in Cell. Highlights: Common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 linked to Huanan market matches the global common ancestor • Wildlife mitochondrial DNA identified in samples from stalls positive for SARS-CoV-2 • DNA from raccoon dogs, civets, and other wildlife species detected in market samples • Genotypes of potential hosts were reconstructed for retracing animal geographic origins [more inside]
posted by bq at 7:13 PM - 1 comment

Lee Marvin Sings: 'Wand'rin' Star' from the movie 'Paint your Wagon' (slyt)
posted by clavdivs at 6:58 PM - 0 comments

Kris Kristofferson, legendary songwriter, actor, and poet died today at age 88. Born in 1936 in Brownsville, Texas, Kris led a fascinating life. What I have always liked most about him, however, was how good he seemed to be. [more inside]
posted by os tuberoes at 5:03 PM - 42 comments

Given these strategic roles, any threat to Klaipėda, whether from mismanagement of a dangerous cargo or a deliberate act, has far-reaching implications for regional security and energy stability. The Ruby episode underscores how hybrid threats can potentially evolve to include kinetic elements. The complexity of attribution, combined with Klaipėda’s strategic significance, makes it a potential flashpoint for regional security. from Floating Megabomb Heaves to Near the English Coast [CEPA] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:05 PM - 23 comments

Lulu Garcia-Nevarro of The New York Times podcast "The Interview" sits down with HBO host John Oliver for about 40 minutes for one of the most honest interviews I've seen from him: John Oliver Is Still Working Through the Rage. There's a depth to this conversation that you might not be expecting. I found it informative and illuminating; perhaps you will too. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:59 AM - 32 comments

This 12-minute short is a taste of the full 80-minute documentary that will premiere in the summer of 2025, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Space: 1999. [more inside]
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:28 AM - 28 comments

Last summer, the 30th anniversary of Guyville was attended by retrospectives, special reissues, and a celebratory tour. This month, Whip-Smart’s anniversary came and went without fanfare. But it’s a remarkable album full of expertly crafted songs, and I’d argue that its story is as important, when considering the alternative rock explosion of the 1990s, as that of its more-lauded predecessor. I spoke to Phair, her bandmates, and label execs about how Whip-Smart was recorded, why it didn’t make her a star, and why it sounds so good now, three decades after its release.

–Indie-Rock Supernova by Dan Kois [archive].
posted by Kattullus at 5:13 AM - 14 comments

Eight years ago, I posted about a new supernatural webcomic called The Strange Cases of Oscar Zahn. The name changed slightly, but the comic continued to 2019. Oscar is the world's greatest paranormal researcher, and an inventor of devices that can detect and affect the spirit world. Oscar is also a talking skull floating above a body. All of them can still be read on the Webtoons website! And now, in print is Volume One of The Strange Tales of Oscar Zahn. [more inside]
posted by JHarris at 3:22 AM - 1 comment

This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers. It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts. from Are We Now Living in a Parasite Culture? by Ted Gioia
posted by chavenet at 2:02 AM - 25 comments

The Top Score podcast from Emily Reese is interviews with videogame composers that ran from 2011 to 2015. It was followed in 2015 with a new series, Level With Emily Reese, that is still recording episodes this year. If you enjoy hearing people who create music talk about how and why they've created that music, these are podcasts for you. Even if you aren't into video games. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 10:56 PM - 3 comments

Øyvind Thorsby, that creator of gloriously weird and weirdly glorious comics full of strange species, decidedly specific spells and gizmos, and lots and lots of farce (previously, previouslier), has begun his seventh comic, My Other Brain is an Idiot (front page currently shows the first of ten pages so far; navigate with the arrow icons). His sixth comic and an updated link to another of his projects are below. [more inside]
posted by BiggerJ at 10:15 PM - 1 comment

Invasive weed dubbed thorny horror eradicated from Queensland after 15-year battle. The karroo thorn can overrun landscapes and make farmland unproductive, so farmers and biosecurity officers are rejoicing at this eradication achievement.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 8:37 PM - 5 comments

Scone geography (languagelog). Include the geographically distribution of cream first or jam first scone eaters. For North Americans, how do you pronounce pecan (mefi's own languagehat)? Bonus post on regional pronunciation: Lima, Ohio and Cairo, Ohio.
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:07 PM - 31 comments

The Canary. If you haven't heard about Chris Mark, that's natural because he recently won a Sammie, an award for unsung public service heroes. Chris Mark toiled away unsupervised for decades in an obscure government agency investigating the causes of coal mining collapses. His work resulted in the setting of practical standards that would eliminate mine-collapse deaths in the US and internationally. This essay is a tribute but it is also a wonderful construction in its own right. Author Michael Lewis is at the top of his form. We learn about the structural secrets of Gothic cathedrals, how coal mines are like chocolate sponge cakes, the role of the ball peen hammer in saving lives, the path of a son who ends up following his father and the son all but denies it. Hat tip to Long Reads (30 min read) [more inside]
posted by storybored at 3:14 PM - 18 comments

I know this upsets people and there is “gut reaction” to push back on this view and point out that despite the performance of Open AI’s new o1 model on logic and reasoning tests, it still makes dumb mistakes at times. That’s true, but so do most humans. Probably all humans. I also hear people say that LLMs use “pattern matching” and “memorization” to solve many problems. Again, very true, but so do humans. Does this mean we will reach Peak Human in 2024? Yes and no. from Have we reached Peak Human? by Louis Rosenberg
posted by chavenet at 12:57 PM - 36 comments

The Three Sisters are a set of plants that some Native American tribes have historically grown together to great agricultural benefit. Corn, beans, and squash nurture each other to produce a bountiful harvest: the corn provides a trellis for the beans, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil, and the squash provides ground cover to prevent weeds and hold in moisture. This is a type of companion planting that saves space and improves garden health. Cornell University has instructions for planting a Three Sisters garden here. [more inside]
posted by brook horse at 12:41 PM - 9 comments

Sixteen years after their last album, five years after Robert Smith said "I feel intent on it being a 2019 release and would be extremely bitter if it isn’t," and three years after long-time bassist Simon Gallup "appeared" to have quit the band because he "got fed up of betrayal," The Cure is releasing Songs of a Lost World. And they seem to be having fun doing it. [more inside]
posted by SafetyPirate at 11:13 AM - 10 comments

This is the first exhibition in the world based on Frida Kahlo's diaries combining the physical and digital world [fridakahlo.it, also see g arts&culture (previously)] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 3:23 AM - 6 comments

Thirty years ago, on 28 September 1994, the MS Estonia sank in the Baltic Sea claiming 852 lives. MS Estonia was a ro-ro cruiseferry that sank on Wednesday, 28 September 1994, between about 00:50 and 01:50 (UTC+2) as the ship was crossing the Baltic Sea, en route from Tallinn, Estonia, to Stockholm, Sweden. "The sinking was one of the worst maritime disasters of the 20th century. It is one of the deadliest peacetime sinkings of a European ship, after the Titanic in 1912 and the Empress of Ireland in 1914, and the deadliest peacetime shipwreck to have occurred in European waters, with 852 (out of 989) lives lost." wikipedia [more inside]
posted by fridgebuzz at 1:54 AM - 21 comments

These pursuits certainly aren’t what you ought to do — much less post about — and yet I find that it’s when we dwell on our secret enjoyments that we learn the most about ourselves. Sexual and aggressive feelings, veering self-destructive, are finally confronted without the veneer of rationalization. Limits cannot hold when it comes to pleasure. What is too much one day is not enough on another. What is too much for one person is just enough for another. And so on. from I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You. [The New York Times; ungated]
posted by chavenet at 1:28 AM - 44 comments

Sea robins have "the body of a fish, wings of a bird, legs of a crab." They can also taste with their "feet." Imagine wading in the shallows at the beach and tasting mussels and clams hidden under the sand — with your feet. A new study shows a fish species evolved to do just that.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 10:36 PM - 11 comments

Neuroscientist Dr. Eliezer Masliah was prolific, publishing around 800 papers on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. His work good enough for long enough that in 2016, he was appointed director of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging.

Yesterday, Science published a report casting substantial credible doubt on 132 of those papers, and on Masliah specifically, as the sole common author among the papers cited. [more inside]
posted by pwnguin at 5:17 PM - 26 comments

Is it possible to pinpoint the moment when readers stopped being able to keep up with their favorite genres? [more inside]
posted by cupcakeninja at 1:35 PM - 38 comments

In the decades since Hanson’s death, the United States has invested ever more in deportation and border militarization in pursuit of an illusory “security.” This criminalization generates black markets—“smuggling networks are the clearest products of efforts at border control,” Weber writes—which systematically beckon border agents toward corruption. The racial politics of border enforcement, now as ever, engender abuse. If Donald Trump is reelected in November, an unshackled immigration police force may lead us into new atrocities, and a breakdown of law in the name of law enforcement, that we have yet to imagine. from The Banality of Border Evil [Texas Observer] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 1:25 PM - 4 comments

NotebookLM is a deceptively simple tool from Google that at first glance looks like a fairly straightforward demo of their Gemini AI platform. Upload pasted text, a link (including YouTube), audio files, or up to 50 documents/500k words (which aren't used for training) and after a brief analysis it will produce various text interpretations -- summaries, tables of contents, timelines, study guides. It even has a chat window so you can pose suggested questions about the source material or ask your own. Useful, if a bit dull. 🥱 ...until you open the "Notebook Guide" panel and see the unassuming "Audio Overview" feature. Hit the "Generate" button and (after a few minutes of processing) the results astonish: an utterly lifelike, minutes-long "deep dive" conversation about your documents between two nameless podcast hosts. Examples [transcribed non-Google versions inside]: Harris-Trump debate transcript - Folding Ideas "Line Goes Up" video essay - Jabberwocky - MetaFilter - The text of this FPP itself (how meta) [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 12:48 PM - 97 comments

The world of WordPress, one of the most popular technologies for creating and hosting websites, is going through a very heated controversy. The core issue is the fight between WordPress founder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine, which hosts websites built on WordPress.
posted by brundlefly at 12:16 PM - 45 comments

Two very different short stories about romantic relationships and change. "The Manifesto" by Ilse Eskelsen, published in Lunch Ticket Summer/Fall 2024: "Elizabeth sucked her bottom lip. She sprinkled cheese over another pizza. Eventually, she asked, 'How do you make guys think you’re smart?'" A girl reads The Communist Manifesto to impress a boy; it works, at first. "Transmogrification" by R.M. Pérez-Padilla, fantasy, published in July 2024 in The Future Fire: "It speaks to how freaked out I am that I told her about it at all." A trans person starts to notice changes in how other people look, especially when they're transphobic. (Content note: transphobic language/behavior, bodyhorror.) Interview with the author and the illustrator.
posted by brainwane at 12:16 PM - 3 comments

Anti-trans laws are hurting kids: Nature (commentary from Erin in the Morning and Parker Molloy)
posted by box at 12:16 PM - 9 comments

Passes away at the age of 89. With a career starting in the 1950's until just recently, Dame Maggie Smith roles understandably spanned the gamut from her first Oscar win for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" to more recent years as the acerbic Dowager Countess of Downton Abbey and of course, the stern, but winking Professor McGonagall. A NYT piece of roles to stream (archive)
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:12 AM - 79 comments

A short description of the types of segmented Roman armor. In Latin. If you'd like to learn more, there is an english-langauge wikipedia page.
posted by bq at 8:52 AM - 12 comments

Meredith Whitraker of Signal talks about the AI economy with FT. A brief profile and interview of one of the few voices within tech willing to speak out about the relationship of surveillance technologies and AI. “I was just trying to figure out how do we support the community that is effectively building prophylactics to the business model I’m beginning to understand?” [more inside]
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:23 AM - 15 comments

Access the library here. From thequietus.com: "The extensive archive was initially opened to the public in 2018, with around 16,000 sounds initially made available online. It has now more than doubled in size to stock over 33,000 samples, which are available to download for free as a WAV or MP3 file. The BBC’s library features recordings dating back to the 1920s, and comprises sounds made in the broadcaster’s dedicated studio for use in specific BBC programmes, as well as field recordings captured out in the world. It’s divided into categories such as ‘Nature’, ‘Transport’, ‘Sport’, ‘Crowds’, ‘Footsteps’ and more." Previously on the blue.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:02 AM - 10 comments

Bridgerton Ball said to the Willy Wonka Experience, "Hold my port." (archive link for NYT) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 7:44 AM - 22 comments

Joshua Idehen - Mum Does The Washing (sl YouTube) Mums explain the world one article of clothing at a time (via Web Curios).
posted by atlantica at 7:06 AM - 11 comments

Peanut butter bacon balls could be the best hope for these tiny endangered marsupials. When researchers aren't in the field, they roll "hundreds and hundreds" of bait balls with the secret ingredient of bacon to lure the endangered marsupial into traps.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 6:47 AM - 10 comments

SOPHIE (yt) Is Gone. Her Music Lives On - "The artist's posthumous album is less an expression of her journey than a guide for the rest of us—a last gift." (previously) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 4:56 AM - 5 comments

Japanese singer-songwriter Sayuri has passed away at the age of 28. She had been on indefinite hiatus as of July this year due to vocal dysphonia. For those unfamiliar with her work, she left behind two wonderful performances on the YouTube channel The First Take, Koukai no Uta (About a Voyage) and Mikazuki (Crescent Moon) (English captions are available for both songs). [more inside]
posted by C^3 at 4:05 AM - 7 comments

We expect language to function in a very linear sense. One word comes after the other. One sentence after the other. But the moment – let's say even in language, right? – when you start using parentheses, you start hyphenating, you are interrupting the flow. Even just referring back to an earlier moment in the text, you can go back to the text. All of these things make you realize like it's not linear. You realize that linear is just how we are taught to experience things. It's not really how we experience things. from Sequential Bodies by Helen Chazan [The Comics Journal] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 2:17 AM - 6 comments

At least 1 in 6 men have been sexually abused or assaulted. "Baby Reindeer" is helping many finally start talking about it. (Trigger warnings: rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse, prison, stalking, suicide.) [more inside]
posted by Jacqueline at 9:07 PM - 19 comments

What once looked like a slippery slope to the hyperinflation of wages is now openly embraced as a policy pathway to the hyperinflation of financial assets. [more inside]
posted by agentofselection at 8:07 PM - 10 comments

Men "borrowing" free time from women is driving the gender exercise gap. As family demands increase, women's physical activity becomes more limited, but the same doesn't happen for men.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries at 7:41 PM - 15 comments

September 26, 2024 is World Cassowary Day: Why the ‘world’s most dangerous bird’ is itself in danger. [more inside]
posted by logicpunk at 7:03 PM - 7 comments

Body Count - "Comfortably Numb" feat. David Gilmour | The situation changed once Ice-T’s team circumvented the publishers and took the proposed track directly to Waters and Gilmour via their managers. “Once we got to David, he was like, ‘Fuck, yeah. I love this song. I approve it,'” says Ice-T. “And then Roger listened to it and his only comment was, ‘Who’s singing?’ When he heard it was Ice-T, he approved it.’ To have two people who sit on two opposite sides of the fence agree on a song, that means it must be good.” (Via Mojo Magazine & a Rolling Stone article)
posted by not_on_display at 6:56 PM - 9 comments

Spiritbox - Soft Spine [more inside]
posted by signal at 6:27 PM - 6 comments

AI smackdown: How a new FTC ruling just protected the free press by fighting back against AI-generated fake reviews. Every time someone gets caught posting phony AI-generated “best lists,” Uncle Sam is free to slap them with a bill for $51,744 per violation ... "with the rise in online reviews we have seen that bad actors can manipulate or fake reviews to deceive consumers for their own benefit." The ruling also bars product review suppression, compensation or incentives for creating customer reviews, and organizations that supposedly provide "independent" reviews - for their own products or services. [more inside]
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:57 PM - 17 comments

So, I'm excited to share some music with y'all. [1h30m] André 3000 shared a listening experience for fans, for his flute music album, New Blue Sun. I don't really know how to describe this, so maybe just put it on and find your zen.
posted by hippybear at 3:41 PM - 11 comments

All of that is just scene-setting for my real concern: the public understanding of fiction itself is changing, and with it, the types of fiction which are commercially (or even socially) viable going forward. Three fictive seeds germinated during the 1970s, and we're now living in the fifty year old forest they gave rise to. Forests coevolve with ecosystems, and now we're seeing the consequences. from They don't make readers like they used to by (MetaFilter's own) Charlie Stross
posted by chavenet at 1:09 PM - 25 comments

"Still, she was enjoying the class, and it was probably why she’d dreamed of a Jvichoru song, even if she couldn’t figure out how her brain had produced it." "Maghda's Song" is a short fantasy story by Eleanor Glewwe, published in 2022 in Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Glewwe is a linguist and musician, and notes, "There is also a cat, if you need that in your life." I was born in the US to Indian immigrant parents (now dead) who spoke Kannada, which I only speak a tiny bit of myself, so the linguistic position Maghda's in felt familiar to me -- diasporic alienation both from the familial tongue, and from the dominant language(s) spoken by people in/from the family's home country. And this story made me cry with wish-fulfillment.
posted by brainwane at 9:43 AM - 4 comments

Highbrow horror cinema has won respectability—but sold its soul. (slTheBaffler) [more inside]
posted by Kitteh at 7:59 AM - 85 comments

“Broadway intersects 59th Street and Central Park West. This was formally called Grand Circle and also just The Circle. [ ] Broadway has actually been a thoroughfare in New York City long before Central Park existed. In fact, it goes back to before the city was called New York, and even before it was called New Amsterdam. The native Lenape people living on this island traveled this very same route for generations making this one of the busiest paths on the island for around 13,000 years. When early Dutch colonizers learned about it, they called it the Wecquaesgeek Trail [harlem + bespoke] in reference to the tribe of Wappinger people who lived on the bank of the Hudson River.” [AD] [more inside]
posted by HearHere at 7:44 AM - 28 comments