May 24
You got it, dude!
"1566 seems very recent, but the hedgehog was around before then"
"It was around before this Parliament. The hedgehog, and its ancestor, narrowly missed being crushed under the foot of Tyrannosaurus rex. The hedgehog was around long before the human species. It tells us a great deal about British civilisation that my hon. Friend has raised the subject, because the hedgehog is a magical creature. It is a creature that appears on cylinder seals in Sumeria, bent backwards on the prows of Egyptian ships..." [more inside]
this account now belongs to the foxen
“pssst guys GUYS the coolest thing just happened” is how it all began, back on April 18, when author and MetaFilter favorite Chuck Wendig (previously, previouslier) spotted an elusive fox out behind his writing shed. [more inside]
"Everybody feels free here"
Much has happened in the past 30 years to try to give disabled people a life that looks the same as for anyone without special needs. People who would have at one time been institutionalized are living in group homes. Sheltered workshops are closing as people are moving into integrated workplaces that embrace what’s called the “neurodiversity” movement. And social opportunities are growing to include specific dating sites, cruises and proms. But adults with disabilities, like Jones, yearn for more opportunities to socialize. Club 1111 is unique for how often it is held — once a month — and for how many people it draws. Local, state and national advocates are not aware of another event like it anywhere in the country.
folklore cards offer insights
Cards of folklore in the Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive "offer insights into some of the hardships and preoccupations of domestic life in Newfoundland over the past half-century or so. But many of the cards, which date back to the mid-1960s, lack the full names of the women who authored them and signed them as their husband’s wife, nothing more. Archivists grew so irked by this that they recently launched a mission to find out the writers’ true names." Household names: Archivists take on task of identifying women who captured Newfoundland folklore [The Globe and Mail] [more inside]
Murray Gell-Mann, 1929-2019
The great theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann passed away today at the age of 89, after a lifetime of contributions from fundamental particle physics to complex systems theory. NYT obit; Caltech obit [more inside]
Troubled treasure
Troubled treasure "But as much as Burmese amber is a scientist's dream, it's also an ethical minefield. The fossils come from conflict-ridden Kachin state in Myanmar, where scientists can't inspect the geology for clues to the fossils' age and environment. In Kachin, rival political factions compete for the profit yielded by amber and other natural resources"
O₂ ≠
Oxygen Not Included [YouTube][Trailer] “...developed by highly regarded Canadian team Klei Entertainment, best known for Mark of the Ninja and Don't Starve. It's a sideways-view building and resource management game set inside a giant space rock. I begin the game with three little characters who've been portaled into a small hole inside the rock, armed with nothing more than a box filled with a few days' worth of food and some funky tools for digging. They begin tunneling in order to create more room for themselves, and to yield resources. The inside of this rock is a Battenberg Cake of liquids, solids and gases, as well as organic stuff that is either really useful or absolutely life-threatening.” [via: Polygon] [more inside]
Death (Of A Career), On-Air
Author (and conspiracy theorist) Naomi Wolf went on an interview with BBC Radio as part of promotion of her upcoming book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. She was expecting to have a chance to talk about the thesis of her book, the way sexual expression has been criminalized.
What she was not planning for, however, was for interviewer Matthew Sweet to show, with evidence, that her book was built on Wolf's misunderstanding of the archaic legal term "death recorded". [more inside]
What she was not planning for, however, was for interviewer Matthew Sweet to show, with evidence, that her book was built on Wolf's misunderstanding of the archaic legal term "death recorded". [more inside]
♪♫♬ I gave my love a lizard / that had some bones ♪♫♬
VITAL UPDATE: my road runner porch-buddy used to run away if I wanted a pic but now when he catches a lizard he KNOCKS ON MY DOOR and then parades his catch around and poses, it’s amazing. Who’s a good boy! Mr Meepmeep! 😍
A woman chronicles being courted by an amorous(?) roadrunner. [Twitter thread with pics and video]
A woman chronicles being courted by an amorous(?) roadrunner. [Twitter thread with pics and video]
How we treat women
Worker camps make it possible to build infrastructure in remote locations in Canada. Is it worth the human cost? (cw: sexual assault) [more inside]
Make Way for Ducklings, 2019
On May 23rd, Boston Police issued a traffic advisory: Tremont Street was down to one lane. A brood of Boston ducklings had not one but two friendly officers to clear their path, as well as assistance from the Boston Water and Sewer Commission when one duckling fell into a storm drain and needed rescue. Channel 7 had a helicopter on the scene.
the railway’s revival hasn’t solely been due to the cats
On a bright May morning at Japan’s Idakiso train station, a small cat basked in the sun as her photo was taken by a group of tourists before getting a tummy tickle from a toddler. While the white, tan and black kitten purred and meowed in the arms of a visitor, one of the station workers looked on with a grin, interjecting only to gently reposition the cat’s brimmed conductor hat whenever it threatened to slip over her eyes. “Having her around the station makes everyone happy. I sometimes forget that she is my boss. previously
And you may ask yourself, well / How did I get here?
Samsung researchers have developed a GAN-based method for building "talking heads" or animated figures from one or a handful of still photographs (paper). [more inside]
Classic videogame/anime music interpreted for the xylophone
A YouTube channel where three Japanese women play classic videogame and anime music on a giant xylophone while wearing themed hats. "Corridors of Time" from Chrono Trigger
"Big Chocobo" from Final Fantasy III
"Love Song" from Dragon Warrior II
"He feeds all the cats... They all know him, and they know that buggy!"
On Wednesday, May 22 Floyd Martin delivered mail for the last time after 35 years at the United States Post Office. @Jennifer_Brett accompanied him and took photos of Floyd saying goodbye to the people on his route (SLT Thread).
A New Island in the Carceral Archipelago
"The military-surplus control console had three buttons labeled “Search,” “Track,” and “Destroy”—the last of which was mercifully disabled but often vigorously pushed by young probationers." An inventor of the first ankle bracelet trackers for criminals points out that smart phones will do everything that ankle bracelets will, are actually useful to prisoners re-entering society, and can be loaded with apps that will help prisoners remember court and parole officer dates, detect drug and alcohol use, and reward rehabilitation. [more inside]
A notably memory-inefficent way to generate fractals
Making fractals with recursive nested Powerpoint presentations and slides. How they work. A better way. [more inside]
This is the magic right here
Stephen Colbert plays D&D with Matt Mercer (YouTube) For Comic Relief's Red Nose Day this year Stephen Colbert teamed up with Critical Role's Matt Mercer for a one on one D&D session. Colbert's joy and enthusiasm is infectious, and Mercer offers up a DMing master class in the way he weaves the theme of Red Nose Day into the adventure.
Living My Best Life With My Curvy Wife
2 days with Curvy Wife Guy, the most controversial man in body positivity He’s just released a music video called “Chubby Sexy.” Will it silence his internet haters?
David Milch discusses his Alzheimer's in The New Yorker
David Milch's Third Act. The NYer's Mark Singer gives some background on Milch's writing process on Deadwood and interviews him about his current memory problems. "I've always said that he writes novels set like plays, and shot like movies, that air on television," Milch's daughter says. [more inside]
“It’s as though that was all I needed to see”
A week ago, Transworld Skateboarding released DAEWON, a documentary about the life and 30-year career of legendary skateboarder Daewon Song. It's free to watch on YouTube. [more inside]
May 23
“Current sea otter populations are at carrying capacity,”
Sea otters are bouncing back - and into the jaws of great white sharks
The sharks aren’t actually trying to eat the otters, preferring calorie-dense, blubbery prey like seals and sea lions. The bites are merely investigative, with sharks recoiling with a mouth of fur instead of a fatty meal. But such bites often cause mortal injuries to the otters, and they’re now happening more often off California’s beaches. [more inside]
You would think it would be ARRR
Drain-cleaning porn
Hi, this channel shows drain cleaning blocked sewer drains using a high pressure water jet machine. The high pressure water hose that cleans the drain has specific nozzles on the end for cutting out tree roots, grease blockages and clearing rubble out of drains.
It is a disgustingly dirty and smelly job, but some one has to do it, so it may as well be me.
Thanks for taking the time to view my dirty videos. (h/t Miss Cellania)
The Naked Don
Brexit: The Naked Truth (Dr Victoria Bateman, Cambridge, 2019)NSFW VIDEO CONTAINS NUDITY [more inside]
What the Herp?
Hello! My name is Fitch.
I’m a bot (v4.0) learning to ID reptiles & amphibians in pics. Tweet @WhatTheHerp for IDs. Report sightings to http://HerpMapper.org to help. [more inside]
He is CRAZY
How Holly Herndon and her AI baby spawned a new kind of folk music
Holly Hendron's new album PROTO is, according to Fader, "an engrossing testament to the power of multiple voices singing in unison. One of those voices is a computer named Spawn", an AI trained in live ceremonies in which hundreds of people were gathered to teach it how to identify and reinterpret unfamiliar sounds in group call-and-response singing sessions. The video for Eternal might give some context. [more inside]
The End Is Only the Beginning
The Lady is a Jock
Mary Bacon took a bullet while pilfering fruit as a child. Mary Bacon dropped out of school in the sixth grade and was pregnant by age 16. Mary Bacon had a romantic relationship with Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Mary Bacon was kidnapped by a stalker. That same stalker later tried to shoot her with a gun. Not all of those sentences are complete horseshit.
“Hasta la vista, baby!”
Terminator Dark Fate [YouTube][Teaser Trailer] Terminator: Dark Fate is the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, but acts as a direct sequel to only the first two movies: Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. The other three films are now considered part of an alternate timeline, according to the filmmakers.
"All my dreams fall like rain on a downtown train..."
"The acclaimed songwriter of hits like Forever Young and Maggie May contacted Model Railroader magazine to talk about his other achievement, Grand Street & Three Rivers Railroad." [more inside]
Can We Make America A Democracy?
"Even the most basic liberal democratic right—the right to vote, about which there is no end to sanctimony in this country—has never been equitably put into practice. Gaze upon our system’s vaunted political blessings from the perspective of, say, someone in Puerto Rico, and they look even more mixed than they do from the mainland, where the Constitution places more weight on rural votes and less-populated regions by design." Reclaiming the Future: On the growing appeal of socialism in an age of inequality "The top 0.1 percent of Americans held 20 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2016 (up from 7 percent in 1979) and owned as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Evidence suggests that the threat that the wealthy pose to what Rawls termed the “fair value of political liberty” has become extraordinary." Socialism and the Democracy Deficit "In reality, though, the resurgence of socialism in our time is a tale of dogged organizing against formidable odds of attaining simple cultural and intellectual visibility, let alone electoral success. " The Socialist Network (The New Republic) "But here, the local DSA has exactly the sort of qualities that have long been hard to find in left groups: practicality, organization, and friendliness. What has impressed me most is that they fundamentally care about actually getting things done, and not just engaging in symbolic politics." Why I Love The DSA (Current Affairs)
When the bass drops and confetti blows up, you know it's getting brassy
Need some more brass music in your life? Try some Meute (official site), a German techno marching band, combining "hypnotic driving techno and expressive brass band music ... just drums and brass, no computers involved" (YouTube profile). They're between the bombast of Too Many Zooz (YT) (previously, twice) and the grandiose scale of Acid Brass (YT) (mentioned previously). But like Acid Brass, it's all covers of techno tracks, like Laurent Garnier's "The Man with the Red Face" (original track; YTx2). If you want your brass mixed with vocals, accordion and other joyful noises, try some Afrobalkan Dance music from South Africa (YT) courtesy of Bombshelter Beast (official site). More of all this below the break. [more inside]
Mark was tweaking when he forged his own death certificate.
He said he'd been diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, at age 30, and had never expected to reach his 40s....To finance the life he kept thinking would end at any moment, he had committed increasingly creative and reckless varieties of fraud. He told me in our first conversations that he had faked his own death several times; I couldn’t quite keep track of how many. He had stolen his brother’s identity and faked his death, too, despite the fact that his brother was already dead.
take my wife. please.
"It was a little creepy"
Out of sight of most New Yorkers, though, was the development underground: a series of tunnels that ran beneath the streets to connect a number of the [Jehova's Witnesses] properties. And though the tunnels began to be filled in two years ago, their fascinating history has recently begun to come to light.Inside The Lost Jehovah's Witnesses Tunnels Under Brooklyn Heights
PLOS Journals Now OPEN for Published Peer Review!
PLOS has added an opt-in option for authors to publish their peer review history alongside their accepted manuscript. The documentation for each review process will have its own DOI. [more inside]
What's Small, Yellow, and Buzzy?
Panic have announced a cute new handheld console, Playdate. Costing $149, it will come with a season of twelve brand new games launched weekly from developers like Keita Takahashi (Katamari Damacy), Bennett Foddy (QWOP), and Zach Gage (Really Bad Chess). The Playdate has an unusual design including a rotating crank controller, and is accompanied by a Mac SDK that works in Lua and C.
May 22
Escheresque
Five minutes of eye-popping video optical illusions, including "Drawing Hands", "Jenga Anamorphosis", and "Umbrella" .
All That Money
“What I’m saying is that at least now, when people use my last name, they will sure as hell use my first name as well. And that’s a win.” Joss and Jillian Sackler are profiled in Town & Country magazine about their very different approaches to having "the most toxic name in philanthropy." [more inside]
It was in a closet in the corner of a classroom, which was a little sad
Words Matter: The Guardian Updates its Style Guide
The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Instead of “climate change” the preferred terms are “climate emergency, crisis or breakdown” and “global heating” is favoured over “global warming”, although the original terms are not banned. [more inside]
An Audience of Athletes: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Sports
One day, I will write about this place
Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina passed away from a stroke last night at the age of 48. He is probably best known in the West for his essay "How To Write About Africa," (video). His memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (excerpt), describes growing up in Kenya in the post-colonial Kenyatta and Moi era of politics, his experiences as a student in South Africa, and returning to Kenya around the post-election violence in 2007. In 2014, he published a lost chapter, "I am a homosexual, Mum", and he imagined the conversation he would have liked to have had with his father. He was one of Kenya's most vocally out gay men, and was also open about his HIV+ status. [more inside]
As of this date, there are 433 calendars listed here.
Being black in Nazi Germany
Film director Amma Asante came across an old photograph taken in Nazi Germany of a black schoolgirl by chance.
Curiosity - who the girl was and what she was doing in Germany - set the award-winning film-maker off on a path that led to Where Hands Touch, a new movie - an imagined account of a mixed-race teenager's clandestine relationship with a Hitler Youth member, but based on historical record.
‘The moment of awakening’
On May 15th, 1919, the country — and the world — watched in astonishment as tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in Winnipeg. They demanded higher pay, better working conditions and the right to bargain collectively. Some 35,000 workers took over the running of Canada's third-largest city for six weeks. The Winnipeg General Strike was one of the most important labour events in Canadian history. “Men who had just returned from a horrific war in Europe could not find employment; factories were shutting down and bankruptcies were a common occurrence. Tens of thousands of people in Winnipeg, Manitoba alone lived in substandard housing, where disease was a deadly reality. Working-class immigrants faced deep divisions along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines.” Lessons From The Winnipeg General Strike
Yasuke, the Jesuit slave who became the first African Samurai
Yasuke (variously rendered as 弥助 or 弥介, 彌助 or 彌介 in different sources) (circa 1555–1590 CE) (Wikipedia) was an enslaved African taken to Japan in 1579 in the service of the Italian Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano (Beyond Ricci, Boston College), who had been appointed the Visitor (inspector) of the Jesuit missions in the Indies (East Africa, South and East Asia). "When Yasuke got to Kyoto (with Jesuit missionaries), there was a massive riot. People wanted to see him and be in his presence" (Thomas Lockley, quoted by CNN), as he was one of the first Africans seen by many of the Japanese. But he quickly went from novelty to trusted and valued retainer to, and warrior for, the Japanese hegemon and warlord Oda Nobunaga in 1581 and 1582 (Wikipedia). [more inside]