March 18, 2015

Shedding Light on Myopia

Nature reviews the rise of short-sightedness and the connection to outdoor light exposure.
posted by parudox at 7:24 PM PST - 38 comments

You have 20 minutes before the sun blows up

Outer Wilds begins around a fire, like so many of the best stories do. When you step towards the crackling flames, you're offered a surprisingly whimsical option: press X to roast a marshmallow. Why not? You transform the sugary orb into a ball of flame. When you step back, however, you see that the world is about to get far, far bigger than a campfire, or even a planet. You're sitting at the base of a rocketship, as a nearby engineer explains that you're the astronaut about to blast off into space.

All you need are the launch codes, and after a leisurely detour through your home planet where you pick up a few essential piloting skills, you suit up, buckle in, and launch your craft triumphantly into space, ready to explore the wonders of the universe.

Then the sun explodes.
[more inside]
posted by Elementary Penguin at 6:10 PM PST - 18 comments

Battle of the Lit-est?

Canada Reads is an annual reality show-style contest organized by the CBC to promote works of Canadian literature. Five public figures, each championing a book begin the program and each day, one book is eliminated from the competition. Debate is often lively, sometimes controversial. [more inside]
posted by peppermind at 5:18 PM PST - 39 comments

Sea Lions are the new Polar Bears

California is having a sea lion crisis, (no, not THAT kind of sea lion, sharknado-face) with five times the usual number of sea lions "washing up onto shore" along the coast, most small pups and most starving. From San Diego, where Sea World cancelled its Sea Lion Shows to make personnel available for rescues and rehab, all the way up to Sonoma County, where 'six sick sea lions' all perished, while one was found on Skyline Blvd. in San Francisco (hitchhiking?) over 1000 feet from the coast. [more inside]
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:51 PM PST - 30 comments

Git to da choppah! screamed Ahnold

Famous scenes from R-rated films, done in a children's book style by Josh Cooley, an artist at Pixar.
posted by mathowie at 3:09 PM PST - 42 comments

Schocking!

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) has announced that he will resign from Congress. He has been recently been in the news for alleged ethics violations including a Downton Abbey office redecoration he didn't pay for, sketchy real estate deals, claiming 170,000 miles in reimbursement on a personal vehicle that he later sold with 80,000 miles on the odometer, and much much more! [more inside]
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 2:30 PM PST - 87 comments

Rogue wounds

In the asylums, the garrison hospitals, the rogues’ hovels, and so on back through time, it is possible to see medicine moving toward this moment, when the malingerer ceases to be a monster and becomes a mirror to ourselves.
posted by zeptoweasel at 2:18 PM PST - 3 comments

LAX? FAE? RIX?

Why do the three-letter codes for so many American airports end in "X"? How do you tell all the "Yxx" codes for Canadian airport codes apart? Where is SUX, again? Why are you flying into FCA? Airport Codes is a gorgeous, yet informative guide to the mysteries behind your favorite (or least favorite) airport code.
posted by heurtebise at 1:42 PM PST - 66 comments

Lovers' Rock - Lewisham 1977

In 1977, John Goto made this series of photographic portraits of young British African-Caribbeans at Lewisham Youth Centre, South London, where he taught evening classes in photography. It was not until 2013, however, that circumstances allowed him to first exhibit and publish the work.
posted by timshel at 12:13 PM PST - 10 comments

My lover's got humor / she's the giggle at a funeral

Twitter person @electrolemon has been making awful, amazing 30-second mashups of Hozier's "Take Me To Church".
posted by naju at 12:00 PM PST - 37 comments

How was Roman column formed?

This short, stop-motion film shows how Trajan's Column might have been constructed. The behind-the-scenes of the stop motion is also pretty neat. [more inside]
posted by rtha at 11:52 AM PST - 37 comments

Connan Mockasin

Connan Mockasin is a musician with some strange videos.
posted by josher71 at 10:55 AM PST - 9 comments

"If you want to feel bad about your looks, spend some time in Seoul."

Why is South Korea the world’s plastic-surgery capital? [more inside]
posted by zarq at 10:43 AM PST - 48 comments

Gender novels

Rise of the Gender Novel: Too often, trans characters are written as tortured heroes. We’re more complex than that
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:41 AM PST - 17 comments

Lighten Up

Lighten Up (NSFW), a short comic about coloring and race in comics by Ronald Wimberly.
posted by dinty_moore at 10:06 AM PST - 15 comments

I resented the existence of Meyer lemons & anyone who championed them.🍋

"Honestly? I've never had more fun cooking. Or eating. I didn't want to write this piece; it's almost humiliating to hear myself talk this way. But there it is. I'm in Berkeley. I'm lucky to be here. I may stay." Mark Bittman talks about California produce. [more inside]
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 9:54 AM PST - 90 comments

The televised will not be a revolution

The changing — and unchanging — structure of TV. A discussion of the television industry, its pieces and parts; how the money flows and the dependencies bind; how it changed with the rise of cable and again with the advent of streaming; and how Apple's rumored web TV service won't save consumers or make Apple much money.
posted by alms at 9:16 AM PST - 33 comments

Self Help Books You Wish Existed

Someone made his/her own self help books. [more inside]
posted by Ideefixe at 8:56 AM PST - 52 comments

For a GNU dawn! For freedom!

The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty: Maria Bustillos profiles Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and author of the GNU Manifesto, which was published 30 years ago this month: The GNU Manifesto is characteristic of its author—deceptively simple, lucid, explicitly left-leaning, and entirely uncompromising… Stallman was one of the first to grasp that, if commercial entities were going to own the methods and technologies that controlled computers, then computer users would inevitably become beholden to those entities. This has come to pass, and in spades… “With software,” Stallman still frequently observes, “either the users control the program, or the program controls the users.”
posted by Cash4Lead at 8:22 AM PST - 113 comments

"I feel like my own identity was born in those cotton fields."

Victorian mourning dress embodies black history
"Vancouver artist Karin Jones has made a powerful installation about black history at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.It’s a braided black Victorian mourning dress made from artificial hair extensions used by black women. Surrounding the dress on the floor are cotton bolls that contain the artist’s hair. I’ve only seen images the work online. Even so, I found myself really moved by the way it uses beauty to embody painful truths about slavery and the history of people of African descent in North America."
posted by Lexica at 7:48 AM PST - 9 comments

"The March Madness of Internet Garbage"

The Worst Internet Things Bracket [more inside]
posted by alby at 7:09 AM PST - 102 comments

“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”

Remains in Madrid Are Believed to Be Those of Cervantes [New York Times]
Spanish investigators said they had reason to believe that bones found at the Convent of the Discalced Trinitarians were those of the “Don Quixote” author.
posted by Fizz at 6:50 AM PST - 24 comments

Party? SUPER PARTY!

The Podcast Is the Product for Keith and the Girl Now closing in on 2,500 episodes — by their estimation, more than any other podcast — the early adapters' "Web radio" talk show debuted in 2005, before the word "podcast" even existed. A decade in, they live-stream hour-plus episodes five days a week, average a million downloads a month, boast more than 36,000 forum members, and say they know of at least 141 KATG tattoos. [more inside]
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 6:13 AM PST - 7 comments

World Elephant Polo Championships

Prior to our arrival in Nepal the following day, only one member of our squad had played elephant polo, in a brief exhibition. The rest of us had neither sat atop an elephant nor played horse polo nor spent much time atop a horse. We had "practiced" twice at a windswept parking lot along the beach in Queens, New York, in bitter cold, using mallets fashioned from PVC pipe and riding on top of SUVs in place of elephants. It was funny but not entirely helpful.
posted by ellieBOA at 5:25 AM PST - 9 comments

If you've played Larry, you know me

I'm Al Lowe and I created a series of games called Leisure Suit Larry for Sierra back in the '80s and '90s along with another 20 games and titles back in that period. I was with Sierra from 1982 until 1998 when it -- well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals. How about that for an opening?
The creator of Leisure Suit Larry interviewed.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:19 AM PST - 45 comments

The irrationality of Alcoholics Anonymous

Its faith-based 12-step program dominates treatment in the United States. But researchers have debunked central tenets of AA doctrine and found dozens of other treatments more effective.
Gabrielle Glaser explores alcohol-use disorder treatment of many types in a lengthy (quite lengthy) article for The Atlantic. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 1:10 AM PST - 142 comments

“We’ll Pay Cash for Your Old Gold and Silver”

I came by my own dishonest trade honestly. By the time I was sixteen, I had been kicked out of high school three or four times—I never managed to graduate—and my mother, fed up, sent me down to Texas to live with my older brother, who had recently been released from prison. He was briefly Calgary’s most successful cocaine importer, before getting busted and sent off to Spy Hill, and he had found employment as a sales manager for a hugely successful jewelry store owned by a brilliant, wildly charismatic man named Ronnie Cooper.
- Clancy Martin (previously) in Lapham's Quarterly
posted by the man of twists and turns at 12:40 AM PST - 22 comments

On Memory: New Writing from Japan

On Memory: New Writing from Japan : a collection of newly translated fiction and non-fiction by Japanese writers, appearing in Words Without Borders magazine.
posted by Nevin at 12:27 AM PST - 7 comments

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