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Nobody knows anything about China.
posted by storybored at 10:38 PM PST - 15 comments

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:12 PM PST - 164 comments

Are You Really in Love if It’s Not on Instagram? SLNYT
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 9:02 PM PST - 23 comments

Some Very Entertaining Plastic [Internet Archive Blog] “It’s been a little over 4 years since the Internet Archive started providing emulation in the browser from our software collection; millions of plays of games, utilities, and everything else that shows up on a screen have happened since then. While we continue to refine the technology (including adding Webassembly as an option for running the emulations), we also have tried to expand out to various platforms, computers, and anything else that we can, based on the work of the emulation community, especially the MAME Development Team. For a number of years, the MAME team has been moving towards emulating a class of hardware and software that, for some, stretches the bounds of what emulation can do, and we have now put up a collection of some of their efforts here at archive.org. Introducing the Handheld History Collection.” [via: Rock Paper Shotgun]
posted by Fizz at 9:00 PM PST - 33 comments

Number Systems of the World
posted by gwint at 7:20 PM PST - 12 comments

A consideration of Bowie as an actor.
posted by MovableBookLady at 6:32 PM PST - 22 comments

Working in a home studio by himself, Jean-Michel Jarre crafted 1976's synthesizer masterpiece, Oxygène [YT album, ~40m]. The sides on the vinyl are hard to break apart, so here it is as originally presented: Side 1 (Oxygène Part I, Oxygène Part II, Oxygène Part III), Side 2 (Oxygène Part IV, Oxygène Part V, Oxygène Part VI)
posted by hippybear at 6:28 PM PST - 28 comments

“Either you’re ruining my childhood or everything’s problematic.” Nat (AshesforFoxes), Erin (Holocroning), and Shi (Ohtze) are Three Harpies podcasting about genre fiction. Metamashina is hours of intelligent discussion about the female gaze, women's voices in SF fandom, leftism versus neoliberalism, the importance of domestic labor narratives, and femmebots in film. [Twitter] [Tumblr] [more inside]
posted by Kitty Stardust at 3:19 PM PST - 5 comments

Konnakkol is the Southern Indian art of percussive vocal performances, much like Scatting in American Jazz. Here's some really cool videos of people transcribing pieces for western drums!

• Konnakkol duet by V Shivapriya and B R Somashekar Jois, with Amir Oosman on quads. (contains transcript if you want to try and sing along)
• Drums and Konnakkol: Mayur G S
• Westerners Cain Daniel and Yogev Gabay give it a shot, another duet this time with a piece from the Karnataka College of Percussion in Bangalore, India

Not up to speed? Wondering about the (seemingly random) finger and hand tapping? B C Manjunath & Somashekar Jois have got you covered with a series of beginners lessons to konnakkol, in English! (link to first video in a youtube playlist)
posted by FirstMateKate at 2:54 PM PST - 19 comments

Sociologist Sharon Zukin spent a year observing hackathons and then wrote about it (paywalled article, Google Books preview) for Research in the Sociology of Work. Wired interviewed Zukin for their article Sociologists Examine Hackathons and See Exploitation. "Zukin tells WIRED the unpaid labor of hackathons recalls sociological research on fashion models, who are also expected to spend time promoting themselves on social media, and party girls, who go to nightclubs with male VIPs in hopes of boosting acting or modeling aspirations. Participants are combining self-investment with self-exploitation, she says. It’s rational given the demands of the modern labor market. It’s just precarious work."
posted by clawsoon at 11:19 AM PST - 40 comments

As it scrambled to compete in the internet world, the once-dominant tech company cut tens of thousands of U.S. workers, hitting its most senior employees hardest and flouting rules against age bias. (SLProPublica feature by Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin)
posted by crazy with stars at 10:34 AM PST - 61 comments

With #DeleteFacebook in full swing, is #DeleteTwitter far behind?

Launched on Nov 17th 2017, Counter.Social (aka: CoSo) describes itself as:

"The first Social Network Platform to take a zero-tolerance stance to hostile nations, bots and trolls weaponizing OUR social media platforms and freedoms..."

CoSo values community, discussion, kindness, integrity, and people before ideology.

And @realDonaldTrump is banned. Forever. [more inside]
posted by Skygazer at 9:08 AM PST - 104 comments

This new app is like Shazam for your nature photos. Using neural networks trained on the vast collection of photos posted to the iNaturalist app, Seek helps you identify local flora and fauna and learn more about them.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:45 AM PST - 29 comments

Inspiration for Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), and at 3000 years old, supposedly the oldest hot spring in Japan, Dogo Onsen resort is having another art festival, decorating hotel rooms and public spaces alike. Starting in 2014 with some dotty hotel rooms, courtesy Yayoi Kusama, Dogo Art this year features Shin Sobue's work of decorating a hotel room with the text of the novel Bocchan, by local boy done good, Natsume Soseki.
posted by Juso No Thankyou at 8:30 AM PST - 3 comments

How and why to search for young Einsteins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), founded in 1971 ... recruited 5,000 precocious children, each of whom had intelligence-test scores in early adolescence high enough to gain entry to university. Research into how these children did in adulthood has emerged over the past two decades. Of the SMPY participants who scored among the top 0.5% for their age-group in maths and verbal tests, 30% went on to earn a doctorate, versus 1% of Americans as a whole. These children were also much more likely to have high incomes and to file patents.
posted by sammyo at 6:16 AM PST - 28 comments