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More than perhaps any creature, salmon epitomize modern wildlife management. We are willing to bend over backwards, to the point of comedy, to recover species we cherish: We captive-breed black-footed ferrets; we shoot barred owls to save spotted owls; we patiently teach whooping cranes to migrate behind aircraft. Yet coexistence occurs strictly on our terms — and there is always at least one term left non-negotiable. We spend millions on wildlife crossings over highways, yet would never close the highways themselves; we relocate imperiled trees to help them weather climate change without daring to retool our carbon-based economy. In the Columbia Basin, the dams, and their power, are the inviolable condition, the infrastructure that fish and managers must turn cartwheels to accommodate. We will give salmon everything, except what we don’t want to give.

The great salmon compromise: High Country News' Ben Goldfarb explores the complicated legal and biological tradeoffs in federal and tribal salmon recovery efforts in the Columbia Basin. [more inside]
posted by Dip Flash at 11:43 PM PST - 7 comments

Developments like wikis and Facebook walls and comments sections were supposed to open the Internet to everyone, “using the Web the way it’s meant to be used.” Ten years in, and it sometimes seems those technologies only opened us up: to quantification, to monetization, to tracking, to abuse. Given these rather disappointing developments, it’s little surprise that some look back at Web 1.0 with longing.

The counterintuitive, GIF-tastic plan to redeem the modern Internet (SLWaPo)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:03 PM PST - 46 comments

Pinboard's (and MeFi's own) Maciej Cegłowski live-tweets O'Reilly's Next:Economy conference.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:51 PM PST - 23 comments

Onepunch-man (ワンパンマン) a comedy/superhero webcomic created by ONE in 2009 hosted on his site which quickly became a viral hit over the years. It features the adventures of Saitama (サイタマ), an unlicensed hero, and his disciple Genos (ジェノス) as they protect the citizens in Z-city from a variety of villains and monsters. However, after all his dedication to training to become a serious hero he feels empty as everything is too easily resolved with one punch. [more inside]
posted by chrono_rabbit at 9:04 PM PST - 14 comments

This kitten is pretty excited to see their human. [SLImgur]
posted by Room 641-A at 8:41 PM PST - 23 comments

In 1991, The Supreme Court heard Barnes v. Glen Theatre, Inc. (spoilers!) (Number 90-26), in which two strip clubs contented that laws against nude dancing violated their first amendment rights.
The oral argument (as recorded and transcribed at Oyez) is just as titter-inducing and thoughtful as you would expect a hypothetical-filled conversation between lawyers talking about nudity would be; it was later adapted verbatim into the play Arguendo.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:18 PM PST - 10 comments

The JB-9 Jetpack test flight around The Statue of Liberty: Finally, The Jetpack We Always Wanted [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 6:38 PM PST - 40 comments

The 'Empire' Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto Trans media theorist Sandy Stone's 1987 essay on transsexual women and radical feminism, written in response to TERF works of the time, was a foundational text for transgender studies, located within a particular cultural moment but calling for a new discourse of transsexual and transgender womanhood beyond the gender binary. [more inside]
posted by thetortoise at 5:35 PM PST - 4 comments

In 1993, alt-rock band The Connells released the single "74-75" from their fifth studio album Ring. The accompanying music video was shot at Needham B. Broughton High School in the band's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, and it featured members of the Class of 1975, juxtaposing yearbook pictures with footage of the same people as they appeared in 1993. The band has now updated the video, with footage of the surviving classmates from the original video.
posted by 4ster at 4:31 PM PST - 47 comments

In early November 1990, George Michael released the VHS documentary GEORGE MICHÆL, the fourth release in support of his floundering second solo album Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1. [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 3:16 PM PST - 39 comments

An Art Without an Artwork By Tom Russell [Guernica Magazine] A summer of chess in Bryant Park.

“Another way to distinguish a great chess player from an average one is to gauge how comfortable he or she is with tension. After the opening flurry of moves it is inevitable that a tension accrue somewhere on the board—a cluster of opposing pieces all vying for control of a vital square. The temptation for most is to resolve that tension by trading off pieces and simplifying the position. Experts let it build and build, and pounce only when they identify a clear way to gain an advantage. Everything you’d want to know about a person psychologically is there to see on the chessboard.”

posted by Fizz at 2:44 PM PST - 11 comments

Drone video footage of the largest ice fishing tournament in the world from Gull Lake, Minnesota. (SLYT) There are over 20,000 holes in the ice and just as many anglers.
[more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:10 PM PST - 28 comments

Intrepid band of puppies take a swim for the first time.
posted by phunniemee at 1:50 PM PST - 36 comments

Floating point math, exemplified by Erik Wiffin. [more inside]
posted by metaquarry at 10:13 AM PST - 43 comments

English is not normal. "No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language." (Aeon via Longform).
posted by pravit at 9:05 AM PST - 103 comments

Kentucky counties with highest Medicaid rates backed Matt Bevin, who plans to cut Medicaid

Owsley County, one of the nation's poorest places [prev], neatly fit the trend. Nearly 1,000 of its 4,508 residents got health insurance after Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear established Kynect two years ago and expanded Medicaid to include people up to 138 percent of the poverty level, which is $16,105 a year for an individual. Newly insured people started to visit the Owsley County Medical Clinic on the outskirts of Booneville. They desperately needed medical care. Even by Kentucky's lax standards, Owsley has high rates of obesity, smoking and poor nutrition, and as a result, greater than normal incidences of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. Some patients wept with relief as longtime ailments finally were treated, clinic officials said. [...] The community's largest-circulation newspaper, the Three Forks Tradition in Beattyville, did not say much about Kynect ahead of the election. Instead, its editorials roasted Obama and Hillary Clinton, gay marriage, Islam, "liberal race peddlers," "liberal media," black criminals and "the radical Black Lives Matter movement."

Owsley County voted for Bevin, a Tea Party businessman who vowed to dismantle Kynect, by a 70-25 margin. [more inside]
posted by Rhaomi at 7:30 AM PST - 99 comments

Anthony Bourdain goes to a Waffle House.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 5:40 AM PST - 122 comments

"I sold my wife’s clothes to build a Christmas village in my parents’ basement." “Oh, Richard has a Christmas village,” my mother said, and began to explain it in painstaking detail. And while I listened to her confuse my post office and library, gloss over my recreation area, and completely fuck up my all-embracing vision, I became assured that there was only a teeny little chance that Litia and I would ever have sex again.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 5:37 AM PST - 108 comments

"A revolutionary story of guitars, motorcycles, cell phones – and the music of a new generation” is how director Christopher Kirkley describes his West African re-imagining of Purple Rain. Set in the Saharan city of Agadez in Niger, Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai (Akounak for short) is a visually sumptuous and musically thrilling movie that works splendidly with or without the Purple Rain mythos. But riffing on Prince’s tale locates Purple Rain’s universal heartbeat

posted by infini at 2:44 AM PST - 10 comments