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Health of Hard Science Fiction in 2015 (Short Fiction) - Greg Hullender of Rocket Stack Rank looks at whether this years stories support claims of doom for Hard SF.
posted by Artw at 11:03 PM PST - 73 comments

Caño Cristales means "Crystal Spout" in Spanish, which doesn't portray the vivid nature of the Colombian river like it's other nicknames -- river of five colors, liquid rainbow, the river that ran away from paradise and the most beautiful river in the world. The river's colors include yellow, green, blue, black, and a seasonal red from Macarenia clavigera, an aquatic herb.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:22 PM PST - 3 comments

The Henry Country Report has revealed leaked documents that show a narcotics team in Dothan, AL planted drugs on black men for years. The cases were prosecuted by Doug Valeska. All of the officers involved were in a local neo-confederate organization, and many of the targeted individuals remain in jail.
posted by hermanubis at 8:56 PM PST - 89 comments

How much daylight you get, every day of the year.
posted by curious nu at 8:09 PM PST - 37 comments

Peace Park 2015 Full Video
This year’s PEACE PARK offers elite riders a massive snowboard playground with endless new transitions and jumps including a half mile roller run, a 60 foot BBQ road gap, a quarter pipe measuring over 100 feet long and 22 feet high, a 22 foot bowl measuring 100 feet in diameter and more – all designed on Danny Davis’s terms. Built and filmed in the West Tetons of Wyoming, this year’s groundbreaking snowboard park is inspired by Danny’s creative vision and takes cues from skateboarding and surfing.
posted by andoatnp at 7:37 PM PST - 7 comments

Stand, virtually, on the stage of the Palais Garnier, among the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet. Use your mouse to manipulate a 360-degree video that allows you to see them from many angles as they perform Benjamin Millepied’s “Clear, Loud, Bright, Forward.” Or journey to Stratford-upon-Avon, where you can try to keep up with a frenetic Alex Hassell of the Royal Shakespeare Company as Henry V, exhorting his troops to go “once more unto the breach." The 360-degree videos are part of an innovative assemblage of performing arts groups that went online on Tuesday morning at the Google Cultural Institute, a free website that made its name in recent years by digitizing and displaying the collections of more than 800 art museums and historical archives.
posted by storybored at 7:23 PM PST - 5 comments

To paraphrase: Grappi is the fun friend from story and products, now in the light and shadow of a television! Interact of Grappi and do the good; make a health, not a hurt. Find a place, a weather, a friend! Do a many thing, make a Grappi joy! Hupa! You have found a strange video game that appears to originate from no known civilization. You have found Virtual Grappi. Be sure to check the instruction manual. (More from the real creator in the unfiction plane. And here's her original forum game [WARNINGS: PERHAPS TO SPOILERS])
posted by BiggerJ at 6:02 PM PST - 12 comments

Your guide to this year's Lifetime Christmas movies [more inside]
posted by Iridic at 5:09 PM PST - 49 comments

Mark Zuckerberg announced that he is giving 99% of his Facebook stock to charity. [more inside]
posted by el io at 4:14 PM PST - 210 comments

Small San Diego Developers See a New Frontier in Tijuana
posted by StrikeTheViol at 3:54 PM PST - 13 comments

Diana Serra Cary, also known as Baby Peggy, is one of the last living silent film actors, and possibly the only major star of the 1920s still alive. [more inside]
posted by Bourbonesque at 2:49 PM PST - 14 comments

A new short film, When AIDS Was Funny, unearths never-before-heard audio reaction to the escalating AIDS crisis.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:22 PM PST - 46 comments

The Art of Punk (previously) is a documentary series from MOCAtv, the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Arts’ YoutTube channel. The series looks at the visual language of the punk rock movement by focussing on three legendary punk rock bands and the seminal artists behind their iconic logos. [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A at 2:19 PM PST - 4 comments

The County: the story of America's deadliest police. First in a five part series by the Guardian. Here is some data which has been posted before [more inside]
posted by adamvasco at 1:51 PM PST - 20 comments

Orange is the new cats. The folks behind the game Exploding Kittens want to repair their kitten-related karma. They've launched a project to convince people to put orange collars on their indoor cats and to educate people that an orange collar on a cat indicates that the cat is an escaped indoor cat who needs to be returned to custody.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:34 PM PST - 70 comments

The 24-person marching band from Rotan, Texas, made it to the Division 1A state finals (i.e., "State") for the first time this year. [more inside]
posted by mudpuppie at 1:29 PM PST - 4 comments

The cast and crew of Tarantino's The Hateful Eight discuss the upcoming old-fashioned roadshow screenings of the first film to be projected in Ultra Panavision 70 in nearly fifty years. [more inside]
posted by hollyholly at 1:16 PM PST - 32 comments

Want to get an idea whether it'll be worth hauling your kit out to your favourite spot to capture a magnificent sunset? Consult the sunset forecast at SunsetWX. Forecast valid in continental US and adjoining fringes only. And SunCalc will let you know exactly where the sun will cross the horizon from your vantage point. [more inside]
posted by Mitheral at 11:43 AM PST - 17 comments

The analogy Kraus uses is that the world around us is like a great concert — and our brains are a mixing board. How that mixing board translates what we’re hearing can have a profound impact on what we understand about what’s going on around us... Here’s the good news: Kraus also firmly believes that our brains can be be trained to hear more clearly. She’s found that musicians and people who are bilingual are able to process sound better than the rest of us.

WNYC's Only Human brings you Listen Up! - a project "to help us all become better listeners." [more inside]
posted by melissasaurus at 11:34 AM PST - 16 comments

Drowned dinosaur eggs' fossil remains reveal embryos grew fast Plus a new study suggests a link between dinosaur and bird nesting habits. Another article frames that study differently. And, remarkably, a treasure trove of dinosaur eggs was found in fossil-poor Japan.
posted by Michele in California at 11:32 AM PST - 2 comments

Modernist gingerbread houses | More | Ginger Bauhaus | Architectural 3-D ginger cookie | The history of using gingerbread at Christmas with recipes.
posted by nickyskye at 11:16 AM PST - 16 comments

Women reacting to (and producing) harsh noise and sexy men of the synthesizer, two single-serving tumblrs from a WHPK dj (previously)
posted by kenko at 10:36 AM PST - 29 comments

A new Pew survey looks at attitudes towards free speech from around the world. It explores how different nations think about free speech and government, the press, religion, minorities, the internet. Also in the report: attitudes towards democracy, religion, and gender. (SLP)
posted by doctornemo at 10:26 AM PST - 62 comments

Chris Cornell covers the song One. (SLYT)
posted by bondcliff at 10:16 AM PST - 41 comments

"In his final arguments to the jurors, Groenweghe called Johnson’s accusers “promiscuous.” Hands in his pockets, eyes downcast, he told the members of the jury that these young gay men “have a lifestyle I don’t understand, that many of us don’t understand. But, he said that HIV criminalization laws weren’t put on the books by legislators just to protect them, but to protect the public health — including the health of the jurors." [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 9:50 AM PST - 95 comments

Inside Detroit's Bicycle Renaissance (NBC)
posted by aniola at 9:21 AM PST - 10 comments

Psy (previously) (previously) (previously) is back with a somewhat surreal and arguably catchy new single and video: Daddy (ft. CL of 2NE1) [more inside]
posted by sparklemotion at 9:10 AM PST - 23 comments

The Virtual Racism, Real Consequences campaign in Brazil geolocates racist Facebook and Twitter comments and puts them on billboards near the posters' homes, with names and faces blurred. The campaign started after a torrent of racist comments on a Facebook picture of Afro-Brazilian weather presenter Maria Júlia "Maju" Coutinho. [more inside]
posted by Etrigan at 8:41 AM PST - 25 comments

Last night on Monday Night Football, the Baltimore Ravens and The Cleveland Browns (both with terrible records and disappointing seasons) battled it out to stay out of the bottom of the AFC North rankings. The Browns seemed to have the game in the bag, as a series of Baltimore mistakes placed them within field goal range and a victory. However, the kick was blocked (a rarity in the NFL) and then returned for a touchdown (even rarer) for a 0 second win by The Ravens. Browns fans were upset (NWS: cursing). The media exposure of this unlikely series of events has caused renewed interest in a list that a fan compiled in October of this year: Every Browns Loss Since 1999, Ranked.
posted by codacorolla at 7:44 AM PST - 63 comments

ClickHole asks: What does it mean to be a man?
posted by schmod at 6:48 AM PST - 19 comments

Why are autumn leaves mostly yellow in Europe and red in North America? The colour of a British wood in autumn is predominantly yellow. There are relatively few European trees which have red leaves in the autumn....Autumn is much redder in North America and east Asia than it is in northern Europe, and this can’t be explained by temperature differences alone.
posted by caddis at 6:47 AM PST - 25 comments

Of course, no post-breakup wallow cycle is complete without revisiting Lauryn Hill’s debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. So one Tuesday evening, I got my glass of wine, dimmed the lights, and got ready for my almost daily routine of crying my eyes out until my tear ducts were depleted enough to be functional around well-adjusted humans for 8 hours the next working day.

That same Tuesday is when I promptly discovered that this album is terrible...As I am sure that a few of you are still vehemently denying reality, I will submit to you some incontrovertible track-by-track truth bombs. -- "The Miseducation Is Overrated", a truth bomb by Shamira Ibrahim
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:38 AM PST - 65 comments

Marlon James, winner of this year’s Man Booker prize, believes that writers of color are “pandering to the white woman.” [The Guardian]

The 2015 Man Booker prize winner Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often “pander to white women” to sell books, and that he could have been published more often if he had written “middle-style prose and private ennui”.

[more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:31 AM PST - 74 comments

The Birth and Death of Privacy
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:03 AM PST - 28 comments

Annalee Newitz (prev) is jumping ship for Ars Technica.
posted by valkane at 4:15 AM PST - 39 comments

If you’re looking for a good way to spend the rest of your week, Archive.org has unearthed a gigantic collection of cassettes from the mid-80 into the mid-90s. According to their notes, the 30GB collection was saved from the archives of noise-arch.net (previously) and donated by former CKLN-FM radio host Myke Dyer in August 2009. Due to its size and obscurity, the collection hasn’t been properly notated but is said to include cassettes ranging from “tape experimentation, industrial, avant-garde, indie, rock, DIY, subvertainment and auto-hypnotic materials”. (via FACT)
posted by lmfsilva at 3:25 AM PST - 22 comments

Stylish supercut of 70s and 80s hacking scenes.
posted by Sebmojo at 1:06 AM PST - 28 comments

Drummer Mike Portnoy drums a game of "Name That Tune" (NSFW) on a Hello Kitty drum kit. Bonus live set.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 12:25 AM PST - 6 comments