December 12, 2019

What harm can it do.

Rosa Lyster uses a seemingly innocuous occurence with her mother on Facebook to reflect on the warping power of new media: "There is no sense to be made of it, no logic to be derived, no sophisticated or intelligent interpretation ... There’s just something fundamentally unsound about it, something scary and weird and emblematic of these scary and weird times." The Year in 5.
posted by codacorolla at 9:16 PM PST - 53 comments

“Ernie! You are annoying me!” / “Ladies…”

For Vanity Fair, Sesame Street Characters Do Impressions of Each Other” (Previously they read movie quotes, Elmo described his day, and Big Bird took a lie detector test.)
For The New Yorker, Sesame Street Enters The New Yorker’s Cartoon-Caption Contest”
posted by Going To Maine at 9:02 PM PST - 6 comments

"We're seeing...clothing brands...throwing out or incinerating clothes"

"Do you order different sizes of clothing online, knowing you can return the one that doesn't fit? Did you know the ones you return are sometimes sent straight to landfill?"
posted by clawsoon at 8:16 PM PST - 36 comments

RetroArch for the Blind

Video games for the blind are perhaps a contradiction in terms, but this upcoming project hopes to improve the situation.
posted by Alensin at 6:46 PM PST - 5 comments

Herbert died

You probably don't know Herbert Pundik, but he was a keeper of dreams Herbert lived with his fate as a refugee. He made it clear that once one had been forced to flee ones home, normality never returned. But he was determined to work for a better world. In the beginning he fought for Israel, even as a spy. But he learnt to expand his ideals beyond one nation, and also suffered from great losses. [more inside]
posted by mumimor at 4:06 PM PST - 3 comments

"What does Sueñito mean?" "It means Little Dream."

The first trailer for the film adaptation of Lin Manuel Miranda's first Broadway show, In the Heights, is out. [more inside]
posted by the sockening at 3:07 PM PST - 20 comments

No Domain For Old Men

How a feud over a website address led to a bloody shootout: "He slammed the door behind him and braced for impact. Moments later, the intruder kicked through the doorway and grabbed Deyo by the neck. 'Where’s your computer?' he demanded."
posted by Gin and Broadband at 2:17 PM PST - 19 comments

Thousands of "Penis Fish" wash up in Point Reyes

Also known as "fat innkeeper worms," this burrowing creature is found from southern Oregon to Baja but mostly around Monterey. This time, they landed on Drake's Beach.
posted by agatha_magatha at 1:48 PM PST - 43 comments

Whom My Soul Loves

Osnat went back to talk to the dybbuk again... [more inside]
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 12:59 PM PST - 6 comments

Numbers average up but words pile on.

Combining Probability Forecasts: 60% and 60% Is 60%, but Likely and Likely Is Very Likely. "... imagine that you are purchasing a plane ticket for your next vacation and you check two websites, Kayak and Hopper, to see if they predict any future price changes. If both websites say that there is a 60% chance that prices will increase, you would typically average the two and also believe there is a 60% chance. However, if both sites say that it is “likely” that prices will increase, you would act as if you are “counting” each prediction as a positive signal, becoming more confident in your prediction and believing that a price increase is “very likely.” " Also: Verbal probabilities: Very likely to be somewhat more confusing than numbers.
posted by storybored at 12:00 PM PST - 14 comments

where the record is unclear about the number of eels due

English Eel-Rents: 10th-17th Centuries and So you're a medieval landlord, collecting property rent from your peasants in eels (Surprised Eel Historian on Twitter)
posted by readinghippo at 10:40 AM PST - 27 comments

As members of Christ’s body, we are called to cancel debts.

This North Carolina Church Is Doing Something Radical: Paying Off People’s Debts. Anne Helen Petersen writes: On Wednesday night at Jubilee Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a group sits around the same sort of rickety conference table you’d find in churches all over the town, the state, the country. In the cabinets behind them, there are old Baptist tracts and stacks of New Testaments with covers declaring GOOD NEWS AMERICA, GOD LOVES YOU. But no one’s reading Galatians tonight. They’re reading Karl Marx. [more inside]
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:04 AM PST - 35 comments

No ancient emperor ever lived so well

We talk about energy production and consumption in terms of watt-hours, joules, horsepower and calories. But what if we talked about it in terms of people? What if we followed Buckminster Fuller's framing of "energy slaves?"
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:02 AM PST - 32 comments

Harbinger households: neighborhoods that reliably buy products that fail

In The Surprising Breadth of Harbingers of Failure (Sci-Hub mirror), a trio of economists and business-school profs build on a 2015 Journal of Marketing Research paper that claimed that some households' purchasing preferences are a reliable indicator of which products will fail -- that is, if households in a certain ZIP code like a product, it will probably not succeed. The original paper calls these "harbinger households."
posted by Etrigan at 8:50 AM PST - 60 comments

44,000-Year-Old Indonesian Cave Painting Is Rewriting The History Of Art

In the 1950s, scientists evaluated primitive rock art discovered in caves on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia (Google maps), but assumed it younger than 10,000 years old because they thought older paintings could not survive in a tropical climate. Then, as reported in 2014, more recent analysis of the pictures by an Australian-Indonesian team has stunned researchers by dating one hand marking to at least 39,900 years old (The Guardian; paywalled article in Nature), placing it close to, if not pre-dating, art from the Chauvet Cave in France (Archeologie.Culture.Fr) that is dated as old as 37,000 years (PNAS). In 2017, the scientists in Indonesia found a massive hunting scene, stretching across about 16 feet of a cave wall. And after testing it, they say it's the oldest known figurative art attributed to early modern humans (NPR). They published their findings in the journal Nature (paywalled).
posted by filthy light thief at 8:35 AM PST - 22 comments

Who will Winalot today? A European country votes.

Today, the bit of Europe between France and Éire takes walkies to vote in a General Election. There are pictures of large queues and important visitors and surprise visitors at polling stations. Final campaigning has occurred. How the results will come in, and live updates from the Guardian and BBC online coverage. Wikipedia page on the election. For political balance (previous).
posted by Wordshore at 7:29 AM PST - 369 comments

unexpectedly confronted with circumstances

A west Clare man fled naked across the seaside resort of Kilkee to his granny’s house after being found in bed with another man’s fiancée. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 5:37 AM PST - 22 comments

“I just like talking, writing about, and playing games,”

The Game Awards: How Geoff Keighley helped create The Oscars for gaming [The Washington Post] “ In 2014, Keighley created The Game Awards, which the New York Times once called the “Oscars of gaming.” But that undercuts Keighley’s ambition. He wants The Game Awards to be the best awards show on the planet. [...] “As a 14-year-old kid, sitting next to [The Sims creator] Will Wright and have him talk about science and life, I felt like I was meeting Albert Einstein," Keighley said. "It’s always driven me. How do we recognize these people?” The Game Awards were borne out of this question, and his view that prior awards shows seemed to prioritize marketing product over the games’ creators. [...] The entire show is only available online, streamed on a dozen platforms, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Steam, without any assistance from cable networks.” [The Game Awards Nominees] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 5:20 AM PST - 31 comments

On the troubling trail of psychiatry’s pseudopatients stunt

From 1969 to 1972, an extraordinary experiment played out in 12 psychiatric institutions across 5 US states. Eight healthy people — including David Rosenhan, a social psychologist at Stanford University in California, who ran the experiment — convinced psychiatrists that they needed to be committed to mental hospitals. The ensuing paper, published in Science in 1973 (free access), opens with the words: “If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?” It claimed that the psychiatric establishment was unable to distinguish between the two. Rosenhan’s study had far-reaching and much-needed effects on psychiatric care in the United States and elsewhere. By the 1980s, most psychology textbooks were quoting it. However, Susannah Cahalan’s investigation of the social-psychology experiment in her book The Great Pretender finds inconsistencies that appear to indicate it was all an unelaborate fraud.
posted by Blasdelb at 4:40 AM PST - 31 comments

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