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Carrie Ann Baade [NSFW] paints pictures that link “the power of historical masterworks with [her] own experience as a contemporary artist.” Her work is fragmentary using an image bank culled from Renaissance and Baroque art which is used to contemplate “the ageless issues of morality, politics, and the individual quest for self-expression.” [NSFW] She describes herself as “a kind of Dr. Frankenstein attempting to piece together the sublime.”
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:09 PM PST - 2 comments

The 2018 fire season in California has been the deadliest and most destructive in the state's history, and made visible smoke across the USA. The Carr Fire, in and around Redding, killed eight as it burned 359 square miles over a month and a week, whose deadliest day came from a fire tornado, a long 150 Minutes of Hell

The tornado signified with horrifying clarity the reality California faces. As wildfire season intensifies, conflagrations will increasingly defy efforts to control them, becoming more powerful and erratic as they race into communities, striking in ways that once seemed unfathomable. “As much as I hate to say it, this is what the future of wildfires looks like[ed],” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “Except the acceleration hasn't ended yet.”

[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:06 PM PST - 31 comments

Rémy Métailler rides Mountain Bikes with a mounted GoPro.
Here he is taking the Medellín Challenge in Colombia.
Photos from the same race.
Here he is @ The RedBull Valparaiso Urban DH 2014
posted by growabrain at 5:49 PM PST - 17 comments

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart gave a demo of NLS, the "oN-Line System", to the Fall Joint Computer Conference of the ACM and IEEE. Later dubbed The Mother of All Demos, it demonstrated many concepts that would later become fundamental elements of personal computing, including the mouse, windows, hypertext, graphics, video conferencing, and word processing. [more inside]
posted by ckape at 3:45 PM PST - 22 comments

In a time where the feminist movement was fairly nascent in India and the film-industry was struggling between exploring social themes and conventional ones, Smita Patil was like the missing puzzle piece who fit just right. [more inside]
posted by nightrecordings at 12:59 PM PST - 3 comments

Dimensions.Guide is a comprehensive and beautiful database of dimensioned drawings documenting the standard measurements and sizes of all kinds of objects and spaces. [more inside]
posted by Foci for Analysis at 10:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Red Dead Redemption 2's Redface Proves How Far Games Haven't Come [Paste Magazine] “It’s nearly the end of 2018, and I have to write an article about blackface and redface in Red Dead Redemption 2. That sucks. It sucks, because it means no one bothered to interrogate the casting. It sucks, because I know the pushback I’ll get for being the one to call out readily apparent racism in a game that opened to $725 million in sales. It sucks, because we’re still having to have conversations about why the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and the dehumanization of people of color is bad. It sucks, because didn’t we just do this with Uncharted: The Lost Legacy? And it sucks, because I hoped maybe we could do better than Charles, and as a Native woman who got her start pleading with games journalists and developers to do better, I wouldn’t need to keep writing these articles.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 10:49 AM PST - 21 comments

Andy Serkis joins the debate on Brexit by expressing Theresa May's inner Gollum. (slyt)
posted by Eleven at 9:55 AM PST - 23 comments

The History of Architecture in Eleven Arches
posted by infini at 9:52 AM PST - 27 comments

1995 saw the release of You Sleigh Me, a compilation album of Holiday songs which featured an interesting selection of artists and many really good performances. Cassette Side A: Run Rudolph Run - Mary Kartzen, Blue Christmas - Collective Soul, Little Drummer Boy - Tori Amos, Christmas Lights - Donna Lewis, The First Noel - Billy Pilgrim, Make It Home - Juliana Hatfield [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 9:29 AM PST - 4 comments

A behind-the-scenes tour of the large facility that houses cetacean specimens for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
posted by carter at 7:47 AM PST - 2 comments

Today is the 70th anniversary of the United Nation's passage of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. (Tomorrow will be the 70th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.) 45 nations have yet to ratify it. "Genocide" is a relatively new word, having been coined in 1943 to describe the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, but the practise is depressingly ancient and common. Biblical scholars argue about whether the Canaanites and Amalekites suffered genocide; Rome and Athens both committed genocides. A two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide is available. The definition of genocide in the Convention is broader than the conventional usage, and Canadians might be dismayed to realize that forcing First Nations children into residential schools probably counts as genocide under the Convention.
posted by clawsoon at 6:15 AM PST - 14 comments

What has made Uber a good deal for users makes it a lousy investment proposition. The notion that Uber, the most highly valued private company in the world, is a textbook “bezzle” — John Kenneth Galbraith’s coinage for an investment swindle where the losses have yet to be recognized — is likely to come as a surprise to its many satisfied customers. ... Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi effectively admitted that Uber isn’t profitable in any market when you factor in corporate overheads.
posted by mecran01 at 6:07 AM PST - 87 comments

Uber engineers build an AI that can reliably beat 80s videogame classic Montezuma's Revenge.
posted by panama joe at 6:07 AM PST - 7 comments