April 20, 2018
He waka eke noa.
He aha te mea nui o te ao.
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
Where are we going? Somewhere we belong.
I found [suddenly departed] Avicii's debut album True [this is the link that shows singers and musicians and such] delightfully revelatory and I don't think his influence worldwide on EDM can be overstated. His willingness to find the intersection between X and Y has fed dance music since 2013, and will long into the future. [Ed. Note: Plus, it's one hell of a fucking affirming group of songs, and there's nothing wrong with having someone sing to you about how the world can be right when all this bullshit is going on. Give it a listen through, and it's okay to discard it after that.] Side A: Wake Me Up [video], You Make Me [video], Hey Brother [video], Addicted To You [video], Dear Boy [more inside]
Accelerated evolution of super-cockroaches is "unlikely to happen"
The world’s largest cockroach farm is breeding 6 billion adult cockroaches a year and using artificial intelligence to manage a colony larger than the world’s human population – all for medicinal use. It is part of the production process for a “healing potion” consumed by millions of patients in China, according to the government.
What makes #9B51E0 purple?
Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs "Why do we perceive background-color: #9B51E0 as this particular purple?
This is one of those questions where I thought I’d known the answer for a long time, but as I inspected my understanding, I realized there were pretty significant gaps.
Through an exploration of electromagnetic radiation, optical biology, colorimetry, and display hardware, I hope to start filling in some of these gaps." [more inside]
The psychedelic renaissance or enclosing mind expansion?
Will psychedelics go corporate like cannabis? - "As billionaires start to invest in psychedelics, some longtime researchers in the field worry they’ll just become another commodity." (via)
“From colorblindness to subtitles, the medium still has a way to go...”
How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players [Waypoint] “Text size is so important, not just for people with less than 20/20 vision, but also anyone who doesn't have a huge TV, or isn't able to sit close to it. It's a classic example of something that is really tough to go back to and fix, but if you consider it early enough in development, it's free, it's just another design decision. Catering for colorblindness is a bit more complex, as it's a design job based on how a particular game mechanic works. But it's generally about just making sure you don't rely on color alone to communicate or differentiate. And if there's no alternative to color reliance, let people choose the colors that work best for them. Subtitles are used by so many people for so many reasons, from hearing loss to playing on public transport, from unpredictable audio mixes to hard-to-understand alien and robotic accents, to playing in a noisy room to when the baby is asleep, so you need the TV on mute.” [more inside]
McInnes, Molyneux, and 4chan
Investigating pathways to the alt-right is SPLC's exploration of the question, "what brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?"
CONSUME
Drunk Education, previously Drunk TED Talks presents a lecture by MeFi's own John Leavitt: The Only Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism [via mefi projects]
SSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
I can't tell where the journey will end
RIP Tim Bergling, Swedish DJ and producer better known as Avicii. Levels. Wake Me Up. True Stories - trailer.
The Weedian Abides
On this auspicious date in 2018, Matt Pike and Al Cisneros have reunited alongside Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder to birth a new Sleep LP, The Sciences (album stream). The record was teased less than 24 hours in advance, unless you count a cryptic Morse code message issued last year. [more inside]
Art and Sexism
"While feminist art critics have for decades pointed out the shortcomings of the 'male gaze,' the post-#MeToo reckoning with the art world’s systemic sexism, its finger-on-the-scale preference for male genius, has given that critique a newly powerful force. And the question of the moment has become: Is it still an artistically justifiable pursuit for a man to paint a naked woman?" Images at the link show painted or sculpted nudity and may be nsfw. [more inside]
Minimum Wage Should Be A Living Wage
“Raising the minimum wage does exactly what it should—it raises wages for the lowest-earning Americans, and it continues to benefit them for years after the increase takes effect. Additionally, it looks like raising the wages for the lowest-paid workers could create a cascading effect that generates raises for employees higher up the earning ladder.” a deep data study by the U.S Census Bureau just announced the long-lasting efficacy of raising the minimum wage - so why isn’t it being reported? (Medium - Civic Skunk) Link to report PDF.
Floating Bog Menaces Crow Wing County
“They said there was this huge chunk of land floating towards them... And they were sitting there having coffee and it just kept coming. It destroyed their dock and boat lifts and they wanted to know what to do about it.” Randy Tesdahl of the American Legion (“I come right out and admit, I am not an engineer”) considers a plan involving tractors, logs, and some really long chains. Atlas Obscura now solicits your solutions for dealing with the sphagnum monstrosity.
dry, the beloved country
I wrote to my friend Paul, who lives in an apartment in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, to see if I could stay with him in Cape Town. He agreed—but only if I understood what was going on. What was going on, he suggested, was not just a drought, but a kind of vast, unplanned, crazy—and fabulous—social experiment. “I hope you’ll be game to test your water-saving limits!” he wrote me. “Nothing leaves the flat except via the toilet these days. The sink and bath are plugged ... I can manage the washing machine on the lowest setting, and its output goes into a 25-liter container for additional flushing. It’s all a bit extreme perhaps,” he conceded.Surprising, even beautiful things can happen when it feels as if the world is about to end. [more inside]
"It doesn't work for me, I'm a failure as a pot smoker"
17. ORANGE. 18. 19. 20.
The debut album from Boards of Canada, Music Has The Right To Children, turns 20 today. [more inside]
The [REDACTED] Robe Leaves Broadway
Broadway is full of funny old traditions handed down over the decades, but one is about to be retired. The "Gypsy Robe" is handed down from musical to musical, honoring the members of the chorus. It wasn't named after the Sondheim-Styne-Laurents musical (in fact, it predates that show by nearly a decade), but after the idea that the robe "travels" from show to show, like the itinerant Romani people. Actors Equity, the union that sponsors the Robe, recently admitted that "the words we use have an impact beyond their intent, and we cannot appropriate someone else's identity without their voice attached to it." The tradition will continue, but the Robe will be renamed based on a vote by Equity members.
When the Windrush blows
Last week's Commonwealth Games brought a warm glow to many viewers in the "Home Countries" of the UK, but for those with ties to the wider Commonwealth it was a reminder of the chill now surrounding them. This week, stories of elderly members of the Windrush generation (named for the ship that brought the first post-war West Indian migrants to Britain in 1948) being dismissed from their jobs, denied NHS care, refused reentry to Britain, and even deported to countries they hadn't visited since childhood, brought the consequences of former Home Secretary Theresa May's "hostile environment" for undocumented migrants into the full view of the British public and press, after years of warnings from lawyers, reporters, MPs and the people affected. [more inside]
"the River Tiber foaming with much blood"
On 20 April 1968, the Conservative MP Enoch Powell delivered one of the most divisive speeches ever made by a British politician, in which he argued that by permitting mass immigration, the country was "heaping up its own funeral pyre". The speech caused an outcry, but 'Enoch was right' has been a racist dog-whistle for far-right politicians ever since. Fifty years on, the BBC explores the legacy of the speech for the immigrant communities in Wolverhampton, Powell's old constituency: Living in Enoch's Shadow. (Warning: offensive language) [more inside]
Framed for Murder by His Own DNA
When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder. Traditional police work would have never steered police to Anderson. But the DNA hit led them to seek other evidence confirming his guilt.
« Previous day | Next day »