April 3, 2017

He's hating in heaven now

Berkeley's most iconic street character, The Hate Man, has died. [more inside]
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 11:13 PM PST - 13 comments

First good archaeological evidence of preventing zombies from returning

The Guardian reports that "A study by archaeologists has revealed certain people in medieval Yorkshire were so afraid of the dead they chopped, smashed and burned their skeletons (abstract, link to full paper) to make sure they stayed in their graves." The remains were found in Wharram Percy, one of the largest and best preserved of Britain's 3,000 or so known deserted medieval villages. [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief at 9:05 PM PST - 18 comments

Yes, it is heavenly ⚔️ No, I would rather eat actual tar

Marmite: The Origins of the World's Most Divisive Condiment
As for those on the fence about the taste? Well, there’s not really a fence. “I have, to date,” says Watkins, “only met one person who has claimed to be ambivalent about the taste of Marmite, and I don’t believe them.”
(h/t Miss Cellania)
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 6:22 PM PST - 107 comments

A Genocidal Nursery Rhyme

Alex Jacob examines the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Indians". [more inside]
posted by Rumple at 4:49 PM PST - 21 comments

Coming Up Again

Upcoming.org has returned! Originally founded by mefi’s own Andy Baio to help people find cool events, it was acquired by Yahoo back in 2006 and eventually killed off, its community squandered. After a successful 2014 kickstarter (as reported by The Verge and Engadget), a few years of background work, and a three-month code sprint, the site relaunched on March 30. Previously
(It also has the interesting distinction of being “the first major website to… use Archive Team's grab to recreate [its] data.”)
posted by Going To Maine at 4:47 PM PST - 12 comments

I'm still in love with you, textbook author, but you need to cool it now

...because if this isn't love for your students (causing you to release another new edition), then you can count me out! If High School and College Textbooks Were Honest. Other Cracked Honest Ads.
posted by klausman at 3:54 PM PST - 9 comments

"A System Designed to Make People Disappear"

I’m going to suggest something I have never suggested to any working person: If you are part of this machine—if you are a guard, an agent, a janitor, or anything in between—quit. Walk off your job. Right now. You’ve got bills to pay? A family to support? I get it. So do the people who come here looking for a better existence. The system you are contributing to is preposterously evil.
Dan Canon: I tried to represent an undocumented man rounded up by ICE. I couldn’t even find him.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:15 PM PST - 29 comments

Da-da-da-dat-dat-da-da-da

The CBS-Turner networks NCAA theme song: A "diminutive masterpiece of auditory branding genius?" If you've watched any of the NCAA men's tournament (the 2017 version of which ends tonight) over the past quarter century, you've heard the CBS March Madness earworm jingle in some form of the other. The current arrangement comes to you via Trevor Rabin, a South African-born musician who was once the guitarist for and the brains-behind-"90125"-era Yes. The original, 1993 tourney version came from Bob Christianson, the "John Williams of TV Sports," who came up with it in a basement studio in Manhattan. It stayed intact through 2003. Then there were other arrangements. For comparative purposes, here's the 1987-1992 theme. [more inside]
posted by raysmj at 2:08 PM PST - 8 comments

Learning, as an adult woman, you have autism

"In the old days we always thought that autism was very much a male condition," she said. "What we are now starting to realize is that it's not quite as simple as that, and that there are -- and always have been -- girls and women who are on the autism spectrum, but they present differently.
posted by bq at 2:05 PM PST - 53 comments

Visions of Jean-Pierre

A firsthand portrait of the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud at work by Olivier Assayas (Film Comment). [more inside]
posted by sapagan at 1:34 PM PST - 2 comments

Lisa S Davis meets Lisa S Davis

For 18 years, I thought she was stealing my identity. Until I found her. The tickets had something else in common. Brownsville, the South Bronx, East Harlem, Bed-Stuy (at least eight years ago, when the ticket was issued), all of them are neighborhoods with large black or Hispanic, and very small white, populations. It was then that it became clear to me: the reason for the tickets wasn’t that these Lisa Davises were petty criminals.
posted by Michele in California at 1:12 PM PST - 97 comments

Love in the Time of Cryptography

"In 2016, after several years of a simple and warm love affair, we hit a snag. We had decided to live together, and that I would emigrate to Europe. But to do this, we had to prove our relationship to the government. The instructions on how to do this skewed toward the modern forms of relationships: social media connections; emails; chats; pictures of the happy couple. He read through this, and showed it to me. We both laughed. Our relationship had left few traces in the digital world. We had none of these things." Love in the Time of Cryptography by Quinn Norton (previously).
posted by figurant at 12:20 PM PST - 8 comments

“There are no missing objects. Only unsystematic searchers.”

How to Find Your Missing Keys and Stop Losing Other Things [The New York Times] “You were sure you left the keys right there on the counter, and now they are nowhere to be found. Where could they be? Misplacing objects is an everyday occurrence, but finding them can be like going on a treasure hunt without a map. Here are some recommendations from experts to help you recover what is lost.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 11:33 AM PST - 84 comments

It's like Uber, but for Wal-Mart!

Amazon Wants Cheerios, Oreos and Other Brands to Bypass Wal-Mart Amazon.com Inc. has invited some of the world's biggest brands to its Seattle headquarters in an audacious bid to persuade them that it's time to start shipping products directly to online shoppers and bypass chains like Wal-Mart, Target and Costco.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:29 AM PST - 120 comments

Murderous Sleepwalker

With Ghost in the Shell failing to overcome the problems of its casting, at least at the box office, Alasdair Stuart takes a look at why the original remains a cyberpunk classic.
posted by Artw at 10:42 AM PST - 116 comments

Beautiful food

Despite Instagram, in-depth and beautiful food blogs are still a thing. A Life Worth Eating covers lovely fancy meals (and coffee) from around the world, such as El Bulli at its height and the sushi restaurant made famous by Jiro, and most recently, the (apparently much improved) Per Se. The long-standing ulterior epicure [prev] is similar, though the writing is longer and clever clever (see this older review of the famous Fat Duck), and there is a healthy (okay, not healthy) dose of much less upscale food from the American Midwest and South, and some excellent top dishes and restaurant lists.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:27 AM PST - 11 comments

“It’s really an exciting time to be a venom researcher.”

"Think about a venomous fang, and you’ll probably conjure up an image of a snake or spider. But perhaps you should also spare a thought for group of unassuming reef fish that are appropriately called fangblennies." [more inside]
posted by ChuraChura at 7:39 AM PST - 7 comments

More computer meta-weirdness from Tom7

Tom7/SuckerPinch is back. This time, he's written a DOS executable that only uses printable bytes. Because he could.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:15 AM PST - 29 comments

The sky's awake, so I'm awake!

Twin babies act out their favorite scene from "Frozen". [Facebook link, also available here]. Cuteness ensues.
posted by Mchelly at 6:08 AM PST - 22 comments

Jesus Christ Let's Help Them

Let's start the week off right with a Big Beautiful Day courtesy of ✨✨PWR BTTM✨✨ the queerpunk duo who have already conquered the NPR Tiny Desk, BESTIE$ FOR CA$H, A.V. Undercover (Counting Crows!), and yes, even frikkin SXSW. [n.b. Some songs have cussing] [more inside]
posted by gwint at 5:32 AM PST - 8 comments

What do International Relations Academics think about Security Threats?

So I emailed 79 academic colleagues in politics and international relations departments across the world, all of whom had published work on security, most of whom offered courses on security at their institutions. I received responses from the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark and South Africa. Ultimately, 59 responded. There were three key ‘findings’ of this exercise.
posted by infini at 3:46 AM PST - 25 comments

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