May 12, 2016

A Black Eye For Open Science

Recently, a dataset of 70,000 scraped OkCupid profiles from November 2014 to March 2015 was released on the Open Science Framework. The set, which was acquired without the consent of either OKCupid or the profile owners, had no anonymization performed on it, meaning that the profiles could be easily correlated to the people behind them, effectively doxing these individuals, a gross violation of research ethics on a number of grounds. Social computing expert Oliver Keyes described the release as "without a doubt one of the most grossly unprofessional, unethical and reprehensible data releases I have ever seen." [more inside]
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:47 PM PST - 73 comments

Throw me in a haunted wheelbarrow and set me on fire

The Friday poem: 'Monica’, by Hera Lindsay Bird Monica Geller off popular sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S / Is one of the worst characters in the history of television / She makes me want to wash my hands with hand sanitizer / She makes me want to stand in an abandoned Ukrainian parking lot / And scream her name at a bunch of dead crows
posted by Sebmojo at 8:37 PM PST - 26 comments

"I Googled it, baby!"

TO THIS DAY, Caldwell isn't sure how authorities took down his drug cartel so swiftly. Perhaps it was the poorly stuffed shoebox-sized package wrapped in elaborate Chinese markings that sounded like a Molly-stuffed maraca moving down the post office's conveyor belt. "Good lord that boy was a bad criminal," says his mom, "and thank Jesus for that."
How Reche Caldwell Googled his way from the Patriots to prison.
posted by Existential Dread at 8:15 PM PST - 11 comments

Want to combat Hollywood gender discrimination? Watch movies by women.

Here’s a list of 245 movies directed by women, on Netflix right now. The list is compiled by Film Fatales.
posted by ocherdraco at 8:04 PM PST - 20 comments

Pathetic Motorways

If people ever do think of a motorway, they think of miles upon miles of tarmac, of great long roads that go from one end of the country to another. This isn't always the case, which is where Pathetic Motorways comes in. Here we look at the shorter, more unusual motorways in a tongue-in-cheek manner; and also examine motorway history - in other words what is, what was, and what might have been all based around those blue lines on maps.
posted by MoonOrb at 7:20 PM PST - 12 comments

“So I embarked on another round of testing.”

How Chris McCandless Died: An update to ‘Into the Wild’ by Jon Krakauer [Medium] The debate over what killed Chris McCandless, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering and occasionally flaring for more than two decades now. Shortly after the first edition of Into the Wild was published in January 1996, University of Alaska chemists Edward Treadwell and Thomas Clausen shot down my theory that the cause of McCandless’s death was a toxic alkaloid contained in the seeds of the Eskimo potato plant, Hedysarum alpine, also known as wild potato. When Treadwell and Clausen completed chemical analyses of the Eskimo potato seeds I’d sent them, they found no trace of any poisonous compounds. “I tore that plant apart,” Dr. Clausen explained to Men’s Journal in 2007. “There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I’d eat it myself.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 6:52 PM PST - 87 comments

“A true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.”

Katherine Dunn, author of Geek Love, has passed away. Katherine Dunn, whose best-selling novel Geek Love was a National Book Award finalist in 1989 and became a cult classic, died at age 70 in her Portland home on May 11.
posted by Windigo at 6:08 PM PST - 41 comments

buff anthro pokemon

buff anthro pokemon
posted by clorox at 5:44 PM PST - 22 comments

Pyrex pleasures

Happy Vintage Pyrex Addiction / Rare Vintage Pyrex (Pinterest) | Vintage Pyrex Kitchenware (article, Collector's Weekly) | Pattern Reference and This Is NOT Pyrex (blog posts from Pyrex Love) | How to Tell Old Pyrex from Really Old Pyrex (blog post, Cara Corey) | 3 Reasons I Love (and Collect) Vintage Pyrex (The Kitchn) | Previously: now we're cooking with glass, American Pyrex Less Resistant to Thermal Shock
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 5:00 PM PST - 35 comments

Amadeus, visualized

Confutatis K.626 - Scrolling Score (Amadeus + musical notation)
posted by starman at 4:19 PM PST - 8 comments

“bureaucratized rape” in the coal fields

‘Rape Rooms’: How West Virginia Women Paid Off Coal Company Debts | What was the Esau scrip? [with audio included] | The Whipple Company Store | The Soul of a Company Store - The Haunted History of Whipple, WV [audio, story sharing]. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye at 4:07 PM PST - 17 comments

Welcome. Delicious friend.

Victorian London has Fallen... into the Earth. Or perhaps it was stolen? [more inside]
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:41 PM PST - 37 comments

Mr. Barne's Steel Shod Players Beat a Nine of Amateurs

The Lost Sport of Ice Baseball that Originated in Brooklyn: First played in 1861. "The rules to ice baseball were essentially the same as for regular baseball but with certain concessions:" [more inside]
posted by ursus_comiter at 1:48 PM PST - 4 comments

I can haz bording pazz?

More than 80,000 people have been forced to flee the raging fire in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Now, two airlines have relaxed their rules about animals in aircraft cabins, offering a chance for all family members to stay together onboard.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 1:46 PM PST - 21 comments

"The Brontes had their moors, I have my marshes."

It's spring in Wisconsin, and the rivers are running. Time to think of Lorine Niedecker, Wisconsin's austere laborer poet, who lived her whole life in modest circumstances on the shores of Lake Koshkonong, sometimes working as a janitor. From her small home came some of the greatest American poetry , as she lived her complex, but simple, "Life by Water."
posted by SandCounty at 12:43 PM PST - 10 comments

To cut or not to cut

The Internet's gift to movie geeks that just keeps on giving is out with another video. Tony Zhou (so many previouslies) makes an examination of the editing process in film with some particular examinations of Hanna and Her Sisters, In the Mood for Love and The Empire Strikes Back. And if that isn't enough to wet your editing whistle, have a look at CineFix's Top Ten Most Effective Editing Moments of All Time (Warning: Un Chien Andalou. I learned my lesson from last time).
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 12:31 PM PST - 16 comments

Making peace with missing out

For music fans, 2016 has quickly become the year of the insta-release. Are you overwhelmed? Excited? Numb and jaded? Checked out entirely? Have you tweeted out your hastily-formed opinion about the latest Big Event album before everyone moves on? Beyoncé, Radiohead and FOMO: How sustainable is the era of the “insta-release?” From March: The Music Critic in the Age of the Insta-Release
posted by naju at 11:59 AM PST - 19 comments

When you've got to mail a letter from Leningrad to Stalingrad

Want to send a letter, but also want to express your admiration for the glorious heroes of the revolution? Stamp Russia has got you covered. [more inside]
posted by Krom Tatman at 10:33 AM PST - 1 comments

They heavily influenced all other small-penised European sculptures.

Why do all old statues have such small penises? and other such pressing art history discussion at How To Talk About Art History. Previously, previously, previously.
posted by Evilspork at 10:14 AM PST - 54 comments

"I started with a box and some leg sticks."

ActualDog is making a game about rectangular pink dogs. This is the development log, which is six pages of amazing gifs of rectangular pink dogs doing rectangular pink dog stuff.
posted by cortex at 10:13 AM PST - 20 comments

Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Free Basics: Facebook's Biggest Setback From Zuckerberg’s vantage point, high above the connected world he had helped create, India was a largely blank map. [more inside]
posted by modernnomad at 9:28 AM PST - 48 comments

Web 0.0

Civitacampomarano is a small village in the province of Campobasso, Italy, with just 400 souls, mainly elderly. In this village, rich in folk traditions, Internet is a partially unknown world: mobile phones have difficulty working and the data connection is practically nonexistent. [more inside]
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:25 AM PST - 12 comments

Like a sky full of stars

The Maya Map shows the plethora of known archaeological sites. From the Maya Research Project's Lars Kotthoff.
posted by Panjandrum at 9:00 AM PST - 1 comments

Crossover Comic, with Counseling

Comics artist Panic Volkushka imagines a present day scene [SLTumblr] between those Fox TV sons, Chris Griffin, Bobby Hill, and Bart Simpson (cw: discussion of abuse).
posted by coolname at 8:51 AM PST - 35 comments

Exxxtreme Baking (Circular Saw Required)

Misha Collins and his kids are back in the kitchen, and THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL. [more inside]
posted by Deeleybopper at 7:46 AM PST - 6 comments

Brazil’s Zika problem is inconveniently not ending.

Harvard Public Health Review: Why Public Health Concerns for Global Spread of Zika Virus Means That Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Olympic Games Must Not Proceed [more inside]
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:24 AM PST - 91 comments

BBC Self Link? Charter Renewal and the Future of Auntie

The BBC must put "distinctive content" at its heart, Culture Secretary John Whittingdale has said. It is part of a major overhaul of how the BBC is run, which has been unveiled by the government. The licence fee will continue for at least 11 years and will be linked to inflation - and viewers will need to pay it to use BBC iPlayer. Mr Whittingdale made clear he was "emphatically not saying the BBC should not be popular". [more inside]
posted by marienbad at 7:22 AM PST - 24 comments

A taxpayer-paid private security source for Walmart

The Tampa Bay Times compared police visits to the number of calls at nearby Target stores, and even to an entire mall. There were four times as many calls to Walmart, on average, compared to Target. When it comes to calling the cops, Walmart is such an outlier compared with its competitors that experts criticized the corporate giant for shifting too much of its security burden onto taxpayers. “Law enforcement becomes in effect a taxpayer-paid private security source for Walmart,” said New York-based leading retail analyst Burt Flickinger. (via)
posted by cynical pinnacle at 7:15 AM PST - 47 comments

Playing By Pyongyang's Rules

The compromises North Korea’s most popular tour operator makes for access. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:04 AM PST - 10 comments

Unforgettable: Becoming an Amnesiac’s Memory

“Do you remember us,” I asked. I was conscious of my voice. It failed, just a bit, on that “us,” but I was trying to keep the terror to myself.
“Technically, yes,” he said.
Caitlin Myer writes for Electric Literature about her experience of her lover losing his memory. (Includes some fairly mild NSFW text, but Your Workplace May Vary.)
posted by Stacey at 7:00 AM PST - 8 comments

no YOUR car culture

I can think of nothing better for you to do than to watch this supercut of SUVs missing jumps
posted by beerperson at 6:52 AM PST - 34 comments

"We Must Go Forward"

In response to a question from one of the 900 woman religious gathered at the Vatican today on behalf of the International Union of Superiors General (representing nearly half a million Catholic women religious on five continents), Pope Francis said he would convene a commission to study the possibility of permitting female deacons in the Catholic Church, "signaling an historic openness to the possibility of ending the global institution’s practice of an all-male clergy." [more inside]
posted by sallybrown at 6:19 AM PST - 41 comments

Yamanote Eki-Melo

The Yamanote Line is the most famous and well-travelled train line in Tokyo. Each station on the Yamanote plays a song (eki-melo, "train melody", 発車メロディ or "hassha melody") when trains are about to depart, differing by platform, direction and station. Click any post to listen to that station's eki-melo! (Links to sound clips can be tricky to discern - begin with the station list, find a station you like and then click on the title of song which follows the platform & station names.) [more inside]
posted by timshel at 5:59 AM PST - 11 comments

Short runway, terrain everywhere, rocks at either end and 40KT winds

Extreme airliner landings at Wellington International Airport, New Zealand, 13 January 2012. Extreme airliner landings at Wellington International Airport, New Zealand, 2 January 2013. Extreme airliner landings and takeoffs at Wellington International Airport, New Zealand, 8 September 2012. Extreme airliner landings and takeoffs at Wellington International Airport, New Zealand, 3 July 2013. [All videos via the Airside TV YouTube channel.] [more inside]
posted by Sonny Jim at 3:57 AM PST - 52 comments

high wire cat

cat pls. cat wtf no
posted by Panthalassa at 1:19 AM PST - 35 comments

A “made in Italy” made by English

How Marsala Wine Became an Italian Typical Product: "It is not by chance that, when in the 1960s a “Protected Denomination of Origin” system was established, Marsala was the first Italian product to obtain such recognition. The history of this wine and the role that it plays in the international commerce since the end of the 19th c., is however strongly reliant on merchants and entrepreneurs that were not Italian, but English."
posted by Drinky Die at 1:07 AM PST - 7 comments

Yes. It's okay to feed them sugar water.

Instagram is awash in famous animals, from Marnie the Dog and Grumpy Cat to an adorable assortment of hedgehogs and prairie dogs and everything else you can think of, including a white fox. And then there is Tracy Johnson and her beautiful hummingbirds.

Wired Mag: Wildly beautiful slow-motion videos of hummingbirds up close.
Instagram: hummingbirdsxoxo
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 12:22 AM PST - 12 comments

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