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In a world of crazy coffee-making contraptions (Espresso Made in Italy) the "cafetière-locomotive" or coffee-making train stands apart (Atlas Obscura), pairing railroad fever (Archive.org) and increased interest in coffee (PBS). First patented in 1861 (Early Tech) by an Italian architect living in Paris, Jean Baptiste Toselli, this bit of "domestic theatre" was reserved only for the very wealthy, as they were never mass-produced.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:41 PM PST - 21 comments

The new glitchless, tool-assisted speedrun of the NES version of Taito's classic arcade hit Breakout clone Arkanoid is 10% faster than the previous record. It was done in an interesting way: the runner simulated the game on a frame-by-frame level in a C++ reimplementation, then used it to brute force a solution to each level, which required a year's worth of CPU effort (split across six cores) to accomplish. Here are full details, including video (12m) of the result played back in an emulator. For extra fun, he made an ASCII-art version of the run!
posted by JHarris at 8:13 PM PST - 27 comments

Virtual Angkor is "a groundbreaking collaboration between Virtual History Specialists, Archaeologists and Historians designed to bring the Cambodian metropolis of Angkor to life. Built for the classroom, it has been created to take students into a 3D world and to use this simulation to ask questions about Angkor’s place in larger networks of trade and diplomacy, its experience with climate variability and the structure of power and kingship that underpinned the city." [Via] [more inside]
posted by homunculus at 6:06 PM PST - 3 comments

It seems that Gmail reads receipts for things you purchase that end up in your inbox, storing them under a 'Purchases' page. It's hard to find where this stuff is stored, and even harder to get rid of it. [more inside]
posted by Quackles at 5:50 PM PST - 96 comments

Democracy is hungry work, so democracysausage.org helps Aussies find a polling place to suit their democratic and saturday barbie needs. It's federal election day in Australia.
posted by adept256 at 4:14 PM PST - 200 comments

Where Should a Child Die? Hospice Homes Help Families With the Unimaginable
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:04 PM PST - 13 comments

Need a place to rest your mouse while reading the agenda? Be sure to leave some space for a cursor park. [more inside]
posted by bbuda at 3:41 PM PST - 9 comments

r/confusing_perspective is the place for puzzling perspectives, confusing angles, and missing context.
Cat's face
Runner of the skies
Perfect timing
Pretty nails
Beach baby and Park Baby
Dilma Rousseff
Shadow
Luckily my son grew into his hand [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 2:37 PM PST - 31 comments

A philosopher ponders why advice so often fails to land. She further distinguishes between instruction, advice, and coaching in an illuminating manner. This essay jibes with my self-help journey and ultimate dissatisfaction with the genre. [more inside]
posted by bbrown at 1:23 PM PST - 39 comments

Talk to Transformer - "See how a modern neural network completes your text." (1,2,3; previously; via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 1:11 PM PST - 72 comments

Angry Birds and the end of privacy [Vox] “Though it doesn’t often come up and is confusing to think through, almost every app on your phone is full of third-party advertising intermediaries — at a minimum, ad software owned by Facebook or Twitter or Google, but often a couple dozen other companies you haven’t even heard of, as well. This includes game apps as innocuous if obnoxious-seeming as Angry Birds and its descendants, like Fruit Ninja (by the Australia-based Halfbrick Studios) and Candy Crush (by Malta-based developer King). These third parties collect information that allows them to keep intricate histories of your behavior, and use it to make money from you in ways you might not expect or even see. [...] The fact that it’s all so confusing is kind of the point, obviously. And as a result, mobile games have escaped the level of scrutiny we’ve applied to social media companies, despite being — as a category — nearly equally popular and far more likely to be used by children.” [h/t Johnny Wallflower] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:59 PM PST - 10 comments

Rising up from the flat, wooded west flood plain of the Mississippi River are four massive concrete and steel structures that would make a pharaoh envious: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ greatest work, the two billion-dollar Old River Control Structure (ORCS). The ORCS saw its second highest flood on record in March 2019, and flood levels have risen again this week to their fifth highest level on record. While the structure is built to handle the unusual stress this year's floods have subjected it to, there is reason for concern for its long-term survival, since failure of the Old RIver Control Structure would be a catastrophe with global impact. [more inside]
posted by ragtag at 12:39 PM PST - 17 comments

Carly Rae Jepsen, queen of [fill-in-the-blank], releases Dedicated today (streaming links) , her follow up album to cult hit E-MO-TION in 2015. Is it a sign o' the times, that pop(ular) music is now a sub-genre of music, directed towards the "highly specific constituency bridging the indie-rock club and the gay video bar"? [more inside]
posted by galleta monster at 12:02 PM PST - 22 comments

One thing that was kind of intriguing was that some of the hormones that are involved in food intake regulation were quite different between the two diets as compared to baseline
posted by hugbucket at 12:01 PM PST - 25 comments

Bill Oakley and his friend Chris Onstad figure out the best frozen foods to cook in your air fryer, and how to cook them.
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:44 AM PST - 16 comments

Bobcat perched atop electrical pole on Alligator Alley crawls down to safety [Fort Myers News-Press, May 9] "How did the bobcat get to the top of the power pole? It climbed there, of course, sometime Thursday along Interstate 75 in Collier County near mile marker 78."
posted by readinghippo at 11:27 AM PST - 18 comments

Defending the jungles, mountains, forests and rivers of Latin America has never been this dangerous. Six of the ten most hostile countries for leaders and communities defending the environment and their ancestral lands are located in Latin America, according to UN Special Rapporteur Michel Forst’s 2016 report to United Nations. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 10:21 AM PST - 1 comments

"...on Monday evening, at Mr. Colicchio’s restaurant Craft in Manhattan, Mr. Adjepong presented the full menu: “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Through Food,” a dinner that zigzags across the Atlantic Ocean, retracing the forced migration of enslaved Africans and illuminating the deep and lasting global culinary influences of the continent." A Chef Tells the Story of the Slave Trade Through Dinner
posted by everybody had matching towels at 10:16 AM PST - 22 comments

The National have released their 8th studio album, I Am Easy To Find. (spotify) The album is accompanied by, and provides the soundtrack for, a 26 minute short film of the same name directed by Mike Mills and starring Alicia Vikander, which depicts the life of a woman. (CW: textual mentions of abuse) [more inside]
posted by lazaruslong at 7:32 AM PST - 16 comments

The Magic Of Estate Sales, Ann Friedman

I’m not anti-Kondo, but you can put me down as a firm skeptic. I believe that the physical things you collect as you move through your life—even those that don’t make your stomach flip with joy—add up to something more than their individual utility or aesthetic appeal or heirloom potential. They aren’t just things, they’re your things. And if you remove yourself from the picture, the stuff you surround yourself with tells a story about you. It is a physical autobiography you write by living. Which is why I love estate sales.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:30 AM PST - 72 comments

n his 2019 Contest entry video, "Erase Me," Christopherson muses about his complicated experience with privilege as a transgender man.
posted by PussKillian at 7:00 AM PST - 8 comments

I. M. Pei, who began his long career designing buildings for a New York real estate developer and ended it as one of the most revered architects in the world, died early Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102. Best known for designing the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre in Paris, Mr. Pei was one of the few architects who were equally attractive to real estate developers, corporate chieftains and art museum boards (the third group, of course, often made up of members of the first two). And all of his work — from his commercial skyscrapers to his art museums — represented a careful balance of the cutting edge and the conservative.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 6:34 AM PST - 36 comments

On a small rock found in Jordan, Ahmad Al-Jallad, a linguistics professor in the Netherlands, discovered text that he thought could be the oldest known record of literary expression in Arabic.
posted by bile and syntax at 6:02 AM PST - 4 comments

With the words "some days are grumpier than others," the official Grumpy Cat twitter feed announced today that Grumpy Cat (real name Tardar Sauce), possibly the most famous cat on earth, passed away this week from complications of an infection. Despite the grumpy face, little Tardar Sauce was apparently the sweetest of cats, and paradoxically, the grumpiness brought joy to millions. She will be missed.
posted by litlnemo at 5:01 AM PST - 82 comments

An excerpt from The Dreamt Land, a new book by Mark Arax.... This was fertility supercharged by irrigation and the science of the Agricultural College at the University of California—the most extensive and intensive farming experiment in the world. No other landscape in history had been so bent by the designs of man. The Great Central Valley, 450 miles long and 60 miles wide, had resembled in its natural state a rolling savanna not unlike the Serengeti. Then a man named Porteous invented the Fresno Scraper, a five-foot-wide hunk of sheet iron that revolutionized the movement of dirt. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 1:38 AM PST - 6 comments