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Y'all wanna hear a story about the time I accidentally transported a brick of heroin from Los Angeles to Seattle? I bet.
Alright, let's do this...
Original twitter thread
posted by AndrewStephens at 5:52 PM PST - 118 comments

Rita Payés, a young jazz vocalist and trombonist, performs Imagina accompanied by her mother, Elisabeth Roma, on guitar. [more inside]
posted by rekrap at 5:02 PM PST - 6 comments

The human genome has never actually been complete, because reading our highly-repetitive centromeres has been "like putting together a puzzle of the Sahara Desert." Paper.
posted by clawsoon at 4:25 PM PST - 14 comments

$40M 'pay it forward' idea is likely to trigger positive 'contagion effect,' researcher says. The exact amount to be covered for the 396 students is still being calculated, Morehouse College President David A. Thomas told CNN on Monday, but the figure will likely be in the tens of millions of dollars. Robert Frederick Smith (born December 1, 1962) is an African-American businessman, investor, and philanthropist. A former chemical engineer and investment banker, he is the founder, chairman, and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. In 2018, Smith was ranked by Forbes as the 163rd richest person in America. Here's the best reaction to Robert F. Smith paying off the student debt at Morehouse.
posted by kneecapped at 1:54 PM PST - 86 comments

The Story of Spikey. Stephen Wolfram gives an account of the origin and evolution of Mathematica's logo, touching upon geometry, paper sculptures, Kepler, and Brazilian folk art, among other themes.
posted by dhruva at 12:23 PM PST - 5 comments

Latimer originally planted his bottle garden in 1960, sealed it, and let it sit — for twelve years. In 1972, thinking the plant may be a bit too dry after all of those years, he “put in about a quarter of a pint of water.” Then, he resealed the bottle — and it’s remained sealed to this day. [via Kottke]
posted by Chrysostom at 12:17 PM PST - 38 comments

Solutions for a Living Harbor: In Seattle, Singapore, and other waterfront cities around the world, engineers are creating life-enhancing designs to encourage marine biodiversity. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:18 AM PST - 10 comments

Hint: There’s a big anniversary coming up. The Chinese government has long been suspicious of Wikipedia. It’s been blocked in China intermittently since 2004, and the Chinese-language version has been blocked since June 2015. Now the government has gone even further. The Wikimedia Foundation released a statement on Friday announcing that it had determined that China blocked all versions of Wikipedia. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 10:46 AM PST - 5 comments

This Old House (previously) is now in its 40th season, and served as vanguard to numerous other home renovation shows. What continues to set it apart though is its goal "to put skilled tradespeople and the work they do in front of the camera."
posted by borkencode at 10:29 AM PST - 53 comments

It has taken more than 220 years but an order of monks at Grimbergen Abbey, producers of a fabled medieval beer whose brand was adopted by mass producers in the 1950s, have started to brew again after rediscovering the original ingredients and methods in their archives. The Guardian reports on a heady new brew. [more inside]
posted by Bella Donna at 9:51 AM PST - 15 comments

Niki Lauda, who famously bought his way into F1 by way of a bank loan secured against his life insurance policy, became only driver in F1 history to win F1 World Championships for both Ferrari and McLaren. After surviving third-degree burns in a horrific crash in the 1976 German Grand Prix, Lauda returned to racing just 40 days later. His epic rivalry with James Hunt was chronicled in the 2013 Ron Howard directed film, Rush. A life-long pilot, Lauda founded Lauda Air in 1979. In 2012 he was named Non-Executive Chairman of Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team and is credited with helping build the team into the dominant force in F1 today. He died on Monday at age 70 of kidney failure. Previously... 1,2
posted by spudsilo at 9:51 AM PST - 25 comments

'Totally Accurate Battle Simulator' Captures the Goofy Mayhem of Mass Violence [Vice Games] “Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is a silly game. It’s purposefully whimsical, everything about it is built to support its farcical premise of AI fighters stumbling toward each other on various battlefields, swinging weaponry around with the physical comedy that accompanies physics-based animations. Knights wobble and fall over under the weight of their swords, mammoths trample crowds then clumsily topple to their sides as axe-throwers throw axes in hopefully the direction of their targets. It’s mayhem, and it’s undeniably goofy.” [YouTube][Game Trailer] [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 9:23 AM PST - 14 comments

Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened? By John Waters
posted by chavenet at 8:09 AM PST - 31 comments

"Our great task today — your task and my task, is to build a labor movement for this new century — a labor movement for all of America’s workers — a labor movement as big and bold as America itself "On May 10, 2019, Association of Flight Attendants president Sara Nelson gave a speech to the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America’s annual Eugene Debs–Lucy Gonzalez Parsons–A. Philip Randolph Dinner. We reproduce the speech here in full, lightly edited for online publication. (Jacobin) "When I mention Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), to people in the labor movement, the response is usually something like: “I would follow her to the gates of hell.” Sara Nelson Is Not Afraid To Strike Back (The Nation) " A few hours of training is not a just transition. The transition needs to begin before the jobs go away. A just transition must ensure pensions and healthcare are protected for workers who spent their lives powering our country in the fossil fuel industries." The Green New Deal Needs Labor’s Support. We Asked Sara Nelson How To Get It. (In These Times)
posted by The Whelk at 7:58 AM PST - 6 comments

Cool philosophy animation showing the fallibility of human intuition. This is a super cool new animation put out by the Center for Public Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. It talks about a little experiment called "The Rope Around the Earth" and why it shows that human intuition is sometimes overconfidently wrong, and draws conclusions for that about our political and social disagreements.
posted by HiPhiNation at 7:48 AM PST - 45 comments

Private Mohammed Kahn, also known as John Ammahail, was born in Persia, circa 1830. Raised in Afghanistan, he immigrated to the United States in 1861. About two months after his arrival he enlisted in the 43rd New York Infantry Regiment, following a night out with friends who convinced him to join.
posted by Etrigan at 6:02 AM PST - 14 comments

In 1909, the Boston Post newspaper commissioned 700 gold-headed ebony walking canes, and distributed one to the selectmen of every town in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, with instructions to give the cane to the town's oldest (male) citizen. In the '30s, the tradition expanded to include women. More than 500 of the canes still survive, some still in circulation and some in local collections, and volunteers at the Maynard Historical Society continue to search out the whereabouts of the remaining ~200. [more inside]
posted by Miko at 5:27 AM PST - 13 comments