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Where Wind and Solar Power Need to Grow for America to Meet Its Goals [ungated link] - "A broad shift toward renewable energy could transform landscapes and coastlines all over the United States." (Net Zero America Project) [more inside]
posted by kliuless at 10:04 PM PST - 27 comments

"There isn’t even a word for us, really. Quiz players? Trivia fanatics? I prefer quizzers. But when I use that to describe myself to a civilian – to a non-quizzer – the inevitable inquiry follows: What does that mean?” A Guardian essay on the world of trivia—and on knowledge, memory, and experience.
posted by blue shadows at 10:00 PM PST - 30 comments

Chinese Grassroots Experience of the Emergency and New Villages in British Colonial Malaya. The British anti-communist operation in Malaya is considered an archetypal COIN campaign and the first modern counterinsurgency. The Emergency, which lasted until 1960, involved the forced relocation of 573,000 rural inhabitants into 480 New Villages. Sixty years on, 450 of these villages, with over 82 percent Chinese inhabitants, still exist in Malaysia. In this study, Teng-Phee Tan visits 150 New Villages and conducts 76 interviews with elderly informants on their personal accounts of the Emergency. [more inside]
posted by xdvesper at 8:53 PM PST - 20 comments

You might know him from the iconic Blade Runner soundtrack, (or the 1492 soundtrack, the Pear Films biography, the more recent soundtrack for the Rosetta Mission or indeed this previous post to the Blue) but today I would like to drop you into the middle of a two hour documentary called "Vangelis and the Journey to Ithaka", in which the man himself casually improvises an entire symphonic work on the most astounding rig I've ever seen.
posted by mhoye at 6:02 PM PST - 29 comments

“To many writers, Ramallah is an ideal, a dream, a promise.” [more inside]
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:37 PM PST - 3 comments

Germany is formally recognizing as genocide the killing of tens of thousands of people from two ethnic groups in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century, the foreign ministry said on Friday, a major acknowledgment of colonial-era crimes. Germany is asking for forgiveness and establishing a fund worth more than a billion euros to support projects in the affected communities. [NYT; Archive] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 4:03 PM PST - 7 comments

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said in a news release Thursday that the remains were confirmed last weekend with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist. Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.” Some of the children were as young as three.
posted by clawsoon at 1:13 PM PST - 65 comments

The Los Angeles Times' food and restaurant critics, Jenn Harris and Bill Addison, find the best fast food chicken sandwich.
posted by box at 12:58 PM PST - 46 comments

RugsInGames is a twitter account that documents the appearance of at least one rug in a given video game.
posted by cortex at 8:47 AM PST - 29 comments

Researchers at Bellingcat have discovered US soldiers exposing nuclear weapons secrets... via free flashcard websites. The flashcard sets "identify the exact shelters with “hot” vaults that likely contain nuclear weapons [and] intricate security details and protocols such as the positions of cameras, the frequency of patrols around the vaults, secret duress words that signal when a guard is being threatened and the unique identifiers that a restricted area badge needs to have." [more inside]
posted by adrianhon at 7:44 AM PST - 48 comments

David Kelley’s idea of making a company where he could work with his friends took on new meaning. When you don’t consciously design a workplace to include, develop, and support diverse employees, working with your friends can mean promoting primarily people just like you; young, white, cis-male designers without apparent disabilities. Not only does this create a difficult and even soul-crushing work environment for people who don’t match the dominant archetype, but how can a homogenous group competently design for our diverse world?

IDEO, one of the world's foremost design firms, has a serious diversity problem. Former employees such as George Aye and Elizabeth Johansen say it is an unsafe workplace for women, PoC and WoC and detail years of abuse by colleagues and managers. Rachael Dietkus, a licensed clinical social worker and design researcher, offers advice on the matter and workplace trauma.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 4:17 AM PST - 21 comments