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Any patzer can blunder a winning position into a loss. But turning what looks like certain defeat into chess victory? That takes a swindler. [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:35 PM PST - 18 comments

Jody Wilson-Raybould, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada: “Our Government is very pleased that Bill C-16 was passed by the Senate today, bringing us one step closer to strengthening laws against discrimination, hate propaganda, and hate crime based on gender identity and gender expression. In Canada we celebrate inclusion and diversity, and all Canadians should feel safe to be themselves. Trans and gender diverse persons must be granted equal status in Canadian society, and this Bill makes that status explicit in Canadian law. [more inside]
posted by Pong74LS at 10:32 PM PST - 26 comments

Video Camera Demo Tape Behold some wonderful femullet, epic unibrow, terrific 90s coat collection, the hair, the Cosby sweaters, CD longboxes, and early selfie culture. [more inside]
posted by linear_arborescent_thought at 10:21 PM PST - 30 comments

At the intersection of #yolo and #youdidnotsleepthere is Flaviu Cernescu and Dina Zaur's climb 833 feet (254m) up a janky Romanian industrial chimney to set up camp. Don't grab anything slick for a while 'cos you're gonna have some sweaty palms. Though it ends charmingly (all hugs!) this one gets worse for a long, long time. [more inside]
posted by Ogre Lawless at 9:59 PM PST - 20 comments

We used the public database from Google’s “Quick, Draw!” to compare how people draw basic shapes around the world. Our analysis suggests that the way you draw a simple circle is linked to geography and cultural upbringing, deep-rooted in hundreds of years of written language, and significant in developmental psychology and trends in education today.
Thu-Huong Ha and Nikhil Sonnad wrote an article for Quartz about how people draw circles and other things.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:52 PM PST - 40 comments

Shiva Ayyadurai didn't invent email. But he's suing everyone who says otherwise.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:35 PM PST - 26 comments

Artist Dana Brodsky, wandering NYC with her 18-month-old, began to paint miniatures of the birds she saw, eventually creating the project Bird by Bird.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 9:29 PM PST - 4 comments

A Mexican Town Is Giving Americans Something Donald Trump Can’t: Affordable Dental Care Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric doesn’t worry the 600 dentists in Los Algodones or the US “dental refugees” they treat, many of whom voted for Trump. “We’re helping the United States take care of the people they are not able to.”, John Stanton/BuzzFeed News (previously: 1, 2)
posted by Room 641-A at 5:56 PM PST - 26 comments

Showing data in physical form from ancient times to the present. One thing not on this seemingly comprehensive list are the Inuit wooden tactile maps. There's lots to chew on in the main list.
posted by MovableBookLady at 5:51 PM PST - 5 comments

Marvel has historically demonstrated an inability to convert its booming box-office success into comic sales. Why is that? Because of poor marketing and a lack of understanding of their audience. From Swapna Krishna, 900 words for SyFyWire on comics publishing missteps.
posted by cgc373 at 4:42 PM PST - 56 comments

Now ole' Eric was just a mountain boy from the holler, but that mountain boy had a dream, a dream of bein' a mountain lawyer and helpin' the good ole' folk of coal country get on Social Security Disability. Maybe if he'd stick to it I reckon thatd'en done been the story, but Eric's dream kept a-growin', and more and more a'the good people kept gettin' swept up in the rise an' fall of Mr. Social Security. [more inside]
posted by T.D. Strange at 3:30 PM PST - 16 comments

Beneath the calm surface of Sydney Harbour lurks another world, a world of…calm sea creatures. Nature is not red in tooth and claw in these videos by Chris Miller—it's a chill world with soothing background music.

Harbour Days
Chowder Bay: The Winter Months
It's The Little Things

More can be found (not all so relaxing) on his Vimeo channel.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:42 PM PST - 2 comments

In response to the announcement by the staff of major anime convention Anime Expo that they were looking for "volunteer translators", AnimeFeminist has a longform editorial on the fandom's cultural devaluation of technical skills and how it serves as exploitation, and how to push back to get labor credited - and paid - as such.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:29 PM PST - 52 comments

"the digital tsunami poised to engulf us, as machine intelligence and a rising tech elite radically restructure life as we know it"
posted by infini at 12:51 PM PST - 42 comments

WoodSwimmer: A music video made entirely from sanding wood. "The sequences are cross-sectional photographic scans of pieces of hardwood, burls and branches."
posted by bondcliff at 12:38 PM PST - 21 comments

Life is Strange: Before the Storm: Life sucks when you’re a teenager, man [Ars Technica] “Following the surprise success of 2015's Life Is Strange—Dontnod's episodic tale of teenage rebellion—we expected publisher Square Enix to return with a sequel. Less expected, though, was the E3 2017 reveal of Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, a prequel that tells the story of series star Chloe Price during her formative years. Dontnod isn't behind the prequel, with development duties instead handed off to Deck Nine Games. While the cynics out there may call this a cash-in, Before the Storm has its moments—at least if the E3 demo is anything to go by. The biggest change—aside from a range of new locations alongside familiar ones—is that Before the Storm ditches the time travel mechanic of the original and lays the teenage melodrama on thick. The strength of Life Is Strange was always in its writing, where it masterfully touched on complex topics like addiction, cyberbullying, and suicide. Before the Storm deals with its own difficult themes.” [more inside]
posted by Fizz at 12:37 PM PST - 19 comments

Phone unlocking fees are now banned in Canada.
posted by Shepherd at 12:19 PM PST - 8 comments

"So… this is certainly a surprising result, one that I didn’t expect to find when I started exploring the data. And it is impressively robust even when controlling for many confounding factors. As an exercise I tried controlling for many other confounding factors within the survey data beyond those mentioned here, but it was difficult to make the effect shrink and basically impossible to make it disappear."
posted by jenkinsEar at 11:50 AM PST - 116 comments

An Illustrated Guide to the Best Works of Frank Lloyd Wright. [more inside]
posted by storybored at 11:38 AM PST - 22 comments

Tracy K. Smith has been appointed the U.S. Poet Laureate (technically, the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress). Smith won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Life on Mars, "A collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain."
posted by Etrigan at 11:07 AM PST - 7 comments

"For the first time, a generation of players is playing in low-tops.... Today's highest-tech, most forward-thinking basketball sneakers don't look like basketball sneakers. And the sneakerheads who love the rich history of the high-top basketball silhouette have had to look beyond the basketball court for inspiration." (sl Esquire)
posted by goatdog at 9:26 AM PST - 43 comments

Author Seanan McGuire is the author of the Hugo nominated novella Every Heart a Doorway, October Day series, the InCryptid series, and the stand-alone ghost story Sparrow Hill Road. She is also good with singalongs...
posted by happyroach at 9:01 AM PST - 29 comments

The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women by Susan Chira in the New York Times.
posted by bile and syntax at 7:51 AM PST - 72 comments

Sonam Wangchuk is an engineer who has come up with an innovative way to provide fresh water to villages in Ladakh, one of the high-altitude deserts in the world located in the Himalayas. Wangchuk sources water from streams and uses it to create artificial glaciers, which store fresh water until it's needed in springtime. [Mashable Video]
posted by ellieBOA at 7:43 AM PST - 14 comments

Summer is here again, and with it the dulcet tones of the Mister Softee jingle (previously) you know and love. What you probably didn't know (but will love) was that someone made a movie starring an anthropomorphic ice cream cone based on the Softee brand. It also features David Caruso. [more inside]
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:29 AM PST - 10 comments

Last night, the Dallas Street Choir made their Carnegie Hall debut. The choir is made up of Dallas residents who are homeless, including some with mental illness and addiction issues. They are currently on an East Coast tour. They were joined last night by 17 New Yorkers who currently live in Manhattan shelters. Last April, they produced the music video Homeless, Not Voiceless. Over 1,200 individuals have attended at least one of their weekly rehearsals, since October 2014.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 6:54 AM PST - 4 comments

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror is an interactive experience created by the Equal Justice Initiative and launched with support from Google. Includes interactive map exploring the geography of lynching, plus audio stories and video. The (PDF) original report this project was based on was discussed here previously.
posted by beagle at 6:29 AM PST - 14 comments

Taika Waititi, New Zealander of the Year, calls on everyone to support a very important cause. The embodiment of everything that's good in the world asks you to have a little think about your contribution to this.
posted by h00py at 5:47 AM PST - 19 comments

Have a round-up of the thrilling musical performances (with some introductions) from the 2017 Tony Awards [in no particular order]: Bandstand -- "Nobody", Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet Of 1812 -- "Dust And Ashes" "The Abduction" (Medley), Dear Even Hansen -- "Waving Through A window", Come From Away -- "Welcome To The Rock", Miss Saigon -- Medley ("This Is The Hour", "I'd Give My Life For You"), Hello Dolly! -- "Penny In My Pocket", Groundhog Day -- "Seeing You", Falsettos -- "A Day In Falsettoland", Warpaint -- "Face To Face" [more inside]
posted by hippybear at 4:21 AM PST - 14 comments

The author of A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes explains (partially) how it may be possible to create new universes in the lab (without destroying the lab and the universe you're in). Hint: it involves passing through a tiny black hole. But some physicists really don't want to talk about it since they'd be seen as 'playing God', and at least one scientific journal really didn't want to be seen as encouraging this 'dirty joke' about 'physicist hackers'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:45 AM PST - 56 comments

Agata's Machine and Waxy are short stories by the Canadian writer Camilla Grudova (tumblr), whose debut collection The Doll's Alphabet has been likened to David Lynch, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.
posted by misteraitch at 2:00 AM PST - 5 comments

There was once a pregnant gorilla.... (SLAtlantic)
posted by hleehowon at 1:38 AM PST - 11 comments

Oats Studios is Neill Blomkamp's latest project. They have just released their first short film, the violent horror sf: Volume 1 - Rakka (possibly NSFW) [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:25 AM PST - 17 comments