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On December 6, 2016, Mr. Marshall officially banned bottle flipping in class 6A. On December 7, he started making this video. On June 29, 2017, he showed it to his students [h/t Miss Cellania]. [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 10:32 PM PST - 16 comments

Extra, Extra - Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken. "I remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. students to write a binary search, and then dissected one of our implementations in front of the class. Of course it was broken, as were most of our implementations. This made a real impression on me, as did the treatment of this material in his wonderful [book] Programming Pearls. Fast forward to 2006. I was shocked to learn that the binary search program that Bentley proved correct and subsequently tested in Chapter 5 of Programming Pearls contains a bug. Once I tell you what it is, you will understand why it escaped detection for two decades..." [more inside]
posted by storybored at 8:47 PM PST - 29 comments

Fish Story is a fourteen minute video documentary where Charlie Lyne tries to find out whether his friend Caspar Salmon's grandmother, Pauline, was invited to an event in Anglesey in Wales, along with other people with fish surnames, to be given a salmon by weatherman Sir Michael Fish.
posted by Kattullus at 4:43 PM PST - 13 comments

Dressed in a military uniform, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in Mosul on Sunday to congratulate Iraq’s armed forces for wresting the city from the Islamic State. The victory marked the formal end of a bloody campaign that lasted nearly nine months, left much of Iraq’s second-largest city in ruins, killed thousands of people and displaced nearly a million more. [more inside]
posted by roolya_boolya at 4:25 PM PST - 14 comments

98DEMAKE rebuilds scenes from modern games so they look like games from 1998. [YouTube] “I do downgrades of modern games. Not actual games, but "what if" sort of videos showcasing how a game might have looked like back in the day.” • If Grand Theft Auto V was made in 1998 • If Dark Souls was made in 1998 • If Fallout 4 was made in 1998 • If Portal was made in 1998 • If Far Cry 5 was announced in 1998 • If Assassin's Creed was made in 1998 • If Outlast was made in 1998 • If Red Dead Redemption was made in 1998 • If The Last Of Us was made in 1998
posted by Fizz at 12:58 PM PST - 23 comments

US electric utilities are pressuring [NYT] state legislatures to stymie the roll out of rooftop solar. But advances in battery storage may make it unstoppable. [Vox]
posted by Chrysostom at 12:51 PM PST - 62 comments

The instagram art of governor Scott Walker (SLWired)
posted by growabrain at 12:47 PM PST - 26 comments

Simone Veil, Auschwitz survivor, Health Minister, first directly elected President of the European Parliament, French Academician, passed away on June 30. She is best remembered in France as the woman who legalised abortion with the law still known today as Loi Veil. [more inside]
posted by snakeling at 10:43 AM PST - 20 comments

At 56, a ‘Light Bulb’ Goes Off and a Firefighter Emerges [NYT] . Robin Nesdale’s story is not that unusual. At 56, divorced and with her daughter, her only child, off at college, her life felt a little empty and rudderless. So she became a firefighter.
posted by Mchelly at 6:57 AM PST - 12 comments

A French Collagist about whom little is known, Zophie Zyphon, has an interesting set of galleries and Les Z’écrits.
There is an Instagram tag and a twitter page. Information is scarce So let the pictures do the talking.
She has been featured in a past edition of Dissonances.
posted by adamvasco at 6:57 AM PST - 2 comments

Peter and Paul, or Heaven and Hell "What is this mess?" said the angel. "Unfold those scraps and put them together." A new twist on the old heaven-and-hell paper-folding trick, and a survey of various versions over the past century. [via mefi projects]
posted by Literaryhero at 5:57 AM PST - 6 comments

Director Wes Anderson is known for creating films with a striking visual style and delightfully eccentric characters. They're unforgettable; once you hear titles like Moonrise Kingdom or The Grand Budapest Hotel, you can instantly picture how they look. Clad in retro-inspired color schemes and costumes, his movies inspire us to look for the whimsy of everyday life. For those who find it, they’ve got a place to share their discoveries—the subreddit called Accidental Wes Anderson. There, people from across the globe post places that could be part of his film sets. -- Sara Barnes, My Modern Met (which has an extensive sampling, for those who wish to avoid visiting /r.)
posted by Room 641-A at 5:27 AM PST - 23 comments