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An Iranian student visiting Isfahan's Masjid-e Shah, or Shah Mosque, also known as the Imam Mosque, takes advantage of the mosque's excellent acoustics to sing a brief and lovely song. [more inside]
posted by yasaman at 10:41 PM PST - 12 comments

Raised by a paranoid father in the foothills of California's Sierra Mountains, 15 year old Eliot Emory has grown up in isolation with records and VHS tapes as his only connection to the outside world [...] But when his father mysteriously vanishes, Eliot is propelled into a world far greater than he ever imagined...and far more perilous.

So begins Echo's Rift, a graphic novel by Jennifer Potter. New pages featuring her beautiful artwork appear 3x a week. It's 3 months and 35 pages old so far, and 'spans many worlds and encounters monsters, aliens, telepaths, mad scientists, and the occasional adorable bunny.'
posted by bluefly at 7:37 PM PST - 17 comments

Explore.org's live webcams have become wildly popular over the last few years, allowing viewers to watch, from the comfort of their home or office, livestreams of grizzlies, walruses, belugas, puffins, eagles and more in their natural habitat. Truly the best of the web. But there is a danger in becoming too attached. Today at a little after 7 pm Eastern time, fans of the osprey cam in Bremen, Me., watched nature in its most brutally real. [Warning: nature.] [more inside]
posted by stargell at 7:36 PM PST - 58 comments

The Anarchist Sailor “Imagine if there were an alternate dystopian reality where law enforcement was 100 percent effective, such that any potential offenders knew they would be immediately identified, apprehended, and jailed,” he wrote. “How could people have decided that marijuana should be legal, if nobody had ever used it? How could states decide that same-sex marriage should be permitted?”
posted by bitmage at 6:38 PM PST - 35 comments

Vaults are large, barrel shaped protein complexes. Found in most eukaryotic cells, their exact function is currently unknown. [more inside]
posted by lucidium at 4:09 PM PST - 17 comments

As the sun begins its downward descent on summer, we pause to take a deep breath of humid air with Pablo Grossi, Argentinian grandmaster-level vinyl digger and selector. 50 miles out from Buenos Aires, Pablo has discovered and traded in thousands of records around the region so that "people from here can know them and have them". Comprised mostly of his vinyl recordings, this exemplary showcase of Exotica is warm to the touch. Best served with ice and lime garnish.
posted by rebent at 1:09 PM PST - 8 comments

Seymour Papert, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Logo Foundation went PENUP today. Many of us who learned programming in the 1980s started with LOGO, which spawned other langauges like StarLogo. Today, its spiritual successor is probably Scratch.
posted by dmd at 12:41 PM PST - 70 comments

VINU'S INOVATIVE CAR PARKING INVENTED 6 YEARS BACK STILL WORKING [more inside]
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 11:31 AM PST - 36 comments

"Steve Roskoski, a library assistant, said he and his fellow librarians (some with their own tattoos) came up with the idea to match readers with books based on their tats. It’s Portland after all. “Book recommending and finding people good reads is something we do every day here at the Multnomah County Library,” Roskoski said. “Social media is a great way to interact with those people - and we’ve seen a great response. We had over 150 awesome tattoos sent in.” That number will continue to grow, Roskoski suspects, as the word gets out." [more inside]
posted by gingerbeer at 10:09 AM PST - 28 comments

"Below are sixty wee puzzles. I’ve tried to provide a heads-up where there’s a whisper of off rhyme or a slight shift of emphasis. The one consistent exception I’ve allowed to perfect rhyme is that at the center and fulcrum point of the puzzle, there may be a possessive “s.” The answer to “White whale’s home haircutting gizmo,” then, would be “Moby[’s] Flowbee.”" [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:34 AM PST - 120 comments

Tokyo elects Yuriko Koike as first female governor Ms Koike is a member of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), but it did not endorse her so she ran as an independent. (SLBBC)
posted by infini at 8:27 AM PST - 49 comments

A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom and Justice. (Platform, Downloads/Briefing)
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:12 AM PST - 16 comments

The world’s most famous and damaging nuclear meltdown is now being considered for the world’s largest solar power plant. “The Chernobyl site has really good potential for renewable energy,” Ukraine’s environment minister Ostap Semerak, 44, said at an interview in London. “We already have high-voltage transmission lines that were previously used for the nuclear stations, the land is very cheap and we have many people trained to work at power plants.”
posted by sammyo at 7:31 AM PST - 32 comments

A group of Science YouTubers got together to perform a tribute to a scientist Hamilton, in the style of his political musical namesake.
posted by divabat at 5:24 AM PST - 14 comments

"British politics has never seen a purer example of the Overton window than the referendum on membership of the EU." Brexit Blues, John Lanchester for LRB [more inside]
posted by cwest at 12:48 AM PST - 30 comments

...all good fights have to be between blue and red, that’s how wars work. (Even bean wars.) Literal beans.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 12:04 AM PST - 31 comments