August 6, 2017
Not a Fish Tale, Really, It's True!
Little kid, big fish.
This is no ordinary 11 year old. Chase Stokes caught the Vermont record Carp. 33.25 pounds. He fishes all his waking hours when he is not in school. [more inside]
LadBaby: the lad's guide to fatherhood
A lad with a relentless sausage roll addiction ventures into fatherhood: date night | the toolbox lunch | buggy horn | dumpster pool party | ball pit trolley | dress for an awards night | learning to walk with dad
Computational Propaganda & its Adherents
This is a short promotional interview for a book about computational propaganda, and an introduction to the Oxford Computational Propaganda Project. This stuff has been talked about a lot since November 2016, it's not going away any time soon, and the risks are substantial. [more inside]
20,000,000-year-old fungus possibly resurrected from spore
Researchers at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) believe that they have succesfully cultured a 20-million-year-old fungal spore sampled from a geological formation 2,500 meters beneath the ocean floor in Aomori Prefecture, Japan. The spore has produced hyphae and a mushroom approximately 1 centimeter long. If confirmed, it may shed light on the evolution of fungi and the genetic and physiological differences between ancient and modern organisms.
Momsplain
Bob's Docs Episode One: Manipulation
For the month of August [On The Media will] be running a series of interviews Bob [Garfield] has done over the years with documentary filmmakers. In the OTM office, the producers have been referring to the collection as “Bob’s Docs.” Over the next few weeks we’ll go through some tropes of documentary film-making, from prurience to access to the personal journey. Episode one is about the deadly sin of manipulation. [audio, downloadable, 23m] [more inside]
the animal’s head configuration is “unique,”
Disembodied Anus-Eye Terrorized Ancient Earth's Oceans [Gizmodo] “Earth’s ancient oceans were rife with nightmare creatures, from many-limbed worms to six-foot-long crab-ancestors. This week, scientists are taking the prehistoric freak show to another level, with a new paper introducing Capinatator praetermissus, the 500-million year old bristled-jawed worm monster pictured above. You know what it looks like. We know what it looks like. It looks like an anus-eye.”
How We Really Tamed the Dog
The perfect dog. Except it’s not a dog, it’s a fox. A domesticated one. They built it quickly—mind-bogglingly fast for constructing a brand new biological creature. It took them less than 60 years, a blink of an eye compared to the time it took for wolves to become dogs. They built it in the often unbearable negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit cold of Siberia, where Lyudmila and, before her, Dmitri, have been running one of the longest, most incredible experiments on behavior and evolution ever devised.
It's the lip syncing that really blows my mind if I'm honest
Episode Four: The Search for the Black Spider. A live-action Adventure Zone fanfilm directed by Curtis McOsker.
Chopin's unpredictable, quasi-fractal offshoots.
The Joys of Chopin, Our Most Catlike Composer. An appreciation, by pianist Jeremy Denk (with audio/video examples and commentary, SLNYT).
Otter Artist
Drawing pictures on a sleeping otter's belly. Does what it says on the otter.
Appalachian Dialect & New Jersey Hillbillies
Southern mountain language isn't frozen in time. The "hillbilly" dialect has changed over time, just as American language has elsewhere in the country, but the stigma remains. Here's what they're trying to do to help erase that attitude.
And over in western New Jersey is a different kind of hillbilly and the stigma they labor under. The article was referenced in a reply to the first link, but I went and read all about the Strangers on the Mountain, of whom I'd never heard.
Why Australians don't loiter
When the British Empire's Australian colonies were being established, Governor Richard Bourke of New South Wales (which then encompassed Victoria) decreed that, in order to facilitate control and prevent rebellion, the towns being established must not include public squares, as cities in Britain and Europe did. Open spaces, such as those outside public buildings, were enclosed with fences and gates. The impact of these decisions has shaped the Australian attitude to public space, from central business districts which were (until recent decades) deserted outside of business hours as people retreated to their family homes, to tendencies to meet in private buildings and pay little attention to the urban landscape along the way. [more inside]
It was a national obsession of borderline-insane magnitude.
For 10 long years — all through the crime-ridden, chaotic 1990s, the early post-Soviet years of timelessness and hardship — life in large cities, small towns, industrial settlements, and snowbound villages across Russia’s 11 time zones would come to a standstill as the remarkably cheery sounds of Santa Barbara’s intro issued from millions of TV sets.Mikhail Iossel explains how the relatively obscure American soap opera Santa Barbara has coloured Russian expectations of the US as well as Trump, recognisable a soap opera villain.
First Support for a Physics Theory of Life
Beginnings of how order can arise from disorder? Thermodynamics says everything gets more disordered through Entropy only naturally increasing. Illya Prigogine (Nobel '77) found a different way in the 50's. First description how order can spontaneously develop from disorder with his "dissipative structures". Been several advances since then.
WHY?
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