Climate scientist John Kennedy explains via an anecdote involving himself, an orange, and hubris that the phrase "some scientists think" should be taken with a shaker of salt. (SLTwitter)
posted to MetaFilter by NoxAeternum at 4:20 PM on August 3, 2022 (40 comments)

"...The observation that bees are most likely sentient beings has important ethical implications. It’s well known that many species of bees are threatened by pesticides and wide-scale habitat loss, and that this spells trouble because we need these insects to pollinate our crops. But is the utility of bees the only reason they should be protected? I don’t think so. The insight that bees have a rich inner world and unique perception, and, like humans, are able to think, enjoy and suffer, commands respect for the diversity of minds in nature. With this respect comes an obligation to protect the environments that shaped these minds..."

Bumblebees can create mental imagery, a 'building block of consciousness', study suggests
posted to MetaFilter by y2karl at 1:18 PM on August 3, 2022 (25 comments)

The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star...
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 1:23 AM on August 3, 2022 (13 comments)

A very amusing Rube Goldberg Machine.
posted to MetaFilter by dobbs at 7:54 PM on August 2, 2022 (14 comments)

Diseases can be idiopathic. Archaeological artefacts can be for ritual purposes*. What are some other technical-sounding terms from other fields that means "we're really not sure"?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Lorc at 12:42 AM on August 26, 2022 (61 comments)

After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance [ungated] - "My rooftop panels showed me that a world powered by renewables would be an overflowing horn of plenty, with fast, sporty cars and comfy homes."
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 1:49 AM on July 31, 2022 (89 comments)

Joni Mitchell performed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, fifty-five years ago. This past Sunday, in a surprise appearance with Brandi Carlisle, she returned for another full set, her first in over two decades. More clips inside, have some tissues ready.
posted to MetaFilter by Ipsifendus at 4:52 AM on July 26, 2022 (40 comments)

Stray follows a brave cat's journey through a world without humans, making robot friends along the way. Dog review. Cat reviews. More cat reviews. IGN. RPS.
posted to MetaFilter by adept256 at 4:26 AM on July 22, 2022 (45 comments)

The team discovers troubling revelations.
posted to FanFare by dry white toast at 8:31 PM on April 7, 2022 (174 comments)

Today NASA published the first image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. That makes this a fine day to catch up on all of the other ways people and our machines are exploring space.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:40 PM on July 11, 2022 (163 comments)

Histography: Timeline of History - "Histography is an interactive timeline that spans across 14 billion years of history, from the Big Bang to 2015. The site draws historical events from Wikipedia and self-updates daily with new recorded events. The interface allows for users to view between decades to millions of years. The viewer can choose to watch a variety of events which have happened in a particular period or to target a specific event in time. For example you can look at the past century within the categories of war and inventions."[1,2,3] (via)
posted to MetaFilter by kliuless at 1:49 AM on July 8, 2022 (5 comments)

A series of increasingly absurd philosophical quandaries. CW: a lot of cartoon death by trolley, moral philosophy. What's the trolley problem? Who's Chidi? previously previouslier still more previously
posted to MetaFilter by nightcoast at 4:25 AM on July 6, 2022 (60 comments)

Suppose your story situation is this. Character A is telling a story, but it's a lie. Character B realizes it's a lie, but doesn't signal that recognition. This is really two problems in one: How do you tell the audience A is lying? And how do you convey that B knows but doesn't reveal that knowledge?
posted to MetaFilter by smcg at 1:55 PM on July 1, 2022 (12 comments)

A free "workbook on the kind of bullshit you need to do when someone you love dies", available as a "version with lots of swearing at the useless, shitty situation you're in" or a "version with a fair amount of black humor but no cursewords". Including "Prepare to spend a long and miserable time on the phone," "Depressing Mad Libs" (obituary templates), "So You Suddenly Have To Become Some Kind of Hacker," and "How to plan a non-religious death party". Published 2019.
posted to MetaFilter by brainwane at 9:37 AM on July 1, 2022 (27 comments)

Colin Morris scraped 15 years of Reddit comments to perform a detailed analysis of the frequencies of compound-word insults. The results are presented in the document Compound pejoratives on Reddit – from buttface to wankpuffin.
posted to MetaFilter by dfan at 9:27 AM on June 29, 2022 (87 comments)

Without any particular planning, some folks (myself included) have had a good time making and commenting on front page posts about potatoes in the last few days. There's no particular reason, no official theme week or anything like that; I saw several people commenting "what's going on?" or "is this a theme week?" so this is your reassurance that you didn't miss an announcement or something. It's just snowballed organically. If you're enjoying it, have fun! If you don't love the fad, please do feel free to post other stuff as usual. Probably the potato harvest season will end in a few days or weeks.
posted to MetaTalk by brainwane at 12:19 PM on June 23, 2022 (128 comments)

Hi everyone, as promised, we’re sharing the initial survey results. Huge thank-you to iamkimiam for writing the questions, and to bleep, kimberrussell, librarylis, mochapickle, tiny frying pan, and valleys for stepping in to help us tag and summarize the data. bleep jumped in and put together some great dashboards for us to more easily count tags, do error-checking and get a handle on how to start those summaries. Again, these are the initial summaries for this MetaTalk, so necessarily a little abbreviated, but we hope it gives a broad-strokes picture of where the site is right now.
posted to MetaTalk by curious nu at 9:21 AM on July 17, 2022 (169 comments)

... and Data Science? How well-regarded is this degree? How difficult?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by Flock of Cynthiabirds at 5:47 AM on June 15, 2022 (7 comments)

Okay, I am rewatching the Purge film/tv series with my kiddo and I have a growing list of questions. Considering that it is likely impractical to corner James DeMonaco and ask him, I present them instead to whoever might happen upon this thread.
posted to FanFare by DirtyOldTown at 8:43 AM on June 27, 2022 (38 comments)

Mark and the team encounter new security measures from Cobel.
posted to FanFare by Silvery Fish at 7:31 PM on March 24, 2022 (78 comments)

It's actually required by law that every evangelical church have at least one person who takes Irish stepdancing classes (CW: Racism) Jenny Nicholson reviews one Canadian church's Easter plays.
posted to MetaFilter by Gorgik at 7:54 AM on June 26, 2022 (38 comments)

Design Fiction has come a long way in the 10+ years since it all began. It's been gaining popularity since then, yet people still misunderstand what it is all about. So its creators made a short film to explain Design Fiction and why it's useful.
posted to MetaFilter by iamkimiam at 2:54 AM on June 22, 2022 (15 comments)

Pixar’s Up was inspired by a single image: a house with balloons tied to its roof floating into the sky, far away from the burden of daily life. “It seemed freeing and aspirational"...But the makers of Up knew that even feel-good stories need pathos... The opening of Up, however, is more than just a narrative device. The movie-within-a-movie is as emotionally heavy as Carl’s helium-lifted house is buoyant.
posted to MetaFilter by If only I had a penguin... at 10:18 AM on June 17, 2022 (118 comments)

Why is this tiny frog so awful at jumping? "The moment the pumpkin toadlet leaps into the air, anything seems possible. The tiny frog, which is about the size of a honeybee and the color of a cloudberry, has no problem launching itself high off the ground. But when the pumpkin toadlet begins to soar, something goes awry."
posted to MetaFilter by moonmilk at 3:49 PM on June 15, 2022 (70 comments)

Popular organist and Director of Music at Pembroke, Anna Lapwood, often finds herself rehearsing on the house organ at Albert Hall. While doing so in May, Bonobo's band heard this happen. Within 18 hours she was written into the closing night and completely slayed it. [SLYT]
posted to MetaFilter by majick at 6:26 AM on June 13, 2022 (24 comments)

Hi Mefites - over the last few months I've been stepping away from my role as moderator here. I wanted to take this chance to make it official and say Thanks for all the fish.
posted to MetaTalk by LobsterMitten at 9:07 AM on June 9, 2022 (84 comments)

I know I've come across many good answers, comments, posts and questions about adult diagnoses of ADHD. Do you have any in your memory banks or favorited, followed or flagged you could share with me?
posted to MetaTalk by Grandysaur at 11:36 AM on June 6, 2022 (22 comments)

Here is a short and very-layperson-accessible linguistics paper that made cartoon steam shoot out of my ears. I hope that you enjoy it as well.
posted to MetaFilter by DoctorFedora at 5:45 AM on June 10, 2022 (108 comments)

Cell Tower, a word search game in which you find words on a grid. Letters must be all connected orthogonally, and read top-down, left-right. Click the hamburger menu to access both the daily and previous puzzles, and instructions. Note that there are lots of words available, but only one solution that uses all the letters in the grid.
posted to MetaFilter by Gorgik at 5:37 AM on June 10, 2022 (25 comments)

AI-generated art and comics about cats, from the future! I've been generating these using a tool called Midjourney, which has proved especially good at mimicking the pen-and-ink art style of New Yorker cartoons. I'm having a ton of fun making these (“new yorker cartoon about a cat being chased by a swarm of bees” is my favorite so far), so I set up a dedicated Instagram. New cat comics/art/weirdness a couple of times a day!
posted to MetaFilter Projects by oulipian at 9:08 AM on June 10, 2022 (3 comments)

I recently integrated Planck.js into a client's product and wanted to reuse that knowledge to make a fun game, so I picked an idea and tweeted along as I refined & built it.
posted to MetaFilter Projects by malevolent at 8:02 AM on June 10, 2022 (7 comments)

In January 2018 music writer Tom Breihan began writing a column, The Number Ones, for Stereogum. (When this column was started, the #1 song in America was Ed Sheeran's “Perfect”.) The premise is simple: he is going through and writing about every single song to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart in order, starting with the very first #1, Ricky Nelson's “Poor Little Fool” from August 1958, and continuing, presumably, at least until he catches up with the chart. At his current rate of three columns a week or so (and the rate of new #1 singles in the streaming era), it'll be into spring 2024 before that happens, but he's made it through the first 40 years of the chart into 1998, so there's a ton of great writing (827+ columns!) that deserves attention.
posted to MetaFilter by Superilla at 2:47 PM on June 3, 2022 (31 comments)

(Previously on Metafilter)
posted to MetaFilter Projects by bondcliff at 8:35 AM on May 27, 2022 (4 comments)

So, this list fell out of one of my old notebooks today. I definitely wrote it, but I have zero recollection of doing so and no clue as to what it could mean. Was it just some random word association game? Am I an unwitting sleeper spy who found my activation code? WHY IS WORDS? (mods, feel free to delete if this is too chatfiltery...)
posted to Ask MetaFilter by a.steele at 1:05 PM on May 25, 2022 (40 comments)

Hi there, Metafilter! Happy Wednesday! You’ll find updates regarding the site below. I’m looking forward to your feedback and questions.
posted to MetaTalk by loup at 1:52 PM on May 25, 2022 (156 comments)

A new trailer for "3000 Years of Longing", the new film from George Miller, based on story by A. S. Byatt. (SLYT)
posted to MetaFilter by Ipsifendus at 3:58 PM on May 20, 2022 (22 comments)

Gamesnacks.com has over 140 simple games you can play in browser with no ads or crap. I've played most of them.
posted to MetaFilter by rebent at 10:23 AM on November 19, 2021 (29 comments)

Ant Game! Place anthills and see how much food your ants can collect before time runs out. Make your own maps in Sandbox mode. Compete against the world in Daily Challenges.
posted to MetaFilter by MetaFilter World Peace at 6:42 AM on May 19, 2022 (19 comments)

Put your skills to the test and solve thirty-two Wordles at once! You have 37 guesses to solve all 32 words.
posted to MetaFilter by geoff. at 2:43 PM on May 15, 2022 (76 comments)

If It Feels Like a New Dark Age Is Falling… That’s Because It Is. Why We’re Entering a Dark Age Between Civilizations.
What’s Happening to America? A Theocratic-Fascist Revolution. When a Fanatical 30% Suddenly Seizes Control of Your Society, It’s Called a Revolution.
Umair Haque - love him or leave him. That his writing output is prolific is an understatement.
He has been described as a Master of Catastrophe who speaks in apocalyptic jazz scat (thanks clavdivs).
posted to MetaFilter by adamvasco at 5:21 AM on May 15, 2022 (57 comments)

We’ve talked about Graham’s Number previously, most recently after Ron Graham’s death in 2020. Numberphile has several great videos about it: Graham’s Number; What is Graham’s Number? (featuring Ron Graham); How Big is Graham’s Number? (featuring Ron Graham). But we’re just getting started. The number TREE(3), which comes from a simple combinatorial problem in graph theory, is proven to be finite, but unimaginably larger than the already unimaginable Graham’s Number. Tony Padilla explains further in these Numberphile videos: The Enormous TREE(3); TREE(3) (extra footage); TREE vs Graham’s Number; TREE(Graham’s Number) (extra). There is an endless supply of even larger numbers defined by fast-growing computable sequences, but things get wilder in the realm of uncomputable numbers. The Busy Beaver function, related to the maximum number of steps taken by a halting Turing machine with a given number of states, provably grows faster than any computable function. David Brailsford explains in the Computerphile video Busy Beaver Turing Machines. And Rayo’s Number is “one of the largest named numbers in professional mathematics.” Tony Padilla is back to explain in The Daddy of Big Numbers (Rayo’s Number).
posted to MetaFilter by mubba at 1:43 PM on February 17, 2022 (24 comments)

The proprietor of one of the longest regularly updated static web blogs, kottke.org, has announced that he is taking an extended break. After 24 years, Mefi's own (#109) Jason Kottke says his fiddle leaf fig tree "is not ok. And neither am I — I feel as off-balance as my tree looks. I’m burrrrned out." Starting back with post 78 there have been hundreds of posts and thousands of comments referencing Kottke, and Jason has featured Metafilter a number of times as well.
posted to MetaFilter by zenon at 7:48 AM on May 13, 2022 (19 comments)

Greg Egan's Dream Factory is a story about the ethics of turning cats into entertainment devices with brain electrodes.
posted to MetaFilter by kaibutsu at 12:17 AM on May 9, 2022 (3 comments)

A delightful performance of Canon in D by Hiromi Uehara that keeps getting jazzier as it progresses, with an inline transcription following the whole way.
posted to MetaFilter by a faithful sock at 7:17 AM on May 6, 2022 (36 comments)

Infinite Images and the latent camera Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst talk about their experiences with DALL-E (versions 1 and 2) and their thoughts on a future where anyone can make conceptual art from a few words. Holly and AI previously and previouslier.
posted to MetaFilter by snortasprocket at 5:52 PM on May 5, 2022 (19 comments)

The Gif Gallery claims to contain (very nearly) 100,000 gifs. Related: a 2013 FPP on the pronounciation, a Stephen Whilite obituary, the giphy repository (FPP), and a 2010 Slate article.
posted to MetaFilter by Wordshore at 4:11 AM on May 5, 2022 (38 comments)

Knotwords (iOS, Android, Steam) (trailer, review) is a new daily word game from Zach Gage, creator of games like Ridiculous Fishing, SpellTower, and Really Bad Chess. It's probably not going to get Wordle-famous, but Josh Wardle likes it, and, if you like word games and/or logic puzzles, you might too.
posted to MetaFilter by box at 6:19 AM on May 4, 2022 (25 comments)

"Today is my birthday. I turn 70. I’ve learned a few things so far that might be helpful to others. For the past few years, I’ve jotted down bits of unsolicited advice each year and much to my surprise I have more to add this year. So here is my birthday gift to you all: 103 bits of wisdom I wish I had known when I was young."--Kevin Kelly (more advice, previously, from the man who brought you Cool Tools).
posted to MetaFilter by MonkeyToes at 2:09 PM on May 3, 2022 (90 comments)

I've installed a language learning extension in my browser called Toucan which changes an assortment of words on whatever page you're looking at into your target learning language -- in my case French -- with the idea that you will learn that vocabulary in the context of your primary language. But what's currently cracking me up is that when I open a page on Metafilter: communauté weblog, it often chooses to translate bits and pieces of peoples usernames.
posted to MetaTalk by jacquilynne at 3:38 PM on May 7, 2022 (46 comments)

What music sounds most to you as if it were written/performed by/for goblins?
posted to Ask MetaFilter by scruss at 7:16 PM on April 30, 2022 (44 comments)