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The Black Book
The Nigerian Hit Movie That Broke Netflix
- "Government corruption, police brutality and the often futile struggle of ordinary Nigerians for justice form the backdrop for Effiong's impressive action sequences. 'Authenticity was key for us, showing Nigeria as it is, in a way that Nigerian people would recognize,' says [director Editi] Effiong. 'Not a Hollywood version of Lagos, but Lagos as we Nigerians see it.' The film's success has raised the bar for Nigerian movies, which have proven a driving force for Netflix and other streaming services as they look to expand across Africa and to export African cinema worldwide."
Un projecte col·lectiu d’il·lustració que ret homenatge a la New Yorker
THE BARCELONIAN is a collective illustration project that pays homage to the legendary THE NEW YORKER through the covers of a nonexistent magazine. More than 100 artists illustrate their relationship with the lived city, with the city of their loves and hates, to show us corners, scenes, anecdotes and episodes from the multiple perspectives of their unique view.
Thoughtful paper about ChatGPT
This paper describes an old and a new way to think about ChatGPT.
Borges and AI is the title; the authors take a high-level view of the entire potential corpus of ChatGPT, guided by a few of Borges' stories that explore universes of infinite possibilities.
The Most Scathing Book Reviews of 2023
“Yes, it’s her world and after reading her book I just wish I could move off-planet.” Lit Hub's annual best-worst reviews list.
Fish in the water and cats in the rice paddy
Thai rice farmer Tanyapong Jiakham in Chiang Rai has created art in his rice paddies by planting rainbow rice seedlings depicting sleeping cats. The artwork takes as its theme a Thai saying "There is fish in the water and rice in the fields" as well as model cat Cooper, whose colouring will be reflected in the rice plants just before harvesting.
On other peoples' aggression, and my response to it
How do I best change my responses to someone else's anger, so that I am calmer and less fearful?
AI-Written Homework Is Rising. So Are False Accusations.
From the Daily Beast. Mira is a student of international business at the Artevelde University of Applied Sciences in Belgium. She recently received feedback on one of her papers—and was shocked to see that her instructor noted that an artificial intelligence detector flagged 40 percent of her paper as being written by a bot. She ended up discussing it with her professor, telling him that she didn’t know how she could prove she wrote the paper. He agreed to check it again—but she hasn’t heard back from him yet.
Power (Plough, Sword & Book) and Progress (Exit, Voice & Loyalty)
Justice by Means of Democracy
[archive|transcript] - "[T]he work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working."[1,2; link-heavy post!]
This is not a Free Thread, so don't leave off-topic comments here
...or perhaps it is a free thread, in which case do? If a MeFite makes an irrelevant comment on a front page post, does anyone read it? What is commenting, anyway? What is commenting... not? Will the many academics who keep studying what we write on MetaFilter ever tell us? Discuss. Or don't. Does anyone care? And is Cool Whip really edible?
Twenty-one red handfish hatched in successful breeding program
Twenty-one critically endangered red handfish hatched in successful Tasmanian conservation breeding program. A lot is riding on this group of tiny baby fish — so much so, they'll be put through school to get them street smart before release into the wild in Tasmania.
If you can ask for help, do.
Most of us will experience the death of a parent. That experience is unique for everyone, yet there is so much we can learn from each other. Sumana Harihareswara has created an extraordinary collection of resources about Eldercare, Family Caretaking, and End-of-life Logistics: Stuff I Learned. It is full of detailed advice, good sense, and compassion. (created by brainwane, found at MeFi Projects)
You want year-end best-of album lists?
Following on the recent Rolling Stone best albums of 2023 posting and with a few media outlets yet to weigh in, a few more best-of lists from the media jungle, compiled for your reference and enjoyment.
Global education's leaning tower
Mathematics, reading skills in unprecedented decline in teenagers
Teenagers' mathematics and reading skills are in an unprecedented decline across dozens of countries and COVID school closures are only partly to be blamed, the OECD said on Tuesday in its latest survey of global learning standards. The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said it had seen some of the steepest drops in performance since 2000 when it began its usually triennial tests of 15-year-olds reading, maths and science skills. Nearly 700,000 youths took the two-hour test last year in the OECD's 38 mostly developed country members and 44-non members for the latest study, closely watched by policymakers as the largest international comparison of education performance. Compared to when the tests were last conducted in 2018, reading performance fell by 10 points on average in OECD countries, and by 15 points in mathematics, a loss equivalent to three-quarters of a year's worth of learning. [...] Countries that provided extra teacher support during COVID school closures scored better and results were generally better in places where easy teacher access for special help was high. Poorer results tended to be associated with higher rates of mobile phone use for leisure and where schools reported teacher shortages.
Most people are only truly productive for 3-4 hours a day
"I don't need to get the most juice out of every single lime" [TikTok]
"If I could make as much money as possible I would be a total prick, a con man, or both!"
A crucial part of the ideology of work-discipline
Our own perceptions of our current period of distraction therefore need to be seen in a longer perspective. Concentration is a social, learned behaviour that is more necessary in some contexts than in others. The modern appetite for bingeing on box sets and multi-episode podcasts makes it clear that we are not losing the ability to concentrate, merely directing it towards different media. We concentrate when we want to. from The big idea: are our short attention spans really getting shorter? [Grauniad; ungated]
Hello!
Parrots taught to video call each other become less lonely, finds research
The parrots were recruited from users of Parrot Kindergarten, an online coaching and educational programme for parrots and their owners. The birds first learned to ring a bell and then touch a photo of another bird on the screen of a tablet device to trigger a call to that bird, with the assistance of their owners. In total the birds made 147 deliberate calls to each other during the study.
Enshittification (and some deshittification) of note-taking software
It’s official: Evernote will restrict free users to 50 notes. After Bending Spoons acquired Evernote in November 2022, the company laid off 129 people in February 2023. At that time, a spokesperson told TechCrunch that the notetaking app has “been unprofitable for years and the situation was unsustainable in the long term.” I was lucky enough to see this in my news feed yesterday, and went into scramble mode. More luck: I quickly found noteapps.info, which not only catalogs the features of different notes apps, but also allows you to do side-by-side comparisons of the features, or dynamically filter your search by feature. I had to ask...who would go to all the trouble of making this, and why?
Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)
"People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. [...] Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus."
PLEASE !!! STOP HITTING EXHAUST FAN WITH MOP HANDLES !!!!!
South Pole Signage
Signs that make you scratch your head. Signs that could exist in a suburban office park anywhere on earth. Signs that can only exist at the South Pole.
Enjoy some humorous existential dread
The Amazing Digital Circus (Youtube, 26 minutes) is a computer-animated Youtube cartoon about a group of whimsical characters stuck in a whimsical VR world. They're all hugely dismayed by this fact and want to leave it please. In that way it feels a bit like social media. In a month it has gotten 147 million views. Meet the characters (1 minute). It was made by the talented Gooseworx, who also made Little Runmo (16 minutes, previously), a cartoon about a video game character who learns a little too much about the world they live in. CW: general disquietingness.
A daily visit to Hotel Fred
Roger Langridge
is a cartoonist. Every morning, he draws a four panel strip about whatever happens to be on his mind and posts it online. Some are about the everyday trials and delights of family life, some are about his dog and others simply rif on what the medium can do. I like them a lot.
The Science Behind Our Musical Tastes
According to Nolan Gasser, a musician and musicologist, sociology plays a tremendous role behind our musical tastes. What we hear when we were babies and throughout our formative years become the home base of our musical sensibilities. But as we grow older, our taste in music evolves and expands as we become exposed to different music. For a deeper dive into musical taste, you may check out Nolan Gasser's Why You Like It: The Science & Culture of Musical Taste.
Buggin' out
In North America, nearly all songbirds feed insects to their young. But since 1970, the number of birds in the United States and Canada has fallen by 29%, or roughly 2.9 billion, which scientists theorize is tied to having fewer insects in the world. Some research also has linked insecticide use with declines in barn swallows, house martins, and swifts .... “Nature is just eroding away very slowly,” Wagner said. As insects disappear, “we’re losing the limbs and the twigs of the tree of life. We’re tearing it apart. And we’re leaving behind a very simplified and ugly tree.” from The collapse of insects
Late Wednesday Night Inspirational Speech Post
"no matter how hard you try to implement these discriminatory policies in the right way, you are never going to find a right way to do the wrong thing" Man gives truly inspiring speech at Virginia Beach school board meeting [DailyKos, includes transcript] "And Gov. Youngkin’s policies are wrong.
One of the ways you could tell is because you have speakers from groups like Moms for Liberty here to support them. And I'll be real simple in case you aren’t paying attention—they're not the good guys. How can you tell? I can help. The good guys don't get declared extremist groups by human rights organizations." Direct Link To Video Of Speech [2m10s]
"This is what it’s like to be alive in history"
"When History Happens: Lyta Gold reflects on the writings of Connie Willis and the heroes of history". Gold writes in Current Affairs magazine three years ago about the Blitz, COVID-19, pandemics, choices, systems, power and powerlessness, grief, trauma, advertising, war and progress.
This is why I love Naomi Kritzer
The Year Without Sunshine is a new story by Naomi Kritzer. It's about what happens after the really big disaster. Kritzer is perhaps best known for Cat Pictures Please, but her other works have been lauded on MetaFilter previously (previously; previously; previously - So Much Cooking; previously - Better Living Through Algorithms, plus her election guide); previously - Paradox; previously; all the previouslies).
Beatles memorabilia from Mal Evans saved by an office temp and Yoko Ono
One article I read about the forthcoming release of a book based on Mal
Evans archives (namesake of MAL, the software that Peter Jackson used to extract John Lennon’s vocals for Now and Then) mentions the papers “languishing in a publishing house basement.”
Another article goes more in depth on how Leena Kutti, a temp was assigned to clear out a publisher’s basement storage area. She discovered the Beatles memorabilia, manuscript and diaries of Beatles gofer Mal Evans. To save what she found, she dropped a note to Yoko Ono.
“Having this trove of interviews was kind of a no-brainer.”
Between 1980 and 2005, Boston music journalist Larry Katz recorded over one thousand twenty-four interviews with established rock stars, local favorites, and industry pioneers. This article from Atlas Obscura, "Unearthing Gems in a Massive Archive of Rock Star Interviews", gives an overview of the vast cache, which is now hosted and searchable on Northeastern University's Digital Repository Service. Giordana Mecagni, head of special collections at Northeastern: “The most important part of these tapes is that they’re just really raw . . . they are unpolished and unvarnished.” [via jessamyn]
Out of one's depth in the field. Here's the fix.
Camera Viewfinder Simulator.
So you've got your fancy camera out of the box. Yay! Wait, you can now adjust focal length, aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and distance from your subject. How do those variables affect the picture? This website gives you sliders to wiggle all those variables and see the result.
Cinematic Fig Leaf
"NO CGI" is really just "INVISIBLE CGI" [SLYT]
This VFX artist rigorously examines the oft-repeated claim that a movie has no CGI or is all practical. As he puts it, why are their 400 VFX artists in the credits then?
You may touch the artifacts
Internet Artifacts: a thoroughly interactive multimedia timeline of the documents, technologies, and phenomena that defined the Internet in the pre-smartphone era. Come for the First Smiley (1983) and the First MP3 (1987), stay for the AOL Dial-Up handshake (1991) and the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny (2006). [Via Neal.fun]
Clutter Block #4: Fantasy Stuff For My Fantasy Life
7 emotional blocks making it harder to declutter.
#1 My Stuff Keeps Me in the Past. Looking at these items may reinforce that your best days are behind you.
#2 My Stuff Tells Me Who I Am. Ask what am I looking to these things to tell me about myself?
#3 Stuff I'm Avoiding. (It me! It me!)
CBC interview with decluttering maven Tracy McCubbin (onTikTok).
#1 My Stuff Keeps Me in the Past. Looking at these items may reinforce that your best days are behind you.
#2 My Stuff Tells Me Who I Am. Ask what am I looking to these things to tell me about myself?
#3 Stuff I'm Avoiding. (It me! It me!)
CBC interview with decluttering maven Tracy McCubbin (onTikTok).
How can I avoid flogging myself for missing the life I could have had?
A recent diagnosis of ADHD, at a late age, has made me realize my life could have been very different had I been diagnosed sooner. By most measures for someone living in North America, I've had a good and fortunate life. But I know myself enough to know that, sooner or later, a spiral of thinking "I could have been better, done so much more" will start, and this cannot end well. Have others among you found ways to prevent this line of thinking?
You Think You Know a Site
I’ve known since I was 11 who these people, this Eyebrows McGee and this languagehat, are.
After graduating from college, I still thought of Metafilter as a rarified club of experts that I’d somehow snuck into. I also thought of Metafilter as a perfect window onto the world. I was sure I could better understand different life experiences because I read strangers’ thoughts, freed by anonymity to be honest. I knew I lived in a tiny bubble, and Metafilter seemed my best defense against that insularity.
This is a memory, or perhaps many memories braided into one
In these years, you are never able to sleep, developing an addiction to Ambien that you’ll still be fighting twenty years later. Your thoughts circle around and around and around and around, taunting you with your deepest anxieties, turning your own mind against itself. In your early twenties, you’ll be diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. But now, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, you take the thoughts at their word, experience them only as evidence that something is irrevocably broken within you. from The Protagonist Is Never in Control [CW: abusive relationships, dysfunctional families, gaslighting]
Deliberate Ignorance
Traditionally, the search for knowledge has involved paying close attention to information—finding it and considering it from multiple angles. Reading a text from beginning to end to critically evaluate it is a sensible approach to vetted school texts approved by competent overseers. On the unvetted Internet, however, this approach often ends up being a colossal waste of time and energy. In an era in which attention is the new currency, the admonition to “pay careful attention” is precisely what attention merchants and malicious agents exploit. It is time to revisit and expand the concept of critical thinking, often seen as the bedrock of an informed citizenry. As long as students are led to believe that critical thinking requires above all the effortful processing of text, they will continue to fall prey to informational traps and manipulated signals of epistemic quality. At the same time that students learn critical thinking, they should learn the core competence of thoughtfully and strategically allocating their attentional resources online. from Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
That's how I got my call sign
"Women, she figures, caught her vibe. "Every woman who read that was like: Mmm-hmm, you go," Cummings says. But men — friends in Silicon Valley — did not. They thought she had been too mean to Vogt. "He was just trying to help you," they told her."
Missy Cummings flew F-18s, has a PhD in systems engineering, and is a professor at Duke. Among other things, she researches self-driving cars.
Innerviews
Anil Prasad's online music magazine Innerviews "delivers in-depth, uncompromising interviews that enable artists to speak at length about topics that matter to them." He's interviewed several hundred musicians over the years, including
Tori Amos,
Laurie Anderson,
Adrian Belew,
Björk,
Ron Carter,
Stanley Clarke,
Keith Emerson,
Béla Fleck,
Robert Fripp (sort of),
Jean-Michel Jarre,
Kronos Quartet,
Bill Laswell,
Massive Attack,
Public Enemy,
Marc Ribot,
Terry Riley,
Buffy Sainte-Marie,
Talking Heads (previously),
Tanya Tagaq,
and McCoy Tyner.
MeFi Business/Legal Update
Thanks for your patience as I have worked through talking with lawyers who talk with their experts. This is a substantive update with some news and some questions for the community. The short form is: everyone on the team of people I spoke with agrees that MeFi could potentially be a non-profit organization (with the ultimate determination being made by the IRS). Now we need to decide how to move forward and make MeFi into a community-run organization. I'll give some backstory and a "where we are with this" situation inside.
Thandiwe Muriu: You Thought You Could Throw Me Away
Many of the works shown here are part of Muriu’s Camo series, which envelops the artist in Ankara wax fabrics common in Central and West Africa.
How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet
How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet.
"Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."
It isn't lost and it isn't a masterpiece
Apparently back in 1975, Graham Chapman of Monty Python and Douglas Adams not quite yet of Hitchhiker's Guide wrote a television show. It's an incomprehensible mess that's entirely worth watching. Out Of The Trees [32m]
Google kills Google Podcasts (in favor of YouTube Music)
Google Podcasts is shutting down
Google just announced that it is shutting down Google Podcasts in 2024, despite having been installed more than 500 million times since its 2018 launch. They are encouraging users to switch to YouTube music instead.