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How Phish turned Las Vegas’ Sphere into the ultimate music visualizer "Some moments last night felt like you were seeing enormous versions of the old visualizers from Winamp or iTunes. Others brought the crowd into intricate, dazzling scenes."
comment posted at 8:42 AM on Apr-20-24
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comment posted at 6:42 PM on Apr-20-24
comment posted at 10:05 PM on Apr-20-24

Oklahoman Cal Clifford asked for a pet octopus at every birthday, Christmas and major holiday. For his ninth birthday, Cal's parents made his dream come true. Then the eggs started to appear...
comment posted at 7:35 PM on Apr-16-24

It was clear to Nyborg that apps such as Tinder were failing their users: designed to keep them coming back, rather than to find a partner and never return. In that moment, it wasn’t fear she felt but empathy. Through letters like this one she had learnt a lot about a particular group of Tinder’s users: those who were “incredibly lonely” ... When she quit, several investors reached out to Nyborg, asking if she planned to start another dating app. Instead Nyborg took a different turn. She began researching loneliness. The new app she came up with looked very different from Tinder. from The loneliness cure [Financial Times; ungated]
comment posted at 8:38 AM on Apr-12-24

The folks at Corridor Crew recently reached back sixty years to recreate a truly wonderous piece of special effects technology that was thought to be long lost.
comment posted at 4:01 PM on Apr-7-24

Gary Shteyngart on assignment from The Atlantic engages in a supposedly fun thing that he'll never do again, cruising from Florida to St. Kitts and CocoCay on board Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas.
comment posted at 8:17 PM on Apr-7-24

4.8 Shaker Strikes Whitehouse Station, NJ. Tri-State residents were surprised this morning by a rare earthquake. Although earthquakes are rare in the North East, they are not unheard of. The Ramapo Fault may be the culprit here.
comment posted at 5:30 PM on Apr-5-24

"Bizarre BEACHCOMBER war erupts over marbles deliberately tipped into ocean to be 'frosted', with purists saying its destroyed novelty value of finding one of the glass balls." A longer, more nuanced take from 2017 in Beachcombing Magazine. Also from 2017, "Is Seeded Glass Sea Glass?" Sea glass in the NYT back in 2010 [Archive]. Note that beachcombing is different when robots do it.
comment posted at 7:07 PM on Mar-11-24

Look, I’m sure a ton of science and hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) worth of research went into creating Giro’s new time trial helmet, which was recently unveiled on Visma-Lease a Bike’s Instagram. And I’m sure its design helps save a watt or two, which, at the upper echelon of bicycle racing, absolutely matters. Especially when you’re talking time trials. But… and it’s a big but… look at this thing. from Visma-Lease a Bike’s New Time Trial Helmets Are Ridiculous [Bicycling]
comment posted at 1:04 PM on Mar-6-24

Full Of Themselves A title drop is when a character in a movie says the title of the movie they're in. Here's a large-scale analysis of 73,921 movies from the last 80 years on how often, when and maybe even why that happens.
comment posted at 12:13 PM on Mar-4-24

The amount of profit that Amazon makes from third-party sellers, as opposed to AWS or some other division, might sound like a technical distinction, but it’s essential to the case against the company. The FTC alleges that Amazon’s low-price image is a mirage: According to the FTC, the company actually keeps prices higher than they would be in a competitive market—not just on Amazon but across the internet—squeezing consumers and small businesses in the process. from Amazon’s Big Secret [The Atlantic; ungated]
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Mar-3-24
comment posted at 1:03 PM on Mar-3-24

The "Atlanta Magnet Man" bikes around Atlanta with a hitched trailer that uses magnets to attract metal debris that poses a risk to people’s car tires. The idea is completely his own, and he does it for free. “I can’t really find anybody that says what I’m doing is a terrible thing unless, you know, they own a tire shop,” he said.
comment posted at 2:40 PM on Mar-1-24
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comment posted at 11:11 AM on Mar-2-24

Chaotic off-brand Willy Wonka pop-up exhibit ends with police intervention

Obviously, when the poor Charlie And The Chocolate Factory enthusiasts showed up at Box Hub Warehouse, the event looked nothing like what the event description suggested. Instead, they were confronted with a sad-looking, mostly empty warehouse with a bouncy house and some ramshackle decorations. Jack Proctor, a dad who took his kids to the event, told STV News that “we stepped inside to find a disorganized mini-maze of randomly placed oversized props, a lackluster candy station that dispersed one jelly bean per child, and a terrifying chrome-masked character that scared many of the kids to tears.” [...] "The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point."

The face behind Willy Wonka 'scam': How Billy Coull 'conned' kids by using AI generated images to sell 'immersive' experience - More shocking pictures emerge of ‘shambles’ Willy Wonka experience - Employee contracts signed with "erasable ink" - Actor hired as Willy Wonka for cancelled event called it a place 'where dreams went to die' - 'Willy Wonka' chocolate experience boss 'truly sorry' after 'chaos' - Read the ChatGPT-generated event "script" [PDF]
comment posted at 1:32 PM on Feb-27-24

The short answer is… It’s complicated.
comment posted at 12:23 PM on Feb-26-24

Legal weed in New York was going to be a revolution. What happened? (Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker (archive.is))
comment posted at 11:44 AM on Feb-24-24

The company will be ceasing operations of Vice.com as it is "no longer cost-effective" to do so. NYT published an article recently: The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer
comment posted at 11:29 AM on Feb-24-24

The Martian helicopter completed its final flight on Valinor Hills. "yeah it really could be an ocean moon" - Let's check in on humanity's exploration of space in early 2024.
comment posted at 1:49 PM on Feb-23-24
comment posted at 11:11 AM on Feb-24-24

Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out (SL Cracked Interview) Jillette has renounced libertarianism (after being asked to MC an anti-masking event) and is terrified of Trump. He still has a lot on his mind.
comment posted at 10:11 AM on Jan-25-24

Starbucks' latest Stanley (Bon Appetit) collaboration causes havoc (Today, Detroit Free Press) at Target.
comment posted at 2:27 AM on Jan-7-24

Learning To Play Piano When There Is No Recital. There are lots of reasons to continue or start a hobby even if you cannot become good enough to make it your full-time job. But even as I write that, I don’t really believe it deep down. I believe it for you. I think it’s a great idea for everyone else to do things that bring them joy and have no other benefits. But not for me.
comment posted at 10:00 AM on Jan-4-24

The L.A.P.D. says it has the largest local airborne law-enforcement unit in the world. A recent audit found little evidence that its choppers deter crime.
comment posted at 3:19 PM on Dec-29-23
comment posted at 1:47 PM on Dec-30-23

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. [so many previouslies]
comment posted at 1:26 PM on Dec-28-23

Star Wars Holiday Special: 5K 60fps Upscale (1978)
comment posted at 9:52 AM on Dec-24-23
comment posted at 11:01 AM on Dec-24-23

Copyright claim against Tolkien estate backfires on LOTR fanfiction writer. (slTheGuardian)
comment posted at 1:31 PM on Dec-19-23

During the 1998-99 snow season, [The] Mount Baker [Ski Area] received 95 feet of snow, setting the national and world record for the most snowfall in a year. The mark stands 25 years later. (ungated, archive)
comment posted at 12:57 PM on Dec-16-23
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comment posted at 1:18 PM on Dec-16-23

Covering long Covid solidified my view that science is not the objective, neutral force it is often misconstrued as. It is instead a human endeavor, relentlessly buffeted by our culture, values and politics. As energy-depleting illnesses that disproportionately affect women, long Covid and M.E./C.F.S. are easily belittled by a sexist society that trivializes women’s pain, and a capitalist one that values people according to their productivity. Societal dismissal leads to scientific neglect, and a lack of research becomes fodder for further skepticism. I understood these dynamics only after interviewing social scientists, disability scholars and patients themselves, whose voices are often absent or minimized in the media. Like the pandemic writ large, long Covid is not just a health problem. It is a social one, and must also be understood as such. From Ed Yong in the New York Times (archive link).
comment posted at 2:23 PM on Dec-11-23
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comment posted at 10:16 AM on Dec-12-23

Americans love avocados. It’s killing Mexico’s forests. (Alternate link here) The article discusses existing political approaches to solutions. But also, try growing your own! A worthy and fun long-term project. Here's an example of some people who decided to put some avocado pits in the ground. They're trying to grow a cold-hardy avocado that can thrive in the Pacific Northwest.
comment posted at 5:47 PM on Dec-11-23

A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. [via Hacker News]
comment posted at 8:56 AM on Dec-9-23

This web app lets you search a song on Spotify and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song.
comment posted at 2:11 PM on Dec-8-23
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comment posted at 2:47 PM on Dec-8-23
comment posted at 9:57 PM on Dec-8-23

Farm robots helping put healthier produce on the table by reducing herbicide use. Hand-weeding and mechanical cultivation fell out of favour following the invention of herbicides in the 1940s. But robots imported to Australia from manufacturers in countries such as Denmark and the United States are reviving these weed-control methods to slash chemical use. Guided by GPS and cameras, the machines use knives and wires to take out pest plants by hand instead of spraying.
comment posted at 5:51 PM on Dec-5-23

Santos is out. And by a fairly decisive margin of 311-114. Watching the election from across the pond, I just could not believe this charlatan was able to convince so many people of his lies. Now let's see him behind bars along with the Orange Shitgibbon.
comment posted at 1:13 PM on Dec-1-23

In his ongoing attempt to to destroy Xitter, Mr Musk suggests former advertisers indulge in auto-copulation. (slyt)
comment posted at 6:47 PM on Nov-30-23

High-quality video of Rush's Neil Peart practicing the drums for half an hour. Nothing more, nothing less.
comment posted at 11:19 AM on Nov-29-23
comment posted at 1:58 PM on Nov-29-23

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is going a bit overboard for Turkey Day 2023, with 48 straight hours of episodes from both the classic era and recently-concluded Season 13! Starting November 23 at 9 AM Eastern time, and watchable for free on the show's official Youtube channel, on their official Pluto TV channel, on their Twitch channel, and on their bespoke streaming solution the Gizmoplex. Two full days of cheesy movies and humorous commentary from a human test subject and their automated mocking contraptions.
comment posted at 8:19 AM on Nov-23-23