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Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games. This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme: The Most Mario Colors
comment posted at 1:57 PM on Jan-21-25

I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before. from US President Joe Biden's final speech.
comment posted at 3:58 AM on Jan-17-25

We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

"Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed. But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth."

comment posted at 3:07 PM on Jan-14-25
comment posted at 5:38 PM on Jan-14-25

American users are turning to RedNote, the Chinese equivalent of Instagram/Pinterest, ahead of a looming TikTok ban, which legislators are now urging Biden to extend the Jan 19 deadline for. TikTok has called rumors that it is considering a sale to Elon Musk, "pure fiction", and its parent company ByteDance has said that it would shut down rather than sell to an American buyer.
comment posted at 5:34 PM on Jan-14-25

The chili cookoff is so profound an American culinary tradition that one would assume its origins to be lost in the mists of history. Instead they trace clearly not just to a single man but to a single piece of writing: “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do", by H. Allen Smith
comment posted at 10:33 AM on Jan-11-25

As of last month, the United States Government Printing Office has soft-launched a new search tool and seeks feedback: DiscoverGov, which "provides simple, one-stop searching across multiple U.S. Federal Government databases". This includes what's currently available in GovInfo plus the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP). Sample search: "dragon". (Other resources include the United States Code, which one can browse and download.)
comment posted at 2:24 PM on Jan-3-25

With Bible sales up 22% over last year, let’s revisit The New Yorker’s 2006 article ”The Good Book Business”. (Wayback Machine link)
comment posted at 3:49 AM on Jan-2-25

The We Rate Dogs Top Ten Dogs of the Year

The last 5 are the hero dogs
comment posted at 5:41 AM on Dec-31-24

Australian bosses could go to jail for 10 years and be fined $1.65 million if they deliberately underpay their workers, as part of new laws that nationally criminalise wage theft from January 1. The new laws and penalties follow years of underpayment scandals in Australia, with cases at prominent employers including Woolworths, Chatime, Qantas, NAB, BHP, 7-Eleven and the ABC. Until now, the federal body that investigates wage theft has only been able to go after companies and their directors using civil laws, which don't come with the threat of jail time. Now Fair Work will be able to go after them using criminal laws too.
comment posted at 10:09 AM on Dec-30-24

20 people in a two-bedroom apartment: the growing health and safety risks of hot bedding. Sydney's housing crisis is evolving into a hidden health crisis and as rents soar, some residents face an impossible choice: unaffordable housing or unsafe living conditions.
comment posted at 4:14 AM on Dec-29-24

Several ancient epics would be a lot shorter if all it took to reconcile the feuding brothers was a reminder of their shared lineage. Unfortunately, our origin stories don’t tell us how to resolve any particular ethical dispute. The essence of such disputes, as with the fratricidal wars of the ancients, is that they are between factions who share the same psychology, the same history, the same aspirations. The history that made us into creatures capable of coöperation also gave us the capacity to hate one another in the aggregate, to draw sharp lines dividing the in-group from the out-group. Sauer’s book may cast a gloomier light than he acknowledges. Our capacity for endless conflict may be just as much a part of our inheritance as is our ability, every now and then, to get along. from Does Morality Do Us Any Good? [The New Yorker; ungated]
comment posted at 3:31 AM on Dec-25-24

The Gaetz ethics report is out. According to a 42-page report by the House Ethics Committee, the former congressman and Trump’s former pick for attorney general regularly paid for sex, possessed illegal drugs, violated the house gift rule, dispensed privileges to a sexual partner, obstructed the investigation, and violated Florida state laws by committing statutory rape of a 17-year-old.
comment posted at 12:24 PM on Dec-24-24

This week Otherworld released Episode 107: The Expedition, which features the story of a young woman and her friend spotting a strange creature near her family's ranch land in east Texas. They enlist the help of the Bigfoot Field Research Organization, an organization dedicated to field investigations into sightings of squatches, as well as documenting stories and evidence in the extensive BFRO Database, and cataloging the latest in Bigfoot hypotheses and research. If you are up for some camping and hiking, a field research expedition might be right for you! Or if want a bit lighter Bigfoot podcast fare, check out the Bigfeets podcast, brought to you by the incredible comedy writers on 1-900 HOT DOG, the absolute last comedy website on the internet. It's the world's only watch along podcast of Mountain Monsters, the which follows the hillbilly Bigfoot-hunting AIMS Crew as search for mysterious Appalachian anomalies.
comment posted at 2:59 AM on Dec-20-24

And yet in certain respects the area is deadly. Starting with the Clinton administration, the federal government has enforced a policy known as Prevention Through Deterrence, which aims to force crossers into more dangerous terrain. The result has been what the anthropologist Jason De León calls “a killing machine that simultaneously uses and hides behind the viciousness of the Sonoran Desert.” Since 1994, Border Patrol has documented the deaths of over ten thousand border crossers, most often from dehydration, exhaustion, or cold: humanitarian groups estimate that the number is many times higher. from Death in Nogales [NYRB; ungated]
comment posted at 4:38 AM on Dec-4-24

Since the earliest days of the motor car, engineers have tinkered together various means of connecting the engine to the ground. While the wheel rapidly became the norm for the ground/vehicle interface, many different engine/wheel coupling techniques have been, and still are, being tried. The history of the automotive transmission (pdf, 1975) provides an interesting insight into the development of the automobile and its drivetrain, and illustrates how the marketplace has and will govern the design of the motor car. See also: The History of Automatic Transmission Fluid (youtube playlist).
comment posted at 8:29 AM on Nov-26-24

'Chuck Woolery, game show host of 'Love Connection' and 'Scrabble,' dies at 83'
comment posted at 4:56 PM on Nov-24-24

SpendTheirMoney.com is a simulation game where players spend a wealthy individual's fortune in a virtual marketplace. This content is for entertainment and educational purposes only. The simulation uses fictional representations of wealth associated with public figures. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
comment posted at 3:31 PM on Nov-23-24

Three million Australians are considered at risk of homelessness. The total population of Australia is 27.5 million, so that's 10.9% of the total population. Services say they're turning new clients away. The number of Australians at risk of homelessness has increased more than 60 per cent since 2016, a new report says.
comment posted at 8:19 AM on Nov-21-24

This belief that ideas literally originate in a single person’s mind, and that they should be paid by the rest of humanity for the rest of time is fucking ridiculous. Ideas do not reside inside self-contained people - they reside in a network of interdependent and interconnected people - but the fact that Bezos, or Musk, or whoever, was an early-mover in articulating a particular idea means they get locked in as somewhat arbitrary figureheads, and the fact that they’re billionaires simply reflects the legal reality of share ownership. They are products of our system, not creators of our system. from The Stone Soup Theory of Billionaires by Brett Scott
comment posted at 4:25 AM on Nov-17-24

Which Country Should You Move To?
comment posted at 5:23 PM on Nov-7-24

"This time there is no intention to allow the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes--" - according to Amichai Stein, from Israel's Public Broadcasting Corporation (KAN), reporting in English, a recent IDF announcement this morning: '🚨 The IDF announces: The division of the northern Gaza Strip into two parts has been completed, and we getting closer to the complete evacuation of the northern part from civilians and terrorists: "This time there is no intention to allow the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes and that humanitarian aid will regularly enter the southern Gaza Strip - since there are no more civilians left north of Gaza City".'
comment posted at 12:29 PM on Nov-6-24

"Harris seems to be adopting a gimmicky new strategy every day, from embracing cryptocurrency to announcing that as president she’ll run all policy through a bipartisan council of advisors. She’s throwing everything against the wall, hoping that something, anything, will put her over the edge. There’s one tactic Harris doesn’t seem keen to try, though. She won’t embrace the kind of antiwar sentiment and economic populism that might appeal to many currently unenthusiastic voters, but which would infuriate the Democratic establishment and the donor class." Ben Burgis in Jacobin, "The Strangely Empty Politics of Kamala Harris."
comment posted at 2:05 PM on Oct-21-24

Holograms are way more complex and fascinating than I ever realized. Not only are they capturing the 3D form of an object from multiple angles, but also the way that light reacts to objects, from reflection to distortion and refraction. A laser shines on a 2D image, and, as the viewer moves around it, the hologram gives the illusion of light bending and reflecting off of glass and metal and plastic that isn't there.
comment posted at 10:56 AM on Oct-15-24

The past year in pictures of Israel and Gaza by Reuters. Casting a pall over Israeli life. CNN's defining images from the past year. Al Jazeera released a documentary on war crimes in Gaza. Zeteo released a documentary on Israel's Reel Extremism. Israel has now escalated the violence to include bombing hospitals, suburbs and refugee camps in Lebanon, a Russian airbase in Syria, the West Bank, and is preparing to attack Iran as the Oct 7 anniversary looms. Lebanon's Foreign Minister revealed Abdallah Bou Habib that the Hezbollah leader Hasran Nasrallah had agreed to a 21 day ceasefire before being assassinated by Israel. Iran has expressed supported for a ceasefire contingent upon a ceasefire in Gaza. Israel rejected global calls for a ceasefire on Thursday.
comment posted at 9:42 AM on Oct-5-24

That error opens up onto the myriad conceptual fallacies built into the entire enterprise, if something so unavoidable can be called an “error.” Past performance is no guarantee of future results; but past performance is all a pollster has to go on. That’s why much of the process of choosing and weighting samples is … well, you can call it “more art than science.” Or you can call it “intuitive.” Or you can call it “trial and error.” But you can also call it “made up.” from The Polling Imperilment, an essay by Rick Perlstein built around Joseph Campbell's 2020 book Lost in a Gallup [The American Prospect; ungated]
comment posted at 2:18 PM on Sep-30-24

Everyone who joins the US military, seeks a security clearance, or applies for some government jobs must, as part of the background check process, fill out Standard Form 86. Questions on this form require applicants to disclose if they're members of organizations that seek to overthrow the US government or deprive people of their civil rights. Lying on this form is a felony, a serious crime that can result in months in prison, but indictments involving lying on this form are quite rare. Molly Conger, host of the Cool Zone Media podcast Weird Little Guys, looks into why this is, and the history of its use, in the episode titled Liar, Liar (57 minutes).
comment posted at 5:10 PM on Sep-18-24

Some of James Earl Jones best delivered lines, on news of his passing at 93.
comment posted at 3:48 PM on Sep-9-24

Who's the Greatest Actor in Movie History? A Statistical Analysis
comment posted at 10:13 AM on Sep-8-24

“You know, stranger things have happened than Bigfoot.” (slTheParisReview)
comment posted at 3:07 PM on Aug-2-24

"To be sure, the worry is not that the AMOC is on the verge of a complete stop. The fear is that it will cross a pivotal threshold, and then begin a decline that is unstoppable. ... It follows, then, that you’d wonder how close we humans are to that threshold. Perhaps you’d heard about the AMOC’s frailty; the shutdown threat; maybe even the decades of fighting among scientists as they try to fathom this gigantic, interconnected, barely understood current. But it was only rather recently that someone dared to go right to the core and ask: How much time do we have left before the AMOC breaks?" How Soon Might The Atlantic Ocean Break, in Wired (archive), on the work of Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen to understand the timing of what's happening to the AMOC.
comment posted at 3:56 PM on Jul-27-24

Cat-Scan.com is one of the strangest sites I've seen in some time. I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
comment posted at 4:01 PM on Jul-14-24

This is an excellent, readable summary of why we won't see a fusion reactor in our lifetime or falling temperatures (unfortunately, the two are linked). Also worth noting is how private investment always jumps on the bandwagon once public funds have built the locomotive.
comment posted at 11:00 AM on Jul-8-24

"We can totally win this election, pass game-changing legislation, and build a Progressive Decade. We can still do that." The Movement Voter Project team spells out their strategy for a 2024 win and a New Progressive Era, featuring Black organizing, the Sun Belt, the Working Families Party, emotional intelligence, and Vision 2035. What if we could sustain a long-term Democratic trifecta at the federal level, win 28 state trifectas, and appoint a majority on the Supreme Court?
comment posted at 4:25 PM on Jul-5-24

Amazon Web Services is reportedly making a deal for electricity from a nuclear power plant [quartz]
comment posted at 10:27 AM on Jul-2-24

The UK's second-biggest city is so broke they can no longer keep the lights on. Birmingham was once a powerhouse industrial city but now the UK's second city is a shell of its former self as rubbish lines the streets, the lights stay out and children grow up below the poverty line.
comment posted at 5:04 AM on Jun-25-24

Political scientist Stephen Teles is a self-described "liberal institutionalist" who argues that "the university should be institutionally neutral" so that academia may pursue its "distinct competence: subjecting society's orthodoxies to empirical and theoretical scrutiny."
comment posted at 5:44 PM on Jun-21-24

United Ireland Should Be Political Objective, Former PM Says [ungated] - "'What I hope we'll see happen in the next government, no matter which parties are in it, is that that we'll see what is a long standing political aspiration toward unification become a political objective,' [former Prime Minister Leo] Varadkar said at an event in Belfast on Saturday."
comment posted at 5:15 PM on Jun-18-24

In a flip-flop for the ages, New York Governor Kathy Hochul suddenly decided to place NYC's massive congestion pricing program (that she championed) on "indefinite pause" less than a month prior to launch. The program, set to go in effect later this month, would have charged drivers coming into Manhattan's central business district $15 during peak hours. Those funds were set to deliver $1 billion dollars a year, providing much needed infrastructure and accessibility updates to the city's century-old subway system. Was this all a cynical election year ploy? Where will the money come from now? And is this even legal?
comment posted at 2:25 PM on Jun-12-24

Nineteen percent of cotton on the U.S. market still sources back to the forced labor heartlands of East Turkestan (Xinjiang), according to a new analysis from Applied DNA of 822 cotton-containing products sampled from February 2023 to March 2024.... More info on enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prohibits the importation of goods produced wholly or in part from the so-called Xinjiang Autonomous Uyghur Region unless it can be proven that they are not the fruits of coerced labor.
comment posted at 11:19 AM on Jun-4-24

States that passed unilateral divorce laws saw total female suicide decline by around 20 percent in the long run. Study.
comment posted at 1:46 PM on Jun-1-24

One of those tools, the “Problematic Paper Screener,” run by Guillaume Cabanac, a computer-science researcher who studies scholarly publishing at the Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier in France, scans the breadth of the published literature, some 130 million papers, looking for a range of red flags including “tortured phrases.” Cabanac and his colleagues realized that researchers who wanted to avoid plagiarism detectors had swapped out key scientific terms for synonyms from automatic text generators, leading to comically misfit phrases. “Breast cancer” became “bosom peril”; “fluid dynamics” became “gooey stream”; “artificial intelligence” became “counterfeit consciousness.” from Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures [WSJ; ungated]
comment posted at 2:51 AM on May-29-24

This post started as a single video of veteran musicmaker Leonard Solomon performing Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" on a homemade "Squijeeblion." That led to discovering his YouTube channel @Bellowphone, full of similarly whimsical covers on a collection of bespoke instruments hand-built in his Wimmelbildian workshop, from the Emphatic Chromatic Callioforte to the Oomphalapompatronium to the original Majestic Bellowphone. Searching for more videos led to his performance in the Lonesome Pine One-Man Band Extravaganza special from 1991, where he co-starred with whizbang vaudevillians like Hokum W. Jeebs and Professor Gizmo. But what was Lonesome Pine? Just an extraordinary, award-winning concert series by the Kentucky Center for the Arts that ran for 16 years on public radio and television -- an "all things considered" showcase for "new artists, underappreciated veterans and those with unique new voices" featuring such luminaries as Buddy Guy, Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, Koko Taylor, and hundreds more. You can get a broad overview of this televisual marvel from this excellent half-hour retrospective, see a supercut of director Clark Santee's favorite moments, browse the program directory from the Smithsonian exhibit, or watch select shows in their entirety: Lonesome Pine Blues - All-star Bluegrass Band - Nashville All-stars - Bass Instincts - Zydeco Rockers - Walter "Wolfman" Washington - Mark O'Connor - Alison Krauss & Union Station - Sam Bush & John Cowan - Maura O'Connell - Nanci Griffith - A Musical Visit from Africa
comment posted at 9:24 AM on May-29-24

Unless you knew modern Chinese history well, you probably have no idea what I am talking about. Most people only knew that "after Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalists, or KMT, was defeated by Mao Tse-tung Communists, Chiang took his army to Taiwan and settled there and turned it into an economic powerhouse..." What most people do not know is that a portion of the KMT Eight Army, under General Li Mi, comprised of KMT 26th and 93rd Divisions, actually remained in Yunnan after after Chiang's retreat, and in order to grow their support, they, with permission from Chiang, allied themselves with the the Karen National Defense Organization and tried to help them take over Myanmar / Burma. Those of you who watched Rambo (2008) may recognize "Karen", as in the Karen Rebels. Yes, it's the same people, still fighting the Myanmar government decades later. And there are a lot more involvement of the Lost Army...
comment posted at 3:15 AM on May-26-24

The Tennessee Attorney General is investigating the mysterious investment company that attempted to have Graceland, the late Elvis Presley's mansion that is one of America's most successful tourist attractions, sold at a foreclosure sale.
comment posted at 6:15 AM on May-25-24

Guardian: World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5C target. “Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed. Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.” [Daily sea surface temperature]
comment posted at 8:16 AM on May-8-24

Ralph Nader is loyal to one pen: the Papermate Flair. But Nader claims that the pens are drying out quicker then they used to. He reached out to Wirecutter (a NYT property) and they investigated. Archive.is link: https://archive.is/54jtw
comment posted at 2:47 AM on May-5-24

Jerry Seinfeld is a Lazy Hack Out of Touch with the Real World - and Who Can Blame Him? Paste Magazine's brief riposte to the New Yorker's Jerry Seinfeld interview in which Mr. It's About Nothing feels that comedy has been killed by "the extreme left" and "P.C. crap."
comment posted at 2:39 AM on May-1-24

Brutalist Churches.
comment posted at 2:36 AM on Apr-27-24

The NLRB announced tonight that UAW won a historic union election at Volkswagen in Chattanooga Tennessee. The union won by a margin of more than 70% as votes [continued] to be counted. With labor shortages throughout the manufacturing sector, many of the workers hired by Volkswagen were much younger and more diverse. Some had even moved from more pro-union parts of the country to work there. “It’s a totally different ball game,” [Renee Berry] said. “The atmosphere is different. You see more pro-union than anti-union [workers]. A whole lot of people who were anti-union in the past have switched.”
comment posted at 2:41 AM on Apr-20-24