Bookmarks (979)

Zoo elephants huddle to protect calves during San Diego earthquake. Elephants at the San Diego Zoo were caught on video running over to protect their young by huddling together during a 5.2-magnitude earthquake. This "alert circle" is a natural response to perceived threats, with elephants having the ability to feel sounds through their feet, an expert says. The zoo confirmed the herd and crew...

Arcade asteroids game powered by real-time Wikipedia edits . Every Wikipedia edit produces a new asteroid. Game is by Kevin Payravi. His article describes installing the game in a Wikipedia-themed arcade cabinet, and links to other Wiki games and visualisations. Via The Signpost at the English Wikipedia.

As both farmers and processors—all of Bear Creek Farm's cattle and pigs are processed, or "harvested," at Cherry Meat Co.—the Cherry family manages the entire conception-to-carcass journey. "From birth and conception until it goes to somebody's hands to cook," said Bill. Within an industry often vast, cruel, and secretive, they have built the opposite: an intimate form of vertical integration, from conception to harvest,...

On the weekend of March 29, 2025, the Cherry Blossom Regional Open Circuit, a fencing tournament that is a qualifier for the Summer Nationals, was held at the University of Maryland. This year's would be very different. In a match between a Wagner College fencer named Red Sullivan, and a Philadelphia fencer named Stephanie Turner, Turner chose to take a knee and be disqualified...

4chan, the internet's most infamous forum, is down following an alleged hack : "According to screenshots shared on Imgur (NSFW warning), it appears a hacker gained shell access to 4chan's hosting server. They then went on to post images of the site's phpmyadmin page, and appear to have doxed the entire moderation team alongside many of the site's registered users. While it seems some...

Scientist and former NASA engineer join first all-female crew in space since 1963 (Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew a solo mission on the Vostok 6 and orbited Earth 48 times).Women in Space (Wikipedia article) Jerrie Cobb on the need to send women to space (1963) (YouTube interview footage) Tereshkova speaks about the experience (YouTube Science Museum feature) Sally Ride, first US American woman in space...

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? If you ever thought that AI company logos look like buttholes, you're not alone.

Meet Ron Hawkins, Toronto's most prolific prickly political rock star. Painter, activist, and of course, world class musician, Ron Hawkins has always done it his way (more or less.)Hawkins rose to fame with his band, The Lowest of the Low, in the early 90s. (Fun fact: they are still touring and I am seeing them in May.) Their debut album, Shakespeare My Butt, was,...

"She's holding up a fabric sample, deep green embroidered with gold. I wore green at my adoption too. I'll wear black to be abandoned." The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For is a science fiction novelette by Cameron Reed, published this month in Reactor, described as: "In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a...

New York City's municipal steam system is an iconic anachronism: a fascinating part of the city's daily life and visual language, a foundational part of its history, and a system that has been exported and refined worldwide. It was an essential technology for its time as the buildings of Manhattan began to reach up and nudge the sky even higher. from Steam Networks [Works...

Someone hacked the crosswalk buttons in Palo Alto and Redwood City. Simulated Musk, Zuckerberg voices are speaking from hacked crosswalk buttons. (archive link)

Crows can consistent detect outlier shapes Crows "could still continue to find the outlier, even though .. perceptually very similar to the other five regular shapes," So what's the next step? - an ordered array of crows ready to peck-select the odd shape out in reCAPTCHAs?

There's a small house ( ⌂ ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. "Small house"—that's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for "Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of...

I think of this as an archive of nearly all written/online pieces on anarcha-feminism and lots of radical pieces on other related topics that are marginalized because of their relationship to gender (adding news items to this blog would compound my work load, although i haven't ruled it out). Not all anarchist feminists agree on various subjects such as sex work, gender, what justice...

" This month saw the publication of two books containing explosive reporting on Biden's downfall, and coming months will bring two more: so far the picture emerging is a damning one for Biden, his top aides and the Democratic party. The books have detailed a president increasingly unfit for the task of taking on Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election and his top...

Crack That Tank (13 minutes) is a World War II training film. A tank commander, played by Dick Purcell, explains to infantry soldiers (the film's audience) what to do when they find 25 tons of rolling metal death bearing down on them on the battlefield.For many of the young soldiers preparing for battle, this would be the last film they would see in their...

Spring has sprung in the northern hemisphere, which is great time to consider the 50 most romantic movies of all time!

From the New Yorker. "We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of the Trump Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom,...

Despite the prevailing skepticism toward non-fungible tokens, the world isn't becoming any less digital and blockchain remains the foundation of digital art's brave new market. It is right to acknowledge the seismic impact of NFTs on contemporary art even while they continue to enrage and inflame. The old world might be putting up resistance to the on-chain economy, but this story is far from...

Stonefish toxin could be new weapon against parasitic worms in livestock: a recently discovered stonefish toxin has enormous promise, according to researchers in Far North Queensland. The compounds have been shown to kill helminths or parasitic gastrointestinal worms while leaving mammal cells unharmed, said Danica Lennox-Bulow, a PhD candidate at James Cook University. Ms Lennox-Bulow said the toxin was different from the one stonefish...

Steve Mould takes on the question... Treadmill vs. Real Hill: Which is harder to run - YouTube. Good arguments, good experiments, conclusion. Right or Wrong? Pick sides.

Sometimes you just gotta go but it can't hurt to know your options. Bathrooms at homeBathrooms outside Bathrooms in hotels Bathrooms for public use, United States edition Bathrooms for public use, world edition Bathrooms that won a contest, United States Bathroom, mall. It's beautiful! Bathroom, most opulent. Rocca Restaurant, Ivens Hotel, Lisbon Portugal. Warning! This is an influencer video, I couldn't find anything better...

Dan Gelbart (previously) has some tips for the sort of people who'd enjoy tips from Dan Gelbart.

TimeOut magazine ranks the 100 best horror movies At GenjiandProust's request, I bring you the 100 best horror movies list, for your fighty delectation!I have *opinions* but will hold out for now until people have a chance to check out the list.

If you're anything like me you're going to accidentally lose several hours to simple sliding tile matching game Exponentile, which will remind some folks of iOS classic Threes and the raft of thematically similar web-based games of which 2048 was a standout example.

Nardwar vs Carney Nardwar vs Singh Nardwar vs Poilievre - didn't happen, Poilievre declined, which makes me sad.There are a few previouslies but I'm going to stick with this one which has some good interview links in the comments.

Replying 'Haha So True!' to Every Meme Your Friend Sends: An Experimental Study in Preserving Social Bonds with Minimum Effort from the Journal of Astrological Big Data Ecology

It seems that this is what we are devolving into quickly. Our purpose becoming solely to produce. Every interaction made to gain or exchange something. But here's a nice video to just throw away all that for a few minutes and embrace Georges Bataille's Philosophy and maybe rethink our lives a little

The manuscript of The Garden of Eden exists in three irreconcilable drafts of varying lengths. To get the story into publishable shape, Tom Jenks, a Scribner's editor, did a cut-and-paste job on the longest of these manuscripts (a version of some twelve hundred pages)—deleting a great deal, changing around much else—thus producing the version that we now have. The result bears a suspicious resemblance...

Rebecca Solnit, author of A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster and editor of Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, writes about community, resistance, hope, and the power of the people at Meditations in an Emergency.The speech she gave at the April 5 Hands Off demonstration in San Francisco is inspiring - as are...

Doctors in Quebec are leaving the public system in record numbers. Advocates of public healthcare are concerned after 780 doctors left the public system in Quebec in 2023, compared to just 14 in the rest of the country. Critics say it could be a warning for the rest of Canada.

When Waugh published his time machine (it took five months to write in total, after some wrangling about army leave), the reviews were thoroughly mixed. Behind the scenes the literati sniped about its ornate style and rococo syntax. Old-fashioned. Florid. Too many semicolons. (So many semicolons). When Waugh was young, he had written viciously funny books: they loved him for his dark and wicked...

The artist Michael Landy destroyed all his possessions in 2001. In 2019, Charlotte Higgins interviewed him about the whether he regrets it. He talked about the process in 2002. There was a MetaFilter post about it at the time.

Lizard rescued from drink can by sharp-eyed outback mates. Travelling along a dusty road in north-west Queensland, a strange sight caught Finn Cain's attention. A drink can was running across the road ahead.

Mechanical Gift Box [via mefi projects] MetaFilter's own churl ("engineer, builder, learner, lover") posted this 20-minute video documenting his 10-month project: handcrafting a beautiful mechanical gift box of wood and brass. Super cool to watch his process and try to figure out where he's going at each step. Nice closeups of his painstaking detail work, plus ASMR goodness. Or just skip to the 19:00...

The Dali Museum has realized the mustachio'd maestro's unproduced 1937 screenplay using Google's Veo 2 generative video model. Here is a preview.

In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the release of A Goofy Movie, Disney has released a documentary on the production of the film, along with several fun shorts celebrating the film.One bit from the documentary that is both surprising and yet not is how then Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg is depicted as a petty tyrant who did not understand what made the characters...

Via TimeOut, the 100 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time. Top 10 are inside."From human clones to alien invasions: we asked scientists, filmmakers and writers to select the best sci-fi films in cinema history" 10. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) 9. The Terminator (1984) 8. Metropolis (1927) 7. Brazil (1985) 6. Star Wars (1977) 5. Aliens (1986) 4. Close...

In a far-flung country the CBC is often the main source of basic, daily news in rural and remote communities. (slTheTybee)Is Canada Ready for Life Without the CBC? Pierre Poilievre Thinks So. Why has Pierre Poilievre suddenly gone silent on defunding the CBC? BONUS: Learn more about our Conservative wiener candidate as he soars in Alberta but falls flat elsewhere. (I don't quite believe...

Viet Thanh Nguyen's newest work is an essay collection of his Norton lectures meditating on the role of the other and literary writing, and is also a call for radical, expansive, political solidarity.1. On the Double, or Inauthenticity 2. On Speaking as an Other 3. On the Death of Asian Americans 4. On Crossing Borders 5. On Being Minor 6. On the Joy of...

A happy tech consumer report, for a change. While "better DRM" might not top everyone's list of "how tech has gotten better," this is a fun read, with worthwhile comments. And the retro pic made me smile.But let the record reflect that, as the author says: "That something this simple could feel revelatory was a good reminder of just how crapified our tech and...

[CW: adult humour] Joe Lycett is a Birmingham comedian, social media user, prankster, poet and frequenter of TV shows. One of his identities is/was Rhubarb Bikini. Other identities led to problems when trying to establish a new gay village in Birmingham to raise the value of his house. Also, on local accents. In Joe's forthcoming TV show, he travels around the USA visiting various...

Since she didn't actually live in a singles complex, the novel could be described as a phony fiction about a phony woman duped by a phony culture selling what Lasner calls "the promise of sex, love, and companionship." Needless to say, such phoniness, and such phony promises, are as active today as they were fifty years ago—even more so in our internet culture—which is...

Boa constrictor on the loose in Sydney's south, locals on alert. The large snake was spotted slithering down a footpath onto sand near a Sylvania bridge in Sydney's south. Red-tailed boa constrictors are not native to Australia and are typically found in parts of Central and South America. It is illegal to own or keep boa constrictors as pets in Australia, as they are...

"When it was hinted that Rex, a noted child prodigy, had read the Bible by the age of two or the Iliad in the original Greek before he was born, Ruth would point out that she'd read everything Rex had, only she had read it first. "I don't want to be remembered as Rex Stout's sister," she said. "I want him to be remembered...

Sarah Vaughan, reissued in 1991 as Sarah Vaughan with Clifford Brown... was Vaughan's own favorite among her works through 1980. ... The Penguin Guide to Jazz selected this album as part of its suggested "Core Collection," stating "it is very difficult to find any flaw in what should be recognized as one of the great jazz vocal records," and awarded it "crown" status.*