Bookmarks (864)

When held up to the light no useful information can be gained through a security envelope. [...] What is kind of mind boggling to me is just how many different patterns there are. If you think about it, five to ten patterns could have been created and that would have satisfied any security needs. There seems to be a lot more than ten patterns...

Inside Netflix's 'Squid Game' Reality Show Disaster: 'The Conditions Were Absolutely Inhumane' [Variety]. What could possibly go wrong?

Lucy Scholes (Prospect, 01/25/2023), "Meet the archive moles": "There's a growing band of people digging through library stacks and second-hand bookshops in search of lost classics. I'm one of them." A reading list of reissues accompanying the article includes titles from Boiler House Press, Pushkin Press, Daunt Books, Faber (Memoir), Lurid Editions, Handheld Press, Another Gaze Editions, Penguin Modern Classics, British Library Publishing, and...

Anadvora is an adorable nerd person on Youtube who posts songs, video essays and other stuff that will charm the socks right off of you. Her ragtime version of the Kinks' Lola is not to be missed, nor is Stacy's Aunt, her hilarious sequel to Stacy's Mom. And then there's her absolute mania for classic series Doctor Who... Her video about her efforts to...

Love this personal essay about the stress of parenting This is the only advice we've ever found to be actually useful: The Bucket System. You each have a 'bucket,' and the more stressed and overwhelmed you are, the fuller your bucket is. When the bucket gets full, like you can't handle anymore: that's it. There's nothing you can do. You're overwhelmed, game over, and...

After rocky start, hopes up in Oregon drug decriminalization In November 2020, Oregon voters passed Ballot Measure 110, which made it the first state in the union to broadly decriminalize drug possession, a response to an untenable status quo. In addition, the measure pledged to support the expansion of drug treatment and harm reduction programs in the state through funds from cannabis taxes. Oregon...

A 30-year-old Portuguese dog has been named as the world's oldest ever by Guinness World Records - beating a record that stood for a century. Bobi is a purebred Rafeiro do Alentejo - a breed that has an average life expectancy of 12 to 14 years.

I watched Groundhog Day every day for a year. Here's what I learned 'We bow at the altar of Groundhog Day': concept copycats celebrate its 30th birthday The bizarre history of Groundhog Day Punxsutawney Phil left his burrow for his annual prediction. Here's how much longer winter will last according to the legend So many previouslies Mmmmm..... Groundhog. PunxsutawneyPhil.com.

Therapeutic Goods Administration approves psilocybin & MDMA for use in treating Depression & PTSD. Australia's medical regulator has approved the use of psychedelics to treat some mental health conditions, making the country one of the first in the world to officially recognise MDMA and psilocybin as medicines.

Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, in collaboration with the Mauritshuis in The Hague, has organized a blockbuster exhibition this spring featuring the paintings of Johannes Vermeer—the largest ever—bringing together 25 of the 34 works that can be firmly attributed to the Dutch Golden Age master, whose paintings are rarely loaned out from the lucky handful of collections that possess them. Three additional works with disputed attribution will...

A growing number of non-Māori New Zealanders are embracing learning te reo – but there's more to it than language. An article in The Conversation by Brian Tweed and Pania Te Maro, on approaching language learning in New Zealand Aotearoa through the lens of whakapapa: 'the emergence of new entities from their previous forms'.

The wikipedia article is an good overview. TLDR: some computers keep time by tracking seconds since January 1, 1970. A subset of these computers used a 32-bit value to do so, meaning that it only has space to track the time until some date in 2038. Most of the major systems have migrated to 64 bit numbers, but not all.

That's A Wrap On The Public Domain Game Jam! Techdirt has just concluded their fourth annual Gaming Like It's 19XX game jam, a celebration of creativity, gaming, and the public domain. All submitted games include reference to materials from 1927 that have now entered the public domain in the United States. All the submissions are up on itch.io.

On the 20th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, Ars Technica published two articles; the first asks if NASA has fixed its safety culture, and the second, a reprint of a 2014 article with some updates, wonders if, had the damage to the ship's wing that occurred on launch been detected before they started reentry, the crew could have been saved. (Previously on...

Wonders of Street View Use the "Link" button to link to a specific image, or to open it in Google Street View. Neal.fun previouslies: Yo I'm bored, let's go chuck rock-filled snowballs at the Earth! (December 8, 2022) Absurd Trolley Problems (aka, A Chidi-stomachache-generator) (July 6, 2022) I don't know how these rocks got stacked or why (November 9, 2021) A background noise generator...

Women have been misled about menopause Hot flashes, sleeplessness, pain during sex: For some of menopause's worst symptoms, there's an established treatment. Why aren't more women offered it? or maybe we should talk about extending reproductive longevity. After all, we don't fully understand the purpose of menopause as most mammals don't experience it. There are theories. Or perhaps we should Cancel Menopause altogether?

Jeanne Theoharis, author of A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of the Civil Rights History, on our tendency to focus on protests, on complaints about Black Lives Matter causing disruption, and on how we trap Rosa Parks on the bus as the mild-mannered secretary and not the uncompromising fighter for justice. Theoharis speaks of how, during the 2013 unveiling of...

Artifact, Relic, and Monument The story of Coil's 'Tainted Love,' the first musical AIDS benefit and the first music video to be added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. (A cover of a cover, the song originated with Gloria Jones's 1964 soul version, which remained relatively obscure until being rediscovered in the '70s by England's Northern Soul scene, and then...

By 1681, Didus ineptus would be gone, by 1710 so would every last settler from Mauritius. The enterprise here would have lasted about a human lifetime. ... To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the point of Satanic intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a Godly creation. But now A 'De-Extinction' Company Wants to Bring Back the...

Philanderer? Fraudster? Spy? The British MP who faked his death and ran away to Australia. He was a British MP who faked his own death to start a new life in Melbourne. But what's the truth about the elusive, alleged spy John Stonehouse?

There's no way you could write a script so tedious and lacking in drama as Tape of me and my friends, which records a momentous summer day in 1993 wherein four extremely stupid teenagers from Gardner, Massachusetts drive to Nashua NH so Mike can buy a TV. Cluelessness pervades every second of this video. Try to count the amount of times someone raises a...

[Warning, some links have autoplaying video/sound] Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Police Save Baby Ducks. Plus 20 more where that came from, compiled by Radley Balko after a Twitter thread by John Hamasaki....

Receipes you can make with a pizza wheel [slyt] Come for the review of how well foods cut with a pizza knutter. Stay for the snapshot of what a random brit has in their kitchen.

The Moon doesn't currently have an independent time. It's time for another look at humanity's exploration of space, from 2022's end to the start of 2023. There's a lot going on, especially between the Earth's surface and orbit. From Earth's surface to orbit China launched 64 orbital missions in 2022, just barely outpacing SpaceX, which launched 60. SpaceX did set some kind of record...

"He has stood his ground, but it ended a number of close friendships including his association with Amory Lovins." Stewart Brand, who is now 84, is currently working on a book about maintenance. [excerpt]. He is best known for founding The Whole Earth Catalog and coined the phrase, "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive." The discussion on The Well...

"Kraft has seen the American people through economic hardship, world wars, and social movements. It is, without a doubt, the food of troubled times. The fact that any one of us can go to a grocery store and buy one of these boxes for about a dollar during a global pandemic, a time of unprecedented inflation in the midst of a looming recession, is...

A few weeks ago, Yogesh Raut (previously on MeFi) walked onto the Alex Trebek Stage and won his first game of Jeopardy! He went on to win two more, and nearly $100,000, before falling to a triple-stumper Final Jeopardy question. He also embarked on what NBC News called "a weekslong social media rant against the show, asserting that it's not a real quiz contest,...

Hello, Monday, it's dear friends. Hi, yes, I'm totally awake, and I have a short quiz for you. How is this thread like a neutron? Give up? They are both free of charge! Also free, this pretty little time-waster that makes a lovely digital fidget toy: Fluid Simulator by Amanda Ghassaei. Enjoy your free thread!

I've spent much of my adult life doing what I loved as a child: asking questions in the hope of finding some sort of resolution. Despite being someone who obsessed over the smallest questions and problems in the world around me, I long resisted turning those skills inward. As a result, I never knew the source of my tics, never knew that I had...

WHOPPER WHOPPER WHOPPER WHOPPER | JUNIOR DOUBLE TRIPLE WHOPPER | FLAME-GRILLED TASTE WITH PERFECT TOPPERS | I RULE I RULE I RULE THIS DAY | LETTUCE MAYO PICKLE KETCHUP | IT'S OK IF I DON'T WANT THAT | IMPOSSIBLE OR BACON WHOPPER | ANY WHOPPER MY WAY WHOPPER MY WAY #notspon

How Often Should You Do the Spartan 300 workout? ...answers your questions about the Spartan 300 workout, presumably an exercise regime favored by that mythically militaristic warrior-state. You can learn how many reps of each exercise are involved, what their diet was and so on. All of this leads up to Question 14: How Tall was a Spartan?

ADS-B Exchange has been sold for 20 million to private equity Jetnet and the volunteer data collectors are are feeling sold out. Unlike FlightAware, FlightRadar24 or RadarBox, ADSBx is an open source aggregator of ADS-B aircraft tracking data that doesn't rely on official data sources like FAA BARR/LADD. As such ADSBx promised to never censor the flight data of any aircraft, including dictators, billionaires,...

What does it mean to be rich in America, where the elite need to re-earn their position anew each day and experience the demands of wealth without its promised sense of security and ease? How is it possible that a couple with kids making $500k a year are scraping by ? (ignore the sales shenanigans at the end) And to further the conversation, let's...

Each year, the United States produces enough wool to create millions of sweaters. But a big hunk of that wool production ends up composted or even landfilled. The Regional Fiber Manufacturing Initiative at Fibershed includes tons of research, e.g. current capabilities of Western U.S. fiber manufacturing (artisanal bottlenecks and all) and their Fiber Visions of how dogbane, wool, and cotton could honor Indigenous practices...

In 1183, a Chinese Poet Describes Being Domesticated by His Own Cats. In Korea cat owners aren't called cat owners: they're called goyangi jibsa, literally 'cat butlers.' Clearly the idea that felines have flipped the domestic-animal script, not serving humans but being served by humans, transcends cultures.

Almost ten minutes of a cutesy depressed anthropomorphic bread undergoing existential torture, a daily occurence for Bernd das Brot (previously) every night when the Kinder Kanal is not broadcasting. In German with English subtitles.

Yunchan Lim is South Korean pianist who June became the youngest ever winner of the Van Cliburn piano competition. Among the pieces that the 18 year old player were Liszt's Transcendental Etudes and Mozart's Piano Concerto #22. Most notable however, was his performance of Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto, which created something of a stir. Lim's performance at Wigmore Hall on Jan 18 (this takes...

He's trusted to repair some of the world's most fabled — and expensive — instruments. How does John Becker manage to unlock the sound of a Stradivarius? (SLChicagoMag)

LATimes has many news articles about what happened at Monterey Park: honoring the victims' lives, how the shooter's motives remain a mystery, whether domestic violence played a part, the deafening silence of Californian Republican politicians, and how to continue to dance and rebuild after a tragedy. In Half Moon Bay, the shooter admits to his rage being sparked over a $100 repair bill, long...

"Those who think "15-minute cities" are for wealthy urbanites should consider this graph from a recent nationwide study. It shows a powerful reverse correlation between household income and use of services and amenities within a 15-minute walk of home. In other words, the wealthier you are, the less you rely on goods and services within your immediate neighborhood or adjacent neighborhoods. (You can easily...

Mitchell Varela gets his pedicures done by one of the most unlikely sources: a cast of striped shore crabs on the shoreline of San Diego, California.

Chronophoto is a game in which you guess the dates of some photos — the closer the guess, the higher your score. That's it!

The 2022 Dog Photography Awards. Be sure to look at the Finalists tab for lots more great dogs, and of course the 2021 winners and finalists, too.

The Rezvani Vengeance is a quarter-million dollar SUV designed exclusively for idiots [Kotaku.com] "You know where you're going wrong? After a long day indiscriminately firing your Beretta 1301 in the desert, you're home chugging back your InfoWars Ultimate Bone Broth Plus, when you discover you're all out of SSI Sight-Rite chamber cartridge laser bore sights. So you jump into your SUV to head to...

Farmer, artist and writer Lynn R. Miller on working horses: "There are fewer rules to working horses and more subtleties and opportunities." A review of Miller's Art of Working Horses. "Then the seat broke and he was tossed forward under the plow, under the feet of his horses and the tongue of the plow, with one thigh up against that sharpened coulter, a steel...