~metafilter | Bookmarks (989)

Half a dozen exceptional One Minute Films. Also, from reddit, half a dozen exceptional Five Minute films. (Five minutes or less, that is). Seven minute limit. Finally, ten good shorts under ten minutes.Looking for more shorts: Four dozen outstanding short films of varying duration.

Could good bugs be the secret ingredient to pesticide-free vegetables? An army of beneficial bugs is fighting the bad bugs that gnaw on your vegetables, protecting the borders of the largest greenhouse set-up in the southern hemisphere.

One last thing to win: Let's go relational by Michael Sifry on substack. Connecting to your own personal network to urge them to vote could tip the 2024 election where it matters most. .....For decades, nearly all Democratic field work has been structured around getting strangers to talk to strangers....What's confounding about this approach to activating voters is that everything we know about how...

"From the colonies to the Progressive Era to the twenty-first century, Americans have seriously considered making voting a duty of citizenship. That history helps illuminate the depth of democratic creativity in our Progressive past. And, given our crises of democracy today, that past should push us to keep reviving this powerful policy today."

She's 103 and Just Ran the 100-Meter Dash. Her Life Advice? 'Look for Magic Moments'Even though she had never competed on a track, Ms. Hawkins said that her children wanted to see how fast she could sprint. Her inexperience did not show. She ran 50 meters in a speedy 19 seconds at the Louisiana Senior Olympic Games, winning first place in her age group...

Phil Lesh has died... Phil has died. So many tears here. Writer of two of my favorite songs, Unbroken Chain, and Box of Rain, both of which will be played at my memorial service. Godspeed Phil...

Yesterday the LA Times announced it would not make an endorsement for President because the billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong refused to allow it, leading the editor the resign. Today the Washington Post announced it will not endorse a candiate either, reportedly because the billionaire owner Jeff Bezos refused to allow it. Meanwhile, the Onion's new owners just made a timely endorsement of Joe Biden.

BBC: Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal's Yard Dairy. Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal's Yard Dairy. Guardian: The 950 stolen cheeses were Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar, which have won a number of awards and are among...

He has been one of the UK's favourite and most prominent refugees for two-thirds of a century. Now Paddington Bear – official name Paddington Brown – has been granted a British passport. The co-producer of the latest Paddington film said the Home Office had issued the specimen document to the fictional Peruvian-born character – listing for completeness the official observation that he is, in...

The poll found that more than two-thirds of Canadians agree that immigration has a positive economic impact. The biggest reason they gave for saying there is too much immigration is its impact on housing prices. (slWP - but archive.ph)

First black hole triple system discovered by astronomers. A system called V404 Cygni was thought to be a black hole and a companion star, but another star billions of kilometres away was also found gravitationally connected to the duo.

"The cozy fantasy genre encompasses a wide range of different types of fantasy books, but there's a surprisingly high proportion of cozy historical fantasy books among them. Maybe this is because fantasy often draws on the past to imagine what a society more reliant on magic than technology might look like. But I'm particularly interested in the fantasy books that really lean into the...

Chinese people, even the well-educated, are forgetting how to write common characters. What is the explanation for this peculiar problem?

In a kind of a zen way, those born ultra-rich live perpetually in the moment. Since they understand very little about causality, they do not understand how events happen or things get made. They can be filled with mystical wonderment at the spontaneous generation of material reality. They can also be blind to social realities that sit outside their lived knowledge, which is terrifyingly...

Trump's recent statements about using the military against the "enemy within" (e.g, the left, anyone who would have power over him, etc.) have prompted John Kelly, his chief of staff for much of his term, to say Trump repeatedly wanted to use the military against Americans when he was president, but lacked generals sufficiently loyal to him.Here's the full NYTimes interview, giftlinked (I've never...

Apple experts divide time into "before Honeycrisp" and "after Honeycrisp," and apples have never tasted so good.

The Bird Daughters is a short comic by Madeline McGrane about an unusual royal family's relationship to their duties. Have you even read any weird fantasy today? Now you can rectify that! Be advised: some gore.Via Str8aura on tumblr. The comic is also on the author's website, but i decided to use the tumblr link as the main one because it reads better there...

The perverse consequences of tuition-free medical school. "But plowing billions of dollars into an approach with results ranging from neutral to regressive is deeply unfortunate, given that better alternatives exist. If the goal is to help low-income students and to train more primary-care doctors, targeted relief for low-income students or for people who go into primary care would work better than blanket subsidies." (Ungated...

A surprisingly potent technique can boost your short and long-term recall – and it appears to help everyone from students to Alzheimer's patients. When trying to memorise new material, it's easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform. Yet taking the occasional down time – to do literally nothing – may be exactly what you need. Just...

Native and introduced mice are quietly pollinating Australian plants, study shows. Flowers can be pollinated in a multitude of ways, and now a series of studies is showing just how big a role rats and mice play when it comes to Australian flora.

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun spends some time unpacking the implications of sanitizing, softening, and aggressively commoditizing the originally absurdist, monstrous post-human Imperial war-slaves of the Warhammer 40K universe in: Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine

In a first-season episode of Boston Legal (Wikipedia, TVTropes), attorney Alan Shore (played with laser precision by James Spader) makes an absolute meal out of intimidating a prospective witness against his client. Here's is that scene, in all it's circa-2014 YouTube glory, with the added value of actor Will Radford in the comments describing how he portrayed the unfortunate target, and his experience filming...

I was hoping that Georgia Ray would turn out to be the John Berger of microscopy with her article in Asterisk Magazine about the historical trajectories of microbiology. Instead, the piece turned out to be a wonderful exploration of "biological dark matter" and the limits of human efforts to understand the tiny other beings that suffuse our planet. What we know now is that...