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It is March 30, 1992. Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" has begun its descent from the pinnacle of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs sweeps the Academy Awards. And WordPerfect Corporation, producer of the industry-standard word processing software, fires its Chief Operating Officer.(He will go on to tell his side of the story in Almost Perfect: How...

The Humber estuary is a challenging place to navigate. At high tide, its wide expanse of open water conceals a constantly-shifting network of mudflats, through which ships must follow a uniquely twisting, meandering path marked by a series of floats, to avoid running aground. The mud shifts so rapidly that new charts are published every two weeks. The crew of the H&S Wisdom apparently...

Many people struggle to make tradeoffs between present wants and future wishes, resulting in the tendency to overly discount the value of future rewards. To explain such behavior, past work has pointed to future self-continuity or the perceived connection between a person's current and future selves. Yet, most of this past work has been conducted on small-to-medium size convenience samples, and as such, little...

When you've spent years watching how some tech bros break the rules in pursuit of personal and economic power at the expense of safety and user protections, all while wrapping themselves in the flag of "innovation," you get pretty good at spotting the pattern.

Endangered eastern quolls released into wild in Tasmanian conservation project. An ambitious conservation effort to boost declining eastern quoll populations in Tasmania is underway, with 24 of the animals released onto a 5000 hectare property. Eastern quolls are marsupial carnivores about the size of a small domestic cat, with adult males measuring 53 to 66 cm (21 to 26 in) in total length, including...

As they politely remind us here, ca 2017, I'm sure we remember why. As I run into things that might help us all I will try to keep them up here.

REI's worker union is asking members to vote "withhold" on all Board candidates Unionized employees of REI, a US-based coop store that sells outdoor gear, are asking members to mark "withhold" on their ballots after a Seattle activist and a top Greenpeace leader were excluded from the ballot.The two were Tefere Gebre, chief program officer at the international environmental advocacy group Greenpeace USA, and...

The Timeless Appeal of Olivetti's Industrial and Minimalist Design Style The 'Olivetti style': modernity, beauty and functionality Olivetti: everything is design Olivetti, design in industry - a 1952 Museum of Modern Art catalog

The Healthy Technology Act of 2025 would amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to allow AI and machine learning to qualify as practitioners eligible to prescribe drugs if authorized by the state involved and approved, cleared, or authorized by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for other purposes. (MedScape)

Just as the so-called "socialism of fools" comes from a truncated analysis of capitalism, resulting in national socialism (i.e., fascism), the feminism of fools, if you will, arises from bad materialism, a diagnosis of the sex/gender system that is fatally foreshortened. This leads it to form a wounded attachment to ontological womanhood. The feminism of cisness, for example, has spread like a pogrom. Today,...

New Australian dinosaurs and the oldest megaraptorid fossils in the world. Australia's first carcharodontosaur fossils unearthed along Victoria's Cretaceous coast.

The SAVE Act, if passed, would represent substantial barriers to voting for not only transgender adults but also for more than 140 million Americans who do not have a passport, as well as 21 million Americans who do not have access to their birth certificate or other documentation or the millions of Americans, including 69 million married women, who have changed their legal name...

Amidst a trade war with American's neighbors and partners, and a crashing economy, US President #47 will address a joint session of the US Congress starting at 9p.m. ET (watch live on YouTube)

NHK World presents A Cat's-Eye View of Japan, 42 5-minute episodes showing various places in Japan as seen by the cats who live there.

Letters and diaries tell the story of the love between two survivors of the final Scott expedition to the South Pole. via the Atavist.

In the 1970s, the Mar Chiquita lagoon (english), which lies in the province of Córdoba, in central Argentina, swallowed neighboring Miramar. The waters destroyed 102 hotels, 198 homes, 65 businesses, the thermal complex, the casino, and the amphitheater, leaving Miramar on the brink of collapse. The economy was obliterated, and many families chose to leave the city, drastically reducing its population. Those who stayed...

The owners eventually decide that [he was] getting bigger than the game, and that his popularity as a player is a threat to their control. No, this isn't about the controversial Luka Doncic trade--it's a look at Norman Jewison's underrated movie Rollerball, which my father took me to see at the Sunnyvale drive-in theater when I was nine years old.

How to master decision making in a world of uncertainty What kinds of decisions are you trying to make lately and you don't know what to do about them? Commiserate, ask for advice, or just talk about whatever else is going on for you in this week's free thread.

The golden age of Japanese pencils "It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at enormous cost, to make the best pencil Japan had ever seen."...

Guardian: Johnson spends a reported $2m (£1.6m) a year on project Blueprint, his personal programme aimed at defying the ageing process ... For starters, he goes to bed at 8:30pm every night and takes more than 100 pills a day ... He also eats all his meals before 11am, bathes in LED light, and spends a part of his day sitting on magnets ......

The Striking Buildings of Zaha Hadid. "The Iraqi-British Zaha Hadid became famous for her intensely futuristic architecture characterized by curving façades, sharp angles, and severe materials such as concrete and steel. The structures she designed successfully accomplished what mystifies so many when they observe great architecture: She took the strongest materials in the world and manipulated them to form objects that appear soft and...

Kingston, Ontario filmmaker Jay Middaugh and his love for the city in film. Jay has written and directed two movies set in Kingston; both heavily feature local musicians/bands. His first film, 2017's Live in Kingston, can be watched in its entirety at the link. (I'll also post it in FanFare.)Eight years later, Jay followed up with a fictionalized version of former MuchMuch veejay Bill...

The Fish Doorbell has been activated again (link to Dutch news website) Peek to see if perch wants to pass, and press the bell to permit.