~metafilter | Bookmarks (966)

A decade after the dress, we've learned a lot about how people could see a simple image so differently from one another. The dress is of particular interest to me as a researcher who studies differences in perception and cognition between individuals. While the colors of a piece of clothing might be a trivial thing to disagree about, we can all learn a thing...

What Harm Reduction Really Looks Like (On harm reduction in Minneapolis, Tim Evans for The Nation (supported by the nonprofit Economic Hardship Reporting Project, archive.ph)

It comes at a time when we're facing a country-wide backlash to harm reduction measures like safe consumption sites, safe supply drugs, and decriminalization. With Trudeau, who has overseen many of those policy shifts, about to leave government, it feels like the end of a relatively progressive era for drug policy in Canada.Yes, this link is from Substack. Yes, I am aware of why...

Variety: "Michelle Trachtenberg, 'Gossip Girl' and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' Actor, Dies at 39." More obituaries: The Hollywood Reporter; CNN; and NYT (ungated). Entries at IMDb, Letterboxd, and Wikipedia. Trachtenberg's work readily available online includes Human Kind Of, "an animated comedy about a nerdy teenager who finds out her estranged father was an alien," released on Facebook Watch and underappreciated in a crowded field...

Jeff Bezos bans Washington Post opinion writers from opposing 'free speech and free markets' "In a move promoted as supporting freedom of speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish opinion columns that oppose the core views of Post owner and Amazon executive chair Jeff Bezos, Bezos has reportedly told staff. " (The Verge link, does not appear to be paywalled.) Opinions editor David...

"Shantyboats were the last resort of those who were too poor even to own a horse, let alone homestead an acre patch of hard-scrabble dirt. They could be cobbled together from discarded planks, canvas, scrap metal and driftwood and rafted up with others, rent free, along the banks of any navigable waterway. And there were plenty of places to which they could drift: most...

The soft power of Ultimate Frisbee in the Middle East, friendlier than bombs or bullets. It's not just about the low cost or the novelty. Ultimate is governed by a principle called Spirit of the Game, an honor system that counts on players to call their own fouls and enforce the rules themselves. Learning to play the game is an exercise in peacebuilding on...

Bernard Palissy (1510 – c. 1589) was a Renaissance man in more ways than one; over the course of his life, he did work as a potter and ceramicist, garden designer, glassblower, hydraulics engineer, painter, surveyor, and naturalist. He is probably best known for his ceramics - dishes and platters decorated with hyper-realistic shells, snails, ferns, fish, frogs, seaweed, and other aquatic life, all...

Study underway into cute but feisty freshwater creature. Scientists are investigating the health of spiny freshwater crayfish in habitats surrounded by large dams, growing towns, and coal mines. (Australia)

I considered Lucian Freud's paintings of me, where I was the model, not the artist. They were all made when I was a young woman—the first when I was twenty, the last when I was twenty-seven. I have never sat for another artist since, yet the label of "muse" has stuck. It is a frustrating and corrosive feeling to be compartmentalized in this way....

Want to iteratively unpack a series of cryptic clues to collapse a horrifying nest of brackets to resolve down to a heavily obscured headline? Want to do it once a day? Good news: Bracket City is here to make you feel alternately like an entire idiot and then kind of a genius.

Tinned Fish Recipes What it says on the tin. It seems appropriate to sayTo be clear, the recipes are part of a store website but there are some nice pictures, a short but interesting origin story and some simple but delicious-sounding sardine recipes.

Native species resurgence in WA's north after rangers' war on cane toads. The Balanggarra Rangers have fought the cane toad for over a decade and are finally seeing native flora and fauna make a comeback (Australia).

Abbott & Costello perform their greatest routine one last time for a mass audience on The Steve Allen Show, October 7, 1956, to commemorate the induction of "Who's On First" into The Baseball Hall of Fame.Copyright Lawsuit Over "Who's On First" Doesn't Get Past First Base In September 2007, Los Angeles Dodgers shortstop Chin-Lung Hu, a late-season callup from Las Vegas, got his first...

The Cuddled Little Vice is a book-length essay by Elizabeth Sandifer which offers a magisterial overview of Neil Gaiman's life and career, from rise to fall, focusing especially on the Sandman comics. [Content warning: Child abuse, sexual abuse]

A fedi thread on how (impossible it is) to model lava. It's impossible! We know SO MUCH relevant stuff, entire fields of knowledge, kitchen-table imbricated with the hardest mathematics. And we still can't. Often because it's, you know, lava.

Sty Scraper is a simple game. Stack the random farmyard junk as high as possible on the platform. If anything falls, you lose. It looks fantastic, the physics are great, and it's fun to play. Enjoy!Did see it was from MeFi's own malevolent. Didn't think to see if they'd posted it in projects. It's fantastic. Illustrations by Doc Hackenbush. Previously on MetaFilter.

Lyrics parody swaps one set of words that accompany a melody with a new set of words, preserving the number of syllables per line and the rhyme scheme. Lyrics parody generation is a challenge for controllable text generation. We show how a specialized sampling procedure, combined with backward text generation with XLNet can produce parody lyrics that reliably meet the syllable and rhyme scheme...

Rare native mouse like dumpling on legs found in Blue Mountains. Ecologists set up tea strainers filled with peanut butter and oats in the Wollemi National Park to attract the New Holland mouse which has not been seen in the area for 20 years. (Australia)

Humans offers a rich historical and literary survey of the pathological and contradictory means by which we define the monstrous, a process often slapdash and mutable. Tracing our history of monster-making through conversations around race-making and nation-building, gender and sexuality, our relationship to the divine, machines and extraterrestrials, the book reveals the myriad ways we express and compensate for a fundamental fear that we...

The lost map of Al-idrisi The 12th-century Islamic cartographer al-Idrisi for created this world map in 1154 for Roger II of Sicily. It was a masterpiece of mapping which remained the most technically sophisticated world-map for three centuries after its production. Drawing on several centuries of Islamic cartographic research, al-Idrisi produced both a single, round map engraved onto a silver disk and set into...

"Few, if any, free jazz saxophonists approached music with the same degree of intellectual rigor as Sam Rivers; just as few have managed to maintain a high level of creativity over a long life. Rivers played with remarkable technical precision and a manifest knowledge of his materials. His sound was hard and extraordinarily well-centered, his articulation sharp, and his command of the tenor saxophone...