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this is your free thread: what does freedom mean to you? please feel free to write about anything/rage against the machinenot raging against the machine? this is an 'ai overview' description: Feedom [sic] may refer to a catalog management platform, a community group in Detroit, or a province in Buenos Aires. other musicians have titled 'freedom', including Pharrell Williams, Beyoncé George Michael, & there...

What does one do with 22 minutes of dead air on Hallowe'en? If you're Matt Geller of KXVO, you put on a black unitard and a pumpkin mask and dance. How will you celebrate the spooky season? Or talk about anything you like!

with rocks in my dress and smoke in my hair i walked into a lake to get some sleep down in there  This lyric from 'Comfort Me' by Sparklehorse (previously) is likely an allusion to Virginia Woolf whose family recently refused permission for a Barbie doll to be created in her image. According to this report in The Times (UK) (archived link) it looked...

Usually when a teenager is driving 120 mph and runs into a police car it's considered a bad thing. Not always, though.

The thing on her face was a bottle cap. As of July, caps in Europe no longer fully come off water and soda bottles due to a European Union law aimed at getting more of the caps recycled rather than littered. When the caps are screwed off, they stay there, dangling from the top of bottles and bumping into drinkers' lips, noses and cheeks....

Nature reports: World-first therapy using donor cells sends autoimmune diseases into remission A new application of CAR-T therapy that doesn't require extraction and modification of the patient's own cells. Using donated cells a "one size fits all" therapy is a possibility.Derek Lowe of the old "Things I won't work with" blog has more details: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/car-t-autoimmune-disorders As he says in the link: "It's a breakthrough,...

How New South Wales farmers are making money from improving biodiversity. Farmers are protecting corridors of land to improve biodiversity for annual payments and to attract premium prices.

The past year in pictures of Israel and Gaza by Reuters. Casting a pall over Israeli life. CNN's defining images from the past year. Al Jazeera released a documentary on war crimes in Gaza. Zeteo released a documentary on Israel's Reel Extremism. Israel has now escalated the violence to include bombing hospitals, suburbs and refugee camps in Lebanon, a Russian airbase in Syria, the...

From rap getting brasher and noisier, to online scenes blossoming during quarantine, to entire subcultures of music being shot to the moon and stripped for parts by TikTok, music as we know it fundamentally shifted this half-decade. from The 100 Best Songs of the 2020s So Far [Pitchfork]See also: The 100 Best Albums of the 2020s So Far

Robin Malan, Rebel Angel has passed. "Robin Malan – [South African] educator, collator, editor, actor, director, writer, publisher – with decades of service behind him, bowed out on 18 September after a short spell in hospital, aged 84."I first encountered his anthologies of South African poetry at school, but as an adult I am still obsessed with his book 'Ah big yaws?: A Guard...

Not only has Untapped Potential set up an independent publishing imprint and rescued 161 previously lost Australian books in the last four years bringing them to libraries across Australia, the research team also used the data generated throughout the process to help answer important research questions that couldn't be answered otherwise. Their findings (PDF) have just been released.By taking on the role of publisher,...

"We know this because of Oprah, because of the Kardashians, because of all these people who are continuing to pursue Westernized beauty, that there is no top where you get to safety" "There will always be something else. If it's not your weight, it is going to be aging. There's always something."Comments and criticisms you make about other people's bodies also influence the way...

The Media Bias Chart (interactive, static, and app versions), from Ad Fontes Media, graphs the political bias vs reliability of media articles."Even centrism is a type of bias. And being politically 'moderate' is no guarantee of moral correctness anyway." Y-axis: from more reliable, fact-based reporting at the top, to analysis & opinion, to less reliable, misleading reporting at the bottom. X-axis: left-right political bias,...

Hopes painful pest costing sheep farmers millions could soon be eradicated on Kangaroo Island. Millions of sterile male blowflies will be bred at a world-first facility and released to mate with females in a trial aiming to end flystrike on the island.

Former Colorado county clerk, conspiracy monger, and election denier Tina Peters has been sentenced to 9 years incarceration for providing pillow and conspiracy peddler Mike Lindell access to Dominion voting machines in the wake of the 2020 election along with using her position to push baseless claims.Of particular note is the utter dressing down Judge Matthew Barrett gave Peters in his sentencing remarks, noting...

The Disciples, by James Mollison. A series of 56 photo montages of music fans outside concerts. It's all about the clothes and the community and the music. This is the web page for an in-person exhibition I wish I'd seen. There's a 5 1/2 minute video (with relevant music) as part of the experience.

At GoodReads, Cybil lists The 78 Most Popular Horror Novels of the Past Five Years. At LitHub, Drew Broussard suggests a spooky season starter kit for the genre-curious. At CrimeReads, Kelley Armstrong describes 7 Great Haunted House Novels Written by Women. On her blog Jump Scares, Emily Hughes tracks 2024's New Horror Books (and several previous years too). Meanwhile on r/horrorlit, recent threads ask...

Banks still provide far too little green financing compared to fossil fuel financing. Banks have made headlines in recent years for committing to reach "net-zero emissions" by 2050 and pledging to mobilize trillions of dollars in the fight against climate change. But are banks on track to fulfill their promises? World Resources Institute's Financial Institutions Net Zero Tracker focuses on Transparency & Ambition; Implementation;...

How Deep-Sea Comb Jellies Hold Their Shape Under Crushing Pressure. The delicate sea creatures fall apart when brought to the surface but can survive miles deep in the ocean due to special cell wall structures, according to a new study.

Across the nation, Republican-controlled state legislatures and conservative activists have passed bills and embraced legal strategies that encourage Americans to monitor one another's behavior and report their friends, family members, and neighbors to the authorities. [...] Republican legislators in Texas have proposed numerous additional restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned, including bills that would punish employers who help their workers get abortions, outlaw...

"Footnotes" is a very short science fiction story by C.C. Finlay, originally published in 2001. 1. Report of the Joint Investigating Committee (Washington DC, 2027) pp. 2-3.... 4. Werks to Beverly Dohnt (and 79 others), 11:21 a.m. PST, 8 Jan 2019, Subj: Fw: one more thing.

The Golden Owl is won after 31 yearsLe trésor de la « chouette d'or » déterré après trente et un ans de mystère, annonce le dépositaire du jeu La Chouette d'Or Previously

SciTechDaily: Groundbreaking Study Finally Reveals How Rubbing Generates Static Electricity. ACS letter: An enduring question in science has been why sliding plays a major role in the triboelectric generation of static electricity–the "tribo" in triboelectricity. We provide here a general explanation which is rooted in established science . ARXIV: A Quantitative Model of Triboelectric Charge Transfer. Bonus Quanta: The Hidden World of Electrostatic Ecology...