~metafilter | Bookmarks (975)

"This site explores the graphic design of Penguin book covers, with a focus on series editions." Previous Penguin

I'm drawn to the mystery of Ring Lardner's assailant and the details of Ike Francis's life for reasons I find difficult to define. It's a sense of something essential hidden away, a small secret part of what made us who we are. It makes me think of those scientists who comb the soil of the Amazon for evidence of ancient civilizations, where nothing else...

The Register reports that CP/M, the "Control Program for Microcomputers," has turned 50 years old! Amstrad released a CP/M laptop, using 720K 3 1/2-inch disks, as late as 1993, as demonstrated by Poking Technology in this Youtube video (19 minutes). CP/M used single-letter designations, like "A:", to represent disk drives. MS-DOS picked that convention up, where it survived into Windows 95 and NT, and...

Grass underfoot, Leipäjuusto in the mouth, stroking a cat, nettle stings on the body, fingers in clay and chocolate, and cold water and steam on bare skin ... after recent topics of smells and sounds and tastes, what are the textures, things you feel, which linger in your memories ... Or write about whatever is on your mind, in your heart, on your plate...

Famous Sycamore Gap tree illegally cut down now showing signs of life. Eight new shoots appear on the stump of a famous tree that was illegally felled in northern England last year.

Was the Internet Designed to Survive a Nuclear Attack? is an essay by computer historian Chris McKenzie which traces the origins of the popular myth that the Internet was the result of an attempt to create a military command and control network that wasn't vulnerable to a single nuclear strike. Via Bruce Sterling, who wrote an early version of the narrative.

Earlier this week, Caltech announced that for the first time in it's history, it has reached gender parity in it's incoming undergraduate class.Caltech was founded in 1891 as "Throop University" (for founder Amos Throop) in the seventeen year old city of Pasadena. It eventually became the California Institute of Technology in 1920. Caltech admitted men only until 1970, with it's first women graduates in...

How do you kill this pest? By importing its natural enemy. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) introduces a biocontrol fungus in the hope it reduces the spread of African boxthorn weed, but it is not available outside New South Wales due to lack of funding.

I wrote a song about my dad getting older - Jax and her dad in the car. One of several charming and heartwarming songs/shorts by Jax. Recently discovered by me - though she has 3M followers on YouTube and 14M on TikTok. Enjoyable content for enjoyment.I told my friends my babysitter was TikTok famous but they called me a liar Responding to a Hater...

How to save $13.27 on your sAAs bill. Hilarious. Sometimes, the boundary between the real and the parody is just a few lines of code.

On 30 May 1975, Toni Morrison, Primus St. John, John Callahan, Susan Callahan, and Lloyd Baker convened for the second part of the "Black Studies Center Public Dialogue" [PDF transcript] at Portland State University. During the dialogue, Toni Morrison said a number of important things, but one piece in particular has stood out in later years [previously; previouslier].Here's the quote: "The function, the very...

Short tiktok skits of chicken shop encounters with London slang. Sparkling water.Robbery Wings Sauce, wherein bossman finally prevails.

People in the industry tend to think that flight is useful and awesome, and not necessarily in that order. One of the reasons that the idea of flying cars has endured is that it seems to promise two different kinds of freedom: on the one hand, to get from point A to point B without a lot of hassle; on the other hand, to...

What does it mean that hundreds of thousands of players are clicking on a banana? Clicker games are the inevitable end-point of the rise of bots and microtransactions.

Everyone thought this tiny lizard was extinct — then it turned up on Melbourne's fringe. Emi Arnold and Pat Monarca were about to finish work when they spotted a long-lost tiny dragon. Now Zoos Victoria is leading the charge to bring the reptiles back from the brink.

It was a sad farewell in D.C. when a beloved Tidal Basin cherry tree had to be removed in the spring. But there's hope on the horizon as cuttings from "Stumpy" have taken root.

The legend of Keyboard Cat: How a man and his cat(s) won the internet lottery. Part of Mashable's Tales of the Early Internet.Bento, the second Keyboard Cat, passed away in 2018 and scored more online obits than 99% of humans—and yet, surprisingly, none at Mefi. (Fatso, the original keyboard cat, died in the 1980s.) Now (or at least as of last August), Charlie Schmidt,...

"Biles's aerial somersaults reach an incredible height. In Tuesday's floor routine, seven feet of air separated her four-foot-eight frame from the ground beneath her. Through the power of arithmetic, we can confidently say that means her head was eleven feet and eight inches above the ground. If that feels abstract, allow us to provide some concrete examples for you." A Partial Inventory of Items...

The third in an ongoing series of experiments for a different kind of MetaFilter experience: Come across an interesting link recently that you'd like to share, but don't want to work it up into a full post? Share it here for our perusal, nbd. And if you'd like to post something but need some inspiration, check out the links here to see what other...

Babish, aka Andrew Rea of the Babish Culinary Universe, ranks the strangest recipes submitted to him by his viewers. Featuring gatorwine, a number of brief musical interludes inspired by gatorwine, and a range of scores for the strange recipes going from 0 (tuna tacos. but not like, the good kind. you'll see.) to 10 (pokkorn, a delicious looking take on popcorn).

Blood thinner could revolutionise treatment for cobra venom. Cobra venom could potentially be treated with a commonly prescribed blood thinner, new research has indicated.

$10M cash withdrawal drove secret probe into whether Trump took money from Egypt by Aaron C. Davis and Carol D. Leonnig (WaPost gift link)

WaPo's Dept. of Data looks at the numbers. (gift link) In a similar fashion to Trump being confused about Harris being both Indian and Black, I stand for all of us who have cats and dogs. We're out, we're proud, we're spending too much on cat food because the dogs keep sneaking in and helping themselves to it.