February 24
You won't be surprised to learn that this was NOT clotted cream.
Queen of Afternoon Tea reviews the Railcar 91 Tea Room at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida.
Built for sound
When it was effortful to make noise and people wanted to hear, what did they do? This reminds me that Vitruvius talked about building for sound, too -- I think I remember reflecting sound for speeches and in the marketplace, and maybe deadening it near temples.
App-exit
"Three questions about Apple [disabling Advanced Data Protection for UK customers]" in responce to a secret “Technical Capability Notice” under the UK's “Snooper’s Charter.”
Do you name your stuff? It's your weekly free thread!
About 1 in 4 people name their cars. And of course people name their instruments (Atlantic, ungated). Does your car or guitar (or crouton) have a name? Share it - or anything at all you want to talk about! (except politics) - it's your weekly Free Thread!
"If I'd known there was a record to be beaten, I'd have gone faster"
Man accidentally sets marathon record on crutches Chris Terrill, 73, from Wilmington in East Sussex needed a hip replacement after injuring himself playing cricket last year. Regardless of being on crutches, he decided to run the Brighton Marathon as usual because he was already registered. It was only after he finished in six hours, 11 minutes and 11 seconds that he learned he had beaten the previous record by more than 13 minutes. [more inside]
Blue Bic
7 Years of Doug Ford
What the hell is cheesecake?
"I always say that 'love is a song.'"
"I'm really sad about the state of this family."
Ten Things I Don't Want To Hate About You Zach Mack and his dad try to mend a rift between them in a very unusual way. Zach makes a yearlong bet with his right wing religious dad over whether or not his predictions come true. (Spoilers for the podcast below the cut.) [more inside]
The hunger for quiet leaves us hungry.
Noise-cancelling tech leaves us less able to listen. "...I find that sad. Sometimes I think of it as a tragedy of the commons in reverse. The tragedy of the commons is we have like a field of grass and we all want to feed our cows on it. But if we all try to feed our cows on it at the same time, then the grass gets eaten up, and it's all gone.
I think in this case, it's more [about] contribution. If no one is contributing to the social space around us, the social space gets more boring, less interesting, more sterile, and so there's even less reason to not be plugged into our technologies."
Waffle’s Revenge
If you didn't want clouds or houndstooth, Windows 95 offered the option to tile 8x8 pixel 1-bit patterns on your desktop. Stored as eight decimal numbers describing the bit pattern of each row. [more inside]
Led Zeppelin's "Physical Graffiti" Turns 50
“Physical Graffiti remains the band’s definitive statement, and rock’s ultimate double album. Unlike some of their earlier work, it does not suffer from overfamiliarity, and is the culmination of what they had achieved up to that point. As far as many fans are concerned, the record marked the end of the band’s reign of supremacy through the first half of the decade, and while these songs have been ranked, there is not a bad note on this LP. Led Zeppelin would not reach this artistic pinnacle again.” [more inside]
📚 Small Press Books in Trump’s Honeymoon Period 📚
One of the ways people are resisting is through their wallets: under the fold, over 100 small press books by people in groups targeted by the Trump administration, or which provide insight and guidance on what to do next. Small press books previously. [more inside]
Gull-et
We want to know what gulls are eating and where! ... Our goal is to get people noticing gulls whilst also contributing to our understanding of gull diet and behaviour. We want to capture the huge diversity of gull diets and understand spatial and temporal trends in what they are eating. from Gulls Eating Stuff
February 23
Rick Steves is one of our great writers.
An Unexpected Writer Shows Us One Way Out of Our Current Hellscape - "Before the travel guides or the long-running PBS show or his ascendance as an American folk hero, Rick Steves was once a broke 23-year-old piano teacher lighting up a hunk of hashish somewhere in the Afghan highlands. It was the first time Steves had gotten high in his life, and he unwinds the story early on in his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail. Steves, and his enduring travel partner Gene Openshaw, loaded the hash in an old wooden pipe and lit it up on their modest hotel bed. At first he didn't sense much of a change, but then Steves felt everything at once." [more inside]
Bee hunter saving native species, one hotel at a time
Bee hunter saving native species, one hotel at a time. A 23-year-old ecologist known as The Bee Man is on a mission to conserve solitary pollinators by building them structures where they can nest — and he's urging others to do the same.
Davie504's Bass Around Sthe Sworld
Davie504 has successfully stopped bassists from India, Brazil, and Korea. But can even he play a 24-string bass? [more inside]
Oak Origins: From Acorns to Species and the Tree of Life
Oak trees are some of the most important trees in the world. Watch as Dr. Andrew Hipp discusses his Oak research. Besides being the backbone of many of our forests, they also support as stunning array of insect life, animal and fungal life, and have also been key to humans since time began. There are a lot of oak species in North America. Some of them are among the oldest living things on the planet. [more inside]
You do tend to turn into your parents as you age
Some people want to log on to find a job. Some want to find new clients. Some want to hire someone. Some want to sarcastically comment on a coworker’s promotion. Some want to snoop on their colleagues. Some just want to play “Queens” for 10 minutes on their lunch break. I have even been asked by friends to look people up on the platform before they go on a date, to see what their potential Romeo or Juliet does for a living. But if weird is the first accusation that springs to mind for a social platform, Microsoft execs probably won’t mind too much as they count the $16 billion a year in revenue that the platform brings in. from LinkedIn is a weird, workaholic wasteland — and a total gold mine for Microsoft [Sherwood] [more inside]
“We're going to take a sauna, sauna”
Though Melodifestivalen 2025, the six week qualifying competition to determine Sweden's Eurovision entry, is not yet over, one particular song and performance has caught attention: Bada bara bastu, by the Finnish collective KAJ. KAJ qualified from their heat for the Melodifestivalen final on 8th March. r/Finland: Their techno-style humor music is based on the Vöyri dialect of Finland-Swedish, which is difficult to understand even for most Swedish speakers. yle.fi: KAJ, often described as a comedy band, consists of Jakob Norrgård, Axel Åhman and Kevin Holmström.
The Odeillo solar furnace is the world's largest solar furnace
Many small mirrors reflect light to a giant mirror wedged into the side of an office block, and back to a target which gets to over 3000C. Even before the oil crises of the 1970s drove additional funding to R&D in renewable energy, a French research programme led by Prof. Felix Trombe was investigating the potential for energy from the sun. The furnace consists of 63 heliostats which track the course of the Pyrenean sun, reflecting it against a giant solar dish built into the side of an office block. The dish reflects the light to a point which can achieve 2500-3500C. Nice pics here. You can get a better idea of the layout from this 2 min YT video. [more inside]
Helen Nearing's "Simple Cooking for the Good Life"
"Helen Nearing felt that she should be the last person on earth to write a cookbook, but she also felt intrigued. 'I am a library inebriate,' she said. 'I began spending long hours in the rare book room of the New York Public Library every time Scott and I were in New York. I made my way through the introductions of 14,000 old cookbooks to discover if I had anything new to say.' (Since she was strictly a salad and potatoes woman, few of the recipes interested her.) She decided that she did, and the goal of Simple Food for the Good Life became 'to simplify cooking to such a point that it would take less time to prepare a meal than to eat it'." [more inside]
I thought of my marriage as something beyond understanding
“What does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to his new wife?” Rich wrote in The American Poetry Review, before revealing she had a suggestion of her own: “I have to say that I think this is bullshit eloquence.” from How Do You Faithfully Tell the Story of a Divorce, Including Your Own? [The Walrus]
February 22
Whale songs follow a lot of the same rules as human language
Whale songs follow a lot of the same rules as human language. Scientists have discovered that human language and whale songs have remarkable similarities in the way they are segmented and structured.
Federal prosecutor threatens California congressman for criticizing Elon
George Lynch
It means 'singing'.
In further entries for Eurovision Song Contest #69 (previously Finland and Estonia), Malta is represented by Miriana Conte, singing the song “Kant”. Radio Times: Kant, which translates to 'singing' in English, sees Miriana sing: "Serving kant... Do-re-mi-fa-s-s-serving kant." Eurovoix: “Kant” has drawn significant attention for its chorus, in which the singer proclaims that they are “serving Kant”. Kant is a Maltese word meaning ‘singing’, but its similarity to an expletive in the English language had led many to speculate that it could be banned at Eurovision. The EBU, which coordinates the Eurovision Song Contest, appears to have approved the lyrics as they are. [Lyrics]
“literally no way this is real”
I sat down and spoke with Evie about curation, digital ephemera, archives, and how tvwishes guides her own art practice. I also asked Evie to share some of her Flickr favorites for this interview. from ༘₊ ⊹ ☘︎ Interview » tvwishes ☁︎ ⊹₊
We're wrong about emotional labour
Emotional labour is revisited by the You're Wrong About podcast - and MetaFilter gets some of the credit? blame? for the scope creep of the phrase due to the apparently still almost famous enough Emotional Labour Thread (around minute 31). [more inside]
Thie world's richest man fakes his skills at a computer game
The world's richest man played a computer game, and as other gamers watched him livestream his game, they start realizing he knows nothing about it, even though his character is one of the best in a game that is incredibly hard to play. [more inside]
How you can be active in politics, protest and resistance.
To counteract the daily litany of shock and awe and in anticipation of the People’s Union Economic Blackout next Friday, Feb. 28th (also in response to this Meta suggestion)… here’s information that you can use to participate in the process, protest or find other ways to make a difference. This is primarily for US Progressives who are feeling helpless, depressed and angry right now. [more inside]
Napping on the job is frowned upon.
Poppy explores the simple math of fractions until her guest’s perception of reality begins to shatter. Improbably Poppy | Episode 2: Education [more inside]
Fiona Apple, singer
Fiona Apple in the recording studio, stealing The Waterboys' "The Whole of the Moon" like a master thief. [more inside]
Sí, se puede
AOC's Speech at NY Rally with Federal Workers - "Make them assert their authority. Ask them: Who are you? Who are you. Because at the end of the day, they're no one. They're just like you, and they're just like me, and he's running around cuz he thinks he's got a bank account with a lot of zeros in it that it makes him some kind of supercitizen. I don't think so. This is America." [more inside]
Russian disinfo isn't only online
Vandals-for-hire are becoming key to Russia's disinformation war. Russia is recruiting low-budget saboteurs to carry out vandalism across Europe to stoke division in an attempt to destabilise the West, using an army of online bots to spread their messages. Ahead of the European elections and the 2024 Paris Olympics, it was believed to be behind multiple incidents of hybrid warfare in France. Now Germany is being targeted in order to stir hatred of the pro-Ukraine Greens party and hurt their election chances in the final weeks of the election campaign.
A society that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement
Gatsby’s original audience had good reasons to see in it only a hyper-local novel about a small segment of New York society at a specific moment. They lacked distance, recognising all too clearly its familiar details. One critic wrote that it “is not necessarily a novel of wide appeal… I don’t even know whether it is fully intelligible to anyone who has not had glimpses of the kind of life it depicts.” Its particularity made it seem impossible for universal meanings to emerge. But we should pause before congratulating ourselves on our discernment, for if our distance from the reality behind the novel makes it easier for us to see its artistry, it has equally led to widespread misreadings of its realistic details. from How we misread The Great Gatsby [The New Statesman; ungated]
February 21
This Post Kills Fascists
Wanted to share some Woody Guthrie Covers for several different songs: Starting with"Fascists Bound to Lose" by Billy Bragg and Wilco. [more inside]
Fly larvae happy to munch on winery waste to make fertiliser
Fly larvae happy to munch on winery waste to make fertiliser. Two different agricultural enterprises have come together to tackle Australia's food waste challenge in an unexpected way — using the humble fly.
Hot Sauces of the World
Gift thinking is a muscle that atrophies without exercise
Feeling heartbroken by the greed and selfishness in our world? Though the systems we live in prioritize profits, we can choose giving and generosity as an antidote to fear and isolation - looking for the helpers and becoming them ourselves. [more inside]
The food so good, I got to share
keep hitting Reply All or the virus can infect your computers
I typed these easily: í â © ™ å č ə ff ĸ ° ™ ß ŭ × ⓞ ¡
A secret move some Linux and Unix users know is that typing special characters needn't be a chore involving Alt codes or a character map application. You go into keyboard settings (on KDE go under Keyboard then Key Bindings; on Gnome you'll have to install Tweaks) and pick a key to be the compose key (I suggest Caps Lock). Then press it, then a symbol (like apostrophe), then a character to combine it with (like e), and what you end up with is the characters combined if possible: é. Or... (see inside) On macOS, enabling the Compose key is hard (try this). On Windows, you can install WinCompose. Jason Lefkowitz wrote a great introduction to the Compose key in 2015. This old page hosted in Dartmouth's webspace gives a number of sequences to try. [more inside]
“And to that, I scream out loud, 'I'm coming'”
[Mod note added: Content Warning for flashing/strobing lights in the video.]
An early favourite for this year's Eurovision Song Contest is the entry from Finland: Ich komme, by Erika Vikman. Wikipedia: The lyrics reflect "the joyous message of pleasure, ecstasy and a state of trance" and sexual pleasure and reaching the climax, reflected in its structure, which corresponds to the way a sexual climax is reached. Eurovision World: Erika herself says about her song for Eurovision: “In this song you take control. Everything related to your sexuality is in your own hands. Pleasure should not be taboo.” Lyrics.
a conspiracy of evil nerds
'What if I were to tell you about an obscure clique of consultants that concoct dubious economic analysis to convince regulators to side with corporations, enabling a massive rip-off of ordinary Americans? I think your curious, cautious response might be, “You’re going to have to be more specific.” OK, so this obscure clique has a name. They’re called the Society of Utility and Regulatory Financial Analysts, or SURFA. And they are a large part of the reason why you’re paying way too much for electricity.' The Secret Society Raising Your Electricity Bills.
Samuel Roth
"Though frequently remembered as a pornographer, Roth importantly shaped the Modernist movement by compelling many of its key players to think more seriously about issues of censorship, artistic freedom, and literature’s relationship to the law. Roth dedicated the first issue of Two Worlds Monthly to Joyce, “who will probably plead the cause of our time at the bar of posterity.” And indeed, Ulysses has become a testimony to the great experimental achievements of Modernism. In publishing Two Worlds Monthly, Roth hoped to carve out a sphere in which these daring Modernist authors could exercise creative freedom, particularly in scandalous yet realistic portrayals of human sexuality." [more inside]
Tassie devil trapped by mistake released into the wild
Tassie devil trapped by mistake released into the wild. Wildlife researchers say they have never come across a male Tasmanian devil with such markings. A Tasmanian devil with highly uncommon markings has been spotted after it mistakenly wandered into a private landowner's trap. Due to its unusual appearance, the devil was taken to a wildlife park on Tasmania's east coast and checked for signs of ill health. The adolescent devil has been released at a secret location, to minimise the risk of illegal wildlife traders finding it. (Australia)
User-centered design: Why we're looking for a few users to test a form
The MetaFilter Moderation Oversight Committee is looking for a few interviewees to test out our intake form. Please consider signing up! This process is a part of user-centred design, which has been around for a long time. But in the age of AI, human-centred design may be more important than ever. [more inside]
A change is gonna come
60 years a martyr: on this day in 1965 CE, Malcolm X was shot by assassins. On February 21, 1965, two men shot El Hajj Malik El Shabbaz (Malcolm X) in New York City. [more inside]