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My wife also saw Han Solo in carbonite, gottabefunky.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:00 PM on May 15, 2024

Well obviously it was painted that way to appeal to Queen Carmilla

For cstross:

The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my
father recognized each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face
now disclosed to view. The features, though a hundred and fifty years
had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life. Her
eyes were… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:45 PM on May 15, 2024

very good title.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:05 AM on May 15, 2024

.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:04 AM on May 15, 2024

Excellent catch, chavenet.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:46 PM on May 13, 2024

posted by The_Vegetables

Eponhysterical!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:27 PM on May 13, 2024

“global weirding” is a phrase I like very much, and want to see in greater circulation.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:28 PM on May 13, 2024

Thank you for this detailed post, Rhaomi. I'm traveling today and can't do the kind of research you did!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:22 PM on May 13, 2024

Hard to read the text.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:13 PM on May 12, 2024

These are amazing. Thank you.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:03 PM on May 12, 2024

I admire his Poe obsession. So many adaptations.

And this bit of inspiration:
The group meet Edgar Allan Poe, who throughout the film drives around on a motorbike with Lenore on the back and a raven on his shoulder, commenting on the action like a Greek chorus.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:15 PM on May 12, 2024

I'm a lifelong horror movie fan, and this ad creeped me out.

Maybe it's spending years playing a musical instrument (cello), or learning to take photos with a real camera now, or spending a lot of my life caring for books. Maybe it was the sheer glee of the ad, reveling in the destruction.

I remember an ad from circa 1999? which had a pre-9-11 airport security line. A guy puts a bunch of stuff on the conveyor belt: a typewriter, a boom box, a… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:58 PM on May 9, 2024

Looks like an earlier ad from another company.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:12 PM on May 9, 2024

Heh - Colbert offers a nicely Gothic twist.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:55 AM on May 10, 2024

Confucius Institutes are probably the best-known elite Chinese influence project...
[T]hey were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion, policing Chinese students at American universities by restricting open discussions of Tibet and Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. They have now been… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:17 AM on May 10, 2024

If I squint I can just make out the Mote.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:11 PM on May 9, 2024

"Impact Of Cold Exposure On Life Satisfaction And Physical Composition Of Soldiers" is quite a title.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:00 PM on May 9, 2024

When 19th century people freaked out about the dangers of trains, they missed this one!
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:45 PM on May 9, 2024

The New York Times article has one good photo.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:56 AM on May 9, 2024

I've been spending recent years trying to get academics to think and do stuff about the climate crisis. It's been tough work, as the overwhelming majority don't want to.

But I've been seeing more interest from some quarters: individual professors, traditional-age students, the rising number of sustainability officers. Architects, campus planners, and food service providers all get it. So over the next few years we'll hopefully see academia take some steps. I hope.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:36 PM on May 8, 2024

Sometimes universities want to fly me out to talk about climate change and academia.

We live on the Atlantic seaboard, so I can instead train to some locals (New England, parts of the northeast, parts of the southeast). Otherwise... I'd like to train to, say, California, but the week of travel destroys my schedule. And traveling out of the country beyond Ontario and Quebec needs planes.

As an alternative, I give fee discounts to do a virtual… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:51 PM on May 8, 2024

I do wonder where the “it doesn’t personally affect me” people live. In the US

Parts of the midwest, it seems.
(Check the series Extrapolations, which sees Miami evacuated to Duluth)
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:18 PM on May 8, 2024

centering the discussion about climate change on this very small component of the total cause is a distraction from the real issue

I can't speak for anyone else in the thread, but what you say doesn't apply to what I'm doing, nor to what a lot of people in the climate world are up to. We're talking about a civilizational transformation, which includes air travel *along with everything else*.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:20 PM on May 8, 2024

biogeo, thank you for your thoughtful response.

Climate change is such a hyperobject that people often grab onto one piece of it to think through: flying, diet, cars, architecture.

One college I work with spent serious money on a consultant who advised them on their climate future. Their conclusion: to swap out their main boiler. That was it. And the college was proud of this.

For a lot of people it's hard to think… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:40 AM on May 9, 2024

The societal and cultural forces at work continue to put much pressure on people to have children

Those pressures are increasingly failing. Nearly every part of the developed world have seen their fertility rates fall below replacement levels (around 2.1 children per woman). The same patterns occurs on the developing world, once a society goes through modernity: increased wealth, improved health care, better public health, and especially… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:46 AM on May 9, 2024

Big Black played in my undergrad dorm's club around 1986. They plugged into the grid and immediately blacked out the building, appropriately. There was some technical work, and then... rock.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:14 PM on May 8, 2024

Nicolai Tangen, head of Norway’s giant oil fund. Even he has taken enough leisure time to amass a collection of Nordic modernist art

Somehow I don't think it just takes time to assemble an art collection.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:54 PM on May 8, 2024

I'm so sorry, Press Butt.on to Check.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:43 PM on May 8, 2024

"Kennedy brainworm parasite" is a phrase I don't think I've ever put together.
Ah, 2024.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:32 PM on May 8, 2024

Good to see more notices on university and college labor organizing. This has been building for years, despite little support from academics and ditto from media.

If you're interested in this, here's a discussion we held with two leaders of Higher Education Labor United (HELU).
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:22 AM on May 7, 2024

If you like this story of Japanese reflective spheres, check out Edogawa Rampo's "The Hell of Mirrors."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:12 AM on May 7, 2024

What a fun world.

Some of its background:

A thousand years after the defeat of
Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz, the
world has fallen into decay. Endless war
has led to technology stagnating, and
beautiful countrysides have been ground
to a thick ruin under the boots of a million
dead men.
Now, nothing grows. A bizarre and
horrible root… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:57 PM on May 5, 2024

“Though thy body’s plasticene-y, thou” I said, “art sure no weenie,
Penguin proud and brisk, though teeny, walking your Antarctic route
Tell me what you think you’re doing, on this dark Antarctic route?”
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:13 PM on May 5, 2024

What a great idea for a secret society: focused on art, somewhat open source, headless, of unclear origin (maybe), with shared rituals. Bravo, you all.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:46 PM on May 3, 2024

I started on BASIC in 1979, working on a dumb terminal hooked up to my elementary school's mainframe. I hacked the Star Trek game and wrote some of my own code.
Over the next couple of years I hand copied programs from a couple of big paperback books. I obsessed over the books, carrying them around and annotating them when I wasn't near a computer.

After that I moved on to COBOL, FORTRAN, then even assembler, before turning away from computers for a few years. But BASIC was my open door.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 7:45 PM on May 3, 2024

I don't think we've got to crucify everybody for their sins.

Have you met MetaFilter?
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:07 PM on April 28, 2024

Wow. A very consistently anti-Ellison thread, this one.

A lot of my memories of him are personal. As a college student a group of us got him to our campus for a talk, and it was a wild time. We had dinner with him, and he veered rapidly from being rude ("You dress like a science fiction fan!" to one person) to thoughtful and funny. His talk energized an auditorium full of sleepy students and maybe some faculty, staff, and townies.
(One cute… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 2:14 PM on April 28, 2024

Rick Perlstein is such a fine writer and historian. Very nice person, too.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:37 PM on April 26, 2024

There's a quote attributed to Napoleon to the effect of: "If you want to understand a man, know the world he knew at 20 years old."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 11:11 AM on April 26, 2024

GenX here. So much of my musical taste came from my teen years:
-classical, when I was playing the cello, and I can still vividly recall hearing some symphonies and concerti for the first time
-pop->rock->punk->New Wave, starting from listening to the radio, then talking with people and getting mix tapes.

In my 20s I fell hard for the Coil/World Serpent world.

...and then nothing new for decades, thanks to being… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 11:28 AM on April 26, 2024

In a college class many moons ago, I was taught that animals don't have sentience because they don't respond to mirrors and don't use symbolic language. So many people do in fact believe that animals are not truly conscious.

tofu_crouton, you might be interested in this part of the "Background" page:

Cleaner wrasse fish appear to pass a version of the mirror-mark test. Questions of self awareness in… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 11:16 AM on April 26, 2024

.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 11:07 AM on April 26, 2024

"DSCOVR is about a million miles from earth" - indeed, in the L1 point, I think.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 4:33 PM on April 24, 2024

I don't know many ant species, seanmpuckett . Is this markedly paler than most?
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:01 PM on April 23, 2024

“At long last, we’re building the first high-speed rail project in our nation’s history" - at long last indeed. Oh, I hope they don't foul this up.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 5:34 PM on April 22, 2024

Yes!

And I want to celebrate the sheer glory of these lines:
"Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune."
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 12:37 PM on April 22, 2024

That Dune essay is very strange.

Dune Part Two looks good, but the images are incredibly static, people are reduced to flat images, with the exceptions of the sudden outbreaks of violent action, which are themselves short lived and poorly staged.
"It's static except for all the exciting bits"?
And if you haven't seen the film, there are a lot of "violent action" scenes.… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:58 AM on April 22, 2024

.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 6:59 PM on April 20, 2024

Average enrollment in higher Ed has been steady trending down for years

That's correct. American higher ed enrollment peaked around 2012 and then declined every year until fall 2023.

This is something I research. Current book ms is actually called _Peak Higher Ed_.
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:49 PM on April 17, 2024

I really, really want to read this but the text is too small.
Is there a way of making it work, other than screenshotting each page and embiggening from my desktop?
posted to MetaFilter by doctornemo at 1:46 PM on April 17, 2024