November 13
US Planes Grounded
The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday ordered a nationwide ground stop on all departing flights “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” [NBC] [more inside]
The world’s smallest football league: 20 fixtures against the same team
The Isles of Scilly Football League, recognised and affiliated to the English FA, has only two competing teams [The Athletic gift link]
Where art thou blue?
Colors come and go and it can be hard to find the right match after a hundred years, even when you have 2000 to look through. [more inside]
Monkey Wrench
is a sci fi animated web series where humans are the vanished elder race who messed everything up. Space mercs Shrike & Beebs encounter new jobs, old enemies and miscellaneous space catastrophes. Six episodes of pro-quality animation to date. Starts episodic with capital-P plot kicking in by episode 4. [more inside]
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do
🌻🌹🌷🌼
Known names, if not exactly those an American would pick
The festival is right to point out the rarity of this delegation, as these writers would rarely be grouped together. On home turf, they’d more likely be gathered by subject matter, identity, or genre, because in the U.S., “American” is not a uniting descriptor—we’re too close to see clearly. But in Vincennes, we can step back and see the whole picture.
November 12
For Want of a Nail: Civilian Harm Mitigation & Response
Adam L. Silverman in Balloon Juice: During the first hours of the U.S. attack on Iran on February 28th, the U.S. struck a girls’ school in Minab southern Iran killing over 150 school girls...
Some have attempted to blame Palantir’s MAVEN data visualization system, other’s the possible merging of a large language model and large image model program with MAVEN to facilitate target development.
The reality, however, is because the intel on the potential target was both over a decade old and wrong, and because the person whose job it was to deconflict the potential target using information about the Iranian civil environment was reduced in force (RIF)/laid off in February 2025.
I was that person.
[more inside]
Van Hollen to challenge Schumer
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) says he will challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer for the role of majority leader. [more inside]
Just like an Italian piazza, this garden has grown a community
Just like an Italian piazza, this garden has grown a community.
The founder behind an community garden in suburban Adelaide is celebrating a legacy that has grown far beyond the garden beds.
Thou still uneaten urn of gingerbread
Wyatt Roy and Julia Mattis made an amphora out of gingerbread. On December 3 it will be displayed in the Greek gallery at Harvard Art Museums, a few feet from the ancient vase it was modeled on. [more inside]
microsoft exchange (and other services) down since around 1:00 EST
developing story on cnet.com as it is being covered. i have not been able to connect to my work email since around 1:00 EST. the strange thing is that it doesn't seem like anyone is really that upset about this. i came to metafilter to see the post, and found there wasn't one here, so i'm posting. is anyone else disrupted by this disruption?
“What an amazing thing”
Abdul El-Sayed Interviewed by NPR's Leila Fadel. 43 min., no interruptions.
Siren culture
Dad Issues in Space: 50th anniversary release
Star Wars, a globally celebrated film skilfully co-edited by Marcia Lucas, is almost 50 years old. Deadline: "Screenings of the original 1977 version of Star Wars will begin on February 19. In addition to the IMAX 70mm screenings, the film will also be presented in Digital IMAX, Digital Cinema, 70mm, 35mm, and 4DX." License Global: "Consumer products and licensed experiences lead a year-long celebration marking five decades since the original "Star Wars" debuted in 1977." Variety: "On May 4, Lucasfilm will also release a new documentary, “The Hero Awakens,” from esteemed filmmaker R.J. Cutler on Disney+. Detailing the making of “Star Wars,” the film will exclusively feature archival footage and audio captured during and around the making of the historic film in 1977."
A life, seen through paper
"The first Pacific Islander to visit Britain"
Saar Shahar (The Conversation, 10/12/26), "Americans can now see a famous portrait of the Pacific Islander who captivated 18th‑century England ...": "In 1774, a young man in his early 20s named Mai arrived in England." Global colonialism narratives edited by novelist John Hawkesworth had just appeared. A journal and four volume history had too. In fiction, the Pacific had figured vaguely in Swift and Defoe, but in poetry, two pamphlets incorporated Tahiti. Mai himself met novelist Frances Burney, having sailed with her brother. He became the subject of a poem and a musical pantomime (scenery reconstruction; more on Harlequinades). One discussion connects Mai's return home to a geography boardgame. That voyage plus others yielded notable art (1 2 3 4 5 6) and culminated in events debated by anthropologists and revisited by SF novelist Charlie Jane Anders.
An Oligarch wants your trees
The illegal trafficking of giant Baobabs from South Africa has been stopped in the nick of time. They have been lying in a Durban ship yard for three months. [more inside]
Every processor die anyone has photographed and given away
Inside every processor is a flat piece of silicon, usually smaller than a fingernail. To see it you have to sand or dissolve the package away and photograph what is left through a microscope. A handful of people do this and give the pictures away, most of all Pauli Rautakorpi, ZeptoBars in Moscow, John McMaster and a photographer who posts as Fritzchens Fritz. These are the 363 processors they have photographed, from 1971 to 2024.
Eurasian bitterns pretending to be reeds
Lessons from Japan's childcare system
From baby hotels to restaurant-quality food: Lessons from Japan's childcare system.
While Australia grapples with childcare scandals, Japan is delivering top-quality care with professional chefs serving up nutritious food. So how did they do it?
November 11
Ueno Is the Loneliest Number
Paraguayan Bank Collapse topples the country's president. (sl Substack) Paraguay's biggest bank by customer count, the digital lender ueno bank, was seized by the central bank on November 2. Within four days President Santiago Peña had resigned, been unanimously impeached and removed, and been put under house arrest. Tomás Mandl, a former US diplomat in Paraguay and author of Modern Paraguay, argues the bank's rise was built on presidential connections and a "revolving door" between business and regulators, and that the collapse shows a democracy that is still maturing. [more inside]
People of Jinsy, stand by your tesselators
Removing SmartTV Spyware Should Be Legal - We Asked the Copyright Office for a DMCA Exemption (Louis Rossmann, YouTube, 16m22s) in which Louis goes over the current state of play in Automatic Content Recognition and associated user tracking. [more inside]
Slime-O-World
Parents won't let you have the normal pets? How about very own slime mold kit? Here•are•some•some•previous•posts•on•slime•molds
Hurtling forward
METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) has just released a long report detailing ways in which AI R&D is speeding up. Conversations are now happening about 'slope change ', instead of just 'step change'. AI 2027 predicted this level of progress would happen several months later than it has. Zvi Mowshowitz does a good overview of the situation.
Harmonic Automata
Harmonic Automata is an audio/visual toy I created for myself to take breaks during the day. All the technical heavy lifting was done by Opus 5.5. Just open it and start making stuff. [via mefi projects]
The delicate mission to save an endangered shrub using "sperm donors"
The delicate mission to save an endangered shrub using "sperm donors".
In the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, an endangered shrub is struggling with fertility. A team of scientists hopes the plant equivalent of IVF can help.
Apple Support Community to Close
Per MacRumors it's the end of an era. After almost 30 years of continuous service, the Apple-run message board where Apple users could seek help and advice from each other is to be closed.
The Riflemen.
Chuck Conners. Actor, Army veteran, Professional Baseball and Basketballl player gets a big hug from Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev. (.55 in) [Slyt, 2:22] [more inside]
“Joy and Eric should survive. At least, for 17 seconds.”
It's 1982. Joy (works for a bank) and Eric (musician), who live in Finsbury Park, follow official advice to see if they'd survive a 1 megaton nuclear bomb being detonated a mile above St Paul's Cathedral. Hilarity (does not) ensue.
This is just to neigh
General Strike! Spaniards Say No to Capitalism
General Strike! Spain shut down as millions refused to work today. At the heart of it is housing injustice and the impossibility of making a life when rent eats up 75% of your wages. Tenants’ Unions have issued an enormous list of serious, plain-as-day policy demands to lower the cost of housing, including: rent freezes, public housing construction, and banning corporate ownership.
Military boards are defying orders and letting trans troops serve
... the votes are a stunning rebuke from the armed forces, where following orders is bedrock. And they suggest the military’s transgender ban is being rejected by the very troops the administration says the ban is meant to serve. “These boards are being told to do something that they know is wrong ... We are seeing them say they’re not going to play that game. We are seeing them nullify a process they see as unjust.” Trans Marines and sailors who went before boards said in interviews that after months of being vilified by top government officials, they expected a quick dismissal, but instead encountered thoughtful respect from fellow service members who voted to keep them. Military boards are defying orders and letting trans troops serve, Dave Philipps, New York Times, via The Philadelphia Inquirer for easier reading
"We do a lot of stories about cats. So I need to know the specific cat."
The biggest publicity Mailer had received in years
A new anxiety has attached to the already famous dead: the specter of oblivion as a casualty of culture war. Of course, oblivion is the natural state of things for most writers and artists, and it usually sets in before they die, if they were lucky enough for things ever to be otherwise. But recent controversies over posthumous reputations, all putatively being argued on moral grounds, seem to me something else entirely: the language of morality enlisted for the purposes of marketing, publicity, and literary consumerism.
November 10
Can James Carville Please Just Be Quietly Wrong Somewhere Else?
The Nation - The omnipresent consultant-cum-tantrum-thrower has long outlived whatever relevance he once had, but cable producers, podcast hosts, and Democratic campaigns haven’t got the memo. [Carville] recently appeared with Bill Kristol on a podcast hosted by The Bulwark and stated that he’d rather Republicans keep the House by a five-member majority after the midterms than have Democrats win, because then “they’re hostage to the DSA.”
Don't get on the Infinity Bus ∞.
bill wurtz uploads a new video called "hi." In three hours, it's gotten 260K views and over 6,000 comments. It is much fun and uses no "AI."
Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you.
How Voting Is Like a Klein Bottle
Why the bedroom is an invisible workplace for women
Why the bedroom is an invisible workplace for women.
There are biological and psychological reasons behind why women experience more disrupted sleep than men, but experts say the mental load is another powerful yet less obvious contributor.
Everyone Told Us Denmark was Expensive They were Wrong
Farmers from the Netherlands have been moving to Denmark for decades However, there seems to be a generational change.
From the 90s onwards, mostly farmers were looking for more space and less regulation.
Now younger people are looking for a different type of freedom. The video is from a channel created by a couple who have moved to Denmark for a simpler life. [more inside]
The Flowery Man
Living with a Visionary: A beautifully illustrated animation about the devastating and occasionally beautiful circumstances around a long marriage, decline, hallucinations, and Covid. Hard and lovely and sad. Single-link NYT gift article.
You'll end before this song does
lo-pi radio is "Live lo-fi beats from the digits of pi, forever." It generates endless music from the sequential digits of pi along with a random walk image based on those same digits. "Every note of the melody you hear is the next digit of pi, in order. Each digit is a note in the Fmaj scale. 0 and 9 are rests (silence)." Created for The Pudding [many previouslies] [more inside]
Can You Guess Americans
Better Than Americans Can? A short quiz on the percentage of Americans who do, own or are various things. Ranking is based on you vs. the rest of the US. [more inside]
More than half of American men age 18 to 49 bet on sports.
Bloomberg [Archive] traces the gambling spending of 2,441 individuals who started gambling within a week of Massachusetts legalizing online sports betting. CW: gambling, addiction, bankruptcy, divorce, suicide. [more inside]
Can the original 6 get a branding do-over?
The PWHL has officially announced team names and branding for this year's expansion squads. This December, you can become a fan of Team USA legend Hilary Knight and the Detroit Clutch, the newest entry in the ever expanding Vegas sports pantheon, the Vanguards, my prediction for rookie of the year, Laila Edwards and the San Jose Sea Lions, or the new home of half my favourite Ottawa Charge players, the Hamilton Havoc.
Apres Russell Brand, le deluge?
UK celebrity who sought permanent legal injunction for exploitative sexual behaviour identified. [more inside]
A fucking asphalt cleaning tractor
I have no doubts that a lot of information is being tracked, stored, and sold. Since that's already done, could you guys at least use some of it?..
How the Railways Killed a Medieval Law
How the Railways Killed a Medieval Law.
Deodands put a price on objects that caused death, sometimes providing compensation to bereaved families.
November 9
Here Comes That Sound Again
Youtuber Colsto posts their experiments with open source intelligence methods. In their latest video, they show how a combination of ADS-B, digital elevation models, and audio spectrograms can turn barely-audible airplane propeller noises into spatial location precise to 100 meters anywhere inside the United States and resistant to protection by filtering or muting. It’s the same pre-GPS method memorably explained by James Burke in a 1978 episode of Connections, but without the expensive satellites.