April 26
“Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” "It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club." [more inside]
Hardly the attitude of the next poet laureate
The war between humanity and its oldest, archest of enemies: pain.
Mark Chrisler's podcast "The Constant" just concluded a 3 part series, "Comfortably Numb". Part 1 is about the horror and trauma due to the pain of surgery before anesthesia started being used in the 1840s, and ends with the question of why no one thought of using anesthetics before then despite their existence for decade(s) (nitrous oxide, chloroform) or centuries (ether) and their recreational use. Part 2 is about how anesthesia was introduced for surgery. Part 3 is about the fight between the men claiming to invent anesthesia led to their ruination. [more inside]
The end of "the end of passwords"?
At this point I think that Passkeys will fail in the hands of the general consumer population. We missed our golden chance to eliminate passwords through a desire to capture markets and promote hype. Corporate interests have overruled good user experience once again. Just like ad-blockers, I predict that Passkeys will only be used by a small subset of the technical population, and consumers will generally reject them. To reiterate - my partner, who is extremely intelligent, an avid computer gamer and veterinary surgeon has sworn off Passkeys because the user experience is so shit. She wants to go back to passwords. And I'm starting to agree - a password manager gives a better experience than passkeys. That's right. I'm here saying passwords are a better experience than passkeys. Do you know how much it pains me to write this sentence?Aussie software engineer William "Firstyear" Brown pours one out for the "shattered dream" of passkeys. [more inside]
"Not-pleasant! I am causing you not-pleasant!"
The short science fiction story "Hello! Hello! Hello!" by Fiona Jones (published March 2024 in Clarkesworld) begins:
I express greetings and most joyful salutations!
I do not mean to interrupt you if you wish to be without company. It is only that I noticed you have been drifting alone for six flares of star-home-past-great-star-birthplace, and that is many flares! Your movement has been aimless, and I express concern!
Adorable footage of tiny bear cubs emerging from hibernation
Adorable footage of mother bear and tiny cubs emerging from den after hibernation. It’s spring time in Canada! (Video by Serge Wolf.)
I guess I have no choice but to love this song forever
Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences. The pervasive nature of music paralysis across generations suggests that the phenomenon's roots go beyond technology, likely stemming from developmental factors. So what changes as we age, and when does open-eardness decline? from When Do We Stop Finding New Music? A Statistical Analysis
April 25
Helen Vendler, 1933 - 2024
Helen Vendler, perhaps the preeminent contemporary American poetry critic, has passed away at 90. [more inside]
It's our lockdown album.
'An evening with Pet Shop Boys' 22-04-2024 [Guardian Live, 1h23m] "To celebrate the launch of their highly anticipated new studio album, Nonetheless [Wikipedia], join Pet Shop Boys in conversation with the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis - live in London, with an exclusive album playback, and livestreamed globally." [more inside]
The "King of Carbonara" shares his pasta recipe
Northern quolls caught napping in midnight siesta discovery
Researchers in WA's north have discovered that northern quolls, thought to be nocturnal, take regular midnight naps. Researchers believe the naps may be related to digestion. Northern quolls in captivity are set to be studied further to understand more about why they take regular naps.
Passersby were amazed at the unusually large amounts of synergy
G/O Media, the much-reviled owner of such internet landmarks as Kotaku, Gizmodo, Jalopnik, and The Root, has been selling off their assets recently, including ClickHole (sold to Cards Against Humanity), Lifehacker (Ziff Davis), Deadspin (gutted), Jezebel and the AV Club (Paste). Latest on the auction block is The Onion... who ended up with a surprising buyer: Global Tetrahedron, a name that might ring a few bells for longtime readers. But what does the advent of this ominous conglomerate mean for America's Finest News Source?™ [more inside]
An emerging new picture of animal consciousness
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by 88 researchers, asks us to consider more non-human creatures as capable of subjective experiences. [more inside]
new music for your ears
3 new tracks:
Die Spitz - I HATE WHEN GIRLS DIE
|
The Warning - S!CK |
[XG TAPE #4] Million Cash (MAYA)
Our Man Bashir
“ So my editor, and I, would like me to bring Garak into this.” - “ That’s interesting. There is an interesting angle for that.” -
Star Trek’s Alexander Siddig interviewed for Arab-American Heritage Month
Social media is neither inherently beneficial or harmful to young people
The Coddling of the American Parent by Mike Masnick (TechDirt) debunks Jonathan Haidt's panicky new book on teens & the internet. Developmental psychologist & scholar Candice Odgers' article for Nature: The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes. [more inside]
Life Lessons From a Ten-Year-Old Cigarette Vendor
The act of trying to keep things the way they are is insanity. It’s an illusion. Trying something new means touching the unknown. It can be frightening and cause you to either fight or flee, rather than say yes.
It takes courage to change. Then again, why change when you don’t have to?
But when you don’t change, everything appears to stay the same. And this is the antithesis of life.
Life is change.
Life is always changing. [more inside]
From Wonder Island to Kiyosu City
Policymakers in other cities can learn from Minneapolis
Minneapolis Land Use Reforms Offer a Blueprint for Housing Affordability: Rents stayed flat as more apartments were built, even as the rest of Minnesota saw increases. [more inside]
"One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea"
When you often notice people "why-don't-they-just"-ing their way into a proposed solution to a gnarly problem, you might turn your criticisms into a checklist. "Your post advocates a [( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante] approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work." These templates often offer a summary of the problem space and a glimpse of experts' frustrations. Solution rejection checklists exist for fixing the housing crisis, beating the CAP Theorem, protecting against DDOS attacks, improving pharmaceutical drug discovery success rates, creating new programming languages and distributed social networks, and (MeFi comment!) saving journalism. [more inside]
The Portugal Model for Addressing the Overdose Crisis
I am a professor of medicine and public health who researches the government’s response to addiction. I also spent more than two decades as a police officer. If cities expect to help reduce our nation’s overdose crisis and not simply ride a policy pendulum back and forth between election cycles, their leaders need to enact compassionate, effective drug policies and ensure fair access to public space at the same time.
Canada loves a homegrown oligopoly
From groceries to pharmacies to financial services, the Loblaw kingdom is hard to escape for Canadians. (slTheWalrus) [more inside]
O povo é quem mais ordena
seven sided coins
April 24
Please don't bring live snakes to hospital
Venomous snake brought into hospital in lunchbox prompts plea from doctors — "please don't do this." Hospital staff came face-to-face with one of the world's most deadly snakes after a patient brought it to the emergency department in a snap-lock lunch container. Snake catcher Jonas Murphy has relocated several snakes brought into the Bundaberg Hospital.
Mr Murphy said the snakes were in plastic containers or bags and posed a big danger if they had escaped.
"You are risking a follow-up bite and you're putting everyone around you in danger as well," Mr Murphy said. "Snakes are one of those things that scare a lot of people, we definitely don't want them in the hospital." [more inside]
Ever wondered what Isaac Asimov would sound like beatboxing?
Or Nixon? Shirley Chisholm? Thanks to Brian Foo, the data driven dj, wonder no longer! [more inside]
Stereophonic on Broadway, it's an interesting story
Making Real Music for a Fake Band [43m] is from Slate's Decoder Ring podcast that digs pretty deep into a particular Broadway play that is the current Hot Ticket In Town [Playbill, Stereophonic]. It also digs into making real things for fake things. The episode looks at a multitude of excellent fake things you already know, and then the playwright David Adjmi and Will Butler formerly of Arcade Fire get into the show itself... A fictional Fleetwood Mac-esque band in the studio struggling to record an album of songs like this [1m45s] in the mid-Seventies. Here's a "retrospective trailer" looking back at its developmental run at Playwrights Horizons. [43s] [more inside]
Examining What "Never Again" Means Through the Lens of Magneto
Writing for Defector, Asher Elbein talks about the evolution of the character of Magneto, who is (yet again) back from the dead and the shift of meaning in "Never Again," from inclusive aspiration to its violent modern application. [more inside]
"We pay attention to timbre, rhythm, as well as variation"
EPIC indeed
Realistic is not necessarily the most convincing
Emil Dziewanowski is a technical artist in the gaming industry who excels at using inventive techniques to create compelling visual effects. His latest blog post, Flowfields, walks you through the process of animating the complex whorls and vortices of Jupiter without using traditional fluid dynamics, using lessons learned from such prior art as Contra's color-cycling, frame-by-frame animation, and the trippy lava effect in Quake, ultimately using a combination of clever tricks to design a "universal" flow simulator that can render appealing fluid effects in just half a millisecond.
Experts left scratching their heads as wombat wanders into ocean
Experts left scratching their heads as wombat wanders into ocean. A couple holidaying in Tasmania's remote north-west have captured a wombat foraging in the ocean. The footage has surprised wombat experts, who say the behaviour is highly unusual.
When you let Dan Stevens be weird, that's when the magic happens
The Mary Sue joins me in welcoming actor Dan Stevens' sleazier weirder side. (slTheMarySue) [more inside]
Life After Running
Life After Running Athletes are often defined by their physical strength. Who are they when they lose it?
It is not a replacement for running, but to live with a chronic condition is to become an expert at negotiating between one’s wants and one’s capacities. It means constantly hacking away at the richness of one’s life—there is nothing casual about it.
“I will not speak with her.”
Ophelia’s life, as much as we see of it within the boundaries of five acts, has been one of enforced silence, climaxing in a desperate call—answered too late by Gertrude—for a chance to unpack her heart with words. She comes in a full and terrible circle from her playful rebuke to Laertes for pontificating about how women should behave, but she never saw what was coming. “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.” Only in her madness, when language tumbles out uninhibitedly, does Ophelia make a direct and profound charge about masculinist privilege and culpability. “Young men will do’t if they come to’t, / By Cock, they are to blame.” Unlike Hamlet with his words, words, words, Ophelia never speaks of taking her own life. And then she does. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune strike more than one target in this play. Among its many wonders, Hamlet depicts a young woman set on a lonely path, leading to an abyss, in a lethal world of male verbal license. from The Silencing of Ophelia by Robert Crossley [Hudson Review]
April 23
Listening at Two Very Different Scales
Large-scale listening: To ensure that DSS-43 can still place the longest of long-distance calls, the antenna underwent a round of updates in 2020. A new X-band cone was installed. DSS-43 transmits radio signals in the X (8 to 12 gigahertz) and S (2 to 4 GHz) bands; it can receive signals in the X, S, L (1 to 2 GHz), and K (12 to 40 GHz) bands. The dish’s pointing accuracy also was tested and recertified. 1200 words from Willie D. Jones for IEEE Spectrum.
Small-scale listening: The sounds being produced are within the lower range of human hearing, so it’s possible there are sounds in the soil we haven’t heard yet. Early research from Switzerland shows soils were producing the most complex sounds in spring and summer, which declined in autumn and winter. Phoebe Weston writes 1000 words for The Guardian.
The six directions: North, South, East, West, Anth and Kenth
On Steam right now is a game that lets you play Mini Golf in four dimensions, called, naturally, 4D Golf (Steam, $20). I don't mean in the sense that time is a fourth dimension, it's set in a fully 4D world: you decide which slice of it is revealed in the visible 3D world at any time. Here's a trailer. (1 1/2 minutes) Here's Youtuber Icely Puzzles playing the beginning of it. (43 minutes) Here's the video devlog. It's from CodeParade, who also made the hyperbolic plane exploration game Hyperbolica. At the end of the release announcement video, its creator mentioned that there is a secret feature in 4D Golf that makes it even more bizarre, but telling its existence is a pretty major spoiler.... [more inside]
Outback cattle property to expand national park
Outback cattle property to expand national park after environmentally significant government purchase. An anonymous $21 million ($13.68 million US) donation has helped with the purchase of the 352,589-hectare (871,266 acre) Vergemont Station near Longreach to create a 1.5 million-hectare (3,706,580 acre) protected corridor in outback Queensland.
Grace Cummings
So I was out yesterday and listening to the NPR show World Cafe, as I do if/when I'm out at that time, and the host starts going on and on about the voice of the featured artist that day, about how stunning it is, and I'm thinking, come on, don't oversell it. They weren't overselling it. [more inside]
The core query softness continues without mitigation
Edward Zitron has been reading all of google's internal emails that have been released as evidence in the DOJ's antitrust case against google.
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019 [more inside]
Zitron concludes that Google Search died on February 5th, 2019 [more inside]
If only your economy room included an escape pod
Little Workshop is an award-winning French studio specializing in high-quality immersive 3D experiences for the web. Their portfolio contains many charming and fun projects you can try out yourself, including endless city generator Infinitown, cute procedural dungeon crawler Keep Out!, pulsing geometric music visualizer TRACK, and Arde Madrid, a multi-scene recreation of Ava Gardner's home in Francoist Spain. Their latest and most ambitious project: EQUINOX, a slick, stylized adventure game set in a failing starship in deep space, complete with a full soundtrack and voice acting in a mobile-friendly interface. Read the case study on their website, or check out their other projects (including the dearly-departed Mozilla MMORPG BrowserQuest).
New ant species named after Voldemort due to visual similarities
It’s peculiar, in the sense that words are supposed to mean something
The Caesar’s mission creep toward absurdity began long before the tequila and the fava beans. In fact, it has been going on for decades—first slowly, then quickly, swept along by and reflective of many of the biggest shifts in American dining. from Something Weird Is Happening With Caesar Salads [The Atlantic; ungated]
How social networks prey on our longing to be known
"To be online today is to constantly walk a tight-rope between the longing to be known and the dread of being perceived." [more inside]
April 22
That mysterious font is Festive, not Stymie
All 29 road tunnels in New Zealand, ranked from worst to best
No One Buys Books
Elle Griffin's report on the testimony from the Justice Department's 2021 antitrust lawsuit to block the merger of Penguin Random House with Simon and Schuster reveals a disheartening truth: practically nobody buys books. [more inside]
Turns out, it was The Last Domino
Genesis -- The Last Domino? PBS documentary [55m], about their final tour from a few years ago. Genesis The Last Domino? tour previously, which wasn't the end, I saw them in November of 2022.
CareFREE drumming
Junna's drumcover of Babymetal's Doki Doki Morning (It's your weekly free thread!)
We cherished the girls, grog and laughter
The Poetry of Actor William Smith. You may be familiar with William Smith as a "that guy" from hundreds and hundreds of movie performances, usually the heavy, such as bare-knuckle brawler Jack Wilson in 1980's Any Which Way You Can. But his poetic contributions have gone largely unnoticed, and courtesy of his still-up website -- Williams passed in 2021 -- you can read poems like The Reaper or thrill to these poems read in Williams' own roadworn voice.