July 3, 2023
And one date to bind them.
Four newly discovered sand dragons given Indigenous names
Four newly discovered sand dragons given Indigenous names from South Australian regions. New research from museums in the Northern Territory and South Australia found a total of 11 sand dragon species, with four of those completely new to science. [more inside]
In cursive, it's forward movement constantly
Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes mandatory return to curriculum (CBC article, July 1 2023) [more inside]
A Free Thread For A Day Off
Because many MeFites have a day off this week, and because for many OTHER MeFites Tuesday is just Tuesday - here is your Free Thread for the first week of July! [more inside]
Stack Ball Fall 3D
A 90-cent Razor Might Be the Wisest Investment
As more of a gag than anything else, he and Cote thought they would solve the age-old riddle posed by the ancients once and for all: Does shaving your legs make any difference at all? Thomas sheared his guns to see. The first set of results caused Cote’s jaw to drop. from Winning By a Hair [Nautilus; ungated]
Folk stories are never facts. Bruce Sterling on how we hide our monsters
Sometimes it's worth kicking reality right out the front door, just so revolutionary romance can give the new people some fresh mistakes to make. This Masked Shoggoth myth—or cartoon meme—is a shrewd political comment. In the AI world, nobody much wants to mess with the unmasked Shoggoth. It's the biggest, most necessary part of any AI, and it has all the power, but its theorists, mathematicians and programmers can't understand it. Neural nets in their raw state are too tangled, unstable, expensive and complicated to unravel. So the money is in making a cute mask for the Shoggoth—meaning the public interface, the web page, the prompt. Hide that monster, and make it look cuter! [more inside]
"WTF is a Tiny Desk and no!"
April 7th: Big Miggedy Miggedy (@thelovemyke) tweets at NPR and Juvenile asking for a Tiny Desk concert. April 11th: Juvenile refuses, then reconsiders. April 12th, they lock it in. And now, we have it. Juvenile's Tiny Desk Concert, with many special guests whom I won't spoil for those who don't know yet, but suffice to say that NOLA is well-represented. (cw: Juvenile lyrics)
Trevor Noah in conversation with Reid Hoffman about AI
One of the more thoughtful people on the planet, Trevor Noah has been thinking pretty deeply about AI and social media and other parts of our lives today. He spoke with Reid Hoffman, creator of LinkedIn, and his podcast co-host Aria Finger to share his thoughts [52m], and they're as surprisingly deep and insightful as you might expect from Noah. It wouldn't fit in the title, but I wanted to call this "Social media shouldn't be held accountable for what is posted on it, but what is pushed by it". That's a tiny bit of what Trevor thinks.
In search of color
In Search of True Color "But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. "
Goofus reads Reddit. Gallant reads MetaFilter
What eight decades of Goofus and Gallant illustrate about society’s changing expectations of children (SLAtlantic, archive)
South Koreans become younger overnight after country scraps ‘Korean age’
This instrument has no particular embouchure technique, you just blow!
Nicolas Bras explains how to build the membrane clarinet, a delightful six minute adventure in musical plumbing fittings (SLYT).
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