July 6, 2023
Half-billion-year-old sea squirt could push back origins of vertebrates
Advanced Lawn Mower Simulator, and other deliberately crap games
Guardian: 'The annual CGC (Crap Games Competition) has been bringing Spectrum fans together for more than 25 years' ... “What makes the CGC entertaining is the self-deprecating, sardonic British humour,” explains 43-year-old Paul Collins from Reading, who first entered the CGC in 2000 with Pear-Shaped (“a simple maze game where you try to collect as many pears as possible”) and Crap Football, featuring a digitised Des Lynam. “There are ideas that can’t possibly work, eg Sim City: The Text Adventure or Blind Flight Simulator. Or names that are just funny, like Whack a Nun II and European Sandwich Hunt.”
Turbocharging the energy transition
The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring. "It seems clear already that the law will stimulate significantly more investment in clean energy than was at first thought possible while generating more revenue from high-income taxpayers to reduce the deficit. ... Companies have announced at least 31 new battery manufacturing projects in the United States. ... The pipeline of battery plants amounts to 1,000 gigawatt-hours per year by 2030 — 18 times the energy storage capacity in 2021, enough to support the manufacture of 10 million to 13 million electric vehicles per year. In energy production, companies have announced 96 gigawatts of new clean power over the past eight months, which is more than the total investment in clean power plants from 2017 to 2021 and enough to power nearly 20 million homes." [more inside]
The Battle of Fishkill
When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war. By Reeves Wiedeman for Curbed. Archive link. [more inside]
‘A ribbon around a bomb’
All this, and still Kahlo led much of her life in her bedroom, alone. “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” Frida Kahlo was born today in 1907. A brief biographical animation.
"I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and… More flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.” [more inside]
I also (don't) have my own achievables!
Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements:
- Sith Lord: Wipe out someone else's commits by force pushing to the main branch.
- Tee Hee: In a single "minor cleanup" commit to the main branch, change every line of every file in the repository so that all open Pull Requests are unmergeable.
- Patient Skeleton: Submit a pull request to a public repository that fixes it, but its been open for at least 2 years.
It's Where I Want to Be!
No American who came of age in the nineteen-eighties — or in most of the seventies or nineties, for that matter — could pretend not to understand the importance of the mall ... Introduced as “A SAFARI TO STUDY MALL CULTURE,” Mall City consists of interviews conducted by Hugh Kinniburgh and his NYU Film School collaborators during one day in 1983 at the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island. Unsurprisingly, their interviewees tend to be young, strenuously coiffed, and dressed with studied nonchalance in striped T-shirts and Members Only-style windbreakers. from Open Culture [more inside]
David Sosa has some thoughts. So does David Sosa. Also, David Sosa.
Brief of amici curiae David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, David Sosa, & the Institute For Justice in Support of Petitioner David Sosa An amicus brief filed by the Institute for Justice, composed in hopes of keeping people with the same name as criminal suspects from having their rights violated.
More information on Techdirt.
things, sensations, experiences, places, memories
A list of good things. "...dirt paths and the way dirt lies at the base of tree roots, the internet, babies laughing uncontrollably, the sound of sprinklers, mohair sweaters..." By Holly K. Hein.
After the cyborg, a bestial revelation
Following the chimera out of the dead soil of the human will be an unnerving experience. "But that’s precisely how we’ll know we’re on the right path." Leo Kim asks us to think beyond Donna Haraway's cyborg, and towards a speculative monster better suited for our time. [more inside]
Zuck's Twitter clone has arrived
Threads is live. The Meta/Instagram "Twitter killer" supposedly had 30 million installs in 24 hours (Mastodon may have less than 2M active users), likely thanks to the ability to access your entire Instagram social graph automatically. Gruber likes it, but not as much as BlueSky (which is still in closed beta) The Threads website doesn't show content by default, but you can access individual users and tweets toots skeets threads. On the other hand, maybe the age of social media is ending.
I Could Do This All Day!
If you watched the TV series Hawkeye, you might remember Rogers: The Musical [4m30s]. If this whet your appetite for show tunes and superheroes, then Marvel has done right by you. [That Captain America musical from Hawkeye is becoming a real stage show, AV Club] Here is Rogers: The Musical in full [32m, , quality audience recording, ancillary material before timestamp and after performance]. The power of Disney knows no limits. [more inside]
Thy eternal summer shall not fade.
The World May Have Just Experienced the Hottest Day Ever Recorded [Time] The entire planet sweltered to the unofficial hottest day in human recordkeeping July 3, according to University of Maine scientists at the Climate Reanalyzer project. High temperature records were surpassed July 3 and 4 in Quebec and northwestern Canada and Peru. Cities across the U.S. from Medford, Oregon to Tampa, Florida have been hovering at all-time highs, said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Beijing reported 9 straight days last week when the temperature exceeded 35°C (95°F). This global record is preliminary, pending approval from gold-standard climate measurement entities like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. [Bonus: Wiki-list of weather records] [more inside]
Echidna Bachelorette
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