Posts with Recent Comments
“The second American revolution”
Onward, Christian soldiers--to war! (At the National Conservative Conference, with labor writer Hamilton Nolan for In These Times)
Defeated by A.I., a Legend in the Board Game Go Warns: Get Ready
“I could no longer enjoy the game,” he said. “So I retired.” Lee Saedol was one of the world’s top Go players, and his shocking loss to an A.I. opponent was a harbinger of a new, unsettling era. “It may not be a happy ending,” he says.
Restore, Reflect, Retry
This is a haunted game about a haunted game. You've played this game before. You may not remember, but the game does. [more inside]
"I've got my story." "And I've got mine too"
Country legends George Jones and Tammy Wynette recorded and scored a string of duet hits during and after their legendarily tumultuous marriage. Widely acclaimed as the greatest husband-and-wife duo—and among the greatest duos, period—in country music history, George and Tammy scored three no. 1 hits amid a total of eight Top 10 singles during their recording career. Despite their individual and collective health and addiction issues (e.g., the lawnmower incident), they made music and built an image that fans cherished long after the couple divorced. [more inside]
Stunningly rare shade of tree frog found on a bench in the Kimberley
Out of the blue: Stunningly rare shade of tree frog found on a bench in the Kimberley. A pigment mutation in the magnificent tree frog has resulted in a rare scientific discovery.
The way is more important than the act
“Does this country have any heroes?” Gatalo asked. “We do not,” came the reply. A minute later there was another answer. They did have a hero. His name was Bruce Lee. from The Wild True Story of the Bruce Lee Statue Heist [DailyBeast]
Caturday
The City’s Crawling With Feral Cats Volunteers are the only thing standing between the city and a stream of sick cats. They’re barely making a dent. They’re barely making a dent. By Molly Osberg For New York. Please support your local TNR: As she introduced me to each cat, she ran down her daily routine: Clean half a dozen litter boxes, feed the cats, dole out medication in “nine to 15 little bowls,” send a round of emails to vets in the hopes of getting discounted checkups and scans. “And then, of course, I’ll try to get some content,” she says. “Because if there’s no content, we’re not getting people’s freaking coffee money to donate towards our, like, exploded eyeball surgery.”
Rave Positive Mixed Pan
Book Marks, a Literary Hub project, is a book review aggregator--like Rotten Tomatoes, for books.
All Correlations Are Bastards
This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may “bake in” bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $134,400 per person for an intervention that could cut the probability of being shot by half. from Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It [NBER; direct link to working paper (PDF)]
A mini-roundup on a niche topic
Small press books about writing, publishing, and creating art: Art of the Grimoire, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, My Trade Is Mystery, The Philosophy of Translation, and The Untold Story of Books. [more inside]
This guy is trolling us
Danish artist Thomas Dambo constructs giant trolls out of trash and hides them in the woods to surprise people. [more inside]
Revolutionary Charisma: Blake, Avon and The Fight Against Fascism (meta)
I hope I’m never loud and lonely enough to want to buy one.
I drove a Cybertruck around SF because I am a smart, cool Alpha male. Drew Magary provides us (at least me) with a chuckle about the most ugly contemporary vehicle to currently exist. (SFGate)
Chromosomes reconstructed from 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth
First ancient chromosomes reconstructed from 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth.
An incredibly well-preserved woolly mammoth specimen that died 52,000 years ago in Siberia has now had its chromosome structure reassembled for the first time.
Turn Out to Vote Out
New trailer for Severance season 2
Release date announced: January 17. But not much else. Perhaps my innie discovered more in this trailer than I did.
I would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, Day One!
Taika Waititi is remaking Time Bandits as a TV series for Apple TV. The original was one of the funniest movies ever, when it came out. Eminently quotable, it featured a large cast of big name actors and a slew of not-so-big unexpectedly awesome actors who don't normally take the spotlight. [more inside]
I can’t go home until I learn something
Fog fills spaces, like water or darkness. Like grief. I am in Souris, a fishing town of a few hundred on the northeastern edge of Prince Edward Island. In my left hand is a paper cup of lukewarm coffee. In my right is a brown bag with a breakfast I no longer want. The paper is stamped with the bright phrase, “bonne journée!” Have a good day! I’m not having a good day. The tire Nick had cautioned me about is the least of my concerns. My motorcycle won’t start. from‘I’m Not Sure What I’m Doing Here’ by Emily Zebel [Longreads]
Shelley Duvall, 1949 - 2024
harm reduction
I LIVE DOWN THE STREET from what I call Car Corner — an intersection anchored by a tire shop, a car dealership, an auto-parts store, and a mechanic. On the other end of the block is a bike path that cuts through the city, a converted railroad track. In the warmer months it buzzes with cyclists, skateboarders, police cars, boom boxes, firecrackers [n+1, content note: On Delivery: the overdose crisis] previously