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Disinformation has one goal: To change the perception of reality of every American....[F]ake news ... [is] actually an old term used by the Soviet Union as a reference to disinformation campaigns that the Soviets and now the Russians have long used to destabilize the West.... The Kremlin’s messaging has an extraordinary reach: In the first year of the Ukraine war alone, posts by Kremlin-linked accounts were viewed at least 16 billion times by Westerners."Bots, trolls, targeted ad campaigns, fake news organizations, and doppelganger accounts of real Western politicians and pundits spread stories concocted in Moscow." The purpose of the propaganda is to further Putin's policy goals: to recolonize Ukraine, to destabilize the West and to power the rise of fascist-friendly governments. How does Putin expect to achieve that? Through conventional warfare, indoctrination, and covert anti-semitic and anti-migrant propaganda.
[more inside]
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Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
Blogger John Salvatier talks stair carpentry, boiling water, the difference between invisible and transparent detail, and how paying closer attention to the beguiling complexity of everyday life can help you open your mind and break out of mental ruts and blind spots.
[more inside]
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We've been enjoying
Eugene Levy's The Reluctant Traveler on Apple TV+ -- this week's episode saw him in the South of France, where we delighted in his confusion about two (Provencal) or three (St Tropez) cheek kisses on greeting someone. How many would you give? (Or talk about anything you want!)
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Classicist
Mary Beard [Wikipedia] is apparently well known for studying Ancient Rome. Comedian David Mitchell has read a lot about the British monarchy. Between them they can cover Julius Caesar to Elizabeth I, and they sat down together for a conversation for How To Academy in
Rulers and Power | Mary Beard and David Mitchell [1h13m].
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Madeleine Pelling (
The Telegraph, 3/17/2024), "
Seriously scandalous and surprisingly sexy: how the Georgians redefined graffiti" --
archived: "In October 1731, ... 'Hurlothrumbo' set out into the freezing streets of London. Armed only with a pencil and paper, he was on a most peculiar hunt. His quarry? The graffiti that lined the city's many surfaces, left behind by its inhabitants."
The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany,
part 1 and
2, 3, & 4. The play
Hurlothrumbo. Pelling on
women archaeologists in the 1780s via the
Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Pelling's
Writing on the Wall,
reviewed (
archived) and at
Goodreads /
StoryGraph. Pelling's
podcast, most recently discussing
St Patrick.
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After 4 nail-biting months of gibberish, Voyager 1 is making sense again. Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing trouble with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, it hasn't contained any usable data. Now, there may be hope for recovery.
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In
Live at Massey Hall: Geddy Lee [55m, CBC], Geddy spends some time talking to his old friend Alex, and then reads a bit from his book. If you like this kind of thing, maybe you'll like this example of this kind of thing.
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Tiny ants are changing the diet of Kenya's lions. Invasive ants are affecting how lions hunt.
The insect invasion has led to the loss of cover for lions to ambush zebra from and forcing them to target buffalo instead.
An army of big-headed ants is changing the food chains of the savannah.
Though they’re little, these ants are fierce. Their arrival in parts of Kenya has decimated populations of local ants which usually live in and protect the whistling-thorn tree.
Without the insects’ protection, these trees are increasingly being eaten by elephants, providing less shelter for a range of species.
One animal this has had a particular impact on is the African lion. These big cats usually use the shelter of trees to sneak up on zebras. But with fewer trees, this strategy becomes increasingly risky.
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As you may know, your elected officials in Texas are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. Not only does this impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech, it fails strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas’s stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, providing identification every time you want to visit an adult platform is not an effective solution for protecting users online, and in fact, will put minors and your privacy at risk. [...] We believe that the only effective solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ age on their device and to either deny or allow access to age-restricted materials and websites based on that verification. We call on all adult sites to comply with the law. Until the real solution is offered, we have made the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website in Texas.
Ars Technica:
Pornhub blocks all of Texas to protest state law—Paxton says “good riddance” [more inside]
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"We should tell you that we've run out of new things to say about Everything Everywhere All At Once, so although we’ll try our best to stay on topic, we'll most likely go on a bunch of tangents about the state of the world, the impending climate crisis, the collapse of consensus truth, the rise of AI, the importance and impossibility of self care, and our collective responsibility as storytellers to confront the issues of our time, because that's probably going to be what's on our mind, but we can't make any promises, but at times we don’t feel qualified to talk about any of that stuff, anyway
we hope you enjoy our SXSW keynote!" [1h]
[more inside]
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Shigeichi Negishi, the inventor of the world's first commercially-available karaoke machine,
has died in Japan. He was 100 years old.
[more inside]
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This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. from
The Great American Novels [The Atlantic;
ungated] [CW: a list which almost by definition lacks your favorite American author or novel]
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Solving for the feminist roots of crossword puzzles in a fun article by Sophia Stewart and what looks like a great book by Anna Shechtman on how crossword puzzles, those traditional cultural touchstones in Western English media that are becoming more diverse and contemporary.
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Trans Person Infiltrates CPAC 2024
Part 1,
Part 2.
Dead Domain, a nonbinary creator who often talks about game design and who you may have seen
go undercover at a hate church, decided to create the persona of vaguely right-wing podcaster Keith to attend CPAC, and gifts us with three and a half hours of troubling content and commentary.
[more inside]
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“
About the
LEMR Housing Monitor
The Low-End of Market Rental (LEMR) Housing Monitor is a centralized data mapping tool that presents critical information on the location and characteristics of the affordable “low-end” of market rental housing stock in six urban regions across Canada: Calgary, Halifax, Greater Montreal Area, Greater Toronto Area, Metro Vancouver Area, and Winnipeg.”
[more inside]
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Snif & Snüf (five minutes), a cartoon about two friends who find a couple of mysterious shapes, by
Michael Ruocco, an animator who's worked on New Looney Tunes, the Cuphead Show and Bojack Horseman.
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AARO Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with UAP, Volume I, February 2024 (PDF): AARO assesses that the inaccurate claim that the USG is reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology and is hiding it from Congress is, in large part, the result of circular reporting from a group of individuals who believe this to be the case, despite the lack of any evidence. AARO notes that although claims that the USG has recovered and hidden spacecraft date back to the 1940s and 1950s, more modern instances of these claims largely stem from a consistent group of individuals who have been involved in various UAP-related endeavors since at least 2009.
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moai.games is a list of 954 examples (and counting) of moai seen in video games, compiled by
MeFi's Own game designer
gingerbeardman. Why? "Moai are cool. And video games are cool. Oh, and lists are cool too." Read
the NintendoLife interview for background on the project, get educated on
the history of the grand sculptures (and
real-life efforts to preserve them), or if you crave mo' moai, check out
MoaiCulture.com's "Popular Culture" page for a comprehensive illustrated guide to 500+ moai in television, film, animation, comic books, literature, poetry, music, board games, magazines, advertising, and more.
[more inside]
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A serendipitous follow up from my
previous Othello post, this
new paper from Hiroki Takizawa claims that Othello is solved: "It is computationally proved that perfect play by both players lead to a draw. Strong Othello software has long been built using heuristically designed search techniques. Solving a game provides a solution that enables the software to play the game perfectly."
GitHub link to C source code included (it's a modified form of
Edax.)
[more inside]
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Rare Footage Of Leonard Nimoy Hosting 1975 Special Presentation Of Star Trek’s “The Menagerie” In 1975, Paramount produced a special movie presentation for syndication of the two-part Star Trek episode “The Menagerie,” hosted by TOS star Leonard Nimoy. The original Spock recorded introductions for each part of the episode as well as closing remarks for the special presentation. In the special, Nimoy explains how “The Menagerie” uses footage from the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage” and more. Originally recorded February 6, 1983 from KAUT in Oklahoma City.
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More importantly, what does the person feeding the fox wear?
A wildlife center in Richmond, VA makes the news for an inventive way of preventing human imprinting on a fox kit.
Associated Press story and video
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The IATA
officially announced:
“In a significant achievement, 2023 saw no fatal accidents or hull losses for jet aircraft, leading to a record-low fatality risk rate of 0.03 rate per million sectors.” [more inside]
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The society’s traditions extended to what historian Holger Hoock describes as “an elaborate set of pseudo-Masonic ceremonies and symbolism.” Membership, strictly capped at 24 men, was a coveted privilege, even for George IV, the Prince of Wales, who had to wait his turn. New members underwent highly theatrical initiations, pledging their oath with a kiss on the beef bone of the day, blindfolded and led by a mitre-wearing guide while other members, as Arnold describes in his account, were “all decked out in incongruous and absurd dresses.” from
A Rare Look Inside Britain’s ‘Sublime Society of Beefsteaks’ [Atlas Obscura]
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I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples.
Until recently, people had no reason to suspect that a $1,200 sofa would be anything less than high quality; the vast majority of the stuff in stores was fairly well made, and you could sit on it to test it. Today, not so much. [...] A combination of factors, including world-altering shifts in labor, manufacturing, transportation logistics, and middle-class American aesthetics, has created a grim scene: a two-year-old, $1,200 Instagram sofa—busted, on the curb, waiting for the large-item trash pickup or an enterprising scavenger who doesn’t realize just how shitty this thing is.
Dwell.com asks:
Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad?
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