Posts with Recent Comments
"Is that you John wayne, is this me"
'I’ve never seen ...The Searchers.'
"I’ve always imagined John Wayne as the epitome of gun-toting American racism. And I didn’t expect this white-supremacy parable to change my mind …" "(John) Ford is likely the best American historian when it comes to narrative filmmaking 'Printing the Legend: 'The Searchers and a journey into the heart of America’s darkness.' " Scores of film students and enthusiasts have wondered and wrote about what does this last scene of the film mean." Cinemas Greatest Scenes: The Searchers Doorway Scene. { CW: racism in film.}
Vortex rings rise from Italy's Mount Etna volcano
Vortex rings rise from Italy's Mount Etna volcano.
Mount Etna has released volcanic vortex rings, a rare phenomenon caused by a constant release of vapours and gases. [more inside]
“The reading public is best served by diversity”
A detailed, yet accessible, take on the history of book distribution (mainly but not wholly by small presses), written by Julie Schaper in 2022.
You can opt out any time you like. But you can never leave.
The USENIX Association have published a Report (PDF) Analysing Cookie Notice Compliance.
We show that 56.7% of cookie notices do not include an option to opt out of consent, that more than 65.4% of websites with an opt-out option collect users’ data despite explicit negative consent, and that 73.4% of websites do so even when users do not interact with the cookie notice.
Will clouds eclipse your view of the eclipse?
What’s the Cloud Forecast for Eclipse Day? (New York Times gift link) "If you have an eclipse viewing destination in mind, enter it in the box below to see the latest cloud cover forecast. We expect the forecast to become more accurate closer to the day of the eclipse, and The Times will update this map as fresh forecasts become available."
Momentum is growing for guaranteed income
A legislator in Illinois, USA, has proposed giving certain categories of people $1,000 monthly on a continuing basis. That is the boldest plan for guaranteed income in the U.S. since 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s idea to give everyone $1K each month. [more inside]
Like "The Net", But For Real
A high ranking Iowa hospital systems administrator has plead guilty to identity theft after stealing his former coworker's identity - for thirty years. (SLArs Technica) [more inside]
More D&D Info Cartoons
Six years ago (really? wow) I posted about Zee Bashew's terrific D&D explainer videos. Well he's still making them, and is trying to do one a week for the next few months! Here are some he's made since I last told you all about them: What is a grognard? - Ceremony - Encumbrance in 5E - The Awful Way I Ran 5E Survival - Magic Mouth - Oops! All Wizards - 5E Players Try 1E (AD&D) - Healer Feat - The Problem With The Awaken Spell (sad/funny) - Dangers of Metagaming - Option: Quantum Inventory - Grappling in 1E. If you enjoy D&D, or just learning or watching videos about it, Zee Bashew's Channel is great.
“Why do tragedies give pleasure?”
That well is classical Greek tragedy, understood as a dramatic portrayal of a character who, while navigating the inevitable contingencies of an embodied, time-bound life, is suddenly brought low by extreme suffering unrelieved by God, the gods, or any other transcendent source of meaning. The key to tragedy is the degree to which that character bears the torment without succumbing to despair. From that crucible emerges the steel of virtue. from The Character of Tragedy by [Hedgehog Review]
Lost Boomer Classic "The Space Explorers" - Rediscovered after 70 years!
"The Space Explorers" was a series of animated, educational Sci-Fi shorts shown on morning kids' TV in the US, around 1961. Astronomy enthusiast Jimmy Perry stows away on the Polaris II, flying to rescue his Dad who crashed on the moon on his way to Mars, in the Polaris 1. Set in 1978, each episode had little bits of this story padded out with educational lessons about astronomy. A very few sequences from the show are available at the Internet Archive, but there's much [more inside]
Neither a good shield nor a good shovel: The Hughes Shield Shovel
The MacAdam Shield Shovel, also known as the Hughes Shovel, was designed and patented by Sam Hughes, the Canadian minister for the Department of Militia and Defence in 1913, to be staked in the ground for alternate use as cover. It was thicker and heavier than normal spades but failed to stop even small caliber bullets. It also had a large sight hole in the shovel blade for a rifle to poke through, making it a poor shovel. In 1914, 25,000 shield-shovels were ordered and shipped to Europe for use by the 1st Canadian Division, and then later scrapped. Sam Hughes had a string of failed inventions: "Hughes equated masculinity with toughness, and argued that militia service would toughen up Canadian men who might otherwise go soft living in an urban environment full of labor-saving devices."
A mindset fundamentally at odds with intellectual rigor and complexity
Three years in the making, the exhibition was scheduled to open in early July 2024. Kahng and her team had secured a total of sixty-two loans. A catalogue containing an introduction and four essays was about to go into print, distributed by Yale University Press. As Kahng was putting the final touches on the show, however, the sbma brought in a new director: Amada Cruz, who had previously served as the director of the Seattle Art Museum (2019–23) and the director of the Phoenix Art Museum (2015–19). Within a month of her assuming the position in Santa Barbara, Cruz instructed Kahng to halt work on the show because, according to the Hyperallergic article, “it was under consideration for its lack of diversity.” In mid-January, Cruz fired Kahng, terminating her for “redundancy,” before promptly stepping into the role herself. from Cruz control [The New Criterion] [more inside]
Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas
Gary Shteyngart on assignment from The Atlantic engages in a supposedly fun thing that he'll never do again, cruising from Florida to St. Kitts and CocoCay on board Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas. [more inside]
Their Men in Havana
A yearlong investigation by The Insider, in collaboration with 60 Minutes and Der Spiegel, has uncovered evidence suggesting that unexplained anomalous health incidents, also known as Havana Syndrome, may have their origin in the use of directed energy weapons wielded by members of Russian GRU Unit 29155. Members of the Kremlin’s infamous military intelligence sabotage squad have been placed at the scene of suspected attacks on overseas U.S. government personnel and their family members, leading victims to question what Washington knows about the origins of Havana Syndrome, and what an appropriate Western response might entail.Unraveling Havana Syndrome: New evidence links the GRU's assassination Unit 29155 to mysterious attacks on Americans, at home and abroad [more inside]
Lyn Hejinian, 1941-2024
Excerpts from Lyn Hejinian's My Life: "A name trimmed with colored ribbons"; "Reason looks for two, then arranges it from there"; "As for we who 'love to be astonished'"; "Yet we insist that life is full of happy chance"; "One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds." Lisa Samuels, "Eight justifications for canonizing Lyn Hejinian's My Life." "The Rejection of Closure," "Continuing Against Closure," and other work online. Obits: NYT (ungated / archived), Jacket2, and The Nation. Remembrances: Berkeley English, LARB, and The Paris Review. Colin Vanderburg (n+1, Apr. 5), "Tree, Chair, Cone, Dog, Bishop, Piano, Vineyard, Door, or Penny: On Lyn Hejinian": "There is no better way to end, or to begin, or to continue. The facts are finished, but the life is still open."
From now on, this is the only soundtrack I will use for NASA posts
Hierarchies of Fountain Pen Friendly Paper
“So as a baseline, what needs to happen before I will publicly recommend something as “fountain pen friendly paper”? My standard is fairly simple: No bleed-through or feathering with any fountain pen nib that can be reasonably used for everyday writing. (Because I mainly use my paper for drafting and notetaking, as opposed to drawing, wet ink samples, or flex-nib calligraphy, my standards may be more lenient than some.)” [more inside]
Whatever else Farley’s work is, it isn’t AI—even when it barely seems I
Why Did This Guy Put a Song About Me on Spotify? [NYT] by Brett Martin [archive link] is an essay about Matt Farley, who we last met ten years ago when he had released 14 thousand songs on Spotify, earning him 23 thousand dollars per year in royalties. Now he’s pulling 200 thousand dollars from 25 thousand songs. He’s also made multiple movies. Farley’s website, Motern Media, has a decent overview of his creative output.
Gonna get downright MetaFiltered tonight
The English language is famous for its large number of drunkonyms, i.e. words that can be used to refer to the state of drunkenness – from blind and hammered to pissed, smashed and wasted. Various lists of words have been compiled in the past (e.g. Levine 1981). However, most of the terms seem to be relatively infrequent, and they also appear to fall out of use relatively quickly. In view of Michael McIntyre’s (2009) claim that it is possible to use any word to mean ‘drunk’ in English, this contribution therefore approaches the issue from a constructionist perspective. In a corpus-based study, we tested whether it is possible to model the expression of drunkenness in English as a more or less schematic (set of) construction(s). Our study shows that while corpus evidence for truly creative uses is scarce, we can nonetheless identify constructional and collostructional properties shared by certain patterns that are used to express drunkenness in English. For instance, the pattern be/get + ADV + drunkonym is strongly associated with premodifying (and often strongly intensifying) adverbs such as completely, totally and absolutely. A manual analysis of a large wordlist of English drunkonyms reveals further interesting patterns that can be modelled constructionally.“I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness, a spirited academic paper from the Yearbook of the GCLA [more inside]
Making sense of climate denial tactics
Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories (FLICC) and a Denial101 video trilogy (Part 1, 2, 3). From climate science communication researcher John Cook of Skeptical Science (with old school website layout!). See also the Cranky Uncle game based on the theory of inoculation: There may be no way to cure existing zombies, but we can reduce the number of people who are infectable by zombies. [more inside]