November 29
Self selective assortative voting (with your feet)
The Red State Brain Drain Isn't Coming. It's Happening Right Now. [archive] - "As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags." [more inside]
Sex! Gender! Queerness!
Meg-John Barker has moved on from being an academic psychologist and practicing psychotherapist after publishing books and papers on bisexuality, consensual non-monogamy, sadomasochism, non-binary gender, and Buddhist mindfulness. Now they make graphic guides and zines to reach a much wider audience. Wondering what a queer relationship looks like? Or how you actually talk about consent in a relationship? Or maybe how to stay grounded when you are full of scary feelings? They also just published an anti-self-help guide to love, sex and relationships called Rewriting the Rules. [more inside]
Subdivisions
High-quality video of Rush's Neil Peart practicing the drums for half an hour. Nothing more, nothing less.
“What’s that thing with the fire?”
A perfectly executed Bananas Foster takes about three to four minutes to prepare. But a restaurant flambé requires additional time to allow the person who orders it to overshare about the one other time they ordered a flambé at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the south of France. Someone at the table will also invariably ask, “Have you ever burned anyone before?” (Thankfully, I have not — but I’ve definitely sent errant chunks of flaming banana out of the pan a couple of times like rogue fruit meteors, causing momentary bouts of panic and a few singed linens.) Every time a pan spiked with sugar and alcohol combusts, flambé sales go viral. One order and the entire restaurant goes up in flames. from Confessions of a Tableside Flambéur
November 28
"official helmets and t-shirts were issued"
New spider discovered: a nocturnal, fast-moving toad hunter
Is John Likeglass Still Around?
The Mystery of VelmaDinkley.com [25m] is an internet mystery posted earlier this year. YouTuber CHUPPL has lost countless hours of sleep trying to answer the questions surrounding this subject. Ruh-Roh! Does a community of Scooby Doo fans have something to hide? The ensuing investigation is entirely human and the end is entirely satisfactory.
A Very Ask A Manager Thanksgiving
An Ask a Manager themed dinner complete with bribery cupcakes Try Bob's Guacamole. Duck Club Sandwiches and Cheap Ass rolls.
I don't know whether I have any more of these in me
The industry side of the game is called the Company, but I came very, very close to calling it Capitalism because the tobacco industry isn't exceptional. The way it pursued profits at the expense of human lives wasn't some kind of mustache-twirling villainy. It is the consequence of capitalism and its incentives. And even if I ultimately decided to swerve from the name, I did want to reflect those incentives – the unsustainable and amoral pursuit of maximum profits, of infinite growth. from Doubt Is Our Product, or A Game About Tobacco Disinformation by Amabel Holland
If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination
This year's U.S. 5th National Climate Assessment Report opens with a poem by Ada Limón, features an Art + Climate Gallery and an Atlas with 15 national maps that show changes in extreme heat & precipitation. [more inside]
I've Made a Huge Mistake
Chris Lewicki recounts a story about how he almost killed a half-billion-dollar Mars rover. Turns out cables are hard.
Ceasefire now
NYT: Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace - Even a conservative assessment of the reported Gaza casualty figures shows that the rate of death during Israel’s assault has few precedents in this century, experts say.[ungated] [more inside]
Ge-brew-tlichkeit
The beer garden’s family-friendliness helped to promote beer as a temperance beverage and a “healthy” alternative to spirits. Over the course of the 19th century, the temperance movement had come a long way from promoting moderation to calling for total abstinence of all alcoholic beverages. To German Americans, temperance was more than a mere political issue; it symbolized cultural conflict that threatened their lifestyle and value system. For the brewers, their ethnic interest was greatly reinforced by their economic interest. from A Lager Beer Revolution: The History of Beer and German American Immigration
“Memories are meant to fade… They’re designed that way for a reason.”
Giant Nerd Husband
In 2017, Malaysian artist Fishball began a thrice-weekly autobiographical webcomic about her and her (much taller) boyfriend: My Giant Nerd Boyfriend. Seven years, 2.3 million subscribers, 786 million views, and 912 strips later, this month they officially tied the knot.
November 27
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
atsʼáhoníyééʼ nił hólǫ́ǫ doo.
Using goats to reduce fire risk
Using goats to reduce fire risk by removing weeds. A herd of goats has removed weeds posing a fire risk in inaccessible terrain in a third of the time they were given to get the job done. Now the landowners have bigger ideas.
Thread for practicing pronouns: Pet photo show and tell, etc.
This is pronouns.page. This is a thread for everyone who feels like they need a place to expand their pronoun usage. Y'all can come here and maybe even feel a little awkward while pretending it's perfectly normal. And then it will BE perfectly normal because you have helped build the future. Need a place to start? Try using new pronouns to talk about your pets: they/them or ki/kin. [more inside]
A.I. discussion with Brian Greene
A World Science Festival youtube vid with Brian Greene, Sébastien Bubeck,
Tristan Harris, and Yann LeCun. It's worth watching to hear the protestations, especially from Yann LeCun about how A.I. is the answer to problems. He...seems to not really be hearing the concerns expressed. Video does contain some AI generated content, as an example.
Hardest Rug Of My Life!
There are a zillion videos like this on the internet. And even this same YouTuber has a bunch of videos labeled some variation of The Hardest Rug Ever. But this 43m epic $1 vs $100,000 Black Carpet! | The Hardest Rug of My Life! is one of those things where you wonder, is it ever going to come clean? What will it finally look like? Completely satisfying at the end, and a testament to how a truly well-made carpet can withstand nearly anything.
Coming soon to the box office.
Good (non-Hollywood-ish) movies coming down the pipe. Vulture magazine lists over a dozen top movies from the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals.
Effective obfuscation
Web 3 is Going Just Great creator Molly White writes in her Citation Needed newsletter on effective altruism and effective accelerationism: As Sam Bankman-Fried rose and fell, people outside of Silicon Valley began to hear about “effective altruism” (EA) for the first time. Then rifts emerged within OpenAI with the ouster and then reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman, and the newer phrase “effective accelerationism” (often abbreviated to “e/acc” on Twitter) began to enter the mainstream. Both ideologies ostensibly center on improving the fate of humanity, offering anyone who adopts the label an easy way to brand themselves as a deep-thinking do-gooder. [more inside]
Rethinking the Green Revolution
It is often taken for granted that the Green Revolution, which introduced new high yield monoculture crops together with chemical fertilisers, was a huge boost to global food production from which there is no going back. This article in the National Academies of Science ISSUES in Science and Technology by environmental scientists Marci Baranski and Mary Ollenburger discusses and critiques that assumption, in particular discussing both how the increased yields were overstated and fragile, and how the narrative and accompanying policies served and continue to serve USA and multinational corporate dominance and centralisation.
Enjoy some humorous existential dread
The Amazing Digital Circus (Youtube, 26 minutes) is a computer-animated Youtube cartoon about a group of whimsical characters stuck in a whimsical VR world. They're all hugely dismayed by this fact and want to leave it please. In that way it feels a bit like social media. In a month it has gotten 147 million views. Meet the characters (1 minute). It was made by the talented Gooseworx, who also made Little Runmo (16 minutes, previously), a cartoon about a video game character who learns a little too much about the world they live in. CW: general disquietingness. [more inside]
Together, we can get paid in full
"May the Lord Watch is the definitive story (1:40:06) of Little Brother, the North Carolina rap group composed of rappers Phonte, Big Pooh, and (formerly) producer 9th Wonder, the underground legends that bridged the gap between The Roots and Kendrick, Tribe and Cole, De La and Drake. The film follows the rise, breakup, and reunion of the preeminent 2000s rap group"
LLM just needs a little help and a little prompt to fake a data set
"ChatGPT generates fake data set to support scientific hypothesis" "In a paper published in JAMA Ophthalmology on 9 November1, the authors used GPT-4 — the latest version of the large language model on which ChatGPT runs — paired with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that incorporates the programming language Python and can perform statistical analysis and create data visualizations. The AI-generated data compared the outcomes of two surgical procedures and indicated — wrongly — that one treatment is better than the other." [more inside]
This post intentionally left blank
...to give you more 'room' to write in the weekly FREE THREAD. What's the point of 'intentionally blank pages' anyway? [previously, previouslyer]
The whole thing is a complete disaster
Among seasteading enthusiasts, the excitement about the crypto ship was intense. A slew of promotional videos and a marketing website promised it would be for “everyone from digital nomads to YouTube influencers, start-up teams and established businesses”. Friedman took to Facebook, boosting Ocean Builders by name and adding: “So glad liberty activism has advanced from Guy Fawkes violence to peaceful exit!” He posted too soon. from The fake hitman, the crypto king and a wild revenge plan gone bad [Financial Times; ungated] [more inside]
November 26
The Puritanical Eye
O brave new world, that has such chatbots in’t.
"What would have happened if ChatGPT was invented in the 17th century? MonadGPT is a possible answer. MonadGPT is a finetune of Mistral-Hermes 2 on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French and Latin, mostly coming from EEBO and Gallica. Like the original Mistral-Hermes, MonadGPT can be used in conversation mode. It will not only answer in an historical language and style but will use historical and dated references. This is especially visible for science questions (astronomy, medecine). Obviously, it's not recommended to follow any advice from Monad-GPT." Available to install and run locally -- or you can try it out for free online. [more inside]
Community Service Announcements from the 70s/80s: Monsters
Tools
The Periodic Table of Tools. (via Kevin Kelly)
Catherine Christer Hennix, drone composer
Catherine Christer Hennix (1948–2023) was a composer of minimalist, electronic, and drone music. Grounded in maths and sciences, her music adapted ideas from Indian ragas, Arabic music, jazz, and blues. She had a a wide ranging career across academia, writing, painting and sculpture, and intellectual movements from Fluxus to Lacan to Sufi Islam. She studied with Stockhausen, took inspiration from La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, but had a modest commercial showing unlike her contemporaries Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Her music is astonishing. [more inside]
"Little more than an exercise in style, but oh what style!"
TURKULES FOR PRESIDENT 2024
"Picture seeing this turkey. He's, like, magnificent. Like, he's huge. And there's a tranq dart sticking out of him, and he's just walking around with it." [more inside]
Even if we had a perfect archive, it still wouldn’t tell the whole story
For 30 years, writers have been using blogs, social media, and email to do things with words that are difficult or impossible to do inside books. They have immersed us in stories still unfolding, created personas that interact with readers, woven their writing into inboxes and feeds, and used code to write at a distance. The public record of literature in the 21st century is full of gaping holes where these things should be. The missing material is right there on our screens, but it slides past with little formal acknowledgement. While it’s become banal to observe that online life is fully enmeshed with the rest of the world, an imaginary curtain separates online writing from the rest of U.S. literature. It’s time to take that curtain down. from Poets in the Machine
November 25
50,000 years ago, Australia had vultures
Lovingly Crafted Puzzle Games Since 2013
Alan "Draknek" Hazelden is an industrious creator of charming, handcrafted, fiendishly difficult puzzle games with a retro 8-bit feel (most using the open-source, HTML5-compliant Puzzlescript engine). Highlights:
Sticky Candy Puzzle Saga -
Spikes 'n' Stuff -
Spooky Pumpkin Game -
Boxes Love Boxing Gloves -
Frog Wizard Gem Quest -
Train Braining -
A Sneeze a Day Keeps the Crates Away -
Cyber-Lasso -
Mirror Isles -
Slime Swap -
A Good Tunnel is Hard to Dig -
Mouse Wants Cheese -
You're Pulley-ing My Leg -
I Have No Mouth, And I Must Create Blocks On All Sides Of Me - More? Check out a list of all games (older ones may break), all Puzzlescript games, iOS and Android games. Also check out the homepage for gamedev partnerships, contact info, and more commercial offerings.
Move over Boston Dynamics, the Mouse is taking over
It began with robots made to throw up in the air to do stunt work. How Disney Designed a Robotic Spider-Man [7m] Then came free-standing, walking, controlled character actors. Disney Imagineers Develop Cutting-edge, Free-roaming Robotic Actor [1m15s] They began to integrate some self-learning AI features and more real movement. Disney Imagineers Demo New Relatable Robotic Character [1m] But just last month came fully autonomous, self-learning completely adorable little robots. A New Approach to Disney’s Robotic Character Pipeline [1m] Imagineers Test BD-1 Style ROAMING DROIDS in Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland [3m30s] A pet AT-ST walking around my house? TAKE MY MONEY!
Interview with Joseff Gnagbo
Joseff Gnagbo is a journalist, academic, and political activist from Cote d'Ivoire who was granted political asylum in the UK and placed in Cardiff, where he learned Welsh and quickly became involved with the Welsh language movement. Now he is the new Chair of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the pressure group that fought via direct action, including serving prison terms, to get legal protection for the Welsh language. Siôn Jobbins interviews him (in English) to discuss his experiences and commonalities he sees between Cote d'Ivoire and Wales.
This sweeping history starts back in 1799 with Napoleon
Al-Nakba A four part video series on the Palestinian ‘catastrophe’ of 1948 that led to dispossession and conflict that still endures. Scroll down for the videos (4X 45 min) First aired in 2008.
"I think that’s what hooked us, trying to save the world."
The rise and fall of AppHarvest, a startup promising to gainfully employ blue-collar Appalachians, provide sustainable produce, and address the problems of agriculture in a changing climate. In the end, it did none of those things, employing contract migrant workers, letting the work environment reach unsafe temperatures, using considerable amounts of power to control the grow environment, and training their workers so poorly that yields of usable produce were low. (slGrist) [more inside]
We are, to some extent, always opaque to ourselves
Nor does it take a transformative life event to provoke feelings of loneliness. As time passes, it often happens that friends and family who used to understand us quite well eventually fail to understand us as they once did, failing to really see us as they used to before. This, too, will tend to lead to feelings of loneliness – though the loneliness may creep in more gradually, more surreptitiously. Loneliness, it seems, is an existential hazard, something to which human beings are always vulnerable – and not just when they are alone. from Loved, yet lonely
November 24
New pain medication from mudjala bark
When John Watson was bitten by a crocodile, he knew exactly which plant would help his wound. Scientists now think that plant could lead to a powerful pain relief gel [more inside]
"An account of a Time Lord's adventures through SPACE AND ONLY SPACE"
Tomorrow (Saturday November 25) starting at 3pm PT (6pm ET/11pm GMT) and running for approximately 24 hours, Laser Webber of the Doubleclicks (several previouslies, dating back to 2011) and Becca McGlynn (with some special guests) will be participating in a charity livestream that watches Doctor Who in chronological order -- but NOT chronological order of the airdates. This chronology is presented in order of when each event took place, from the perspective of the show's internal universe. [more inside]
Avantgardey
Precision formation dancing is one of my favorite things. And I was astonished to see Avantgardey's performances from America's Got Talent and Japan's Got Talent. [22m, performances include judging segments, video is chapter marked for convenient skipping]. This 9m video gave me some background about this thrilling dance troupe. And from Taiwan News just a couple of days ago, Japanese dance troupe Avantgardey's Taipei performance goes viral has an embedded Instagram video of another dance.
"It’s one moment in hard rock history that we can all be proud of."
Hear 'n Aid (previously) was a 1986 hard rock/heavy metal charity album that raised $3 million for famine relief in Africa. [more inside]
Concerts by Cercle
For 7 years, Cercle has been livestreaming DJs and other musicians playing sets from impressive locations around the world: Icelandic Wilderness (Ólafur Arnalds), Hot air balloon above Cappadocia (Ben Böhmer), Guatape Colombia (Above and Beyond), Lapland (Sofiane Pamart) , The Eiffel Tower (Nina Kraviz), Brighton i360 (Fatboy Slim) or Bali (Lee Burridge)... [more inside]
How to improvise a boat out of a train.
100 years ago this month Buster Keaton released his groundbreaking silent film "Our Hospitality", described as his "...first feature as auteur and his first masterpiece." [more inside]