June 1, 2019
To regulate certain pay-to-win microtransactions
On May 23, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), joined by Senators Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), introduced the Protecting Children from Abusive Games Act, which would ban lootboxes and microtransactions from videogames marketed to minors. (Bill text on scribd; Google Doc version.) [more inside]
Generalist Academy, a new topic every day
The Generalist Academy is MeFite Paragon's blog where they share one interesting thing every day, like Thailand's culinary diplomacy (also known as gastrodiplomacy), 16th century German artillery master Franz Helm's proposed "rocket cat" ("This sounds like a terrible idea."), Samoan independence, and Poggio Bracciolini's Renaissance-era fart jokes. [via mefi projects]
Here comes the flood: New Blue Orchids single co-written by MES
Martin Bramah’s Blue Orchids have been the most consistently enjoyable spin-off of The Fall since 1980 (first lineup included both Martin and Fall founder/keyboardist Una Baines - previously) and they’re back with a new single co-written by Mark E Smith back in the late 70s, “Addicted to the Day”
Iocaine Powder
Buried in the source code from a 1999 Rock Paper Scissors tournament is a comment section starting with, "They were both poisoned," that goes on to describe one of the cleverest strategies ever designed for a computer game. As with its inspiration from The Princess Bride, the strategy considers that its opponent might know its strategy, and that its opponent might know that it knows that the opponent knows its strategy, and... you get the idea. Tweaks on the original idea remain the core of the best Rock, Paper, Scissors algorithms.
they're good genes Brent
We know that dog owners and cat owners have different personalities, but now it appears that love for dogs may be coded in our DNA.
Yoga’s Instagram Provocateur
You cannot swing a cat (pose) on Instagram without hitting photographs of yoga instructors with perfect figures twisted into perfect shapes, selling essential oils and greeting-card spirituality.
Alex Auder is not one of them. [more inside]
“Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware...”
DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too [The New York Times] Chess and Go were child’s play. Now A.I. is winning at capture the flag. Will such skills translate to the real world?
“In a paper published on Thursday in Science (and previously available on the website arXiv before peer review), the researchers reported that they had designed automated “agents” that exhibited humanlike behavior when playing the capture the flag “game mode” inside Quake III. These agents were able to team up against human players or play alongside them, tailoring their behavior accordingly.”[more inside]
Lingua pulcherrima
Argumentum ad Ignorantiam: The Real Issue With Mary Beard's Latin - "What irritates me is that —again like most classicists — she treats this as a self-evident fact to be just accepted rather than a problem to be dealt with, as if nobody could hope to actually read Cicero with ease. It always strikes me as bizarre and a bit embarrassing to see classicists insisting that it is impossible to acquire fluid or fluent command of Latin or Greek, that "we" can never do this. It's not just that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or Descartes. It's that people do actually acquire this kind of competence. Today. Anyone who pokes around at, say, the Paideia Institute, will find proficient Latin-speakers as readily as Zeus finds incestuous booty-calls." [more inside]
After Monica, Lorena, and Tonya
Heidi Fleiss is not trying for a redemption narrative. Her story is much stranger than that.
Once a 90s tabloid cause célèbre, the former "Hollywood Madam" always refused to reveal her client's names. Then twenty years after the height of her infamy a reporter gets a call from Pahrump, Nevada. [more inside]
"Enjoy my old flute if you find one. I certainly did."
Over the last 51 years I have played and owned many flutes... Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull tells about his flutes, and why you might find one for sale secondhand at regular market prices.
Conflict Kitchen
Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries with which the United States is in conflict. [more inside]
How Do You Cover An Existential Threat?
“To limit the worst effects of the climate crisis, we have under eleven years to decarbonize our economy, mobilizing, as Bill McKibben and others have urged, on the speed and scale of WWII. One might expect to see that mobilization effort in the US media more often; climate change, after all, frames every beat. A threat of such breadth, teen climate activist Greta Thunberg once said, should preclude us from talking, writing, or reporting about anything else. Yet my news feed tells a different story.“ War all the time? Climate reporters weigh coverage quantity against quality (CJR)
You're Gonna Miss Me
Roky Erickson, Lead singer and guitarist for legendary psych band The 13th Floor Elevator has died. Roky Erickson was a difficult personality in that he had a peerless talent for the music he created, and was known for excesses in chemical intake. This second however, may have more to do with mental illness, than actual excess. Much like contemporary Syd Barrett, Roky lead a tumultuous life. I'm going to leave the links below the fold. Please enjoy the music and videos. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »