December 10, 2019
"There's something changing in these winds"
“Almost everyone is gone now. Maybe at last it will be my turn next.”
35 years later, the Bhopal disaster continues to destroy lives: “It would be better if there was another gas leak which could kill us all and put us all out of this misery,” said Omwati Yadav, 67, who can see the Union Carbide factory from the roof of her tiny one-room stone house, painted peppermint green with orange doors. Her body shaking with sobs, she cries out: “Thirty five years we have suffered through this, please just let it end. This is not life, this is not death, we are in the terrible place in between.” [Photos] [more inside]
The Year of “They”
I Want To Die, But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki
But in South Korea, a generation of frustrated young people is reclaiming the idea of frivolous expenses—from cab rides to expensive sushi—as a psychological survival tool dubbed shibal biyong. Loosely translated to “fuck-it expense,” the term is a compound noun combining shibal (a swearword for frustration) and biyong (expense). [more inside]
Antiquity is the unknown, unanticipated galaxy.
Out the window, I watch a white landscape that turns pale green, dark green, yellow and red, brown under bare branches, until snow falls again. "However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. " Donald Hall, the late poet laureate's meditation on aging. [more inside]
🎄🌏🗑️
The great Christmas tree debate: Are real or fake firs better for the environment? [The Independent] “For many of us, the first shivers of that festive feeling come as we meander through the pines and firs at the local Christmas tree stall. Yet, while we become evermore conscious of the environmental impact of our spending, the question of whether artificial or real Christmas trees have a lower carbon footprint has become top of the eco-friendly Yuletide agenda. Do we opt for a lifelong plastic tree we can dust off and reuse every year, or do we embrace the urge for that real Christmas tree smell, buying one freshly felled and dumping it in a landfill come January? The obvious answer may be to shirk buying any tree at all – but bah humbug!” [more inside]
Modesty is for them. You’re in a better space now.
Welcome to your 40s, Kelsey. Welcome to not giving a s**t at the gym. (NSFW for language and pixelated nudity.) The Baroness von Sketch Show tackles that magic moment where you hit your 40s and stop caring so much about what others think in the gym locker room. Also: Perimenopause and what would happen if women ran the world. The subversive appeal of Baroness von Sketch, feminist-and-queer-friendly comedy by four Canadian women in their 40s.
“when you ... take a 50,000 ft view of it, it kind of seems inefficient"
Buying from Amazon, or Target, or Wal-Mart online? Your packages may pass through the small town of Roundup, Montana on a circuitous journey from warehouse to prep center to warehouse to prep center to your home [more inside]
The 2020 Olympics: One Major Loser Announced
After the scandal that came out in the aftermath of the Sochi Winter Games, where it was revealed that the Russian anti-doping agency had, under orders from the Russian government, engaged in egregious tampering of anti-doping testing, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) had been deliberating on how to properly sanction Russia. Today, they announced their decision - for the next four years, including the next Summer and Winter Games and the next World Cup, Russia will be banned from competing in all major sporting competitions. (SLBBC) [more inside]
14 feared dead in New Zealand volcano eruption
Search and recovery operations are ongoing after a volcanic eruption on White Island (also known as Whakaari) in New Zealand. Every burn unit in the country is at capacity treating the victims, who included tourists and guides visiting the normally uninhabited island. Authorities announced, then walked back, a criminal investigation.
"Designing something just powerful enough is an art."
Susan D'Agostino recently interviewd Barbara Liskov, looking back at her work as a computer scientist with a mathematics background, working in the late 1960s when computing power had outpaced the abilities of programmers. Her response was data abstraction (Medium), as used in the CLU programming language (Wikipedia) that she and her students at MIT developed between 1974 and 1975, when AI was in its infancy. The Architect of Modern Algorithms. Barbara Liskov pioneered the modern approach to writing code. She warns that the challenges facing computer science today can’t be overcome with good design alone. (Quanta Magazine) [more inside]
“You want the true version?” he joked. “I have much better versions.”
He smiles as he shows it to me. “At that time it was very easy to lie, because the Internet was not invented.” So that first formal communication to Nintendo was a lie?
“Yeah,” he laughs, “of course.”
The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo by Joe Skrebels
The Lie That Helped Build Nintendo by Joe Skrebels
Visualizing Moore’s Law
In 1965, [Gordon] Moore wrote that the number of components in a dense integrated circuit (i.e., transistors, resistors, diodes, or capacitors) had been doubling with every year of research, and he predicted that this would continue for another decade. Later on in 1975, he revised his prediction to the doubling occurring every two years. Today’s animation comes to us from DataGrapha, and it compares the predictions of Moore’s Law with data from actual computer chip innovations occurring between 1971 to 2019. Visualizing Moore’s Law in Action (1971-2019) [more inside]
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