April 14, 2017
Squirrels & Squee is not just an indie band
From the Department Of Isn't That Cute: A North Carolina Squirrel Eats Tiny Ice Cream Cones Every Day [more inside]
Deep Network, Deep Flaw
A recent study of neural networks found that for every correctly classified image, one can generate an "adversarial", visually indistinguishable image that will be misclassified. This suggests potential deep flaws in all neural networks (with a hint of a solution). [more inside]
“If you don’t want to know the scores, please look away now.”
If You Don’t Want to Know What This Article Is About, Please Look Away Now [The New York Times] “The formula remains the same after all these years, its familiarity a comfort, its consistency its charm. Every Saturday night, about 10:20 p.m., Kate Silverton, the anchor for the BBC’s 10 o’clock news — the marquee news program of Britain’s national broadcaster, watched by more than four million people — hands over from the corporation’s home in London to a studio in Salford, where the BBC’s sports arm is based. One of four sports presenters sits waiting. A cheery welcome and short introduction follow. And then, every week, without fail, comes that warning. It is such an intrinsic part of the broadcast, and has been for so long, that it is not far short of a national ritual, one of those few sentences a whole country knows by heart.”
Heart to Heart
“I picked him up from school and the first thing he said when he got in the car was, ‘Mom, I met Rod Carew today!” Mary recalled. That was the first time Konrad gave his heart to Rod Carew.Konrad & Carew: How an NFL player’s donated heart saved (the) life of a baseball Hall of Famer
"It's not safe to run an internet facing Windows box right now."
Ars Technica: The Shadow Brokers—the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency's weaponized software exploits—just published its most significant release yet. [more inside]
The Moderators
The Moderators is a 20-minute documentary by Adrian Chen and Ciaran Cassidy that follows a team of new internet moderators at an outsourcing firm in India as they look for pornography and scams (film contains some NSFW images in the background). The film is based in part on Chen's 2014 Wired article on content moderation (previously on the blue), which goes into more depth on the rapid culturally-sensitive decisions required and the psychological impact of this work for the humans who constantly see these images.
dweet your heart out
Head to dwitter to look at and play with (and even create your own) tiny JavaScript demos. Lots of rad programmatic art: scratchy lines, a colorful random walk, some sort of hypercubic butterfly, pulsing and inverting abstract shapes, etc. There's even interactive stuff, both sights and sounds.
The Company Continued
You may remember science fiction author Kage Baker (previously), who wrote reams of words about time-travelling immortal cyborgs. Since her untimely death five years ago, her sister Kathleen Bartholomew has been editing and releasing some of Baker's remaining work and blogging regularly about the process, about Baker's life and their relationship. [more inside]
Kasey Rogers
Hitchcock fans might recognize Kasey Rogers as the ex-wife doomed as soon as strangers met on a train, Bewitched fans might recognize as Darren's boss's second wife Louise Tate*. But after all that, she became involved with motorcycles after her young son began riding and this led her to motocross racing. In 1972, she began writing a Powder Puff column for Modern Cycle Magazine and did feature stories on the mini-cycle nationals and other racing events, and eventually she worked with the American Motocross Association to establish PURR ("PowderPuffs Unlimited Riders and Racers"), bringing women into the male-dominated sport, in 1974 with a national event sponsored by Yamaha (original program pdf ). PURR would later evolve into what is now motocross's Women's Pro-Class division. [more inside]
The useful village
LucasFilm celebrates Carrie Fisher
The Star Wars Celebration is going this weekend, celebrating 40 years since the first movie's release. As part of the main panel, there was a Tribute To Carrie Fisher created by LucasFilm. It's touching and is truly a celebration. [more inside]
Consciousness consciousness
From Nautil.us Magazine's current thematic issue on Consciousness, a series of short essays, including:Is matter conscious? Is there awareness behind vegetative states? What do animals see in the mirror? Do Aliens have inalienable rights?
For-profit college, without the pesky college part
Forest Trail was something new: a program branded as a university and that offered athletics but no teachers, libraries or curriculum of its own. Athletes would pay to play sports year-round and live on campus.What could go wrong? Spoiler alert: lots.
One weird trick for your cat
Thinking inside the box: Veterinarian Chris Brown read on the internet that if you mark a rectangle on your floor with masking tape, your cat will be drawn to it like Maru to an Amazon box. So he tried it. And so did thousands of other people in the comments. [FB, some non-FB links inside.] [more inside]
"Breathe. Just Breathe."
The alternative to "there's no alternative'.
"...the scare of the near-bankruptcy brought together the elite groups within the city, and enabled them to act in concert in ways that otherwise would have proved difficult to attain. The framework of “crisis” generated a sense of inevitability, making it seem that there were no alternatives. Across the Atlantic, “there is no alternative” would soon become one of Thatcher’s favorite slogans. "How The Rich Seized Control of New York City." New Republic, Kim Phillips-Fein
Think before you do anything. You need a lot of knowledge first.
Until now, [Gene] Sharp’s ideas have largely been applied in authoritarian contexts abroad, whether in the Middle East, post-Communist Europe, or elsewhere. But under Trump, Sharp’s ideas have become all too relevant to the contemporary United States. What insights could American activists today glean from his work about the possibility of resisting the Trump administration? How to Bring Down a Dictator: Reading Gene Sharp in Trump’s America (Dissent Magazine) [more inside]
It's Like Uber for Birds
So this guy picks up a cute little redhead on his way to work.
"Winds are super bad. Love to everyone."
'I'M A GONER': El Faro's last hours as ship sails into storm. Jason Dearen has written a gripping long-form investigation of bad decisions, corporate greed, maritime culture, and human tragedy aboard the doomed cargo ship El Faro for AP News. [more inside]
Two years making daily art
Making Things is a page of pulsing, shimmering geometrical animations and designs made with Processing. The artist, Saskia Freeke, has also written a thoughtful article about making daily artwork.
Two Guys Who Hate Each Other - "At A Party"
"It’s not like there aren’t a ton of options for white hair"
Polish Priests Blessing Things
Celebrate holy week! Only the best in Polish priests blessing things. Cats, neurosurgical microscopes, well-endowed cycling teams, IKEA stores, and so much more.
Do Not Try This
Casual drinker Emmett Farnan finishes the first documented beer half marathon. Farnan competed in The Holy Half Marathon in Half Bend, Indiana, shotgunning a beer at every mile marker. That is 13 beers drank while running over 13 miles, and he managed it all in 1:43.
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