April 27, 2018
Pamper Me To Hell and Back
Hera Lindsay Bird, New Zealand Poetry Star, interrogates capitalism and love in her recent poem Pyramid Scheme. Why aren't they called triangle schemes? Her most recent collection, published this year, is titled Pamper Me to Hell and Back. [more inside]
Amsterdam's Bridge Houses Become Tiny Hotel Rooms
From the 1600s to the 2000s, these structures helped control the canals. Now they've become redundant and a hotel company has begun modifying them into hotel rooms, each different, each alluring. [more inside]
NetHack 3.6.1
NetHack 3.6.1 has been released. Release notes. Downloads (so far the only ready-to-run version is Windows). Usenet announcement on Google Groups. [more inside]
National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Inside the memorial to victims of lynching. The first national memorial to victims of lynching opened yesterday in Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice commemorates 4,400+ black people who were slain in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950. previously previouslier
The history of Shari'a
The History of the Shariʿa. An article on the evolution of Islamic law in Lapham's Quarterly by Mohammad Fadel. [more inside]
Some Avengers Assembly Required
The BIG MOVIE Avengers: Infinity War has generated a ton of press, commentary and spoilers ([REDACTED] DIES!), and a lot of parody & satire even before the official premiere. The (IMO) funniest ones address the absurdly large collection of super-characters by making it even more absurd, like College Humor's animated "Infinite Avengers" bit, adding nearly every Marvel character ever* and Nerdist's "Ultimate" trailer remix that "crossovers" with nearly everything Disney owns**. [more inside]
“'BattleTech' is the rare tactics game that makes attrition a tool,”
'BattleTech' Revives the Classic Mech Franchise in All Its Grueling Glory [Waypoint] “I’m talking about love here, and what I love about BattleTech is that it’s a game you feel in your gut, where you help topple a totalitarian regime by leaving a trail of broken and twisted mechs, as well as their dead pilots, littered across the stars. And they don’t go down easily, like playing pieces that you take off the board after a good move. They walk through showers of missile fire, shudder under the weight of cannon shot, get slashed to pieces by massive laser beams, and finally pummeled into the ground by other mechs’ massive metallic arms. This isn’t XCOM, where the point is to avoid getting hit while you surgically dismantle enemy squads piecemeal. This is war.” [YouTube] [Game Trailer] [more inside]
The cold Locke-Voltaire equations
Leaving populations to boom and bust on their own is currently gruesome in the Netherlands, economically advantageous in Sussex, and contentious where reintroduced Yellowstone bison can be hunted. [more inside]
'68 at 50
The New York Review of Books reflects on the political events of 1968 and their legacy fifty years on: Power to the Imagination by Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Claus Leggewie; Enoch, Bageye and Me by Colin Grant; When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution by Mitchell Abidor. Also, from CNRS, an interview with historian Michelle Zancarini-Fournel: 1968: a Turning Point in History?
pass the trash
"I’ve seen what happens when we pretend that these guys can simply disappear once they’ve been pushed out. In my experience, they resurface elsewhere, often to prey on others. That’s especially true of men who aren’t famous enough to make headlines, and whose career moves aren’t subjected to constant scrutiny. And so if we want the #MeToo movement to be about more than just which celebrity will be the next to fall, or whose comeback must be stopped — if we want it to lead to real, lasting and widespread cultural change — we need to talk. About what we do with the bad men."
"Who today remembers Harriet Miers, never mind her hair-do?"
The Very Specific 2006-ishness of Those Alleged Joy Reid Posts [Richard Kim, The Nation]
"I don’t know if Reid did or did not write these posts, and I do not have the technical expertise to comment on the central question about hacking around which this controversy now revolves. But I was a gay blogger and a prolific reader of blogs, gay and political and otherwise, during the period in question. And when I forced myself to review the posts, many of them were instantly recognizable to me as something a liberal blogger in those years could have written. In fact, the more I put on my 2006-ish hat, the more unexceptional they seemed to me." [Context: Joy Reid Doubles Down: Homophobic Posts ‘Hacked,’ ‘Fraudulent’]
"I don’t know if Reid did or did not write these posts, and I do not have the technical expertise to comment on the central question about hacking around which this controversy now revolves. But I was a gay blogger and a prolific reader of blogs, gay and political and otherwise, during the period in question. And when I forced myself to review the posts, many of them were instantly recognizable to me as something a liberal blogger in those years could have written. In fact, the more I put on my 2006-ish hat, the more unexceptional they seemed to me." [Context: Joy Reid Doubles Down: Homophobic Posts ‘Hacked,’ ‘Fraudulent’]
Three second bursts of previously lost Technicolor
The British Film Institute has recently discovered short, evocative snippets of lost early Technicolor films from the Twenties (including a brief, tantalizing glimpse of Louise Brooks from the lost film The American Venus). [more inside]
Gelman's Law
A quick rule of thumb is that when someone seems to be acting like a jerk, an economist will defend the behavior as being the essence of morality, but when someone seems to be doing something nice, an economist will raise the bar and argue that he’s not being nice at all. [more inside]
For Your Consideration
Television Writer (Parks and Recreation, The Good Place), Guinness Book of World Records Contender* and national treasure Megan Amram is attempting to earn 1/4 of an EGOT with her web series, An Emmy For Megan.
(Amram previously on Metafilter.) [more inside]
War is old, so is sex. Let's play God, you go next.
Rick Dickinson, designer of the first three Sinclair computers, dies.
Few machines have changed the world of computing as much as these. I am old enough to buy two of these three gems after they were released, after millions of square kilometers of mowed lawns and petamiles of cycling through the neighbourhood, delivering unwanted advertising materials. The BASIC used on these machines was so easy to use that even an untalented 13 year old could program away in a jiffy, and there were beautiful to boot.
What a talent.
"What they came back with made me cry."
Six months ago, a parks official cleaning out an office came across two cardboard boxes that had been sitting around for decades. Inside were 2,924 color slides, pictures made in parks across New York City’s five boroughs late in the summer of 1978. No one had looked at them for 40 years.
The worthy-but-dull obituary of Gustav Born
Tom Whipple's Twitter thread about receiving the assignment to write an obituary of Gustav Born for the Times of London (paywall).
Turns out Born was inspired by being at Hiroshima after the bomb went off to research how platelets work. His father Max Born was a colleague and friend of Einstein. And he's the uncle of Olivia Newton-John.
... the great wolf Fenris rose from the deep
German chancellor Angela Merkel is set to meet with Trump today, as late night television analyses Trump's call-in to Fox & Friends (Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert) and Alexandra Petri evokes Ragnarök.
The quiet revolution: China’s millennial backlash
Behind a stall in Beijing’s central business district, a barista offers drinks with names such as “Can’t-Afford-To-Buy-A-House Iced Lemon Tea”. Another stall of the same chain sells “My Ex-Girlfriend’s Marrying Someone With Rich Parents Fruit Juice”. This is the brand Sang Tea (sang meaning “dejected, dispirited”) — a business that began in Shanghai last year, initially meant to be a temporary pop-up stall to mock the brand “Lucky Tea”, but whose dark comedy and deadpan presentation resounded with millennials, and prompted franchises to open across the country. [more inside]
Our Duty To Build The Future
“It is not that we are not capable of sustainable prosperity. We have never had more or better ability to build a better world. What we seem to lack is a belief that we can actually use those powers to change anything, and we lack that belief precisely because the future has been ripped out of our cultural debate...
.. Because the reality is that change is not only in the interests of future generations, it’s in our own interest. Almost all the things we need to do to safeguard the best possible set of choices for the children of 2050 are things we’d want to do for other reasons, anyway.” In 2010 Alex Steffen wrote Putting The Future Back In The Room, on the practical need for optimism in the face of Climate Change as a radical political act in beliving social and political change is possible.
.. Because the reality is that change is not only in the interests of future generations, it’s in our own interest. Almost all the things we need to do to safeguard the best possible set of choices for the children of 2050 are things we’d want to do for other reasons, anyway.” In 2010 Alex Steffen wrote Putting The Future Back In The Room, on the practical need for optimism in the face of Climate Change as a radical political act in beliving social and political change is possible.
Women in Sonic Art
:::::::::::: Ekho :::::::::::: Women in Sonic Art A (defunct?) blog detailing female identified sonic artists, with links to their work.
From blue to red
The Quest For The Next Billion-Dollar Color The world has never had a truly safe, stable and bright red pigment. The trail may start with YInMn, the first blue created in two centuries
Image inpainting for irregular holes using partial convolutions.
Inpainting. Rese rchers fr m NVI A introd ce a deep lea ning me hod that ca edit imag s or recon ruct a corrup ed image that has holes or is mi ing pixels.
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