Favorites from East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94
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Things that fall off trucks: Cellebrite bags, Apple software
You may have heard that one should be very careful about opening files from untrusted sources; there’s always the possibility that they could pose a risk to the integrity of your computer. When you’re in the business of providing your law-enforcement customers with software whose whole point it is to handle data from extremely untrusted sources, you might think that this is particularly salient advice. If you don’t heed it, your customers might have to immediately stop scanning mobile phones of suspects who may be using the popular Signal instant-messaging app. Indeed you would be giving them, and defenders and courts, very good reasons to doubt this kind of evidence altogether. Moxie Marlinspike (previously) first broke the news about the hack of Cellebrite’s digital forensics software in an entertaining post on the Signal blog.
The Antikythera Cosmos
The Antikythera Cosmos
"The UCL Antikythera Research Team struggle to solve the front of the Antikythera Mechanism—a fragmentary ancient Greek astronomical calculator—revealing a dazzling display of the ancient Greek Cosmos" [previously]
Keith Burgun's 4 Interactive Forms
"Within 'interactive entertainment', there actually exist a number of forms – patterns of design that work in a certain way. Only by understanding these forms can we proceed with guidelines for better interactive system design." MeFi's own Keith Burgun, a game designer and game design instructor, discusses mapping, solving, evaluation, and understanding in four categories of interactive entertainment.
minimal cells
Scientists Create Simple Synthetic Cell That Grows and Divides Normally
- "New findings shed light on mechanisms controlling the most basic processes of life."[1]
Your Burnout Is Unique. Your Recovery Will Be, Too.
Recent research suggests that when you’re feeling burned out, the best person to help you recover may be yourself.
Burnout is not a monolithic phenomenon, but rather, it can present as any combination of three distinct symptoms: exhaustion (a depletion of mental or physical resources), cynical detachment (a depletion of social connectedness), and a reduced sense of efficacy (a depletion of value for oneself). To recover from burnout, you must identify which of these resources has been depleted and take action to replenish those resources.
Two debugging puzzles (and more to come?)
Julia Evans (previously) is making interactive in-browser text puzzles to help people learn how to debug computer networking issues, and asking for feedback as she tries stuff out. "The Case of the Slow Websites" and "The Case of the Connection Timeout" are already up (source code using Twine), and she's thinking of making several more. "I'd love to know what folks think of this approach to learning debugging! One of my favourite ways to learn is by debugging weird problems, so my idea with this style of game is to sort of share the experience of past bugs I've run into so that other people can learn from them too."
It's Hard to Argue the Other Side and Not Sound Like You're Stealing
This body of songwriters will not give publishing or songwriting credit to anyone who did not create or change the lyric or melody or otherwise contribute to the composition without a reasonably equivalent/meaningful exchange for all the writers on the song. Meet the songwriters who told pop stars: 'Don't steal from us' [BBC]
White Nationalists Gleefully Embrace Tucker Carlson
White nationalists sure don't think Tucker Carlson's "replacement" segment is about voting rights.
Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and popular media personality among young white extremists, responded to Carlson’s Monday night segment by tweeting, “This week Tucker redpilled 4 million people and there is nothing liberals can do about it.” He then listed the white nationalist talking points he believes Carlson got right: “Demographic replacement, ADL, Israel, it’s all there... a full redpill. On primetime Fox News for 4 million mainstream conservatives,” he wrote. “Can you feel it? We are inevitable.”
CW: ugly hate speech, anti-semitism, stupidity
Spaghetti Sucks
It started with a dream and ended with a brand new pasta shape. Follow Dan Pashman of The Sporkful on his three-year journey documented in a five-part series, "Mission: ImPASTAble", as he tries to develop the perfect pasta.
'Political Misdirection and Rebranding Exercises'
Top Republicans Want to Rebrand GOP as Party of Working Class
(slNPR, includes link to six-page memo from Rep. Jim Banks* (R-IN))
"It is, by far, the easiest way to write a tune as you can clearly see"
Exuberant composer Guy Michelmore demonstrates how to write a tune using dogs, how to use inversions to improve your chord progressions (featuring an impressively impractical visual aid), how to write music while trapped in the boot of a VW Polo. Or if you you're in a hurry, how about music theory in 16 minutes? Bonus: Guy introduces the people of Britain to Cabbage Patch dolls in 1983.
Photo ID
Remi Wolf's new clip (yt) has all the makings of a summer hit. This is the track's second vid (yt) though, and is probably worth your time.
16,000 kilometres on a 50-cc pedal-start moped
In the summer of 2018, Austrian Stephan Regensburger went on a 13,000-kilometre journey from Ulaanbataar - where he had shipped his Puch Maxi a few months earlier - back home to Innsbruck. This journey, documented in this 14-video YouTube playlist, took 92 days across Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Poland and Slovakia. The next year, Stephan's wanderlust took him on a 3000-km trip from Austria to Tunisia on the same valiant little bike. Read more about his adventures on his blog here.
This should not happen more than once
"I keep coming back to the detail in CNN’s report that this wasn’t something Matt Gaetz did a single time, but repeatedly. Because if it happened more than once — if it happened twice, even — that is because the first time went better than it should have."
Metafilter fave Alexandra Petri turns down the humor and sharpens her scalpel for a column on Matt Gaetz and, more importantly, his enablers. (SL Washington Post)
Хранители
Guardian: Soviet TV version of Lord of the Rings rediscovered after 30 years. Parts one and two of the 1991 TV movie are now available on Youtube. Although there are no English subtitles, the visuals are not to be missed.
"Fill World With Gentleness"
Hitoshi Yasui makes music as "chair house", and is currently working on the "Piano Ten Thousand Leaves Project" (Soundcloud). Each day, chair house improvises, records, and uploads an original piano composition. They're generally quiet and gentle pieces. He started the project in 2014, and aims to create 4,536 songs in total to match an 8th century anthology of Japanese poetry. If he stays on track, he will finish in mid-2026.
"Stallman’s 'that’s how it is' is not how it has to be."
At the end of his recent online presentation for LibrePlanet, Richard Stallman announced his reinstatement to the board of the Free Software Foundation, a year and a half from his removal from said board in response to his history of misogynistic behavior triggered by his response to victims of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein. The announcement was met with condemnation from other open source groups, with groups like Outreachy banning the FSF from participating in their programs.
"an empty crib and a raven with a scroll in its beak"
"I am concerned that you did not receive my previous missive, although my raven reports that you took the letter and appeared to read it." "The Ransom of Miss Coraline Connelly" by Alix E. Harrow, an epistolary short story published last year in Fireside. Content note [spoiler, so, in extended description].
Connecticut Zoning Atlas
The Zoning Atlas is a first-in-the-nation interactive map showing how all 2,620 zoning districts and 2 subdivision districts in Connecticut treat housing. With a total of 32,378 pages of regulations read and analyzed, the Zoning Atlas is cumulative and illuminating. This type of project has never been done before on a statewide basis.
Televised Worlds, Part 2: Lands of Dreams and Nightmares
There's an important shiny rock, and the bad guy orders his minions to go get it. Sounds like a normal cartoon, right? But the is The Dreamstone, the gorgeous British animated series set in a full-blown fantasy universe, officially available on YouTube in its entirety (click Playlists to see everything in order). Stick with it after Season 1 - the heroes and villain may become more complacent, but impressively, they gradually improve, the heroes moreso. A miniatures game and a tabletop RPG based on the series are currently in production at Oakbound Studio.
A.G. Cook's remix of Describe by Perfume Genius
Perfume Genius has released Immediately Remixes, a set of remixes from his 2020 album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately. A.G. Cook's remix of Describe is accompanied by a video [content warning for flashing lights] by the animator Jack Wedge
This one's for the old-school analog television fans.
Why was there no channel 37?
It's pretty darn technical, but the upshot is, apparently, aliens.
You can go ahead and skip this one...
Shields and Yarnell, Captain and Tennille, The Carpenters, Donny and Marie. One toke over the line....
Why? I don't know.
It just seemed important for some reason.
That kinda day
I used to like this song
Youtube channel There I Ruined It take your favorite songs and transform them into new genres of music. E.g. Folsom Prison Blues as disco, Enter Sandman as a kid's song, We Will Rock you as Dixieland
The Voice Goes Electric
Michael Winslow impersonates Jimi Hendrix playing “Purple Haze” at Montreal’s “Juste Pour Rire” festival using his mouth as an electric guitar.
Previously -but postdating this recording- we had posts about Winslow performing “Whole Lotta Love” and “The History of the Typewriter”
A short clip from Viceland of Winslow and a DJ playing together
Previously -but postdating this recording- we had posts about Winslow performing “Whole Lotta Love” and “The History of the Typewriter”
A short clip from Viceland of Winslow and a DJ playing together
Is consciousness everywhere?
"Accounting for the nature of consciousness appears elusive, with many claiming that it cannot be defined at all, yet defining it is actually straightforward. Here goes: Consciousness is experience." Christof Koch, at MIT Press, discusses what Integrated Information Theory (IIT) has to say about consciousness: "Some level of experience can be found in all organisms, it says, including perhaps in Paramecium and other single-cell life forms. Indeed, according to IIT, which aims to precisely define both the quality and the quantity of any one conscious experience, experience may not even be restricted to biological entities but might extend to non-evolved physical systems previously assumed to be mindless — a pleasing and parsimonious conclusion about the makeup of the universe."
Sorry, Elvis's birthplace!
(looks to the left) (looks to the right) (takes a deep breath)
"MEMPHIS!"🚫🚫🚫BANNED BY TWITTER🚫🚫🚫
Gizmodo, The Guardian, The Independent, Engadget, WREG out of... you know, that town.
"MEMPHIS!"🚫🚫🚫BANNED BY TWITTER🚫🚫🚫
Gizmodo, The Guardian, The Independent, Engadget, WREG out of... you know, that town.
Which was the stylus at the time
The finest Simpsons history posting group on Facebook - since that story of the rocks painted as copper last week - is just emerging from an extremely intense exploration of how many jokes they can get from that 1750 BC cuneiform complaint tablet to a guy called Ea-nasirOr, how to remake classic Simpsons memes into jokes about Sumerian copper merchants delivering substandard ingots.
Woof!
Dog.
A poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. "The dog trots freely in the street/
and sees reality/ and the things he sees/
are bigger than himself/
and the things he sees/
are his reality./
Looking Closely
From a Single Cell to a Salamander
"In this six-minute time lapse video, you can watch a single cell grow into an alpine newt salamander. I got this via Craig Mod’s post about looking closely, in which he asks: when precisely does this collection of cells become a salamander?"
Pass the pepper.
Wondering how to safely pass the pepper while socially distancing? Kinetic artist, Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machine's has the answer for you.
What about if you need to pass the salt? He's resolved that too.
Considering taking up one-man cricket? He destroyed his house showing you how.
Tired of taking out the compost? A couple compost bags to the face, and he got it right.
That sibling bothering you? After accidentally making a "mean machine", he figured it out - fart spray and all.
"It’s part of the same pseudoscience as measuring people’s skulls"
'They become dangerous tools': the dark side of personality tests
– The Guardian on the new HBO Max documentary, Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests, which "investigates America’s infatuation with personality testing, revealing the surprising origin story behind the MBTI while surfacing ethical questions and criticisms that these seemingly harmless instruments are profoundly discriminatory and reflective of larger troubling issues of who exactly is considered worthy and valuable in society."
Microtonality
Decolonizing Electronic Music Starts With Its Software.
"In 2004, Khyam Allami was ready to give up on electronic music. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t write melodies that sounded like the music in his head. “It felt like the software was leading me somewhere that wasn’t my intention, and I couldn’t understand why that was,” he recalls. Born in Syria to Iraqi parents, Allami had grown up in London playing guitar and drums in punk bands. He was exploring Arabic music for the first time—or at least trying to, but the music’s distinctive quarter-tones were proving difficult to emulate. The software simply wasn’t made for him."
Now he has partnered with creative technology studio Counterpoint to create two free browser-based pieces of software - Leimma to create and explore microtonal tuning systems, and Apotome to create music with the tuning systems the artist selects in Leimma. Link to both. (Note that Apotome appears to work only in Chrome or Firefox, and the tutorials are rather long and maybe a bit heavy on the theory and music tech for the average non-musician.) Use of the software was premiered at this year's (mostly virtual) CTM Festival in Berlin.
Teaching Jake about the Camcorder, Jan '97
Never press the rewind button or else you may record over a precious memory.
The State Birds Are Garbage (SLYT)
Not the fauna themselves, but rather their selection.
Not only is the content compelling, the author uses a totally novel (to me) low-tech fake-high-tech "this is a unix system" style presentation medium. To me it's as interesting as the content! I had to keep asking myself: why is this good? It's like a layer cake of nostalgia and... is that irony? I can't tell! Keep it comin'...
Flim is the Thing
Flim is a movie search engine currently in beta that returns screenshots from movies based on keywords. [Via Kottke & Boing Boing & Recomendo]
"a tacit understanding that we’re all here to help one another..."
"Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around the world helped hapless users figure out their computer systems, learn about technology trends, and discover the latest whiz-bang applications.... the meetings often happened IRL."
3 Mules
Who are we? We are the Mules. Where are we from? We are from the outside. We live outside all day, every day. Where are we going? Nowhere. We’re here: the outside, the web of life, the beautiful earth, a place like no other. We have come to this place, a place of golden sparkling light, a place for anybody and everybody. Give your faith, hope and energy to this place at which time you connect to it and receive the magic and endless possibility of infinity. As you walk in this place with these mules you spread the awareness that this beautiful earth, like no other, can only be protected by the way we live one day at a time.
Non-Metro Congress-people mover under the Capitol
US Senators and members of the House can ride
a
special system of below-ground trains in Washington, DC. One of them may utilize Linear Induction Motors, a fascinating form of electrical propulsion (with magnetic levitation, even) made possible by Triple Phase Electricity.
The Moomins as queer family
The unlikely queer family at the heart of the Moomins. "In recent years, Moomins creator Tove Jansson has become a queer icon. What her stories capture, says Elizabeth Lovatt, is the importance and joy of choosing your own family."
Coming out of COVID is a chance to radically reimagine our societies
We need to engage with the two sides of any conscious change: imagination and experimentation.
"Human beings find it easy to imagine an apocalypse or a disaster. But we struggle to imagine positive alternatives: what education, welfare, workplaces, democracy, or neighborhoods might look like in 30–40 years, or how we could make them radically better."