youzicha

Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

S. Hossenfelder and T.N. Palmer Rethinking Superdeterminism and a popular science article by the same authors How to Make Sense of Quantum Physics. Hossenfelder's blog is full of commenters saying, “but if this was true we would not have free will!!”, which instantly made me want to believe in superdeterminism.

The Real Butterfly Effect. Nowadays “butterfly effect” just refers to to systems that depend sensitively on their initial conditions, but in the paper/talk that introduced the phrase, Lorentz was atually speculating about something even stranger: a deterministic system which is unpredictable beyond a fixed finite time horizon, no matter how accurately you can measure the initial state.

This could be philosophically interesting if you want to reconcile determinism and libertarian free will, because (much like Aaronson's freebits) it could leave some space for the soul to hide. See also Hossenfelder's case for strong emergence, which speculates about a similar kind of free-will loophole, this time with a “scale” horizon rather than time horizon.

Tides and centrifugal force. Centrifugal force doesn't play any role in tides: even though the earth is in orbit around the two-body center of gravity, the tidal forces are the same as they would be if the earth was in freefall directly towards the moon. I used to think this was counterintuitive, but this article has some good animated gifs which help make sense of what is going on.

Does running cold water on a burn for 20 minutes actually help? Apparently yes!

Hacking an arm prosthesis so that it plugs into a synth.

And the thing is, for me it's such a natural thing to do I don't really have to think about it. I just do it. It's zero effort because I'm so used to producing this muscle signal. For me this feels like I'm controlling the filter with my thoughts. It's difficult to put in words.

In 1997 a tiger was shot and wounded by a Russian poacher. It then found the poacher's cabin and waited outside his front door to kill and eat him when he came back.

Hydrocephalus and Intelligence: The Hollow Men. Gwern doesn't believe the claims of intelligent people with only 2% of the normal brain volume. However, he mostly focuses on rebutting the claim that destroying 98% of your brain would make you smarter (which, to be sure, seems unlikely), and several of the sources he quotes seem to say it would be unsurprising if destroying most of your brain (e.g. glial cells) would not make you dumber—a rather surprising claim itself, I would think! A comment on SSC suggests that because brain function can deteriorate quickly, perhaps the supposedly IQ 120 patients used to be smart but were no longer.

I've sometimes seen science fiction stories or philosophical hypotheticals asking if you would rather transition or get a treatment that makes you feel at home in your assigned sex, but apparently something like that can happen in real life.

Cat owners resorting to China’s underground marketplace to buy antivirals.

When Robin Kintz’s two kittens, Fiona and Henry, contracted a fatal cat disease last year, she began hearing of a black-market drug from China. The use of the drug, known as GS-441524, is based on legitimate research from UC Davis, but the ways to get it seemed much less so. “It was, ‘If you want to save your cat, send me thousands of dollars, and I’ll DHL you some unmarked vials,’” she says. And she did. Kintz transferred the thousands of dollars, got the unmarked vials from China, and then injected the clear liquid into her dying cats every day for months.

You probably know how to prove that √2 is irrational. Can you adapt the proof to also show that √5 is irrational? It turns out that there is a good and a bad way to do so, and the bad way is attested as far back as Plato!

Before the moon program, Margaret Hamilton worked as a research assistant for Edward Lorenz and was acknowledged in some of his pioneering papers about chaos.

Facebook Research prototypes a sunglasses-sized VR head set using holographic optics. I love the roadrunner logic here: save space by replacing a set of bulky lenses with a 2D drawing of them.

A youtuber makes a 100W CW handheld laser pistol, housed in an old radar gun casing from 1985. It must be insanely dangerous, but it looks just like you imagined laser guns when you were a kid.

The Fermi Paradox has not been dissolved.

the main effect reported by Sandberg et al., namely that the Fermi observation is not antecedently very improbable given our current knowledge of parameters in the Drake equation, is entirely dependent on their largely unexplained approach to describing the uncertainty in [the fraction of habitable planets with life]. If it is treated like the other parameters in their equation, the effect vanishes.

Computing

Alan Turing's unpublished paper Intelligent Machinery (1948) contains early versions of many points made in his famous Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950). In particular, there's a precursor to the Imitation Game/Turing Test:

It is possible to do a little experiment on these lines, even at the present state of knowledge. It is not difficult to devise a paper machine which will play a not very bad game of chess. Now get three men as subjects for the experiment A,B,C. A and C are to be rather poor chess players, B is the operator who works the paper machine. (In order that he should be able to work it fairly fast it is advisable that he be both a mathematician and a chess player.) Two rooms are used with some arrangement for communicating moves, and a game is played between C and either A or the paper machine. C may find it quite difficult to tell which he is playing. (This is a rather idealized form of an experiment I have actually done.)

Comparing the specs of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer vs USB-C Chargers.

Compiler warnings as an implicit, deniable backdoor. (The Hacker News discussion has an explanation about how the “fix” creates the vulnerability.)

Why Does "=" Mean Assignment?

Looking at this as a whole, = was never “the natural choice” the assignment operator. Pretty much everybody in the ALGOL tree used := for assignment instead, possibly because = was so associated with equality. Nowadays most languages use = entirely because C uses it, and we can trace C using it to CPL being such a trash fire.

Crabs: The bitmap terror (1985). One of the truly groundbreaking inventions at Bell Labs. The report is a like a who's-who of famous computer scientists, pranking each other.

In the next few days, unaware people were exposed to crabs in the comfort of their own terminal ("Let me show you something..."). The question would always come up: "How do you stop them?" "You can't." "Yes, but how do you stop them?"

In the land of BSOD 256 byte demo for pico8. The source code fits in a tweet.

About the efficient reduction of lambda terms, an introduction to optimal reduction and whether it is useful in practice (somewhat pessimistic).

Solving the mystery behind Abstract Algorithm’s magical optimizations. One of the more suprising results of optimal reduction is that you can compute exponentials of church numerals efficienty, e.g. computing 10¹⁰ mod 13 nearly instantly, even though the code looks like it would need to store 10¹⁰ in unary representation. How does it do it?

Arts and Culture

David Bowie once performed as a guest singer with Placebo in 1999.

Nouvelle Vague's cover of Bela Lugosi's Dead is pretty good. (Although I still prefer the original.)

Hatsune Miku cover of Ameno. I think it's better than the original, which is very rare for vocaloid music.

The moai emoji was likely inspired by statues in Shibuya, not in Easter Island.

Excellent shitposty Utena liveblog (via pdaliceliveblogs who by the way also runs a good Utena liveblog).

“I got measles once” THIS IS THE LEAST TRAGIC TRAGIC ANIME BACKSTORY I HAVE EVER BEEN FORCED TO SIT THROUGH

UTENA therefore you and me. An animatic music video for si-o’s song “故にyou and me”. It’s quite good, and also I’m impressed with the dedication to make an anime music video by personally drawing it.

English translation of Renai Circulation by Y. Chang (4 min video, performed by Lizz Robinett). I'm impressed, it's not very literal but gets across the cuteness very well.

For some reason, Wir Sind Helden's 2005 hit "Von hier an blind" was translated and released in Japanese. It's very bad!

Hundreds of Artists Redraw the 2000s' Favorite Gothic Anime Angel. The original artist Hiro Suzuhira posted a redraw too. This is really sweet—but the twitter hashtag system is an abomination, at the time you could find hundreds and hundreds of them, but now the twitter search ignores old posts so the entire event is effectively lost? Apparently the original painting was concept art for, or turned into, a figure.

On Translationese. The prose in both Kenzaburo Oe’s and Haruki Murakami's novels have been compared to Japanese translations of foreign novels. But actually what this means is completely underdetermined: in the case of Murakami and early Oe it was a "clear and natural" style, but the "intellectual and elaborated" style of Oe's later novels was also called translationese.

Billie Eilish and Finneas break down their hit song 'Bad Guy' (12 min video).

The hillarious part about all this that we just were in Australia in May, and my dad goes "you heard these crosswalks?", and I was like "Yes. The chorus to Bad Guy". And he goes "what?"

"Take 5", but in 4/4.

Philip Glass tweets:

Stuck in the house? Here’s 3.5 hours of “Einstein in the HOUSE”, a full performance of Einstein on the Beach in someone’s living room.

(I don't know why, but I found this amateur performance much more engaging than the professional ones I have seen on youtube.)

Adam Neely posts some lo-fi hi-hop microtonal Christmas chunez, as well as some theory and more theory and examples.

And here is an entire playlist of Ｍｉｃｒｏｔｏｎａｌ lofi hip hop playlist - ♩beats to relax/study to♩ by various composers.

Esther Sayffarth adjusts a handful of bardsongs to avoid the letter e. Also by Sayffarth, a nice introduction to oulipo.social, my second-favorite social network after tumblr.

Much like roman sculptures, many medieval cathedrals were painted in bright colors rather than the bare stone we are used to. Here's a twitter thread with comparison pictures.

The word balloons in Watchmen change style depending on which decade is depicted.

The anatomy in the Armada Portrait looks really weird, I wonder what Queen Elizabeth thought. “Here it is, Your Majesty, ta-dah!”. “Uh, thanks, it's.... lovely. Let's put it in a rarely used room to protect it”.

There can't possibly be enough CVCVC names like "Shevek" for everyone on Annares. (via.)

why not declare that the official form is something more like Shevekozuf? That way we immediately get a billion or so possible names

(Meanwhile, there are a thousand ways to transliterate Chebyshev/Чебышёв.)

Words that are anagrams of their antonyms.

A year before Metroid, there was another game called Baraduke which also had a character in a bright yellow space suit who hunts underground space aliens, and at the end is revealed to be a woman. Is there some kind of shared cultural influence behind them?

Signifier is "a Brutalist response to 17th century typefaces", i.e. it tries to capture the essence of the earlier typeface while being obviously based on Bézier curves and polygons instead of on physical metal. Zoomed in it looks jarringly harsh, but when zoomed out it feels very similar to the classic humanist style.

Ink traps and pals. An ink trap is smalll notch near a sharp corner in a graphic design, to compensate for imperfect printing technology which would otherwise smooth out the corner. Many fonts make use of it, and similar ideas also transfer into the digital realm (e.g. in "Signifier" above).

Combining Blade Runner 2049 music and drone footage of San Francisco on 9/09/20.

Meander is a procedural system for generating historical maps of rivers that never existed.

International Politics

The New Age of Instagram Diplomacy.

Over the last few months the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has been pushing its diplomats to vigorously engage on global (as opposed to Chinese) social media channels. This has been most notable on twitter, and has resulted in two dozen diplomats or so adopting the persona of professional twitter troll. The United States does this, Trump says that, and voila! the Chinese diplomatic core is on the scene with a few sarcastic comments they hope might go viral. Hou takes the MOFA directive to grow her social media presence in a different direction: her model of public diplomacy is not the twitter brawler, but the Instagram influencer. Welcome to the 2020s.

Would Iraqis greet us with flowers? I made sure of it.

On Feb. 13, 2003, a few weeks before the invasion, I was working as a cameraman for a network news bureau in Kuwait. Our fixer told us that his cousin, a florist, planned to donate 10,000 flowers to children’s charities for the youngsters to give to American soldiers to show gratitude for saving them from Saddam. It was a perfect scene: friendly Arabs, cute kids, our brave men about to go into battle. We pitched the story to our bosses in New York.

CNN article about the Iranian missile strike, with interviews from soldiers on the base. The strike hit a housing unit for drone pilots and operators, so it was targetted quite precisely. The article ends with this rather ironic quote (via):

“You looked around at each other and you think: Where are we going to run? How are you going to get away from that?” said Ferguson. “I don't wish anyone to have that level of fear,” he said. "No one in the world should ever have to feel something like that.”

Inside the U.S. military's raid against its own security guards that left dozens of Afghan children dead. There's a lot of back story in the article about how U.S. local contracting for base security worked, but the core story seems to be something like this. U.S. soldiers were told that a Taliban commander would be visiting a particular village for a wedding. They device a plan that 12 special forces soldiers will drive into the village in the middle of the night to abduct the man, followed by another 70 soldiers ten minutes later to cover them as they move out. Unfortunately, when they try to do so, they discover that there are guards posted around the house: a parked truck blocks the street, and men with rifles fire at them from the roof when they stop their car. And then,

The commander shot two red flares into the air so the other units trailing behind could find them. He would later testify that he did not consider retreat a viable option. “For the reputation and just the credibility of coalition,” the commander said, adding that withdrawing from a fight with the Taliban when you are so far committed is “completely inconceivable and unacceptable.”

So instead they call in an AC-130 gunship to reduce the entire village to rubble, killing 91 civilians including 60 children.

“Marg bar Âmrikâ” is better translated as “Down with America” than “Death to America”. Or maybe “Go to hell, America”?

Supposedly you can tell whether an editorial in People’s Daily or Global Times represents official government policy based on whether the name in the byline is a pun (via).

Examples include
钟声 Zhong Sheng
“voice of China” or “voice of the central”

任仲平 Ren Zhongping
“important People’s Daily commentary”

仲组文 Zhong Zuwen
“Central Committee (CC) Organization Dept. Article”

An ongoing trial in Guantánamo Bay gives some more details about torture in 2002.

Mitchell became embroiled in a vicious turf war with a rival, the CIA chief of interrogations, for mastery of the “enhanced programme”. Each sought to use their links to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to get the other removed from their post. In that struggle the detainees were used as bargaining counters. The two men had them tortured for training or demonstration purposes.

What Does It Take To Be a Shen Yun Dancer? I got this as a Youtube ad a lot of times until I finally watched it, and it's actually kindof compelling! I guess cults are bad, but I feel a lot more positive towards Falun Gong if they produce a bevy of lithe attractive ballet dancers. They eventually took down the video, but apparently it was spammed enough to become an internet meme.

In more Falun Gong youtube ads, Hong Kong Printing Press - Our Press Was Just Torched is cute because they pronounce The Epoch Times as "The Epic Times".

So don't let communists win! Click that button below and try the paper yourself.

Domestic Politics

What did Mayor Pete actually say about Palestine (in Arabic) that time? Basically nothing.

Elizabeth Warren's interfaith council turns out to be an 87.5% intrafaith council.

Republicans sadly warn us that they would not vote for Bernie Sanders.

Special Adviser to the White House on Faith and Opportunity Initiative, Paula White, leads a prayer: “In the name of Jesus, we command all satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now”. She later commented that it was taken out of context and not meant literally. (Via.)

Meanwhile, the chaplain at the U.S. Army Garrison Daegu in South Korea writes a COVID 19 Assualt Prayer.

Law

USCIS policy to reject applications if they have any blank fields.

Yolanda is hardly the only victim of maliciously persnickety bureaucrats. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has collected 140 other examples of allegedly “incomplete” forms: an 8-year-old child who listed “none” for employment history but left the dates of employment field blank. An applicant who entered names of three siblings, but the form has spaces for four.

A story from Short Circuit:

While in jail on misdemeanor charges, inmate asks guard if he can charge his cell phone, which was not taken from him during booking. Uh oh! He's charged with possessing contraband! Trial court: “[C]onsider yourself fortunate” that I'm only sentencing you to 12 years in jail, with parole eligibility after three, instead of a full 15-year sentence. Mississippi Supreme Court: “While obviously harsh, [a] twelve-year sentence for possessing a cell phone in a correctional facility is not grossly disproportionate.” Concurrence: Our case law does, indeed, demand we uphold a 12-year sentence against this father of three for a victimless crime likely caused by a failure in booking procedure, but the prosecutor and trial judge deserve a mild finger-wagging for being so punitive. (H/t jduffyrice)

Decryption Originalism: The Lessons of Burr. Can the government force you to decrypt your hard drive, or does the Fifth Amendment protect you? Turns out there is case law on this question, from 1807.

In 2014, more than half of all California wiretaps (and one sixth of all the wiretaps in the U.S.) were authorized by one judge in Riverside County.

Steward Baker asks: Will the First Amendment Kill Free Speech in America? (I.e., a court held that you can't sue a search engine to force them to change their search results.)

The Automotive Police State: “No form of direct government control comes close to [traffic] stops in sheer numbers, frequency, proportion of the population affected, and in many instances, the degree of coercive intrusion.” Interesting to compare this with Scott's comments about On The Road (“a picture of a high-trust society collapsing ... because the book’s protagonists are going around defecting against everyone they meet at a hundred ten miles an hour”), and Kontextmaschine's comment that “the development of motor vehicles totally changed crime in America”.

Why is the Japanese Conviction Rate so High? (via.)

[It] seems unrelated to any pro-conviction bias at the judicial administrative offices. We suggest an alternative explanation: the high conviction rates reflect case selection and low prosecutorial budgets; understaffed prosecutors present judges with only the most obviously guilty defendants.

Before 1972 U.S. federal law didn't have any explict statute about audio recordings, so instead this was left to state law. The 1972 copyright act deliberately didn't preempt state law for existing works, so recordings made before February 15, 1972 are still managed by the state. However, New York law also didn't have any explicit statute about audio recordings, so instead New York courts rely on the common law! I'm not sure how much medieval English case law there is about phonograms, but apparently the courts have concluded that copyright therefore lasts in perpetuity. [Edit to add: this was fixed by the 2018 Music Modernization Act which extended federal copyright to old audio recordings also.]

COVID-19

Can you defeat COVID-19 by putting snot up your butt?

Local government authorities cut off thousands of roses in a park in Saitama, to keep flower viewers away.

"Taiwanese response to the 'rona was so effective/early in part because deputy director of Taiwan CDC was shitposting on Taiwanese equivalent of 4chan on New Year's Eve".

Clown delivers covid death count.

Military

"laser/beam weapons are often depicted as instantly penetrating the target, but currently existing laser weapons are low-power, like a lightspeed flame thrower."

Long range artillery faded into obscurity in the U.S. army because the range closures are a pain.

The original use-case for the SR-71 was to direct a second wave of ICBM strikes.

There was at least experiments to give the F-117 an air-to-air capability with a secondary mission to shoot down Soviet AWACS, just like in Red Storm Rising.

The Pantsir's record in actual combat situations speaks for itself.

Venezuelan patrol ship sinks itself by ramming a cruise liner.

Beware of the Gwern

/u/terratheillusionist relates this sad tale:

“Once opened I was shown a waifu so lovely and pure that I stared in amazement and awe. Then the page refreshed automatically. Now I am doomed to forever refresh to get her back, knowing it shall never be.”

And:

The man was devastated when he found out that his waifu wasn't real fictional.

I know the feel bro.

Light verse on twitter

Doubly dactyls about insight pornography, effective altruism, breakdown of the bicameral mind.

Some say "as rodents, so with man" / Some say "IN MICE".

The tachyonic antitelephone.

Miscellaneous

Ethan Zuckerman leaves a letter for the next occupant of his MIT Media Lab office, explaining why the window doesn't open.

Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15 (2015). “MIT has been my middle school, my high school, my entire education,” says Ahaan Rungta. MIT is extremely insular: the most common graduate school destination for MIT undergrads is MIT itself, and (unusually for the US) many of their faculty members went to MIT for grad school. I was hoping this guy would take it to the next level, but apparently he instead became a sports writer for Red Sox Life and Celtics Life.

Vox on The right way to kill a fish (8 min video). “the first step is to make sure that this fish doesn't experience any stress [...] by placing a spike into its brain”

"If archaeologists had to name our culture in the style of the Corded Ware culture or the Funnel Beaker culture, we’d be the Injection Moulded Plastic culture."

In December 2020 Britain had its first monthly trade surplus since record-keeping began in 1998. However, it's apparently an artifact of a single bank changing a gold holding from "unallocated" to "allocated" status (without even physically moving any gold).

The Cost of Thriving (and a twitter thread summarizing it by the author). Trying to compare inflation-adjusted cost of living in different time periods is made complicated because the measures of inflation include improvements in the quality of goods. E.g.,

BLS reports that toy prices (including electronics and video games) fell 73 percent from 1994 to 2018.19 Yet the actual toys on the market have become more expensive. In 1996, Toys “R” Us advertised a Nintendo 64 for $200.20 Today, the cheapest Xbox One console sold by Amazon costs $245 (and its list price is $300). The outdated Sega Genesis cost $100 in 1996, whereas the outdated Xbox 360 costs $170 now. A twenty-inch boys’ bike cost $100 in 1993 and costs at least $100 now.

In order to capture a notion of the good middle-class life, the author proposes to instead compare "the number of weeks of the median male wage required to pay for rent on a three-bedroom house at the 40th percentile of a local market’s prices, a family health insurance premium, a semester of public college, and the operation of a vehicle". Doing so shows that the "thriving" middle class existence is indeed harder to get now than in the past.

Twitter user ellegist made a chart of men you will briefly date in your 20s; other twitter users had a lot of thoughts on it.

Funny tweets

Ship of theseus anime cut. As if you could prevent heart attacks by letting a special medical spider bite you once a year. Seven-year-old kid fails to stump mom about International Space Station trivia. Academic fields ordered by purity. Canonically, the Buddha had a magical penis containing 10⁴⁰ bodhisattvas. Eliezer Yudkowsky bakes a zero-calorie cake. A summer roll is sprouting. You cannot remove this baby. This cake is a lie. ALL NATURAL OAK & HICKORY COWBOY BRAND LUMP. Mediatation lifehack. Why are radio wavelengths called X-band, S-band, etc? Why are the two magnetic fields denoted B and H? A Google spelling correction. People stocking up for social distancing buy ALMOST all the beans. The ceiling fan had a wall controller that seemed fairly straightforward. Star forts from ancient astronauts. Yudkowsky on false statements. 10-liter fuel can of the French army.

The Sphinx was an experimental project for a home automation system, commissioned by the Soviet State Committee for Science and Technology in 1987. The functionality was perhaps marginal, but the design is extremely stylish!

A colorful door constructed out of 585 mounted diapositives of Pantone swatches.

Supposedly the awkward netflix Evangelion subtitles can be blamed on one particular anime convention in Baltimore in 2013. (Although, “don’t buy into shit some weirdo on SA says because it’s almost always bullshit lined with shreds of truth”.)

When Akira was first published in an English translation, it was given this absolutely hideous coloring.

The Anti-Kitten-Burning Coalition.

A brief course in Russian drinking vocabulary: part 1, part 2.

The Forbidden Books of Jewish Magic. Shorshei ha-Shemot is a magical compendium by the 17th-century Rabbi Moses Zacuto. In 1995 it was published as a book, but to buy it you first had to go through an interview, because the publishers had promised to “neither to give nor to sell the book to those other than the God-fearing who will not make use of it for Practical Kabbalah [Kabbalah Ma’asit], ... And they must conduct an investigation and an interrogation [hakirah u-derishah] before selling this holy book to see if he [the potential buyer] is worthy of it.”

Hong Kong police is being criticised for using tear gas in an unsafe manner. The British Army in the 1980s would not have done that:

Despite these fatalities in Northern Ireland, the secret document, written in September 1981, shows that British soldiers in Hong Kong planned to be “very much more aggressive than the present tactics in Ulster” if faced with a riot. [...] Briggs told his visitors that in reality his men would skip the less lethal option of using tear gas and resort straight to opening fire: “Practically the steps would be: Talk, Photograph, Baton rounds, Shotgun, and Small Arms fire”, he said. [...] “Small arms fire would be directed into the crowd for lethal effect.”

A possibly somewhat unhinged redditor complains about the r/SSC moderators:

No more imagining. It is 2019. I burst into this place like Perevozchenko bursting into the Chernobyl control room, and what are the bad news I have to deliver?:

The reactor core's gone!

Nope:

Global warming is working in tandem with a complex system collapse to end civilization and kill our entire species, and this will happen in this century.

And do you believe me?

Of course not, you're obviously a crazy person! You fried your brain with hard drugs!

I slightly partially agree with that! What I mean is that there is a crazy person in the room! And in the Chernobyl control room, the only crazy person was Dyatlov. And do you know what I see when I see someone calling me crazy? I see a crazy person, someone stuck in the denial stage, a Dyatlov.

Impossible! You're crazy, the climate is obviously fine! Take him to the infirmary Ban him!

You're seeing the blue-black dress as white-gold, Dyatlov. I see it as blue-black because I see things as they actually are, and you don't.

Anyway, what interests me is that this seems like a really widely applicable metaphor! Compare: in the decades after The Matrix was published, many different political factions started to talk about a “red pill”, because they all considered themselves as the ones who had seen through the general indoctrination. Similarly, this idea that the reactor already exploded so we need to suspend the rules and start punching people, and that everybody else is crazy for not seeing it, could (in addition to climate change) apply to e.g. concentration camps on the border; uncontrolled immigration (ala "The Flight 93 Election"); fascists on the streets; antifa supersoldiers on the streets; LGBT backlash; the Homosexual Agenda; hate-speech on social media; internet filters and supression of free speech; etc etc.

False Faces. A short blog post about Nonviolent Communication and modelling yourself as a collection of agents, but it mostly impressed me by the effective use of a red/white color scheme for the text and diagrams.

Over at la casa de memecucker, politics takes a sharp turn from theory to practice.

The Japanese Communist Party announce their new virtual idol! William Andrews provides some historical context, talking about JCPs previous propaganda art featuring youthful girls and music, the importance of reaching out to the newly-enfranchised 18-year olds, and the legacy of this all-singing, all-dancing JCP:

The JCP has traditionally had a very strong youth wing, which formed a major part of the student movement in the post-war years (leading to many serious clashes with the New Left students). Its youth movement also famously was always very musical. In fact, this was one of the many reasons that the New Left factions lambasted the JCP: that it had not only abandoned the cause of a true revolutionary movement, but was focused only on fun singing and dancing in its activism, when the radicals believed the stakes were so high they justified and even required direct physical conflict with the police.

There is an established legal doctrine that Once the Cat Is Out of the Bag, the Ball Game Is Over.

Via metafilter, an Interpretation and Analysis of Every Song By Pet Shop Boys. Though a few of the annotations seem either irrelevant

[the spelling ‘alright’] has become so extremely commonplace that it would be somewhat pedantic to insist on its ‘incorrectness’ in anything but the most scholarly and formal circumstances

or unconvincing

The line about the narrator not wanting a cat ‘scratching its claws all over my habitat’ may include a mild pun. Habitat is the name of a U.K.-based retail furniture chain founded in London in 1964.

or relevant and convincing but somewhat obvious

the last line … ‘Maybe I didn't love you…,’ suggesting … that he has indeed never really loved the person to whom he's singing.

“Post-mortems” collected by Dan Luu. Via tototavros, who correctly notes that everything in the “Time” section is great.

This is your captain speaking, is there a pilot on the plane?

Languagehat on translating Marx. The English translation of Capital says that “human labour in the abstract” is “a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour”—but the German original has a more vidid metaphor of labour as meat jelly. Meanwhile, the meaning of the phrase “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft” is hard to render in English, but there’s a suitable Russian word.

Eleanor Lutz makes an Atlas of Space: ten maps of planets, moons, and outer space. Topographic maps of Mars, the Moon, and Mercury; maps of the western constellations and constellations in 30 different cultures; and an orbit map of the solar system.

Very good thread by cryptography professor Matthew Green about the Trump administration preparing to push legally mandated encryption backdoors.

The arrangement of the Starlink satellite constellation is painful if you have perfectionistic tendencies.

A cool photo of the crumbling radar-absorbent skin of a F-22 Raptor.

Marianne Williamson's book A Return to Love (1992) comments on AIDS.

Why is it that sometimes when you unsubscribe from an email list it says it can ‘take a few days’?

Before Aum Shinrikyo became famous for their terror attacks, they were a meme because of their 1990 election campaign, featuring happy girls dressed as elephants singing “Shōkō, Shōkō, Asahara Shōkō”...

A simulacrum trend from the 1970s: wall-sized pictures of streams and mills, but the mill it is depicting is a reproduction too.

Tool-assisted speedrun to beat Super Mario Bros. 3 in 0.78 seconds.

In 1940-70 high end camera lenses often used thoriated glass to increase the index of refraction. However, thorium is slightly radioactive, which may cloud the film.

It used to be thought that male lions rarely hunted, with lionesses doing most of the work. According to more recent research male lions do hunt, but while the females hunt in groups on the open savannah, males are solitary ambush predators hiding in dense vegetation.

Praxis!

The Swedish phoneme notorious for having its own dedicated IPA symbol, /ɧ/.

Hacking a misdesigned “buy one get one free” promotion to obtain infinite pizzas.

“When Boris Johnson, as editor of the Spectator, published a poem in 2004 calling the Scots a ‘verminous race’ that deserved ‘comprehensive extermination’, he may not have imagined it could come back to haunt him 15 years later in his first weeks as prime minister.”

Via AlphaGamma on SSC, the UK Trident Alternatives Study.

The Trident Alternatives study reviewed the options generated for the 2006 White Paper and filtered them against the assumptions and constraints ... Hand-delivered systems were excluded as they would not meet several constraints, including in particular credibility and absolute range. ... Helicopters and dirigibles were excluded because of technical feasibility and credibility issues. ...

Twitter threads about Soviet research into nuclear turbojets and nuclear ramjets.

A t-shirt with English-Japanese portmanteaus. I particularly like “sore wa chigawrong”, for exploiting that u/w is the same sound.

The James Bond film Spectre (2015) begins with a lavish Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City—which was invented for the movie. But the next year the movie inspired the city government to organize the parade for real. (via.)

Steam sales are not covered by the MA tax-free weekend.

The 9th Circuit finds that Second degree murder is not a crime of violence. (From the the dissent: “MURDER in the second-degree is NOT a crime of violence??? ... How can this be? ‘I feel like I am taking crazy pills’”.) The reasoning is fun and involves, like, three layers of weird legalistic constructions. (Via Eugene Volokh.)

What the Heck is Crab Rangoon Anyway? (via.)

The history of crab rangoon leads back to tiki culture. The dish was probably invented by Victor Bergeron, best known as the namesake founder of the Trader Vic’s chain of tiki bars. (Trader Vic’s, in turn, inspired the Trader Joe’s grocery chain—you can still see some of that weird colonialist imagination in its design motifs.)

Quiz: can you guess the world city from its cold war Soviet spy map?

On childhood reading:

I had plenty of favorite books, but Urfin Jus and His Wooden Soldiers is particularly engraved in my memory. [...] And I remember my love for that book especially well because later, when I read Volkov’s many, many volumes to my daughters, I suddenly discovered how monstrously, unimaginably poorly they were written. I simply could not physically say with my mouth what I read on paper; I had to edit the text while reading so as not to spit.

Cute economics theorem: ‘Just Enough’ Piracy Can Be a Good Thing :

In this setup, the supply chain faces a situation known as double marginalization: Both the manufacturer and the retailer decide on independent margins, each of which gets assigned to the price of the good. ... That’s why manufacturers and retailers may be better off with a moderate dose of piracy — two wrongs can actually make a right. When Comcast loses a Game of Thrones viewer to piracy, so does HBO, which limits the pricing power of each.

Having a visa does not guarantee entry to the U.S.—the immigration officer you talk to at the airport can make the final determination. As an incoming Harvard student found out, when his visa was revoked because people he followed on social media had made posts critical of the U.S.

A guest feature on zimmerit.moe describes The Evangelion-Ultraman Connection:

NERV is, essentially, a deconstruction of Ultraman’s SSSP or Science Patrol team. In Ultraman, the Science Patrol’s job was to discover the monster-of-the-week and serve as the means of exposition. In subsequent Ultra Series, there’s some manner of successor to the Science Patrol which fills the same role, but in general, they always typically side with their show’s Ultra hero and help them. NERV, however, is their antithesis; a version of the Science Patrol that, instead of working with Ultraman, confined and controlled his power for their own purposes.

The Hasegawa typeface has the latin alphabet written with a brush, based on lettering in English-languge books published by Takejiro Hasegawa around 1890-1910. (Via.)

A jet airplane on the ground will form a (usually invisible) vortex leading into the air intake, like a giant bathtub drain.

Because of zero-width joiner shenanigans, “If you want to remove the emoji of a Black woman running from a Google doc, you have to first delete her gender, and then delete her Blackness.”

A Vantablack BMW X6 coupe.

Misc funny tweets: Toilet tokens. Galaxy brain energy. ネコと和解せよ. Pet chameleon helps out in the household. Soviet maps always divided the U.S. into three regions. US Law Violation Roulette.

Colombia faces a potential time bomb, as former drug lord Pablo Escobar's private hippos have gone feral. On the one hand they are a super-adapted invasive species and very dangerous to humans, but on the other hand they are adorable, so people don't want to shoot them.

photo_time_traveling - photoshopped pictures of celebrities standing next to younger versions of themselves.

Wanted: Epitaphs for Hot Topics.

Any given research community always has a few hot topics that attract an inordinate number of paper submissions. Sometimes these are flashes in the pan, other times they mature into full-fledged areas having their own workshops and such — but most often they endure for a few years, result in a pile of PhDs, and then slowly die off. After this happens I often find myself with unanswered questions: Were the underlying research problems solved or were they too hard? Did the solutions migrate into practice or are they withering on the academic vine? What lessons were learned?

Languagehat asks: why are people now talking about hominins instead of hominids? (Answer in the blog comments.)

There is a St. Marx cemetary in Vienna. (As always on languagehat, the blog comments are excellent.)

Someone who was a moderator on several subreddits was charged with sex crimes, and the subsequent gloating reveals a network of mutual antagonism. People on r/ChapoTrapHouse crow about the corruption this reveals in r/neoliberal ("To begin with, I've confirmed this with multiple sources in the neoliberal community"). Someone on r/thelastpsychiatrist uses this as a "teaching moment" about "SJW-Feminism-Carceral-Neoliberalism-Necropolitics" ("They are the town bores of 300 years ago. ... They were the volunteer church choirmaster of the 1970s. Today the analogue is a /r/badphilosophy mod."). And someone on r/SneerClub apparently decided that the shoe fit and sneers about the r/thelastpsychiatry post! Politics in 2019 seems to take place in a 2D plane that is very orthogonal to the usual left-right scale.

                      Bad philosophy
                         sneering
                            ^
                            |
                            |
 Chapo Trap  <--------------+-------------> The neoliberal community
  Housism                   |
                            |
                            v
                    Last Psychiatry fans

Short youtube clip (8:36) about four space-shuttle related artifacts at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The "high-temperature reusable surface insulation" tiles had a density of 140 kg/m³, which is simlar to balsa wood. The density of cork is around 220 kg/m³ and styrofoam (expanded polystyrene, like in food containers) is 11-32 kg/m³.

If you don't know Swedish you are really missing out on the Martin Kragh saga. He is an academic who, a few years ago, published a paper Darkly Hinting (with zero evidence) that a particular newspaper spreads pro-Russian disinformation. This pissed off a lot of journalists. Now his name figured in the Integrity Initiative hack and the newspaper published an opinion column Darkly Hinting (with zero evidence) that Kragh is secretly working for the British government. People on twitter are so angry. Everyone calls for the counter-intelligence police to investigate everyone else.

The mathemization of economics in the 1950s and 60s.

Norwegian Air's nightmare in Iran (and an NPR episode about the same story). In December 2018, a Norwegian Airlines plane on-route from United Arab Emirates to Norway suffered engine troubles and made a precautionary landing in Iran. Unfortunately, because of U.S. sanctions it's illegal to export spare parts to Iran or to send engineers there, and the U.S. government shutdown meant that nobody could issue an exceptional export license, so the the plane was stuck at the airport for more than two months.

Gordon Kane predicts when we will observe SUSY particles. (Via Sabine Hossenfelder.)

Translating "onii-chan" as "Leonidoff sauce".

From the "are we the baddies" department: in a series of experiments April 1945-July 1947, eighteen unwitting patients were injected with radioactive materials.

Building a telephone ring booster. There is something noble about going through this effort just to be able to keep using your old phone from the 1980s, isn't there? I myself, I couldn't even get the energy to keep using my preferred window manager on my desktop computer. I think the onslaught of the modern world has broken me somehow.

A gin and tonic at Oakland International Airport.

Cetaceans in Cold War Science and Science Fiction. Kontextmaschine suggests corvids are next.

Remember the ancient frozen fish from the introduction to The Gulag Archipelago? Some squirrels were retrieved under similar circumstances.

"Hey, want to see the worst org syn workup ever?"

Why does the Magna Carta talk about the ancient obligation to build bridges?

LEDs and analog drivers for them. This blog post is really clarifying! Why do people say that LEDs drop a constant voltage? How can you make a red/green LED package with only two leads?

I really liked this Utena livetweeting thread.

A case solved by /r/whatsthisthing -- "Uncle found this in a cave in Okinawa around 1966-1967, believes it's from WWII." It sure is!

YouTube's new fact check tool apparently classified videos of the Notre-Dame fire as fake, and attached an article about 9/11.

The IRS replies to a FOIA request about their Bitcoin policy.

I really hope Adrienne got her furnace fixed; it was a pretty cold February. But I'd have much preferred learning less about her working-from-home schedule and more about the substantive policy reasoning she and others shared in advance of the 2014 bitcoin tax guidance.

The image data is used to estimate gender in order to deliver the most optimized content.

Stasi agent costume party!

Vaporwave Google Maps.

Huawei optimizes your photos of the moon, but Moon mode is not what it seems.

Illustrated history of American cheerleader outfits.

A poem about Silicon Valley, assembled from Quora questions about Silicon Valley (from 2016).

Orcas and sperm whales stealing fish from human fishers.

By coincidence, a reporter finds out that his wife is the world's best tetris player. (Current leaderboard.)

Don't want to do the work. Someone on tumblr called this an "office shanty".

"404", as in the HTTP status code, is "widely used to denote censorship and oppression in China"

Tree Circle!

The original Portuguese lyrics to The Girl from Ipanema turns out to be extremely relatable, in an /r9k/ kind of way.

Girl with tanned body ... / It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw / Ah, why am I so alone? / Ah, why is everything so sad?

Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre. Very motivational post by Venkatesh Rao.

What defines mediocrity is the driving negative intention: to resist the lure of excellence. [...] You try not to be the best dinosaur you can be today, because you want to save some evolutionary potential for being the most mediocre bird you can be tomorrow

Jones et al., Diophantine Representation of the Set of Prime Numbers, 1976.

I liked this exchange from reddit.

Obscure law entitles Prince Charles to legally set off a nuclear bomb. Apparently a lot of British laws include "Crown Saving Clauses", e.g. the Nuclear Explosions Acts provides that "No contravention by the Crown of a provision made by or under this Act shall make the Crown criminally liable". However, the question of who exactly is "the Crown" is surprisingly hard to figure out; it might include Prince Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall. The author complains of "clauses included as a matter of routine which no one, as far as I could discern, could explain or define".

Uber insiders describe infighting and questionable decisions before its self-driving car killed a pedestrian. Not at all reassuring.

The total number of axles in a train must not equal 256. Not at all reassuring.

How the Border Wall Is Boxing Trump In. In a very postmodern way, the original idea of a border wall seems to have been motivated less by concrete effects on the ground than by its rhetorical effect:

As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate — who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder — would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign.

I read Industrial Society and Its Future, and this bit reminded me a lot of the Whispering Earring:

Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we will illustrate with an analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a Grand Master, is looking over Mr. A's shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make all of his moves. In each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making all of his moves for him he spoils the game, since there is no point in Mr. A's playing the game at all if someone else makes all his moves.

Inattentional blindness reduced by 3D information. In VR you can see the gorilla!

I like the drip of redacted developments coming out of the mystery grand jury case.

Someone on twitter linked to this syllabus for a Classical Chinese course, which made me feel intensely jealous of undergrads who can just spend their time going to fun classes. I don't mean to say something like "you only know how good you have it when it's gone" because even when I was in college I was always thinking "I bet nothing in the rest of my life will be as good as now", and that has proven completely accurate.

From the "are we the baddies" department, George Washington apparently owned dentures made from human teeth.

If Holden Caulfield Spoke Russian.

after the brouhaha subsided, Nemtsov’s translation was pulled from print, leaving only Rait-Kovaleva’s—a net loss, perhaps, for Russian literature. Read side by side, these two translations almost seem to cancel out each other’s deficiencies—through a sort of triangulation, the contours of Salinger’s original begin to emerge.

An interview with the photographer who took the Paul Ryan 'How do you do fellow kids' photos.

I mean, it’s funny because the magazine didn’t like the pictures at first. The photo editor didn’t like the pictures. He was like, he didn’t really know what to make of them I don’t think. I think he was kind of like, “What is this?” It’s not really what they were expecting, but, I think they realized that they had something that was [laughs] potent, I guess, and useful. They ended up publishing the pictures on the eve of the vice-presidential debate.

You've seen the ads. But what's the deal with Shen Yun?. Answer: it's Falun Gong propaganda. There's a fun thread on Metafilter with comments from people who have been to the show, e.g.: "Not only was it lacklustre in its entertainment value and choreography, it was a slap in the face when the second half did a tone switch and had posters and chants that said 'Falun Gong is good.' They also asked the audience to chant along."

The Hidden Cost of the ‘Fat Leonard’ Investigation

China was at the time seen as the U.S. Navy’s greatest adversary, and therefore the best and brightest officers in the service cycled through deployments in 7th Fleet. Many of those same officers’ promotions were later put on hold while the investigation was ongoing, with the effects rippling up to the highest levels of the service.

Photos of (mostly) Soviet control rooms.

The animator describes the shot in Into the Spider-Verse where Gwen plays the drums.

On her first day in office, the Swedish Minister of Culture is accused of cultural appropriation.

The wikipedia article on tailings dams is darkly humorous. "A tailings dam is typically an earth-fill embankment dam used to store byproducts of mining" ...so you just put the toxic waste in a big pool? "Tailings dams are designed for permanent containment, meant to 'remain there forever'". Thus solving the problem for all time! "10,000 years is 'a conservative estimate' of how long most tailings dams will need to maintain structural integrity." Wow, that sounds impossibly difficult, I wonder what insane engineering they use to approach this? "[The] failure rate is 'more than two orders of magnitude higher than the failure rate of conventional water retention dams.'" Well then.

(Via Scott's linkpost:) The Embroidered Computer! So cool!

Apple revokes Facebook's "enterprise app" certificate (which is needed to install/run applications outside the Apple app store), shutting down all the internal Facebook applications. I guess I don't feel too much sympathy for Facebook in particular, but remember when people still owned general-purpose computers? This is the shittiest cyberpunk dystopia.

[posting this on Dreamwidth to try out the editor, and to experience the elegant Middle Cut from a more civilized age.]

A year ago nostalgebraist posted a review of Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line, and pointed out that its arguments about text, GUIs, Eloi, and Morlocks culture, etc, are all enjoyable but complete bullshit.

Last month I read The Second Self (by Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT), and I was surprised to find that in the preface to the 2005 edition of the book, Turkle draws a distinction which feels very similar to Stephenson's Eloi/Morlock split. Let me quote extensively (the entire book is on libgen too, although obviously none of us would dream of reading it illegally):

( Read more... )

Turkle does not cite ItBwtCL, but I think the similarities are very striking. If this really is an "independent discovery", it seems to indicate that Stephenson and Turkle are on to something—that these two clusters of Transparency/CLI/Algorithm/Books versus Opacity/GUI/Simulation/Disney correspond to some real thing in the world. Even if ItBwtCL is full of glaring factual errors and logical fallacies, the conclusion may still be true.

Turkle's theoretical explanation for the clusters is quite different from Stephenson's. One of the main claims of her book has to do with two different cultural conceptions of computers. One, which goes back to Lady Lovelace, thinks of computers as the paradigmatic example of a mechanical, deterministic, and predictable system which "only does what you tell it". She interviews microcomputer hobbyists in the early 80s, and this is exactly what attracts them to the hobby. The early micros are much to small to do anything very impressive or useful, so the pleasure of owning them is all about understanding how they work. As people pursue this hobby, it's largely about perfecting their understanding, e.g. taking an existing program in BASIC and rewriting it in assembly language. On the other hand, she also interviews hackers at the MIT AI Lab, who are the exact opposite: they want as high-level languages as possible, and they delight in small commands having elaborate and hard to predict effects. (Think of the introduction to SICP, which compares computer programming to conjuring spirits.) So which way you prefer can depend on your personality and what your appetite for risk/safety is, and the same computer interface can in principle support both styles. Turkle interviews Doris, who uses a word processing program running on something like MS-DOS:

[Doris] was doing her writing on a general-purpose computer, rather than the much more restricted special-purpose word-processing machines that are common in business settings. This meant that she also got to work with other programs. She needed to use a separate program in order to prepare the disks on which her text is kept, to make “back-up” copies of her work, to rename files, and to combine them to make her chapters into a book manuscript. Her involvement with these many programs gave her a sense of accomplishment at being able to find her way around not one constructed world, nor, indeed, a number of them, but within a system of logical worlds whose unity is symbolized by the “operating system,” the program that coordi- nates and gives access to the other programs in the system. At first, using the operating system felt to her like the symbol-pushing of her memories of school mathematics. But as time went on, its rules and hierarchy began to seem elegant, its patterns reassuring. Like Carl, Doris found pleasure in understanding a system in that especially complete way that does not ever happen in the “real” world.

Although Doris does not program, she is clearly on one side of the divide separating the style of the “prototypical hacker” from that of the “prototypical hobbyist.” She is interested not in magic, but in transparent understanding:

I have a friend whose son wants to be a computer wizard [the term used at her university for virtuoso programmers in the style of hackers]. For a while, I called on him whenever I had a problem. But I can’t stand the way he works with the computer. He won’t read the sections of the manual I show him. He sits down and starts typing. He never seems to know exactly what’s going on, but somehow by instinct he finds a way to solve the problem. I can’t stand it. I have stopped asking him for help.

But although both approaches are possible in principle, in practice most everyday things are too complicated to understand completely. Microcomputers in the 1980s (and the similarly-sized PDP-7 in the 1970s) are an exception: they are simple and discrete enough that you really can know exactly what is going one, and unlike modern computers there is negligable abstraction leakage (the LOGO source code, or the 6502 assembly, or the circuit diagram each give a "complete" description of the system). For a brief moment in time, ordinary households contained these interesting objects which really rewarded bottom-up understanding. People who were there remember it fondly:

The world isn’t like that anymore. At some point along the way the systems that were being built and the libraries and components that one had available to build systems were so large, that it was impossible for any one programmer to be aware of all of the individual pieces, never mind understand them.

I guess in this theory, we can still attribute the change to Microsoft Windows—not necessarily for popularizing the GUI over the command line, but for creating famously messy APIs, which do not come with source code, so that we all had to settle for experimental poking around. It can't be a coincidence that the Law of Leaky Abstractions was coined by a Microsoft alumnus.

Maybe, back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all "Morlocks who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in, a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision." It's just that this is a historical coincidence, rather than an intrinsic property of command line interfaces.

I guess this is the Schelling point for tumblr refugees? I hope it will not become necessary, but I'm kindof charmed by the clunky interface.