December linkdump / bad takes collection

[youzicha]

(Everyone on my reading page are talking about how virtuous they feel for being on Dreamwidth, and how this site brings out the best in them, etc. Anyway, here's a bunch of links and bad politics that I felt were too low-value to post on tumblr.)

Dying All Tensed-Up. The 25th space shuttle mission was the Challenger accident. The 26th mission, two years later, was fine. But the 27th mission apparently came extremely close to disintegrating on re-entry in exactly the way Columbia did 15 years later. I wonder what the public reaction would have been.

The Bat and Ball Problem Revisited. A detailed and very funny review of how people go about trying to solve the famous Cognitive Reflection Test question.

Harassment of Waymo Self-driving Cars. The article suggests that people take out their general anger at society/the economy on the cars. For a long time I have seen theoretical suggestions that people could block cars by just standing in front of them, taking advantage of the cars' unwillingness to run people over, and now that seems to be actually happening.

Byrne’s Euclid. A HTML/SVG reproduction of Oliver Byrne’s celebrated work from 1847, plus interactive diagrams, cross references, and posters.

There is a Classical Chinese Wikipedia, where the Article/Talk/History tabs are labeled 文/議/誌, with Featured Articles for the pre-Confucian Chinese classics. Aesthetic!

There's No Such Thing as a Free Watch is very good, but I also liked this Hacker News comment suggesting that even the people selling the watches don't make any money, and the real profit is in being a consultant teaching people how to set up scammy online watch stores.

A New York Times columnist calls TikTok "the only truly pleasant social network in existence." Joseph Cox, writing for Vice/Motherboard, instantly replies that it is poorly moderated, leading to problems with nazis and people soliciting underage nudes. Could it be that the only way to get rid of bad conduct on social networks is through suffocating panoptic surveillance which also sucks all the joy out of them?

Three months after the Swedish election, the negotiations for forming a new government remain unsuccessful. Meanwhile the lame-duck government proposed an “unpolitical” budget, by making as few changes as possible from last year. For example, it allocates 8 million SEK for celebrating the 100th year anniversary of film director Ingmar Bergman—for the second year in a row.

From somewhere in the middle of a woke Twitter thread on why we must regulate Facebook:

Trying to fight a predatory, politically connected monopoly through heroic personal responsibility doesn't work. You can't fight the sugar companies just by dieting harder. You can't fight Amazon just by buying a few books locally. System problems must be solved systemically.

I guess it fits with leftist thought in general, but I had not realized that “dieting is impossible, the only way to lose weight is through government regulation” has become so uncontroversial that you can just list it as an supporting example without further discusssion.

Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge. Hey, Iraq still exists, I wonder how things there have been going lately? It occurs to me that almost all English-language long-form reporting from Iraq that I have seen has been from The New Yorker, they really seem to play an important role.

Famous author Alice Walker unfortunately spreads antisemitism. But since we live in the never-ending 2015, shitpost of the world, she does so in free verse:

Where to start?
You will find some information,
Slanted, unfortunately,
By Googling. For a more in depth study
I recommend starting with YouTube. Simply follow the trail of “The
Talmud” as its poison belatedly winds its way
Into our collective consciousness.

András Schiff Beethoven Lecture-Recitals. András Schiff performed the complete Beethoven piano sonatas 2004–2006, and before each one he gave a lecture where he plays for a bit, talks for a bit, and explains his interpretation of the pieces. This is really charming!

Zero Books Posadist Special. Features an interview with Comrade Communicator, a committed Posadist who finally explains the 2016 election in a way that makes sense.

Fermium, element 100, was first produced in 1952. In a nuclear reactor? In a particle accelerator? No, in rainwater. The American government quickly classified the study of fallout as a military secret, so scientists raced to produce Fermium in a particle accelerator to be the first to publish the discovery.

You've heard about “how many guilty men should escape before one innocent suffers”, but how about “how many percent of a jigsaw puzzle must you complete before you can see it's a space shuttle”?

Palm Pilot in the 1990s: instead of solving machine recognition of handwriting, train humans to write legibly. Amazon in the 2010s...