youzicha

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".