January links and thinks

"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.