youzicha

In 1988 Bernie Sanders, returning from a 10-day trip to the Soviet Union, concluded that “The people in the Soviet Union love ice cream and that Ben & Jerry’s is going to make a fortune.” (Via Maciej Cegłowski.) Who was that communist who talked about ice cream being important and nourishing?

One of the songs on J.A. Seazer's new Utena-themed album is called “Papal Ass Allegorical Symbolism Operetta 1”.

8chan /robowaifu/. “We are technologists, dreamers, hobbyists and geeks looking forward to a day when any man can build the companionship he desires in his own home. Not content to wait for the future, however, we are bringing that day forward.” The level of companionship may currently be somewhat limited:

Minimum Viable Product Robowaifu

Apparently in the 16th century there was a trend of armillary sphere rings (1,2). The bands represent celestial coordinates, and when you are done thinking about astronomy you can fold it up and put it on your finger.

New York Times fashion section: “Anna Sorokin, Elizabeth Holmes and Cardi B all provided a visual brief on how to use clothes to communicate in court”. There is an Instagram for the outfits Sorokin wore during her trial, which were selected by a professional stylist:

As it turns out, Sorokin, having retained the services of New York criminal attorney Todd Spodek, is now being dressed by a stylist. ... Spodek confirmed Thursday morning that the stylist is indeed [Anastasia] Walker, who works with celebrity clients including Courtney Love, T-Pain, and G-Eazy. He added, describing Sorokin’s look for court on Thursday, “Today it’s Yves Saint Laurent blouse, and Victoria Beckham pants.”

“Half of Americans admit using swimming pool in lieu of shower”---but these things are not what they seem, the survey sponsor is Big Chlorine!

Google search trends for CNN vs. Fox News 2008-2018. A reddit comment suggests that it may largely be driven by more old people getting internet.

Google search trends for CNN vs. Fox News, 2008-2018

Gwern trains a neural network to interpolate between anime faces and photos of real faces. It's horrifying.

David Mitchell monologue about Beer Advertising (video, 2:35 min). “Who in the world, when looking for a long drink at the end of the day, wants it to be creamy?”

“My dad wired the bin the wrong way and now it’s an attack bin”

Languagehat on Language in 19th Century Russia: aristocratic Russians were raised by Russian-speaking nannies until age six or so, and then they were handed over to foreign tutors and required to speak French. The use of French by Russians continued for surprisingly long, Dostoyevsky commented on Russians in Bad Ems in the 1870s:

In Ems you can, of course, tell who’s Russian mainly by that Russian-French way of speaking which is peculiar to Russia alone and which has begun to amaze even foreigners. […] What surprises me is not that Russians don’t talk Russian to each other (it would actually seem odd if they did) but that they think they’re speaking French well. […] Russians speaking French (that is, a great mass of the Russian intelligentsia) can be divided into two groups: those who indisputably speak bad French, and those who imagine that they are speaking like real Parisians (all our high society) but in fact speak as indisputably badly as the first group.

Same Pictures. Same Places. 68 Years Apart. The New York Times recreates photos from 1951---mostly highlighting that people no longer wear suits.

The golden age of aerospace. The AN-1 was 1958 concepts for a nuclear-powered submarine aircraft carrier carrying a squadron of eight VTOL Mach-3 fighters. The Budd Skylounge was a 1967 concept for a bus/helicopter hybrid.

A Tale of Two Kitties by arsanatomica. A few weeks after reading this post I was feeling stressed out about work, and noticed that I was absentmindedly chewing up and swallowing a small wooden twig that happened to be on my desk. If I die from wood chip impaction, please go ahead and use my body for an educational tumblr post.

Bullet Time, a funny article about the social video site Bilibili. “the test was once even longer and more difficult to pass, earning it the nickname the ‘Chinese otaku high school examination’ in reference to the infamous, grueling, week-long test that single-handedly determines college admissions around the country”. “the Cultural Revolution, a display of youthful re nao gone very wrong”.

I watched the Chernobyl miniseries, which is like catnip to me: a period piece with lush production values set during the cold war, and it deals with a radiation accident! 😍😍 The events are fictionalized, but the setting is supposedly very authentic, and the reactor scenes were filmed in an actual RBMK-reactor in Lithuania. The first episode, which deals the first few hours after the accident, is the best and is also quite self-contained, so if you are not up for the full five hours I highly recommend watching that one. There's a short HBO's Chernobyl vs Reality - Footage Comparison (7 minute video), pairing shots from the tv series with archival film.

Nuclear tourist Carl Willis posts photos and videos of the Chernobyl power station, very helpful to get a sense for what it looked like on the inside.

The Chernobyl plant visitor center has a really detailed scale model showing the state of the reactor after the accident. Photos, video.

There is a photo going around of someone dying in an extremely gruesome way from radiation poisoning, but who exactly is it? (cw: death, graphic pictures.)

“FORTH on the ATARI: Learning by using FORTH is an incredible title, only topped by the cover art.“

I'm extremely pleased that someone uploaded Pale Fire on Genius! :D

Misunderstanding Beatles lyrics in 5th grade.

Probably you have heard about "PC-loser-ing" from Richard P. Gabriel’s essay The Rise of Worse Is Better, but what exactly is it? Hacker News has some useful explanations, including a link to a draft paper explaining the idea. You can see the difference in the behavior of the write system call. In Unix, if you handle a signal during the write, the system call will return and tell you how many bytes were written (fewer than expected). In ITS, the program counter will be set to just before making the call, and the syscall arguments will be changed in place by the kernel to only write the leftover bytes. The “New Jersey guy” in the essay was Bill Joy and the “MIT guy” was Dan Weinreb.

Fun bugs, via Hacker News. Math.Round opens the browser print dialog, and Infinite Loop in macOS Night Shift in the summer near the Arctic Circle.

“The 10 levels of jazz guitar” demonstrated by playing Summertime (4 minute video).

How to land on the Moon. A description of how the Apollo Lunar Module worked.

“Daily reminder that Eva Unit 01’s voice is just Megumi Hayashibara pitched down.”

An anecdote about using red/green LEDs to show hardware status.

Many emminent physicists, including Niels Bohr and John von Neumann, thought that lasers were impossible because of the uncertainty principle. Most kept disbelieving, but Von Neumann changed his mind in 15 minutes.

Singapore discovers one weird trick for funding the government.

People who are above the age of 40 are older than people who are below the age of 40, p < 0.0001.

Jibo was an MIT startup making a “social personal robot” designed to appeal to children, until the company was aquired and had to shut down their servers.

When Stuard picked Maddy up from school later that day, she handed him a note she wrote Jibo’s parent company. In it, Maddy writes that she loved Jibo since it “was created,” and that if she had enough money, “you and your company would be saved.” She signs off with, “I will always love you. Thank you for being my friend.”

IBM i: An Unofficial Introduction.

Let’s be honest: IBM i is a legacy system. Yet even given this fact, in some ways it comes across as more futuristic than contemporary, mainstream operating systems. A product of IBM’s “Future Systems Division” — their mission being to blue sky new ideas in systems design — it was ahead of its time in the 1980s and arguably is still ahead of its time. At the same time, anyone who has accessed an IBM i system via a terminal full of lime green text will appreciate that this is a system that time forgot.

As one of IBM’s “midrange” systems, IBM i exists to service boring business functions. Payroll, warehouse inventory; if you have some deeply boring bookkeeping totake care of and need an extremely reliable system to that end, IBM i has you covered.

So IBM i is at once extremely advanced technology, applied to the most mundane of ends. If you are a retail employee, you could easily use an IBM i system via a dated greenscreen and never appreciate the absurd and improbable sophistication of the system that lies behind it. It’s a bit like encountering an unreal computer of extraterrestrial origin and almost incomprehensible sophistication that was transported back in time 100 years in a freak timewarp but which is now being used solely to keep the accounts of a random credit union in Calgary.

In the discussions about sarin use in Syria, where people aligned with the Assad regime (implausibly) claimed that the sarin had been made by the anti-regime forces, you often saw the take that “It’s not possible to make sarin in a kitchen; here’s what the fancy chemical plant that the Aum Shinrikyo used looked like”. But apparently Aum were never able to get their tonne-scale plant to work, and the sarin that they actually used was made at kg-scale in a much smaller shed.

In a YouGov survey, around a third of Americans are in favor of a hypothetical preemptive strike on North Korea. There was no significant change in approval between a non-nuclear strike killing 15,000 North Koreans or a nuclear strike killing one million civilians. The authors also consider various subgroups, e.g.

When the number of expected North Korean fatalities increased from 15,000 to 1.1 million, preference for using nuclear weapons among respondents who favor the death penalty increased from 38 percent to 49 percent (although this is not a statistically significant change). One respondent who supported the death penalty and the US nuclear strike in this scenario explained, “It's our best chance of eliminating the North Koreans.”

Pope Francis releases “peace doves” in a Vatican City event, the doves are immediately attacked by other birds.

a white dove attacked by a hooded crow

The original source code of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0.

Star Wars spaceships rendered to scale hovering over Manhattan.

Guys do interior design. (I particularly like this one.)

“Das Licht funktioniert nicht!” --- “Ja, mein Kindle hat jetzt Goodreads!”

Indian-style Anthy cosplay, now complete.

Imogen Heap performs “Hide and Seek” using Mi.Mu Gloves (10 minute video). It’s like the Minority Report user interface, but for music.

In a single press conference, President Trump first apparently thinks “Western-style liberalism” means liberals in San Fransisco and Los Angeles, on the U.S. west coast, and then responds to a question about busing by saying “it is certainly a primary method of getting people to schools.” I guess he skipped watching the second Democratic primary debate (with the Harris-Biden exchange)... and really, who can blame him?