July/August Links (未来をLET'S START!)

[youzicha]

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.