2019Q4 links

[youzicha]

Aerospace

In order to get to the toilet in a B-36 bomber you had to use a rope and trolley to scoot down a 50 feet long, narrow pipe.

The Tragic Tale Of How NASA's X-34 Space Planes Ended Up Rotting In Someone's Backyard.

Most of the time the Apollo astronauts kept their gold visors down, so their faces are not visible in photos from the moon, but occasionally they flipped the visor up to look at something. Andy Saunders, an astronomy hobbyist, has been enhancing old photos to recover pictures of Neil Armstrong and Jack Schmitt.

The Masten Space Systems Xaero flew 110 test flights in 2010-2012. It was amazingly cute, I want to hug it!

Close approach of Borisov & Oumuamua.

Science and Technology

Neuralink announces a brain-machine interface which can implant thousands of electrodes.

The cockpit of the Shanghai airport maglev trains looks remarkably low-tech. The plug-in fan is a particularly nice touch.

Typesetting lines of justified text in the Linotype era.

Distributed-element circuits. Queering the Electrical Engineering/Magick Sigils binary.

Chiral Reactions With Chiral Electrons.

In Old Movies, Why The Dial Tone After Someone Hangs Up? (3 min video, via.) The answer is mildly interesting, but more importantly, the Museum of Communications in Seattle has an electromechanical telephone switch which you can see work as you dial a number!

Before the incubator was invented, premature babies had a very poor prognosis, with less than one in four surviving. After the incubator was invented (in 1896), doctors still did not use it because they worried that allowing weak babies to live would be dysgenic, so for the next 40 years the only way to get access to one was to enroll your baby as an attraction in an amusement park side show.

The arXiv paper What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole? is fun becaue Figure 1 shows a primordial black hole to scale. (via.)

The Kola superdeep borehole looks really inconspicuous on the surface.

How Microwaving Grapes Makes Plasma (8 min youtube video by Vertiasium). Grapes are just the right size that the wave length inside the grape equals the length of the grape, which focuses the radiation on a single spot.

Arts and culture

The Interlace, in Singapore, looks like a computer graphics rendering but it actually exists. Here's a video too.

Boulet - Flash-Back (Link to a single comic.)

En Garde!: Fencing at Ohtori Academy. The fencing club practices classical fencing, which fits with the general 19th century aesthetics. All the fencers in the series use épées except Ruka, who has a rapier. When Ruka “““coaches””” a girl in the club, their en garde position is actually pretty terrible. And the sword Shiori is polishing does belong to Ruka after all, a double fake-out.

Twitter user @est_ll does lots of cool Utena cosplay, e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Typefaces used in Evangelion. The Eva title cards reference Kon Ichikawa's credit texts, which in turn were inspired by the International Typographic Style.

Supposedly all Rothko's paintings are in the public domain now.

One of the tourist attractions of Onomichi (a city in Hiroshima prefecture) is the path of literature, a 1 km long walking trail featuring 25 poems engraved on stones. The poems are all inspired in some way by the town of Onomichi and were written by famous historical authors, but most of them had never been translated into English—until the translation of Yakuza 6.

Lana Wachowski on the Matrix trilogy:

we were like, “Well, can the audience go through the three movies and experience something similar to what the main character experiences?” So the first movie is sort of typical ... The second movie is deconstructionist ... And then the third movie ... asks you to actually participate in the construction of meaning.

(I guess the answer is “no”...)

Four Tiger swords are magic swords used to cut down evil spirits—they can only be forged between between 3-5am on two days every 12 years. The latest ones were made in 2013, on Feb 21 and March 5.

幼稚園児が書きたかった「鎧武」の字.

The bike that Pirsig rode during the trip described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace is now on display at the Smithsonian.

Ahegao shirt accessorized with ahegao latte.

“people seem more aware of the Problematic™ elements in the original Potter series. But one Problematic™ element I rarely see people mention in that context is how the fifth book seems to imply that Umbridge's comeuppance came in the form of centaurs gang-raping her.”

BING BANG, a kinetic and sound sculpture by Swiss artist Etienne Krähenbühl. (Via.)

Werner Herzog Was Brought to Tears by Baby Yoda.

Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting

Nearly every stylistic decision you see about the channel — the length of the clips, the number of examples, which studios’ films we chose, the way narration and clip audio weave together, the reordering and flipping of shots, the remixing of 5.1 audio, the rhythm and pacing of the overall video — all of that was reverse-engineered from YouTube’s Copyright ID.

The sculpture Ganymede (1804) by José Álvarez Cubero looks... unreasonably wholesome? Two bros having beers kind of thing.

Adapting Legge's translation of Shijing to “make it a bit more... leggy”.

Jake Tapper, a journalist at CNN, is a guest artist for Dilbert. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Someone tweeted a screencap from My Neighbour Totoro and noted that the perspective lines don’t merge in a point, prompting lots of discussion. Zompist redraws the image to show what it would look like in correct perspective.

Peter Handke won the Nobel after two jurors read conspiracy theory. The 2019 prize seems like an utter trainwreck: immediately afterwards the commentators were going “awarding such a controversional author clearly is meant to send a very very carefully calculuated message”, but then each subsequent interview with the jurors makes them seem more clueless, and no calculation is in evidence.

It seems complicated to figure out exactly how deplorable Handke’s genocide apologism is, but this column (German original, Swedish translation) makes him sound pretty bad.

Law

Ontario dental hygienist loses licence for treating wife.

In Ontario, it’s considered professional misconduct if a dental hygienist has “sexually abused a patient.” According to the Regulated Health Professions Act, sexual abuse includes any sexual intercourse or other types of sexual relations. Consent is irrelevant, and a spouse is included in the definition of a patient. There is a mandatory revocation of a professional’s licence for a finding of sexual abuse

Mark Dominus on the pain of tracking down changes in U.S. law. This is something I have noticed also: although one can easily read the current version of the United States Code online, it's surprisingly hard to figure out when a particular law was introduced. Each statute enacted by congress is a patch like ”delete paragraph so-and-so and instead insert the following text”, and the citations that link the Code to the corresponding Statutes are inconvenient to follow. But,

This article started as a lament about how hard it was for me to track down the provenance of the coffee exception. But it occurs to me that this is the response of someone who has been spoiled by plenty. A generation ago it would have been unthinkable for me even to try to track this down.

Originally the Code was only a convenience for the reader, but now it's the de factor authoritative source of law. Tobias A. Dorsey gives an example where the outcome depended on whether you read the Code or the actual Statues that congress wrote, and the Supreme Court followed the Code.

On march 18, 1947, one of the great justices, Felix Frankfurter, gave one of the great speeches on statutory interpretation. He called it “Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes.” Sixty years later, we consider his speech a classic on how to read the statutes. The irony, however, is that we no longer read the statutes. Not in the sense that Frankfurter did. Frankfurter actually did read the actual statutes. He did not read the United States Code; he read the Statutes at Large.

Clarence Thomas’s Radical Vision of Race. An extract from the recently published book The Enigma of Clarence Thomas; argues that Thomas' views on affirmative action are continuous with his radical student activism and his admiration for Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Antonin Scalia's friend Bryan Garner wanted Scalia to officiate at his wedding in 2010, but under Rhode Island law out-of-state judges could not serve as officiants. Garner had “friends in the state government who were ‘handling’ the matter”, by making the Rhode Island legislature pass a law (with only a day to spare). Apparantly this is a common thing, searching for “Solemnization of Marriages” on the RI legislature website finds dozens of these one-offs.

Freedom of the press and repression of the photocopier. A tale of Swedish jurisprudence.

International Politics

Trump's Pee Tape: Analyzing an incredibly convicing fake. Someone made a fake video recreating the fabled Trump pee tape, and apparently filmed it in the real Ritz-Carlton presidential suite (which costs $18,000/night).

A Ukrainian Jon Stewart Who May Bring Down Trump. A profile of Volodymyr Zelensky, who made a career from Soviet tv comedy to Ukranian tv comedy to being president of Ukraine.

How the Iran Hawks Botched Trump’s Syria Withdrawal

The efforts made by U.S. officials to appease Ankara never satisfied Erdogan. In early December 2018, Jeffrey inadvertently gave the Turkish leader the blueprint for the invasion he would conduct 10 months later. During a trip to Turkey in December 2018, Jeffrey urged Turkish officials not to launch a cross-border operation, warning that if Ankara attacked the YPG in northeastern Syria the United States would withdraw all its forces from the country, leaving the Turks to face Russian and Syrian troops on their border. The remarks were meant as a deterrent, but they were based on what turned out to be a false assumption: that Erdogan would rather have the United States and the SDF on his border than Russia and the Assad regime.

50% of AI researchers from Africa who wanted to attend the NeurIPS 2018 conference had their visa applications denied. One of them was Tẹjúmádé Àfọ̀njá, a phd student currently living in Germany. This year she organized one of the NeurIPS workshops, and was denied again.

The Nine Dash Line actually contains ten dashes.

The reappearance of the tenth dash has raised eyebrows in Japan because it’s drawn very close to Yonaguni, Japan’s westernmost island in the Ryukyu chain, only 70 miles from Taiwan. Yonaguni isn’t claimed by China ... but is practically obscured by the shading that emanates from China’s tenth dash.

Hokkaido University historian detained in China for two months.

According to news reports, Iwatani was detained by Ministry of State Security officials shortly after his arrival in his Beijing hotel in early September, having been invited to China by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for two weeks of research collaboration. He had been invited by CASS the previous year, with no apparent problems. [...] During a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Bangkok on Nov. 4, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hinted that the prospects for President Xi Jinping’s scheduled state visit to Japan next year might hinge on a proper handling of Iwatani’s case. This strategem seems to have paid off. With Iwatani’s release on Nov. 15, the Chinese government finally made public the charge that Iwatani had confessed to, as a condition for his release. Iwatani had confessed to “collecting inappropriate historical materials.” At the time of his detention, he had allegedly been found in possession of a book of documents relating to 20th century Kuomintang Party history.

Yomiuri Shimbun notes that the offending book was bought in a used-book store. This article gives additional context, noting that several other Japanese intellectuals have recently been harassed by China.

Kim Jong Un scaling Paektusan on a white horse! He looks ~so~ ~dreamy~. Per the KNCA news release,

The eyes of Kim Jong Un standing up atop grandiose Mt Paektu were full of noble glitters of the illustrious commander who clearly indicates the road of advance of a powerful socialist country that is achieving prosperity with its own efforts and by dint of storm of Mt Paektu in the face of all headwinds.

'This is mass rape': China slammed over programme.

In November, various Western media outlets reported that Han Chinese men had been assigned to monitor the homes of Uighur women whose husbands had been detained in prison camps. The reports came out after an anonymous Chinese official gave an interview with Radio Free Asia, confirming the program but denying there was anything sinister about it. As part of the “Pair Up and Become Family” programme, Han Chinese men stay with and sleep in the same beds as Uighur women. According to the Chinese Government, the programme is designed to “promote ethnic unity”.

Computing

The epic quest for the perfect self-enumerating pangram.

Bypassing the Nintendo NES DRM by zapping the system protection chip with negative voltage.

Hanno Behrens discovered a flaw in the Commodore 64 where a simple BASIC command could create a hardware-destroying short circuit. And then he, uh,

The first time I tried that out was on my own C64, it went into brown-out mode. Yes, I was even back then deeply scientific and I couldn’t believe what I had discovered. So I tried and was so fast on my off-switch that you can’t imagine. I really loved my computer but I loved knowledge more than that.

For a while many C64 died an unexplainable death. Especially in shops that I visited. To type in those two POKE was a matter of seconds.

It was the only time in my life that I did something destructive on computers, but if you found out something like THAT and you are 14, what would you have done?

Paul Graham is back on his bullshit, making a new Lisp dialect.

Some mystery user moved a billion dollars worth of BTC into a single bitcoin address. Various people on twitter think this is a bad idea, since this transaction could then become a very high-value target for exotic attacks—somewhat like storing your money in a single billion-dollar coin. Reminds me of the proposed Trillion-dollar platinum coin, or maybe the Bank of England £100,000,000 paper bank notes.

OpenAI experiments with fine-tuning GPT-2, and stumbles upon this amazing parable for Unfriendly AI:

One of our code refactors introduced a bug which flipped the sign of the reward. Flipping the reward would usually produce incoherent text, but the same bug also flipped the sign of the KL penalty. The result was a model which optimized for negative sentiment while preserving natural language. Since our instructions told humans to give very low ratings to continuations with sexually explicit text, the model quickly learned to output only content of this form. This bug was remarkable since the result was not gibberish but maximally bad output.

How “special register groups” invaded computer dictionaries. A lot of computing dictionaries, even ones published as late as 2017, all copy-and-paste the same definition:

Central Processor Unit (CPU)—Part of a computer system which contains the main storage, arithmetic unit and special register groups.

But a CPU does not contain the main storage, and “special register groups” is nonsense. This text actually orginated in 1959, when the words “CPU” and “mainframe” used to mean something quite different.

Explaining 4K 60Hz Video Through USB-C Hub. Even though the physical USB-C connector is the same, there are four different video standards in use, so you need to pay careful attention when buying a hub.

Clang solves the Collatz conjecture.

Stylometric and bigram analysis, and some careful connecting the dots, reveals that Gwern Branwen and Satoshi Nakamoto are both sockpuppets of—David Gerard! It's always the one you least suspect.

MakerDAO must have read Drew McDermott/Eliezer Yudkowsky's advice about replaing variable names with gensym'd lisp symbols and decided to adopt it as their house style.

The vacuum-tube based TRIPLE FLIP FLOP 309653 from 1956 stores 3 bits and draws 25 watts.

A description of how programming via punch cards worked. It seems kindof nice, it has an arts-and-crafts feel to it, no? HN contributes a nice trick for handling debug flags.

Cook with Athlon XP (9 min youtube video). Cooling a CPU by directly submersing it in water, a nice illustration of how much heat they create.

The ALPS CP10SJ550A Kanji Keyboard from 1989 has 542 keys, each of which (when pressed together with a modifier key) can produce 9 different characters.

The Zedripper. A laptop based on a 16-core Z80 processor running at 83.33 MHz (implemented in an FPGA).

I had an idea that I wanted to explore – what if history had taken a different turn, and personal computers had gone down the multi-CPU path right from the start? Even in the 1980s the CPUs themselves (and pretty quickly, the RAM, too) were fairly cheap, but multi-tasking for personal computers was exclusively focused on a ‘time-slicing’ approach [...] I found a company called Exidy that came the closest – in 1981 they released their “Multi-NET 80” machine, which allowed up to 16 Z80+RAM cards to be added to it, but it was once again designed to serve 16 individual users rather than a power user with 16 simultaneously running programs. [...] Fast-forward 40 years, and transistors are very cheap indeed. I inherited some pretty monster FPGA boards (Stratix IV 530GX parts) following a lab cleanup, and was looking for something fun to do with one of them.

Brad Cox is famous for designing the Objective-C programming language, and this interesting blog post reviews two of his books, Object-oriented programming: an evolutionary approach (1991) and Superdistribution: objects as property on the electronic frontier (1996). In the first, Cox sets out a manifesto about how object-oriented programming will spark an “industrial revolution” of software, “the replacement of artisinal, cottege manufacture with scaled-up industrial processes that depend on well-specified interfaces between standardised, interchangeable parts”. Superdistribution goes further and imagines an “object oriented economy”, where each method call requires a micropayment. I guess this idea has been reinvented multiple times, it reminds me a lot of Eric Drexler’s Agoric Computing, and even one of the founders of the company I work for has some dreams along these lines (now implemented on the blockchain, naturally). I guess at least Drexler was directly inspired by libertarianism, which brings to mind the puns about “Objectivist C”...

(I also really liked the reviewer’s observation that Simula-style objects creates a Leibnizian monadology.)

A Hacker News thread with comments from CycCorp ex-employees, giving the inside scope about the last great hope of Good Old-Fashioned AI.

The inference engine language has LISPy syntax but is crucially very un-LISPy in certain ways (way more procedural, no lambdas, reading it makes me want to die).

文言文編程語言. A programming language based on Classical Chinese. The coolest part of the project is the pretty-printer, which can format the programs like so:

The Cyberdeck Mark 2: the dream of the '80s is alive. A 3D-printed cyberpunk-inspired split-keyboard portable computer which lets you work in virtual reality. (Reddit posts, via.)

Misc

Due to human error, the annual memorial wreath for “Den Opfern von Krieg und Faschismus” (victims of war and fascism) instead commemorated victims of “Krieg und Verschissmuss” (war and fucked-up-ness).

Cuban crocodiles are native to Cuba, but because of the embargo you can't import them from there, but in 1978 Fidel Castro gave a pair of crocodiles as a gift to a Soviet cosmonaut, but he couldn't care for them and gave them to the Moscow Zoo, which gave them to a Swedish zoo, which is now the main source of exports to the U.S.

Fidel Castro's crocodile bites man at aquarium crayfish party. One crocodile from the original pair still has a bite, 40 years later. The man lost his left arm, but considers it philosophically:

I have really had a great life. Now I will have to adapt to a new life under different conditions—in a way that's exciting. And I have learnt that a crocodile in water can jump up two meters, I didn't know that before.

Baby cuban crodiles are extremely cute and sound like laser guns.

The Media Lab Disobedience Award is a cash prize and a glass orb given to “individuals and groups who engage in responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices”. In 2018 it was awarded to Tarana Burke, BethAnn McLaughlin, and Sherry Marts for their work in launching the #MeToo movement and fighting against sexual assault and harrassment. Some sponsors who helped raise cash for the prize also received glass orbs, such as Jeffery Epstein.

Jim Watkins, owner of 8chan, testifies to Congress wearing a “Q” pin, but that seems like the least remarkable thing about his appearance. I did not expect 8chan's owner to have a mustache and mutton chops, like some kind of hipster from The Dream of the 90s.

Apparently at some point Curtis Yarvin did some fashion modelling in a biker jacket. I've always been a bit confused about how the neoreaction bloggers transformed into the alt-right, but maybe the missing link is the fact that Moldbug looks exactly like Pepe the frog?

A twitter thread collects WTFery from the George W. Bush era. I had suppressed some of these memories. (Commenting on one of the items, Memecucker notes that the notion “free speech = racism” is now so established that people even project it back to this era.)

The Israeli army is so feminist that it not only let women be soldiers but even made special boob rifles for them.

The Age of Instagram Face. The reporter visits a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills:

I felt that I was being listened to very carefully. I thanked him, sincerely, and then a medical assistant came in to show me the recommendations and prices: injectables in my cheeks ($5,500 to $6,900), injectables in my chin (same price), an ultrasound “lipofreeze” to fix the asymmetry in my jawline ($8,900 to $18,900), or Botox in the TMJ region ($2,500). I walked out of the clinic into the Beverly Hills sunshine, laughing a little, imagining what it’d be like to have a spare thirty thousand dollars on hand. I texted photos of my FaceTuned jaw to my friends and then touched my actual jaw, a suddenly optional assemblage of flesh and bone.

Facebook’s Libra Is Half A Century Late And A Navy Short. I really enjoyed this article, which consists of 50% breezy Realpolitik theorizing and 50% funny quips.

The Libra hearings did not focus all that much on Libra itself. Libra was a good excuse to get Mark Zuckerberg to fly to DC, but his questions addressed other problems—Russian and Iranian election interference, child porn, antitrust, cyberbullying, and a general sense of arrogance. One Congresswoman chastised Zuckerberg for his failure to solve the student debt crisis. Clearly, Congress has a higher opinion of Facebook’s ability to solve problems than Congress’.

How To Fillet Every Fish. A 34 minute youtube video demonstrating how to fillet 22 different kinds of fish, incredibly soothing.

Random funny tweets

Maciej Cegłowski studies Cantonese vocab. Let's avocuddle! Yahoo News misparses the sentence “Zooey Deschanel divorces Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard”. Vacuuming the Enterprise-D. ブチギレ寸前みたいな看板. The most beautiful equation in mathematics. Learn to love sonic booms/nearby helicopters, the New Sound of Freedom! How do you explain vowels to a young child? The weird trend of corporate nerd IP “tiki” merch. Ancient Egyptian bread slices are conic sections. The exact moment when the 1990s ended. Epilogue to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Scam call escalated to a supervisor in the scam call center. The toilet snorkel may save you life, but is it worth it? Please log in to your video card. Game concept where you fly your spaceship into the sparse regions of floating point. SurveyMonkey favorite color chart. Cats predicts impeachement. Nintendo is trans-positive but does not believe in emigration. Very cursed python repl feature. Japanese news agency telegram has a summary of the literature Nobel prizes.