The reason republicans get so incredibly huffy when any of the tools of law enforcement are ever turned upon them is they think “criminals” as an inherent class of people (who they of course could never be part of) rather than a descriptor for someone who commits illegal acts.
Not too far-fetched an observation. Consider the following:
Disturbing fictionalization of a real-life tragedy (cached). Based on a book by Jon Krakauer. Andrew Garfield is simply excellent as a devout Mormon, dogged detective, and patriarch (“priesthood holder”) of his family.
Features some quick lessons in the History of the LDS which was not very flattering to the Church. Characters say “I’ve had a revelation” a lot before proceeding to perform all manner of shitty deeds. It’s a meditation over common-sense and rationality, spiritual doubt and loss, and the unbridled power that most religions impress into the hands of men by upholding and sanctifying patriarchy.
It’s all bleak, awful stuff. Moreso when even the heroic Pyre engages in it, which is exactly the point. Under the Banner of Heaven illustrates how no one who grows up in this kind of environment can escape its influences — no matter how kind, progressive, or loving they think they are. That’s why it’s so jarring when Pyre transforms — from the man who says, “I love you,” during every phone call with his wife, Rebecca (Adelaide Clemens); tucks his daughters into bed each night; and gently invites his dementia-addled mother, Josie (Sandra Seacat), on daily walks — into a domineering “priesthood holder.” The decisions he makes as the family’s religious authority are ostensibly to protect his family from the doctrine he’s beginning to interrogate, but he still uses its male-exalting infrastructure to get what he wants.
Each episode would start with one of the most beautiful title cards I’ve seen for a show:
They should give this young actor an Emmy for the few minutes she’s on screen 💯
Came recommended by HU. I had to borrow them from PG1. A limited, 7-part comic book series based on one of my favorite movies. Told from the perspective of John Doe and provides his backstory which is about as sad and disturbing as you can imagine it would be. About as gory as the movie itself. Most parts have a different style. Plenty of out-of-context Bible quotes. Just really well-executed.
These are hard to find and expensive: anywhere from $250 on eBay to $350 on Amazon.↩︎
please bro just one more election please just one more I swear we just gotta win one more please bro please after the election we’ll fix everything please come on bro this is the most important election in history bro please bro I gotta win this one please bro please
You predict (or have insider information) that the price of lawnmowers will fall. The current market price of a lawnmower is $1,000. You go to Eddie’s Lawnmower Rental Company and rent a lawnmower from Eddie for $10 a day. He doesn’t care about you returning the same lawnmower; he just wants you to return a lawnmower (assume that all lawnmowers involved in this story are in great working condition).
You sell this lawnmower to your neighbour for $1,000.
Ten days later, and as you predicted, the price of lawnmowers falls to $500. Now you buy another lawnmower for $500 and return a lawnmower to Eddie. So now you have gained: $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $400.
Now say you made a bad prediction and the price of lawnmowers went up to $1,500. So now you have lost $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($1,500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $600.
Theoretically, there is no bottom to your losses. So you have to be very careful when you short things. It’s not for everyone. Stick to Index Funds if you don’t understand what you’re doing.
Finally, here’s some discussion on where the expression ‘going short’ may have come from.
McMaster: called him a dope with the intelligence of a kindergartner
Mattis: called him a 5th grader.
Mnuchin: called him an idiot.
Graham: called him a complete idiot.
Priebus: called him an idiot.
John Kelly: called him a f***ing idiot.
Tillerson: called him a f***ing moron.
Cohn: called him dumb as sh*t.
McRaven: called him the biggest threat to our democracy.
Bannon: called him a f***ing moron.
John Dowd: called him a f****ing liar and too dumb to testify.
Rupert Murdoch: called him a f***ing idiot.
John Bolton: “Trump has the attention span of a fruit fly.”
William T. Kelley: (Professor at Penn) called him the dumbest goddamn student he ever had.
Fran Lebowitz (author): “Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”
Tony Schwartz: (the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal”) called him a man with a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.
John Kelly: “He is the most flawed person I have ever met in my life.”
Anonymous GOP Congressman in a Safeway Rant: called him an evil, really f***ing stupid Forrest Gump.
Mueller: called him Individual 1
Macula is an absolutely lovely typeface by Jacques Le Bailly.
It reminded me of Impossible Type by Fleta Selmani.
I also found out that Eric Demaine has an “Impossible Folding Font”.
Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link)
Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially designated a superfund site. My goddamn ticket tracker shouldn’t spin up my fans when I try to do something as austere as access the backlog, but, as we all know, it’s impossible to display tickets withou 21 MB of JavaScript and 164 HTTP requests. (Yes, those are real numbers.) (link)
and finally,
JIRA makes it dangerously easy to implement overly bureaucratic processes. A certain kind of organization is drawn to it for that reason. Even a healthy organization switching to JIRA can get carried away with the tools now at its disposal. JIRA is a software product but also a social institution, an organizational philosophy. Sure, you can have the software without the attitude or vice versa, but use of JIRA is still a (weak) negative signal about the quality of an employer.
Turns out that the main thing protecting employee autonomy is the logistical difficulty of micromanagement. JIRA “solves” that problem. (link)
A giant, disjointed fucking mess. Tried to pay attention but I zoned out twice watching it. I couldn’t even tell you what this movie is about.
For day-to-day things, a 10-year old MacBook Air is perfectly adequate (except, maybe, if you’re trying to read an article on the Des Moines Register’s or KCCI’s websites without using a PiHole…)
Didn’t realize it was a four-parter. Major nostalgia. Have forgotten most of my French but I somehow still remember a lot of words for things (and their gender!) thanks to these books (well, Volume 1 at least). Looks like the CBSE still uses it. Here’s audio to accompany the books.
I know nothing of D&D, wanted to find out more after watching the latest season of Stranger Things, and came by this video. I still don’t understand how the figurines contribute to the gameplay but was amazed by his vast collection of them. Lots of lovely passion and camaraderie here ♥️
That would be a Swiss gun instructor. His country has 2.3 million guns per 8.6 million people and has had exactly one mass shooting since 2001.
They are able to do this despite being one of the most armed European countries because they have commonsense gun laws, actually fucking act to prevent senseless tragedy, and do not fetishize or worship their guns or the hallowed, immutable, “God-given” Second Amendment.
There was yet another mass shooting in America, this time in Ames, Iowa, a collegetown I lived in for many years. Three innocent people died. More thoughts and prayers by our effete, corrupt leaders until the next horrifying and avoidable tragedy. Nothing will change.
Update March 21 2023
by Matt Davies
Amil Niazi in a sobering article about ambition, COVID, women, mothers, and late-stage capitalism.
Think jq but for HTML/DOM. If you wanted to get all the post titles on this log,
curl -s -o - https://log.nikhil.io/ | gunzip - | pup "header > h2 > a" text{}
Lovely stuff.
Saw with LD. Revenge flick set in Scandinavia in 895 AD. LD thought that the ultraviolence was a bit gratuitous and didn’t serve the plot very well. I don’t know what one would expect from a story about a beefy Viking beserker hell-bent on revenge. Lush, beautiful, amazing visuals from Eggers and crew. I wish I saw this in the theater. This is Eggers’ third movie after The Lighthouse (which we thoroughly enjoyed) and The Witch (which I am too much of a chicken to watch). Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy were excellent.
Excellent cinematography and art direction. Bouncy background score by Thaman. Rana Daggubati stole the show, is magnetic in every scene he’s in, and we were all amazed by the ease with which he plays arrogant douchenozzles 💯 Could’ve been at least an hour shorter. Lovely poetry.
It’s hosted by three University of Iowa engineers and scientists who are tired of “cropaganda” and is rather entertaining. The latest episode calls the recent E15 Law a “Fart in a Hurricane”.
One of the hosts is an engineer named Chris Jones who also writes a very lively blog with wonderful nuggets like this:
[…] corn ethanol for fuel is stupid. The industry exists by virtue of one reason and one reason only: government policy. The environmental benefits of using corn to produce a liquid biofuel HAVE ALWAYS been more desperation-half-court-heave than slam dunk, it’s lower potential energy when compared to gasoline makes the 10% blend number an obvious head fake, and its dominance of American politics has kept higher energy players sitting at the end of the bench. So why does ethanol get its ticket punched to the Big Dance year after year after year? Politics. Liberal politicians from Joe Biden to Amy Klobuchar to Dick Durban to Sherrod Brown to Cindy Axne to the Iowa City dogcatcher provide all the cover Republicans in general and Iowa Democratic state legislators in particular need to continue force feeding us this rancid cod liver oil until kingdom come.
See also: “Iowa is Addicted to Cornography”
I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.
Indecision has been a pretty huge problem in my life and this comment by /u/tomwaste hit home.
I’m not sure if people have experienced the same but when I entered my 30s I became convinced I was rapidly running out of time. Rather than using that as motivation I let it paralyze me with indecision because I “couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice.” Consequently, I’m now 39 and, though I’ve had great things happen in my 30s, I regret spending so much time worrying and so little time committing to a course of action.
What’s the simplest way out of this mire of Analysis Paralysis?
“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”
Their comment also reminded me of this Sylvia Plath poem illustrated by Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils.
This is Zephyr, a “captive-born gray wolf” at the Wolf Conservation Center in NY. Below, you can hear him and his friends orchestrate some of the most beautiful sounds you will hear today. I’ve watched this five times and it was somehow even better with my eyes closed.
Here’s the Wolf Conservation Center’s YouTube channel for more music. Fuck I love wolves ♥️🐺
Simple, consistent, SVG, adjustable stroke-width, and there are 1900 of them (and counting).
Like the badass below 🔥🔥🔥
Got this off Reddit and other sources. Too lovely to vanish off the internet. We have a few of these in Des Moines and I swear I quiver in my immigrant slippers every time I see them 😰
My dudes. Cached here via YouTube because it is too precious to be yanked off the internet. Via Rob G.
It also occurred to me that the OS in the video would be more usable, more respectful, and less full of spyware than the giant crock of shit that is Windows 11.
It’s what all the Patagonia-clads are raving about. They tell me it solves all perf problems in a snap.
Update
Here’s an NPM package. And, of course, Java if you’d like to deploy this in an Enterprise™ setting.
Summary of Wikipedia article: Japanese kimono didn’t have pockets. They needed something to store their stuff in. So they made containers that they hung from their kimonos’ sashes1. The part that secured the container to the sash at the top was called a netsuke (“root attached”.)
Here’s a really cute one of a sleeping cat from the 19th century 😻
Update
Here’s another. It’s a crouching tiger 😍
An obi, which is a favorite NYTimes crossword clue!↩︎
This is from a while ago but I didn’t get the memo. It’s a little crazy:
It’s named after Reddit user /u/vaieriepieris, an ESL teacher from Texas, who made it for a map subreddit in 2013.
Behold the story of a Master Strategist, a 5D-Chess playing Svengali absorbed in his craft 🙏🔥
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This really got me:
My job is to keep our code running while other packagers are changing theirs.
Lord have mercy. NPM continued use and existence is proof that (Almost) Every Day is a Miracle ✨
As far as Indian Gurus go, I find this guy more illumined and full of practical, actionable advice than, say, this guy, less full of shit than this one, and definitely less batshit crazy than this one.
Via LT 🙏
Update
The creator of the video is Masood Boomgaard. Here’s his YouTube channel. And here’s the Balm your Soul needs in its entirety 🙏 🌸
I mean just look at it 🥰
Really cool stuff. Trained on the New York Times ingredients corpus (large 13.5MB CSV) and turns this
ingredients = [
"3 large melons",
"5 1/2 cups water",
"2 cups flour",
]
into this
[
{
"name": "melons",
"unit": None,
"qty": 3.0
},
{
"name": "water",
"unit": "cups",
"qty": 5.5
},
{
"name": "flour",
"unit": "cups",
"qty": 2
}
]
Heslin’s vow on Wednesday comes one day after Jones offered an FBI agent and 18 members of 10 families who lost loved ones in the school shooting $120,000 each to settle defamation lawsuits he lost against them in Texas and Connecticut late last year.
[…] Jones, the host of the “Infowars” internet program, called the Sandy Hook tragedy “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors.”
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
Saved me a ton of time with small project I’m working on right now. Looks like it’s written in C.
A couple from snowy Minnesota decided to take a winter vacation back in the simple Florida resort where they had stayed for a honeymoon twenty-five years before. Because of his wife’s delayed work schedule, the husband went first, and then when he got there he received a message that she would meet him soon. So he sent her this e-mail in reply. But because he typed one letter wrong in the e-mail address, it went by mistake to an old woman in Oklahoma, whose minister husband had died the day before. Here is what she read:
“Dearest,
Well the journey is over and I have finally arrived. I was surprised to find they have e-mail here now. They tell me you’ll be coming soon. It will be good to be together again.
Love as always.
P.S. Be prepared. It’s quite hot down here.”
Tedious “I can make longass movies like Marty too!” stuff from Ridley Scott. Fascinating and tragic story in real life though. Adam Driver is reserved. Lady Gaga is outstanding. Jared Leto is a fucking clown and is either trying too hard or doesn’t give a shit anymore.
Al Pacino is in this movie as well. He is this person in the movie.
Lessons learned from “Frog and Toad Together”: Don’t be like Toad and yell at your seeds. Do what you must with love and care and leave them be. They’ll be fine.
“But when?!”
More people like this, and on both sides, please.
Senator Grassley is 88 years old. He voted to oppose Judge Jackson’s nomination.
“Having carefully studied her record, unfortunately I think she and I have fundamentally different views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government because of those disagreements I can’t support her nomination,” Grassley said.
Via JK.
I like nothing more in the world than sitting on my ass doing nothing. And it’s not my fault I have this attitude, because I happen to have an amazingly comfortable ass. It may not look like much, but if you could sit on this baby for two minutes, you’d realize that getting off this ass would be a crime against nature.
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.
Via this collection of lovely talks by my main man Jack Kornfield ♥️
I was lucky. I went to good schools, I had excellent teachers. I was in the right place at the right time.
Opportunity and luck bestow their benisons upon a once-in-a-generation genius, mathematical mystic, and one of the greatest theoretical physicists to have walked the planet.
You never hear of Dirac much1. I read this article about him being in love and decided to read more about his life and work. This award-winning book came highly recommended. I enjoyed its breadth and depth thoroughly. I am a slow reader and was surprised by the speed at which I got through its heft: 625 pages2! Farmelo expertly weaves world history, politics, religion, and humor into Dirac’s story. The epilogue spends some time conjecturing that he may have been autistic in a bid to explain his many eccentricities and severe taciturnity3. Lots of painful family tragedy that was rather difficult to read. Intuition and Mathematical beauty were paramount to him:
If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until [this happened]. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.
Here’s an In Our Time episode with Farmelo and two other physicists if you want to get a taste of what this excellent and riveting biography is about. I thought this description of Dirac by a young Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who took Dirac’s Quantum Mechanics course at Cambridge four times in 1930 because it was “just like a piece of music you want to hear over and over again”) was rather funny:
“Dirac showed none of the confidence that might be expected of a young man at the top of his game. Chandrasekhar wrote home to his father that he was disappointed that Dirac did not show a bit more swagger: ‘[Dirac is a] lean, meek shy young “Fellow” (FRS) who goes slyly along the streets. He walks quite close to the walls (like a thief!), and is not at all healthy. A contrast to Mr Fowler […] Dirac is pale, thin, and looks terribly overworked.”
Update 08 Mar 22
Here’s a video of the author giving a presentation on Dirac and Mathematical Beauty
Brilliant. Take a bow, Late Show writers.
Unknown artist, circa 1800
The terrifying goddess Kali, wearing a necklace of skulls and holding a severed head in one of her hands, is worshiped here by other gods. From the left, we see Indra, Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer). Kali is associated with violence and sexuality; she stands for the forces of destruction, but she is also a life-giver. Her posture is that of a woman giving birth.
Not gonna lie: Her head reminded me of the Dust Bunnies in Spirited Away 🙏
What a strange, strange creature. Those bumps remind me of rivets on a submarine. But because they are anglerfish, the bumps are even more bizarre than you’d expect:
Since anglerfish are deep sea creatures, it took scientists years and years to figure this stuff out. They could never find a male. Females preserved in formaldehyde sitting on dusty museum shelves usually have strange lumps that appear to be parasites. They ARE parasites. Sexual parasites!
Those lumps are all that is left of the males! They had taken that last bite and had become absorbed into the females’ bodies and became nothing more than dangly bits. The male’s eyes and fins atrophy away, and nourishment comes from the female’s blood.
Lovely.
