A Brief History of People Thinking Piers Morgan Is the Pigeon Lady From ‘Home Alone 2’.
Had to cache it because this is just lovely stuff. Pretty sure I had a mini-blackout when I read the Trainspotting part 💯
On The Evenings
It’s a well-known fact that computers run faster in the evening.
Some People Are Incurably Stupid
Octopus Meets Jar
♥️🐙♥️
Watched because Denzel and Revenge. Not sure why I bothered finishing it. Absolutely awful. The cinematographer appears to have borrowed the ghastly verdigris-like palette from this terribly photoshopped poster, and keeps twitching the camera with the giddiness of a raver who’s taken two of them Mitsubishi pills that were in vogue at the time.
Dakota Fanning is the only other reason to endure this. She was only ten in 2004 but acted like she’d been at it for at least three decades.
“Where are the Turks?”
Bilal Göregen (YouTube, Instagram) is the Turkish street musician in my favorite video of 2020.
He sounds like a very positive, gracious, and sweet human being on this KnowYourMeme interview1 which features this delightful nugget (emphasis mine):
Q: How has the response been from your previous fans and followers that were around before the meme? Also, have you received any interesting or wholesome messages from fans since your meme went viral that you can share with us?
A: When I read the comments section after my video went viral, I see that my Turkish followers still do not understand the meme, and they ask questions like, “Is the channel stolen? Why are there so many foreigners here? Where are the Turks?”
Assorted Bilal things: Here’s a ten-hour version of his viral hit. And here’s him making a lot of Indian people very happy. And lest I forget, this is the original Finnish folk song he’s covering:
Which TIL has an editorials section…↩︎
Watched with LD. Reminded me of “Hereditary” (it’s a slow burn) but with The Evil being this chimera of financial insolvency, really bad trust issues, childhood trauma, and severe affluenza. Jude Law was perfect, but Carrie Coon was so fucking good as the beleagured yet passively complicit partner and mostly grieving person. The scene shot from the stable facing the manor was genius. Sean Durkin (writer and director) stuck the landing perfectly. Lovely stuff.
Tedious, uneven, rushed, and a colossal waste of an interesting premise and the talents of several amazing actors (Ron Perlman, Dana Delany, Andre Royo, Alona Tal, and a brilliant Garret Dillahunt.) You can skip the latter half of the episodes in the first season (here’s a recap) and skip-watch all but the last three episdoes of the second, and still know what’s going on. It’s as if they were told there wasn’t going to be a third
What to do with Over-Engineered $700 Computer Wheels.
If impatient, skip to the last minute.
An 18,000-year Old Pupper
This is Dogor 🐾, an 18,000-year old puppy preserved in Siberian permafrost. His name means “friend.” He was discovered as a lump of frozen mud near Yakutsk and lies at a private museum.
Dogor left the wilderness as a lump of soil and ice, but scientists could make out the head and paws of what they believed at first to be a young wolf.
Fyodorov told The Washington Post that he carefully cleaned off dirt and debris to reveal near-intact fur — “extremely rare for animals of that time period.”
“It’s an amazing feeling, to see, touch and feel the history of earth,” he said.
Other researchers, affiliated with the Centre for Paleogenetics in Stockholm (Twitter), think he could be “part of the evolutionary bridge that turned a fierce wild animal into man’s best friend.”
Testing on a rib bone has revealed the animal’s age: about two months, said Stanton, a postdoctoral scholar who has been working for more than a year on a broader attempt to answer lingering questions about canine history.
The analysis also put Dogor’s short life at a particularly interesting period of time, right around when many wolf lineages were going extinct and dogs are thought to have emerged. Exactly how and when they evolved from wolves is unclear; one recent study estimates between 20,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Omoshiroi Blocks
These are memo pads that “excavate objects” as they are used. A bit more expensive than your average PostIt, but a very lovely idea.
Idiots Out Walking Around - II
Informed Choice Iowa is a group that “unites Iowans seeking to preserve their medical freedoms.” They are “pro-science” folk that count “ex-vaxxers”, “selective vaxxers”, “non-vaxxers”, and “vaxxers” among their members. I’m guessing that this list doesn’t include a single practicing physician.
And here’s them celebrating their freedoms, by which they mean a blatant disregard for the science they claim to love and the Iowans they claim to serve. Need confirmation but I hear that eating at least two tubes of toothpaste is on the agenda for their next idiot congregation.
Here’s a local news story about this superspreader event.
This is a very handy psql cheatsheet.
One should be good 80%+ of time between that and the awesome pgcli.
Raj on Hell’s Kitchen
Tapped this YouTube suggestion on a lazy Sunday. This man pushed my capacities for sympathy and empathy to their breaking points in this 20-minute highlight reel. I don’t know what to type here other than quote the very first sentence of his Fandom wiki page:
Raj is widely regarded as one of the worst and most useless chefs in Hell’s Kitchen history.
I don’t watch the show and don’t have a full context. But the most charitable assessment I can offer after sitting through the highlight reel below is this: The man is wired very, very differently, which I suppose makes for engaging (cruel?) television 🤷♂️
YouVotedForThis.com is a lovely collection of Brexit repercussions.
I created YVFT site after my Conservative voting aunt complained on Facebook that there weren’t enough police to deal with disruptive teenagers in her town. I wanted to scream, “But you voted for this!” without looking like a lunatic.
Studio Ghibli is named after this plane.
Turns out Miyazaki’s dad was an aeronautical engineer.
Sleeping Octopus
You could almost just narrate the body changes and narrate the dream. So here she’s asleep. She sees a crab and her color starts to change a little bit then she turns all dark. Octopuses will do that when they leave the bottom. This is a camouflage like she’s just subdued a crab and now she’s going to sit there and eat it and she doesn’t want anyone to notice her. It’s a very unusual behavior to see the color come and go on her mantle like that. I mean, just to be able to see all the different color patterns just flashing one after another… you don’t usually see that when an animal’s sleeping which really is fascinating.
But yeah if she’s dreaming that’s the dream.
Transparent Baby Octopus
(Source Unknown)
Idiots Out Walking Around
Reynolds said election victories for Republicans in the state this week show Iowans support her approach. “It was a validation of our balanced response to COVID-19, one that is mindful of both public health and economic health,” Reynolds said.
Because political victories, not cases or deaths, should inform and ‘validate’ one’s strategy when dealing with a raging pandemic.
gron is a JSON grepper
Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.
That material between a speaker and their microphone is called a “pop filter”.
It helps minimize or eliminate popping sounds (“aspirated plosives”) like when you say ‘pop’ or ‘pepper’ or ‘pots’!
Resolution versus Magnification
Was looking for a portable iPhone microscope and came by this one on Amazon. Doubted the “50x-1000x magnification” claim and landed on this video by Oliver Kim (here’s his channel on YouTube) on how to make sense of that feature.
The key idea here is to think of a microscope as a device that resolves hitherto unseen things. It’s simply not just a magnifier of small things our eyes cannot resolve. This is the difference between the 2x optical zoom on your iPhone versus the 10x you can slide it up to.
So I don’t doubt that the product on Amazon can do 50x, which is fine for my needs. I just don’t believe that the upper bound (1000x) can provide anything useful.
Naughty Letter Frequencies in English
Here’s a community-maintained "List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words" across various languages on Github. I was curious about a naïve frequency distribution of consonants across the English-language corpus (NSFW, obviously) and wrote a small script. Here are the results:
| Letter | Count |
|---|---|
| t | 211 |
| s | 208 |
| n | 193 |
| r | 186 |
| l | 167 |
| g | 147 |
| c | 124 |
| b | 121 |
| p | 116 |
| h | 97 |
| d | 91 |
| m | 91 |
| k | 72 |
| y | 70 |
| f | 48 |
| w | 41 |
| v | 29 |
| j | 21 |
| x | 19 |
| z | 7 |
| q | 5 |
Not sure what I’m going to do with this information but here it is. 🤬
“I’ve loved living here, but I’ve never been as worried about the future of this country than I am right now.”
Foreign correspondents on the state of America and the election in four days.
The Best Suspense and Thriller Movies
Saved three lists of the best movies of the genre according to the British Film Institute, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes. Merged them into a giant list here and sorted by year here.
Pretty version with all those lists here. #covidplanning
A bit sloppy compared to the first season but still quite the entertainer (or maybe I just love the surfeit of bad language, of which there is plenty ♥️)
Excellent stuff from the main cast, especially Sheeba Chaddha and Rasika Dugal.
But Pankaj Tripathi could read the backs of shampoo bottles in 40-minute episodes and I’d still binge the ‘show’ and write encomiums about how good a performer he is.
A beautiful story about my favorite alien told with phenomenally good camera work. Left me a bit misty-eyed1. Lovely stuff.
Felt like kicking myself for reading a few comments about it on Hacker News later. Not sure why I did this but promised myself I’d stick to the topics that site is good for (empathy not being one of them.)↩︎
Hammerhead X-Rays
Fred Rogers and his Children
Mentioned this to NB. Saving here for later.
On this event:
Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling television—gently, of course—to just shut up for once, and television listened. He had already won his third Daytime Emmy, and now he went onstage to accept Emmy’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.
I often wonder what people like him would think of our times.
On Mutually Assured Destruction
“Hum toh doobe hain sanam, tujhe bhi leke doobenge.”
Fatman (Trailer)
Well this was certainly most unexpected.
The University of Iowa, 1930
A lovely campus map of UIowa in 1930 (source unknown.)
AxiDraw is a portable ‘Drawing Machine’.
It’s priced at $475 for the basic model and $800 for a deluxe version. The video is very satisfying to watch (I couldn’t have picked better background music.)
One could start with a Brachiograph for around $20 (basic Raspberry Pi setup, soldering skills, and assembly required.)
Those patterns on a thimble are called ‘Guilloché’
Via AS as we were discussing Audemars Piguet’s “petite tapisserie”
Kids
by Michael Frei & Mario van Rickenbach
Rating: B
CK and I loved this short and strange and beautiful ‘game’ by artist Michael Frei and developer Mario van Rickenbach.
There’s even an art exhibition. I don’t know. Take it for what it is.
“The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing.”
On why GNU grep is fast. Via HN.
Michael Keaton and Christopher Lloyd were excellent. But Peter Boyle steals the show as “Jack McDermott. Christ fixation. Megalomania.”
BILLY
Hey, Doc, isn’t it true that if even one of those tiles were to come loose, millions and millions of gallons of water would come pouring down on us and squash us like tiny little bugs? Is that a leak up there? You see those tiles? They’re leaking water right there!DR. WEITZMAN
Bill. Cut it out. Oh, my God!JACK
I will hold back the waters.DR. WEITZMAN
Thanks, Jack.
.
BILLY
Dr. Verboven can be such a perfectionist.JACK
Yeah, but that’s what makes him such a great diagnostician.HENRY (DR. VERBOVEN)
Vital signs are good. Zip code checks out.
.
JACK
Let me hold the gun.HENRY
No.JACK
I let you sit in the front seat.(HENRY HANDS GUN TO JACK)
PSYCHIATRIST
Jack, Jesus Christ would never point a gun at another human being.JACK
Stay out of my psychosis and get your ass in that van.
and finally (even though there’s a lot more understated gold)
JACK
I drove the moneylenders from the temple. I can handle a ten-spot.
🙏
Art Plunge
by Space Plunge
Rating: B
Well-worth the $2 you’ll spend on it. Don’t look behind you if you have major vertigo or megalophobia. “The Creation of Adam” was hair-raising. The Vermeer was just so beautiful 💯
Coin Sound
This is lovely. More here.
“Haiyaa is the MSG of Word.”
So saith Uncle Roger, who finally approved someone’s egg-fried rice. Via KP.
Tim Kendall testifies
to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce on Facebook’s engagement practices and likens them to time-tested strategies used by Big Tobacco before they were somewhat regulated.
And he would know. Kendall was the former “Director of Monetization” at Facebook and is currently the CEO of Moment, a company that seeks to help people “build healthier relationships with their phones.” Which I suppose is one way to atone.
Saw this after about 18 years. Some assorted notes: Thought I heard “Boléro”. Every frame is a fucking painting. Just so wonderful: sunshine through the leaves and at the interrogation, characters walking into and out of the audience, the gate’s history and state of decay, and of course Tajomaru’s sword when he’s under the tree 🤣 No idea what his constant fly-swatting signified. Faces sometimes resembled those in Ukiyo-e paintings (like this one). Save for the hapless priest, every character is demon and human. Storytelling: tension between whether it is to be regarded a fable or a real account. ‘The lies we tell ourselves don’t matter as long as they’re in the service of mending and preserving our humanity.’ Professor David Thorburn breaks down the movie.
Staying Out of It
And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.
– Elie Wiesel, Nobel Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1986
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
– Desmond Tutu (quoted in Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes, 1984)
I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal1.
– Martin Luther King, Jr., Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, April 30, 1967
Found out this doesn’t really appear in Inferno.↩︎
Stars David Lynch, his spouse Emily Stofle, a monkey, and a chicken. The oddest and most hypnotic thing I’ve seen this year (and twice.) A mere 17 minutes in length and like if film-school students used GPT-3 to generate a script an hour before the assignment was due.
Toototabon 🐓
Interstate 35
I’ve lived in Iowa for a while and felt this in my soul.
Frost
by kunabi brother
Rating: B
Developer site. A beautiful meditation that’s just the right length.
Reminded me of “Osmos”, an all-time favorite. Won an Apple Design Award on 2018 (with “Florence”.)
Please Don’t Suck Please Don’t Suck Please Don’t Suck Please Don’t Suck Please Don’t Suck
. I mean yes, Denis Villeneuve and all that. But please don’t suck.