nikhil.io

A lovely campus map of UIowa in 1930 (source unknown.)

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.)

Via AS as we were discussing Audemars Piguet’s “petite tapisserie”

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.

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.

🙏

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 💯

This is lovely. More here.

So saith Uncle Roger, who finally approved someone’s egg-fried rice. Via KP.

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.

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

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 🐓

I’ve lived in Iowa for a while and felt this in my soul.

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”.)

. I mean yes, Denis Villeneuve and all that. But please don’t suck.

by u/skinnybonez32. Here’s the original video.

Unbelievable.

Just pure joy.

Source (without annotation). See also: “Ave Maria”.

Saw with CK. Excited because Charlie Kaufman. Mostly self-indulgent tripe. The conversations in the car were interminably tedious¹ and missing PBR hats and gauloises. The weirdness in the first third-to-a-half of the movie was excellent. Top-notch performances and camerawork.

I love the movie and was surprised to find out that there was a graphic novel that preceded it. A work of original and breathtaking beauty like the movie and its soundtrack. Kent Williams’ style and vision took a bit to get used to. Wonderful stuff.

Aronofsky notes in the book that the movie almost didn’t happen due to budgetary concerns, and that he reworked it to make it a “lean, mean indie film.” I wonder if that explains the beautiful macrophotography they used for SFX.

Here it is on ThriftBooks.

See also: The time-tested stratagem of going La La La La La. Here’s the entire conference.

is a simple and aptly-named COVID tracker that uses data from Johns Hopkins. As of September 1^st 2020, my state of Iowa is #1 (woohoo!) with a 7-day infection rate of 261/100,000 people (“there might be 2 to 6 times as many recent infections”) and an R₀ rate of 1.7. “Over the past 30 days, 246 people in Iowa have died of Covid-19. If Iowa remains on its current trajectory, expect to see more than three times as many deaths from Covid-19 over the next 30 days.” That’ll show 'em.

Known as “The French Angel”, the wrestler Maurice Tillet is rumored to have inspired the look of Shrek. He suffered from acromegaly caused by a benign tumor on his pituitary gland (which regulates the synthesis of Human Growth Hormone - Wikipedia). Here’s a color video of him chilling 🤗

helps you “bust writer’s block and be more creative” using an AI. Came by it after reading this amazing result of a collaboration between GPT-3 and James Yu.

👏 👏 👏 (cached)

Yep. And the tweet was in the context of school openings, but college towns like Ames and Iowa City, are no exceptions (like she continues.) I say we continue to doubt the science, exercise absolutely no discipline in the interest of the economy (because the Communist Kiwis maintain zero interest in restoring theirs as quickly as possible), yell at people who wear masks, fight Big Government telling us what to do, expect maturity and restraint from children and teenagers, have no bloody plan, defend our effete leaders who institute weak policies that are too little and too late, control the numbers and the narrative, and just continue to be awesome ♥️ That’ll show 'em. We’re only beginning to get tired of winning folks.

I found out I am to thank the Ottomans for a lot of my favorite things to eat and drink:

• Baklava (which dates back two thousand years, to the Assyrian Empire)
• Coffee made the Right Way™
• The modern kebab
• Shawarma
• Sherbet
• Dolma (stuffed food) and Sarma (wrapped food)
• An ancestor of the hummus: a chickpea spread flavored with cinnamon, pine nuts, and currants. Consumed with bread and popular in the 15th century
• Ayran: My absolute favorite thing to drink on a hot day. Couldn’t find many differences between ayran and the laban I grew up drinking.

Headed over to “Wisdom of Chopra” to get myself a slice of Deepak’s #cosmiconscious insight.

Took that and had GPT-2 use it as a seed for more wisdom. Behold:

The invisible is the foundation of total belongingness: When we feel like we belong and are at home, we are happy, healthy and in good spirits. Without our sense of belonging, we feel anxious, sad, depressed, disengaged, and negative.

In the struggle to locate our identity, we can limit our awareness of who we are. We become prisoners of our own identities, which is usually the result of trying to fulfill our parents’ or society’s expectations of us.

It takes wisdom and intelligence to become an invisible expert, and this is not only to create a safe space for self-knowledge, but also to create safe spaces for others to be able to be themselves.

Imagine all the different spiritual and emotional benefits when we do not see or know about another’s stories, feelings, anxieties or challenges.

Imagine how freeing it would be for a Buddhist monk or a leader to have all their body, thoughts and speech remain invisible to everyone, including themselves.

How liberating would it be to know your gifts and be free from the burden of being in constant search of knowledge or validation, simply knowing that you are a gift to yourself and the world, and you matter to you.

As the Torah tells us: “You have been born for such a time as this” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We have been given the gift of life to explore our true identities, free of expectations and limitations, to finally reach out into the unknown to create the power and joy of the divine within.

In a world that seems to be in constant change and evolution, it is easy to feel alone and afraid. Yet we are never alone, and it is always safe to be true to ourselves.

There is power in transforming into the master of our own universe. In the words of the Buddha: “The job of a bodhisattva is not to be a creator, but to create a creator.”

In the depths of our souls, the divine resonates with us, nudging us to release our inner monologue of fear and the unconscious power it holds over us. Each and every one of us has within us the potential to embody divine love and compassion for ourselves and all of creation, and in the embodiment of this divine potential, we ignite our own personal power.

Gather the courage to become the master of our own universe and to discover the true magic that dwells within.

Aum Shanti 🙏

, ThriftBooks, and Bookshop are three alternatives to purchasing books on Amazon. Powell’s is withdrawing from the Amazon Marketplace: “The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality.”

“Nidhi: In thirty-five years of being in this industry, I’ve never seen a dish look like that… taste so good. It’s delicious.”

👉 Of all the stuff I could’ve attempted to appreciate from the genius’ collegiate notebook, I loved these annotations the most and don’t care what that says about me.

Some absolutely marvelous photos of a Southen Blue-Ringed Octopus by @SammyGlennDives

Like she’s dancing!

Would love to find out what kind of protective gear the photographer had on. But it seems like the octopuses are very shy and will attack only when provoked, which is when their rings become more intense 🐙 The salivary venom¹, synthesized by bacteria and not the octopus itself, doesn’t have an antidote and is only used to hunt and defend. It’s either injected via the beak, or is sprayed as a mist, paralysing the prey in either case for the final kill (presumably involving more beak.)

Here’s a little more. Love the intro. They truly are so alien and so, so beautiful 😍

The software industry is currently going through the “disposable plastic” crisis the physical world went through in the mid-20th century (and is still paying down the debt for). You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 years ago? Black hole of fad frameworks and brittle dependencies. Computer Archaeology is going to become a full-time job.

– Source

Myrna Tellingheusen is my new favorite person on the internet ♥️

See also: “Creating a QR Code step by step”

Every. Damn. Time.

by Tommy Siegel

Took me two tries to get through this. I felt bad for Rep. Clawson but he was well-intentioned and, to CM’s point, this is the kind of “honest mistake” that can happen only in a few countries 🇺🇸

Source. See also: Every website in 2018

And don’t forget to vote to privatize and abolish the Fire Department by calling their experience and credentials into question!

By @ShowerThoughtsComics

Look we just wanted to make sure The Ocean would remember our species for having delivered value at any cost.

The Punisher logo is genius. Via Pete.

Ah, lovely. Absolutely lovely. Really lovely folks, let me tell you.

On the developer side, what I hope people are doing is trying to make, not just good code, but these days we’ve been very good about having explanations for the code. So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Sometimes the code change is so obvious that no message is really required, but that is very very rare. And so one of the things I hope developers are thinking about, the people who are actually writing code, is not just the code itself, but explaining why the code does something, and why some change was needed. Because that then in turn helps the managerial side of the equation, where if you can explain your code to me, I will trust the code.

A lot of open source in general is about communication. And part of it is the commit messages, part of it is just the email going back and forth. Communicating what you’re trying to do or communicating why something doesn’t work for you is really important.

– Linus Torvalds, in conversation with Dirk Hohndel (emphasis mine)

This is pretty much what mine look like. For my personal stuff, I get so lazy, I use a list of developer excuses to generate a commit log that looks like this 🤦‍♀️

I hereby swear to read this document and make writing good commit messages a habit ✋🚀

Wikipedia calls it “decompression damage”. The Smithsonian Magazine has more.

Bill Burr on The Joe Rogan Experience:

BURR: I don’t want to start this bullshit. I’m not gonna sit here with no medical degree, listening to you with no medical degree, with an American flag behind you smoking a cigar, acting like we know what’s up, better than the CDC. All I do, is I watch the news once every two weeks - I’m like, “Mask or no mask? Still mask? Alright, mask!” That’s all I give a fuck about. I don’t care. I just love how wearing a mask became like this fucking like soft thing that you were doing… like being courteous…”

ROGAN: It’s for bitches¹.

BURR: Why is it for bitches? That’s just so stupid.

ROGAN: (Fakes weak cough)

BURR: Oh God you’re so tough with your fucking open nose and throat and your five o’clock shadow. This is a man right here! A man doesn’t wear a mask.

Rogan’s immediate response somehow reminded me of the “infantile phallocentric Nietzscheanism that is destroying modern human culture” from one of my favorite articles.

About as predictable as it gets. Chadwick Boseman is excellent.

They call themselves Blac Rabbit. Here they are on Ellen.