nikhil.io

Here’s a giant list of games people have created with it. Here’s a teeny little introductory adventure. I plan on playing The Quest of DuBebe this evening:

It was only in 1922 that:

which, as that article notes, still did not prevent us from imagining a Wet-Ass Venus well into the 1950s. Here are some pictures of its surface.

Very common in India. And that article is from a journal that offers EAL news. EAL (English as an Additional Language) is not the same as ESL (English as a Second Language). EAL is favored above ESL among the language pedagogy community:

Why? Because sometimes it is not clear what an individual’s ‘first’ language is (perhaps they grew up speaking one language at home, and a different language at school). And because oftentimes people can speak more than two languages.

EAL is more inclusive and applies to “a wider range of individuals’ contexts”.

Robocop’s wet dream. Here are the artist’s website and Instagram.

Henry Lin has a degree in Architectural Design is a “a lover of all things transportative”. He draws really lovely Car Silhouettes 😍 Here are a few.

Chevy Corvette C3 (1968-1972)

Jaguar E-Type (1961-1968)

Lagonda Rapide (1961 - 1964)

Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W221)

Mercedes-Benz CLS400 (C218)

Bugatti Centodieci

This is a short film done entirely with the Early Access version of Unreal Engine 5. It’s only around eight minutes long and took six weeks to make but its plot is more exciting and coherent than whatever the heck was happening in Prometheus¹.

In 1967, the Films Division of India¹ asked all kinds of 20-year olds about their dreams and how they felt about the future of a nation that was, itself, 20 years old. Here’s the original video. A lot of the kids who speak English in the video (starting at 5:00) attend the august Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

A colorized and edited version of that video went viral. Here’s a most fascinating “Where are They Now?” follow-up by the author where he tracks down seven people in the video. It’s a mix of Hindi and English. Lessons learned: Life is way too short, way too fickle, and almost never pans out the way you think it will. Privilege helps a lot.

REALLY 📢 LOUD 📢 NOISES 📢. It’s really, really loud.

This is Boyapati Srinu’s third movie with Balakrishna after Simha (loud) and Legend (louder.) Akhanda is the loudest and shittiest collaboration yet. The story is a complete afterthought and, very loosely, holds together punch dialogues, fight scenes, and forgettable shit songs featuring Balakrishna’s embarrassing and dismaying calisthenic attempts at joint health and mobility¹. Meat for the most hardcore of Balayya fans. At this rate, he could just put out a two-hour plot-free smorgasbord of Balayya belting us with nothing but punch dialogues and still have a hit on his hands.

Diarrhea with kernels of punch dialogues. Please make sure you protect your hearing if you decide to watch this disaster. Here’s a review via NN. 0:09 to 0:24 is accurate.

When I said the first few seconds of the review above were accurate, I wasn’t fucking around.

Those histrionics are marginally better than the movie.

The music director thinks it’s wrong to call his shit loud. “You don’t ask the priests at the temple to turn down the volume of the bells ringing do you?” He submits that the ear-splitting volume induces a “trance” state. Otolaryngologists might call it “trauma” but OK Bro.

Artist Unknown

A study of DNA extracted from the leg bones of extinct moa birds in New Zealand found that the half-life of DNA is 521 years. So every 1,000 years, 75 per cent of the genetic information is lost. After 6.8 million years, every single base pair is gone. Bacterial RNA is much tougher and sequences have been recovered from ice crystals that are 419 million years old. These are only short fragments of 55 base pairs though.

Dil Se, written and directed by Mani Ratnam, is one of my all-time favorite movies. I still consider its soundtrack to be A R Rahman’s greatest work. It’s just magnificent stuff.

When I was 15, I remember seeing the movie’s trailer¹ and being awestruck by this haunting background song² that didn’t make it into the official tracklist. The song is a rendition of a well-known poem, Sitaron Se Aage Jahan Aur Bhi Hai, by another genius Allama Iqbal.

I’ve been looking for this song for a long while, settling for shitty movie extractions (which are exactly that.) I went to the extent of trying to contact Madras Talkies, the director’s production company, several times to no response or avail.

Twenty four years later, and thanks to the internet, I’ve finally found good versions of this elusive song 🥰

• Amar Confronts Meghna
• Main Theme (in Tamil and Urdu)
• Main Theme (alternative, Urdu only)
• Amar Searches Meghna’s Room
• Kuch Log

All of these appear to be from a 20-year anniversary release I couldn’t find anywhere but here. The whole thing is just absolutely lovely. Oh and here’s another version at appears to be mostly the same as the one linked to, and a solo version by a guy named Sujay.

Saw with LD on Christmas Eve. I thought it was well-done millennial nostalgia porn. Nothing wrong with that. I loved the humor and digs at techbro culture and co-option of “red-pill” by the far-right (which led to my favorite set of Tweets.) Thought it could be a deconstruction of the original Matrix (for what isn’t these days?) and was very swayed by this lovely analysis by /u/Dangerous_Budget8897.

Breaking free from the Matrix is about breaking free from preconceptions. This is emphasised by the fate of the real Morpheus, who was so convinced by the mythology of the One that he couldn’t accept the new peace could be undone. I think Lana regards certain fans of the original film in the same way, with their steadfast commitment to the original film’s aesthetics. This revival executes the highly-anticipated action scenes with total indifference, all while cheerfully embracing goofy comedy along with the defiantly uncool visual palette continued from the final shot of Revolutions.

Is this a middle finger to the audience? To some extent, but I think Lana would argue that they need their expectations recalibrated. For her, the Matrix is about love. She is aware that, as the analyst says, “people will find it sentimental”, but the positioning of sentimentality in favour of macho posturing is one of the film’s core tenets. Co-writer David Mitchell has said that Neo never shooting a gun was a purposeful choice, and it makes sense in light of the trilogy’s sacrificial ending. Neo is no longer the One, flying off alone at the end of the film, but someone who is incomplete without Trinity. Smith is once again used as an individualist counterpoint to the protagonist, but is here rendered almost irrelevant. Freedom is impossible or meaningless without connections between people, and an act of faith (in this case jumping off a building) can be more about trusting in other people than yourself.

There is also the element of further rejecting binaries. Another aspect of the Trinity arc is to do with accepting or integrating other aspects of yourself, in a way which perhaps reflects Lana’s transition. The female led cover of Wake Up¹ can be seen as a kind of corrective to the aforementioned macho elements, and the conservative adoption of the term “red pill”. People in this story are kept in place by ‘Fear and Desire”, the sense that possibilities are just out of reach, and the film proposes that the only way to set them free is by example, to “paint the sky with rainbows”.

💗

Journalist David Walsh recounting a story about his late son John in the context of his work uncovering Lance Armstrong and the USPS Pro Cycling Team’s “most sophisticated, professionalised and successful”¹ doping program.

COVID Theater has become a sad thing to behold these days. Do we still wear masks? If transmission is mostly airborne, why do we get to take them off at restaurants to eat our food when droplets from a sneeze can travel in excess of 25 feet? What’s all this talk about a second booster? Is Omicron something to worry about? How bad is it really?

I see. Well this is very practical and actionable advice, for I was planning on being distressed myself before I read that.

Mike Dawson expresses the mood I’ve picked up from most of my friends and family (all of whom, I’m happy to say, are vaccinated because they are responsible adults and not selfish, stupid, and insolent bloody children who are determined to make this nightmare last as long as possible because of their expertise in infectious diseases.)

A friend used to loan me this lovely book when I was 12 or 13. I loved reading and re-reading it to the point where I remember asking him if he could just gift it to me for my birthday (he declined). And then Life happened and I grew up and I forgot all about it until around 3 years ago, when I suddenly went “wait a second” as I was casually reading some translation of Journey to the West. This book is a childrens’ adaptation of that classic Chinese tale! I then started looking for it, off-and-on, with very little luck.

Last year, LD told me about this absolutely lovely website called “Stump the Bookseller” run by LoganBerry Books in Cleveland. For a nominal fee, I submitted everything I could remember about the book hoping that someone would know it… only to find it myself that evening. My Google-fu had somehow improved after submitting that request. I bought it from AbeBooks posthaste.

This is one of my most precious of books.

It’s just a fantastic adventure to get lost in. To understand the Myth of the Monkey a little deeper, I turned to this paper by Professor Whalen Lai¹. There’s just too much to quote but here’s a highly condensed TL;DR of both the book and the story:

Watched with LD. Decent attempt at Desi Noir in picturesque Himachal Pradesh¹. Raveena Tandon is intense, vulnerable, and puts in good work as Kasturi Dogra. Great stuff by Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Zakir Hussain, and Meghna Malik. If Jeff Goldblum had a younger brother from an Indian mother, he would look like Indraneil Sengupta. The denouement was a bit rushed and left the door wide open for a second season presumably based on how well this one did. Watchable, predictable, enjoyable.

The wedding song was the laziest composition I’ve heard in a while (spoilers… maybe.)

Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them

“yeah we divide our year into a number of sub units called ‘months’ made up a number of days, and they’re not all the same length”
“I guess that’s unavoidable, if your rotations-count per orbit is a prime number”
“yeah, our’s isn’t prime”
“but surely you have most of these ‘months’ the same length and just make the last one shorter or longer?”
“No… They’re different lengths following no logical pattern”
“what”
“and we further subdivide the months into ‘weeks’, which is 7 days.”
“ahh, so each month is an integer multiple of weeks?”
“that would make sense, but no. Only one is, sometimes”
“SOMETIMES?!”
“yeah our orbit around the sun isn’t an integer number of days, so we have to change the number of days to in a year from time to time”
“oh yes, a similar thing happens on Epsilon Indi 7, where they have to add an extra day every 39 years to keep holidays on track”
“yeah that’s how ours work! Although the ratio doesn’t work out cleanly, so we just do every 4 years, except every 100 years, except except every 400 years”
“oh, you number your years? What’s the epoch?”
“uh, it’s supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it’s off by 4 years, if he existed at all.”
“if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you’re not sure exists?”
“yeah. He’s written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty.”
“interesting. I didn’t realize your planet was one of the ones with a single universal religion, that usually only happens in partial or complete hive minds.”
“uhh, we’re not.”
“You’re not?!”
“yeah we have multiple religions.”
“oh but they all have a common ancestor, which agrees on the existence of that leader, right?”
“uh, no. Two of the big ones do, but most of the others don’t believe in him”
“YOUR CALENDAR IS BASED ON A RELIGIOUS LEADER THAT NOT EVERYONE BELIEVES IN?”
“well, on his birth. And yeah, we got it wrong by a couple years.”
“OK, fine. So, you have somewhat complicated rules about when you change the length of your years, and I’m scared to ask this, but… You definitely just add or subtract that extra day at the end, right?”
“… Nope.”
"At the start of the year? "
“nah. The end of the second month”
“WHY WOULD IT BE THE SECOND MONTH?”
“I’m not sure, really.”
“huh. So at this point I’m dreading asking this, but how do you measure time within each day?”
“oh that’s much simpler. Each day is divided into hours, each hour has minutes, and each minute has seconds.”
“ok. And 10 of each?”
“10 hours? No. There’s 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds”
“… I thought you said you used a base-10 counting system”
“we do! Mostly. But our time system came from some long gone civilization that liked base-60 like 5000 years ago”
“and you haven’t changed it since?”
“No.”
“huh. Okay, so why 24? That’s not a divisor of 60”
“oh because it’s actually 12!”
“what”
“yeah each day is 24 hours but they are divided into two sets of 12.”
“and that’s 5 12s, right, I see the logic here, almost. So like, after hour 12, it becomes the second half, which is 1?”
“No, after 11.”
“oh, you zero-index them! So it’s hours 0-11 in the first half, then 12-23 in the second half?”
“No. 12 to 11 in the first half, and again in the second half”
“please explain that before my brain melts out my mouth”
“the first hour is 12. Then the next one is 1, then it goes back up to 11, then 12 again”
“that is not how numbers work. And how do you tell first 12 apart from second 12?”
“oh we don’t use numbers for that!”
“you don’t number the two halves of your day?”
“nah, we call them AM and PM”
“WHAT DOES THAT MEAN”
“I think it’s ante-meridian and post-meridian? But I’m not sure, I dont know much Latin”
“Latin?”
“yeah it’s an ancient language from an old empire which controlled a lot of the world and we still use some of their terms”
“oh, and that was the civilization that liked base-60 and set up your time system?”
“that would make sense, but… No, completely different one.”
“okay, and what do you do to if you want to measure very short times, shorter than a second?”
“oh we use milliseconds and microseconds”
“ahh, those are a 60th of a second and then 60th of the other?”
“No. Thousandths.”
“so you switch to base-10 at last, but only for subdivisions of the second?”
“yeah.”
“but at thousands, ie, ten tens tens”
“yeah. Technically we have deciseconds and centiseconds, which are 1/10 of a second, and 1/100 of a second, but no one really uses them. We just use milli.”
“that seems more like a base-1000 system than a base-10 system.”
“it kinda is? We do a similar thing with measures of volume and distance and mass.”
“but you still call it base-10?”
“yeah”
“so let me see if I get this right: Your years are divided in 10 months, each of which is some variable number of days, the SECOND of which varies based on a complex formula… and each day is divided into two halves of 12 hours, of 60 minutes, 60 seconds, 1000 milliseconds?”
“12 months, actually.”
“right, because of the ancient civilization that liked base-60, and 12 is a divisor of 60.”
“No, actually, that came from the civilization that used latin. Previously there were 10.”
“what”
“yeah the Latin guys added two months part of the way through their rule, adding two more months. That’s why some are named after the wrong numbers”
“you just said two things I am having trouble understanding. 1. Your months are named, not numbered? 2. THE NAMES ARE WRONG?”
“yep! Our 9th month is named after the number 7, and so on for 10, 11, and 12.”
“your 12th month is named… 10?”
“yeah.”
“what are the other ones named after?!”
“various things. Mainly Gods or rulers”
“oh, from that same religion that your epoch is from?”
“uh… No. Different one.”
“so you have an epoch based on one religion, but name your months based on a different one?”
“yeah! Just wait until you hear about days of the week.”
“WHAT”
“so yeah we group days into 7-day periods-”
“which aren’t an even divisor of your months lengths or year lengths?”
“right. Don’t interrupt”
“sorry”
“but we name the days of the week, rather than numbering them. Funny story with that, actually: there’s disagreement about which day starts the week.”
“you have a period that repeats every 7 days and you don’t agree when it starts?”
“yeah, it’s Monday or Sunday.”
“and those names come from…”
“celestial bodies and gods! The sun and moon are Sunday and Monday, for example”
“but… I looked at your planet’s orbit parameters. Doesn’t the sun come up every day?”
“yeah.”
“oh, do you have one of those odd orbits where your natural satellite is closer or eclipsed every 7 days, like Quagnar 4?”
“no, the sun and moon are the same then as every other day, we just had to name them something.”
“and the other days, those are named after gods?”
“yep!”
“from your largest religion, I imagine?”
“nah. That one (and the second largest, actually) only has one god, and he doesn’t really have a name.”
“huh. So what religion are they from? The Latin one again?”
“nah, they only named one of the God-days”
“only on… SO THE OTHER DAYS ARE FROM A DIFFERENT RELIGON ENTIRELY?”
“Yep!”
“the third or forth biggest, I assume?”
“nah, it’s one that… Kinda doesn’t exist anymore? It mostly died out like 800 years ago, though there are some modern small revivals, of course”
“so, let me get confirm I am understanding this correctly. Your days and hours and seconds and smaller are numbered, in a repeating pattern. But your years are numbered based on a religious epoch, despite it being only one religion amongst several.”
“correct so far”
“and your months and days of the week are instead named, although some are named after numbers, and it’s the wrong numbers”
“exactly”
“and the ones that aren’t numbers or rulers or celestial objects are named after gods, right?”
“yup!”
“but the months and the days of the week are named after gods from different religons from the epoch religion, and indeed, each other?”
“yeah! Except Saturday. That’s the same religion as the month religion”
“and the month/Saturday religion is also from the same culture who gave you the 12 months system, and the names for the two halves of the day, which are also named?”
“right! Well, kinda.”
“please explain, slowly and carefully”
“yeah so cultures before then had a 12 month system, because of the moon. But they had been using a 10 month system, before switching to 12 and giving them the modern names”
“the… Moon? Your celestial body?”
“yeah, it completes an orbit about every 27 days, so which is about 12 times a year, so it is only natural to divide the year into 12 periods, which eventually got called months”
“ok, that makes sense. Wait, no. Your orbital period is approximately 365.25 days, right?”
“yeah. That’s why we do 365 or 366 based on the formula”
“but that doesn’t work. 365 divided by 27 is ~13.5, not 12”
“yeah I’m not sure why 12 was so common then. Maybe it goes back to the base 60 people?”
“okay so one final check before I file this report: Years are numbered based on a religious leader. Years always have 12 months, but the lengths of those months is not consistent between each other or between years.”
“don’t forget the epoch we number our years from is wrong!”
“right, yes. And your months are named, some after a different religion, and some after numbers, but not the number the month is in the year.”
“right. And when we change the month lengths, it’s the second one we change”
“how could I forget? After months you have a repeating ‘week’ of 7 days, which is named after gods from two religons, one of which is the month-naming one, and a nearly extinct one. And you don’t agree when the week starts.”
“nope! My money is on Monday.”
“that’s the Monday that’s named after your moon, which supposedly influenced the commonality of the 12 months in a year cycle, despite it orbiting 13 times in a year?”
“correct!”
“and as for your days, they split into two halves, named after a phrase you don’t really understand in the long dead language of the same culture that named the months and Saturday.”
“Yep. I took some in college but all I remember is like, ‘boy’, ‘girl’, ‘stinky’, ‘cocksucker’”
“charming. And then each half is divided into 12 hours, but you start at 12, then go to 1, and up to 11”
“all I can say is that it makes more sense on analog clocks.”
“i don’t know what that is and at this point I would prefer you not elaborate. So each of those hours is divided into 60 minutes and then 60 seconds, and this comes from an ancient civilization, but not the one that gave you the month names”
“yep. Different guys. Different part of the world.”
“ok. And then after seconds, you switch to a ‘base-10’ system, but you only really use multiples of a thousand? Milliseconds and microseconds?”
“right. And there’s smaller ones beyond that, but they all use thousands”
“right. Got it. All written down here. Now if you’ll excuse me, I just gotta go make sure I didn’t leave my interociter on, I’ll be right back.”

The tall alien walks back into their saucer without a wave. The landing ramp closes.

The ship gently lifts off as gangly landing legs retract. There’s a beat, then a sudden whooshing sound as air rushes back into the space that previously held the craft, now suddenly vacuum.

NORAD alarms go off briefly as an object is detected leaving the earth’s atmosphere at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

In the years to come, many technological advances are made from what was left behind, a small tablet shaped object made of some kind of artifical stone/neutrino composite material.

The alien message left on screen is eventually translated to read “Untitled Document 1 has not been saved, are you sure you wish to quit? (yes) (no) (cancel)”

Many years have passed, and we await the day the aliens return. They have not.

With our new advancements, we build space-radar systems and can see the many species flying around the galaxy. It’s not long before we realize they’re intentionally giving earth a wide berth.

Drone ships criss-cross the galaxy, but when they get within a lightyear of earth they detour around it.

We finally get a subspace radio working, and start working to decode the noisy traffic of a thousand civilizations talking to each other. We broadcast a message of greetings and peace

Less than a week later, the subspace net goes quiet. Our space radar reports the solar system is now surrounded by small vessels, suspected to be some kind of automated probe, and they’re blocking all radio traffic in or out. Even the pulsars go quiet, all radio waves are gone.

We focus on cracking the secret of FTL travel. The first prototype never makes it off the ground, as before the rocket can even ignite, it’s crushed by a small meteor

Forensic reconstruction suggests it was a sundial, carved from rock dug out of the far side of the moon.

Anyway if anyone wants to, like, draw or animate this or film this (or something inspired by it)? That’d be sweet, you don’t need permission from me, go ahead. I’d do it but I don’t have the time or skills. Just put like “based on a story by Foone” somewhere in the credits.

It’s always weird saying that because it kinda sounds like I’m implying I think this is like A MOVIE SCRIPT THAT’S GOING TO HOLLYWOOD! or something. I don’t, I just want to make sure everyone knows it’s free to adapt and remix and all that.

It amused me to type, I hope it amused you to read, and if it amuses you to make something based on it, go right ahead. I’d love to see it.

Sounds lovely, really.

Absolutely beautiful work by Nada Maktari 🔥

Here are a few others for the Dune that didn’t get made.

I just ordered a set of “blackout” plates from the DMV here. They’re rather cool and look like this:

I didn’t know that they were actually a solution to a problem. People would take existing, specialized plates for Dordt University and cover them up to look like the blackout plates.

Clever! But led to some unnecessary altercations with law enforcement since doing this was a legal gray area. State Senator Charles Schneider was able to get the mandate for blackout plates included in 2019. Just in that year, the state raised $850,000 through the sale of these plates for the Road Use Tax Fund (simple arithmetic suggests that ~14,000 people ordered them.)

I got all that from Aaron Calvin’s article in The Des Moines Register. Summarized it here since the Register’s website, like most websites these days, is an unreadable and unusable crock of shit.

Americans are paying a quarter million dollars more for healthcare over a lifetime compared to the most expensive socialized system on earth. Half a million dollars more than countries like Canada and the UK.

One in three American families had to forgo needed healthcare due to the cost last year. Almost three in ten had to skip prescribed medication due to cost. One in four had trouble paying a medical bill. Of those with insurance one in five had trouble paying a medical bill, and even for those with income above $100,000 14% had trouble. One in six Americans has unpaid medical debt on their credit report. 50% of all Americans fear bankruptcy due to a major health event.

So there’s a good chance you wouldn’t be able to pay for it, especially if you get sick enough to lose the job you depend on for insurance.

mediocre healthcare for free.

Except it’s US healthcare that’s mediocre vs. it’s peers.

• US Healthcare ranked 29th by Lancet HAQ Index
• 11th (of 11) by Commonwealth Fund
• 59th by the Prosperity Index
• 30th by CEOWorld
• 37th by the World Health Organization
• 52nd in the world in doctors per capita.
• Higher infant mortality levels. Yes, even when you adjust for differences in methodology.
• Fewer acute care beds. A lower number of psychiatrists. Etc.

The US has the worst rate of death by medically preventable causes among peer countries. A 31% higher disease adjusted life years average. Higher rates of medical and lab errors. A lower rate of being able to make a same or next day appointment with their doctor than average.

Comparing Health Outcomes of Privileged US Citizens With Those of Average Residents of Other Developed Countries

These findings imply that even if all US citizens experienced the same health outcomes enjoyed by privileged White US citizens, US health indicators would still lag behind those in many other countries.

When asked about their healthcare system as a whole the US system ranked dead last of 11 countries, with only 19.5% of people saying the system works relatively well and only needs minor changes. The average in the other countries is 46.9% saying the same. Canada ranked 9th with 34.5% saying the system works relatively well. The UK ranks fifth, with 44.5%. Australia ranked 6th at 44.4%. The best was Germany at 59.8%.

On rating the overall quality of care in the US, Americans again ranked dead last, with only 25.6% ranking it excellent or very good. The average was 50.8%. Canada ranked 9th with 45.1%. The UK ranked 2nd, at 63.4%. Australia was 3rd at 59.4%. The best was Switzerland at 65.5%.

OECD Countries Health Care Spending and Rankings (Source)

“Fear can be a funny thing; it doesn’t always shine a flattering light. It can make us forget that others are scared too.”

The author tells a short and lovely story about the pandemic, isolation, hope, the value of community, nature, and so many other things for such a short book. It is told through the experience of his grandpa (and his grandpa’s doggy). It made me think of my own grandmother and how (a) we are not meant to be alone and (b) how loneliness is especially devastating for older people.

Really loved his drawing/art style as well. Lovely stuff 💗

At the Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur. About as mesmerizing as percussion can get.

Speaking of mesmerizing, see this performance by the great Zakir Hussain at the Berklee College of Music.

Renay Mandel Corren passed away at 84 a week ago (RIP 🙏). Her son wrote what is one of the best obituaries I’ve read in a while. A small excerpt:

Here’s what Renay was great at: dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said she read them for the articles, but filthy free speech was really Renay’s thing. Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud. We thought Renay could not be killed. God knows, people tried.

Please enjoy the whole thing. I cached it here because it is too important to lose. Via PLG.

This (beautifully formatted and well-paced-and-delivered and surprisingly sparsely attended) talk by Gabriel Lebec on the fundamentals of Lambda Calculus is one of my favorite talks ever.

As Lebec explains, the lovely bird names come from this book called “To Mock a Mockingbird” by mathematician and logician Raymond Smullyan. The naming is simply delightful. As Matthew Gilliard explains:

The premise is that there are enchanted forests which contain many (or sometimes very few) talking birds. Smullyan dedicated the book to Haskell Curry - an early pioneer in combinatory logic and an avid bird-watcher. The birds, which I suppose represent the combinators, have an interesting characteristic:
Given any two birds A and B, if you call out the name of B to A it will respond by calling out the name of some bird to you.

This bird whose name A calls when you call B is denoted as AB. Once you have several birds in place, a single call can cascade around the forest with each call following rules depending on who produces it.

The very first bird we are introduced to is the Mockingbird whose characteristic behaviour is that whatever name you call to the Mockingbird, it will reply as if it is the bird whose name you called. This is denoted:

Mx = xx

For any bird x we can say that Mx (the result of calling x to a Mockingbird) is the same as xx (the result of calling x to a bird of type x). It really does mock other birds! And what’s more, the existence of the Mockingbird, in combination with various others, unlocks some really fascinating group behaviour from these birds.

And!

Soon we discover that birds have certain properties: The can be fond of other birds, they can be egocentric if they are fond of themselves. The can be hopelessly egocentric if they only ever talk about themselves. There are happy birds, normal birds, agreeable birds and many others. We also meet other types of birds with specific properties - the Lark, the Kestrel, Sage birds, Bluebirds, aristocratic birds, Eagles, the list goes on and on. Luckily there is a Who’s Who list of birds in the back to keep track.

Excellent stuff, particularly the mechanical keyboard envy¹. There’s a Nikhil in it too! 💁‍♂️

For “the greatest movie never made”, although there appear to be a few contenders¹ for that title, like Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon.

My absolute favorite is the last one by Hugo Emmanuel Figueroa 🙌

Pe-release flyer (Source)

by Matt Chinn.

Variation 1 by Stan and Vince.

Variation 2 by Stan and Vince.

by Hugo Emmanuel Figueroa

I think we’re doing pretty well here. Things will be fine in 2024. Peaceful, lawful, and full of dignity and decorum 🙏

You either get Nic Cage or you don’t. Via CM.

Because we don’t simply write non-annoying and non-creepy software that respects you and does the thing you want it to do anymore. Gotta deliver Value™ to all key stakeholders. By which we mean ourselves and the Market. Not you. You are nothing more than Data that taps “Purchase” to us.

• The Best Albums: Pitchfork, Rolling Stone
• The Best Graphic Novels: New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian
• The Best Movies: New York Times, Empire, The New Yorker

I’ll cache and smush these soon.

Reddit user u/Inzitarie made this lovely Cultural Map of the United States. It’s not perfect but it’s something. He based his version on this one by u/Aijol10 right below it

Saw with LD. Saw it listed some place as a must-watch Korean thriller. As action-packed and entertaining as it is forgettable. Chock-full of clichés, excellent chemistry between the two main characters. Don Lee is a force of Nature. Can’t wait for an Indian remake starring S. J. Suryah (and Vijay, of course.)

Stephen Crowley is a product designer who maintains @ShitUserStory, my favorite new Twitter account¹ (via Deepu). He also maintains a Medium blog with gems like these:

• “Can Squid Game make you a better UX designer?” (cached)
• “What I’ve learnt about design from parenting a toddler.” (cached)
• “How I overcame impostor syndrome” (cached)

Lovely stuff.

From the highly entertaining “Just One More Thing”

Absolute shit that was thrice as long as it needed to be. A total waste of my time and Amruta Subhash’s talent. When I was done, I wished I’d spent my evening watching every available video on the Island Boys on YouTube.

Saw with LD. Noir, Jung, myth and mythology, Proteus, Prometheus, masculinity, sexuality, very large phallus, isolation, identity, lobster dinners, psychosis, mermaids, flatulence, alcoholism, omens, portents, songs, odes, the-father-is-the-son-is-the-father, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

“Every Frame a Painting” and it somehow manages to be quite funny at times. Oh and this (emphasis mine):

Bravo!

If you took “Buttons” by The Pussycat Dolls and deep-fried it in stale peanut oil, you would get the result below. It’s by Youtuber Dii and it’s all I’ve been humming for the past 48 hours.

Fun little quiz! Did not do as well as I thought I would…

A most beautiful, graceful, and sublime rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs.

Lovely, lovely stuff 🙏❤️ (via Deepu)

See also: Worlds Beyond the Stars

I see I’ve been summoned. Your comments in this thread make it clear that nothing will change your position. It’s a difficult position to combat, because it’s in such a defiance of literally anything written on the topic in at least the last 50 years. You are not operating off the same foundations of evidence that others are, and for that reason I suspect they, like me, are not terribly interested in arguing. Because it’s unlikely your drivel will be removed, I’m posting some quotes and links for those who see this thread later and think you might have even begun to approach a point supported by any specialist on the topic. I do not intend these to be comprehensive; there are myriad examples of “deliberate attempts to destroy native culture in the Americas” in, well, literally any single book or article you can pick up about the era. Rather, because you’ve instead there never was any such thing, I’ve provided some obvious examples.

A primary goal of the Spanish colonial regime was to completely extirpate indigenous ways of life. While this was nominally about conversion to Catholicism, those in charge made it quite explicit that “conversion” not only should be but needed to be a violent process. Everything potentially conceivable as an indigenous practice, be it burial rituals, ways to build houses, or farming technologies, was targeted, To quote historian Peter Gose:

only by rebuilding Indian life from the ground up, educating, and preventing (with force if necessary) the return to idolatry could the missionary arrest these hereditary inclinations and modify them over time.

Francisco de Toledo, Viceroy of Peru, made clear in a 1570 decree that failure to comply with Catholicism was an offense punishable by death and within secular jurisdiction:

And should it occur that an infidel dogmatizer be found who disrupts the preaching of the gospel and manages to pervert the newly converted, in this case secular judges can proceed against such infidel dogmatizers, punishing them with death or other punishments that seem appropriate to them, since it is declared by congresses of theologians and jurists that His Majesty has convened in the Kingdoms of Spain that not only is this just cause for condemning such people to death, but even for waging war against a whole kingdom or province with all the death and damage to property that results

The same Toledo decreed in 1580 that Catholic priests and secular judges and magistrates should work together to destroy indigenous burial sites:

I order and command that each magistrate ensure that in his district all the tower tombs be knocked down, and that a large pit be dug into which all of the bones of those who died as pagans be mixed together, and that special care be taken henceforth to gather the intelligence necessary to discover whether any of the baptized are buried outside of the church, with the priest and the judge helping each other in such an important matter

Not only was the destruction of native culture a top-down decree, resistance was explicitly a death sentence.

The contemporary diversity of Latin America is not the result of natural “intermixing,” but the failure of the Spanish to assert themselves and the continuous resistance of the indigenous population. As early as 1588, we see letters from local priests airing grievances about the failure of the reduccion towns they were supposed to relocate native families to:

‘the corregidores are obliged, and the governors, to reduce the towns and order them reduced, and to build churches, take care to find out if the people come diligently for religious instruction and mass, to make them come and help the priest, and punish the careless, lazy, and bad Indians in the works of Christianity, as the ordinances of don Francisco de Toledo require, [but] they do not comply. Rather, many of the towns have yet to be reduced, and many churches are yet to be built, and a large part of the Indians are fled to many places where they neither see a priest nor receive religious instruction.

Reduccion was not a voluntary process, nor was it a question of simply “moving away.” Not only did it involve the destruction of native religious sites, it frequently involved the destruction of entire towns to repurpose building material and ensure people could not return. In fact, where we do see more voluntary participation in Spanish colonial structures, usually because of the political legibility and opportunities it provided, the resulting syncretism becomes an ever greater source of anxiety for the Spanish. Indigenous elites could selectively participate in Catholicism and game the system to their benefit- not something the state wanted to admit could happen.

These quotes come from Gose’s chapter on reducciones uploaded here.

I will also provide this section from the conclusion of Nicholas Robins’ book Mercury, Mining, and Empire; the entirety is uploaded here. The quoted chunk below is a summary of the various historical events presented in that chapter.

The white legend held much historiographical sway throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, and in no small part reflected a selective focus on legal structures rather than their application, subsumed in a denigratory view of native peoples, their cultures, and their heritage. As later twentieth-century historians began to examine the actual operation of the colony, the black legend again gained ascendance. As Benjamin Keen wrote, the black legend is “no legend at all.

Twentieth-century concepts of genocide have superseded this debate, and the genocidal nature of the conquest is, ironically, evident in the very Spanish laws that the advocates of the white legend used in their efforts to justify their position. Such policies in Latin America had a defining influence on Rafael Lemkin, the scholar who first developed the term genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. As developed by Lemkin, “Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor,” which often included the establishment of settler colonies. Because of the intimate links between culture and national identity, Lemkin equated intentional cultural destruction with genocide. It was in no small part a result of his tireless efforts that in 1948 the United Nations adopted the defintion of genocide which, despite its shortcomings, serves today as international law. The fact that genocide is a modern concept and that colonists operated within the “spirit of the times” in no way lessens the genocidal nature of their actions. It was, in fact, historical genocides, including those in Latin America, that informed Lemkin’s thinking and gave rise to the term.

Dehumanization of the victim is the handmaiden of genocide, and that which occurred in Spanish America is no exception. Although there were those who recognized the humanity of the natives and sought to defend them, they were in the end a small minority. The image of the Indian as a lazy, thieving, ignorant, prevaricating drunkard who only responded to force was, perversely, a step up from the ranks of nonhumans in which they were initially cast. The official recognition that the Indians were in fact human had little effect in their daily lives, as they were still treated like animals and viewed as natural servants by non-Indians. It is remarkable that the white legend could ever emerge from this genocidogenic milieu. With the path to genocide thus opened by the machete of dehumanization, Spanish policies to culturally destroy and otherwise subject the Amerindians as a people were multifaceted, consistent, and enduring. Those developed and implemented by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo in Peru in the 1570s have elevated him to the status of genocidier extraordinaire.

Once an Indian group had refused to submit to the Spanish crown, they could be legally enslaved, and calls for submission were usually made in a language the Indians did not understand and were often out of earshot. In some cases, the goal was the outright physical extermination or enslavement of specific ethnic groups whom the authorities could not control, such as the Chiriguano and Araucanian Indians. Another benefit from the crown’s perspective was that restive Spaniards and Creoles could be dispatched in such campaigns, thus relieving cities and towns of troublemakers while bringing new lands and labor into the kingdom. Ironically, de Toledo’s campaign to wipe out the Chiriguano contributed to his own ill health. Overall, however, genocidal policies in the Andes and the Americas centered on systematic cultural, religious, and linguistic destruction, forced labor, and forced relocation, much of which affected reproduction and the ability of individuals and communities to sustain themselves.

The forced relocation of Indians from usually spread-out settlements into reducciones, or Spanish-style communities, had among its primary objectives the abolition of indigenous religious and cultural practices and their replacement with those associated with Catholicism. As native lands and the surrounding geographical environment had tremendous spiritual significance, their physical removal also undermined indigenous spiritual relationships. Complementing the natives’ spiritual and cultural control was the physical control, and thus access to labor, offered by the new communities. The concentration of people also inadvertently fostered the spread of disease, giving added impetus to the demographic implosion. Finally, forced relocation was a direct attack on traditional means of sustenance, as many kin groups settled in and utilized the diverse microclimates of the region to provide a variety of foodstuffs and products for the group.

Integrated into this cultural onslaught were extirpation campaigns designed to seek out and destroy all indigenous religious shrines and icons and to either convert or kill native religious leaders. The damage matched the zeal and went to the heart of indigenous spiritual identity. For example, in 1559, an extirpation drive led by Augustinian friars resulted in the destruction of about 5,000 religious icons in the region of Huaylas, Peru, alone. Cultural destruction, or ethnocide, also occurred on a daily basis in Indian villages, where the natives were subject to forced baptism as well as physical and financial participation in a host of Catholic rites. As linchpins in the colonial apparatus, the clergy not only focused on spiritual conformity but also wielded formidable political and economic power in the community. Challenges to their authority were quickly met with the lash, imprisonment, exile, or the confiscation of property.

Miscegenation, often though not always through rape, also had profound personal, cultural, and genetic impacts on indigenous people. Part of the reason was the relative paucity of Spanish women in the colony, while power, opportunity, and impunity also played important roles. Genetic effacement was, in the 1770s, complemented by efforts to illegalize and eliminate native languages. A component in the wider effort to deculturate the indigenes, such policies were implemented with renewed vigor following the Great Rebellion of 1780–1782. Such laws contained provisions making it illegal to communicate with servants in anything but Spanish, and any servant who did not promptly learn the language was to be fired. The fact that there are still Indians in the Andes does not diminish the fact that they were victims of genocide, for few genocides are total.

Lastly, I would direct readers to the following article: Levene, Mark. 1999. “The Chittagong Hill Tracts: A Case Study in the Political Economy of ‘Creeping’ Genocide.” Third World Quarterly 20 (2): 339–69.

Though it talks about events a world away, it’s discussion of genocide is pertinent here. From the abstract:

The destruction of indigenous, tribal peoples in remote and/or frontier regions of the developing world is often assumed to be the outcome of inexorable, even inevitable forces of progress. People are not so much killed, they become extinct. Terms such as ethnocide, cultural genocide or developmental genocide suggest a distinct form of ‘off the map’ elimination which implicitly discourages comparison with other acknowledged examples of genocide. By concentrating on a little-known case study, that of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh, this article argues that this sort of categorisation is misplaced. Not only is the destruction or attempted destruction of fourth world peoples central to the pattern of contemporary genocide but, by examining such specific examples, we can more clearly delineate the phenomenon’s more general wellsprings and processes. The example of the CHT does have its own peculiar features; not least what has been termed here its ‘creeping’ nature. In other respects, however, the efforts of a new nation-state to overcome its structural weaknesses by attempting a forced-pace consolidation and settlement of its one, allegedly, unoccupied resource-rich frontier region closely mirrors other state-building, developmental agendas which have been confronted with communal resistance. The ensuing crisis of state–communal relations, however, cannot be viewed in national isolation. Bangladesh’s drive to develop the CHT has not only been funded by Western finance and aid but is closely linked to its efforts to integrate itself rapidly into a Western dominated and regulated international system. It is in these efforts ‘to realise what is actually unrealisable’ that the relationship between a flawed state power and genocide can be located.

Genocide need not be a state program uniquely articulated to eliminate a people or their culture. Rather, it is often disguised in the name “progress” or “development.” This connects to the Spanish colonial economic system, based on what Robins (above) calls the “ultra-violence” of forced labor in mines.

I love this ring as much as I love Mr. Stanley Tucci.

It’s from The Devil Wears Prada and is an aqeeq ring (which “means quartz in Arabic, and agate in Turkish”) which was a pretty common sight on older hands when I was growing up.

I looked far and wide for a replica and found this on Etsy¹. That price aside, not bad at all!

Eighth Wonder of the World indeed. Here’s a nice calculator that draws graphs, and allows for monthly contributions and rate variances.

The Dune screenplay was written on MS-DOS on a program app called “Movie Master”. It has a 40 page limit which helps the writer, Eric Roth.