A guide to elegant post-dinner debauchery from Mr Wei Koh, watch aficionado, Style Council member and founder of The Rake Magazine, in partnership with IWC Schaffhausen.
The ‘guide’ in a nutshell: “Drink whatever you want, with whomever you like, talking about anything you’d want to, on any day of the week, until any time that works for you. I’m rich. Buy this watch.”
Well… not really. Maybe. Brian Will examines the history of the OOP way of thinking and it’s over-application as a panacea to every problem domain, particularly in The Enterprise™
A fascinating peek into the (big, lucrative) world of competitive gaming and how an humble champion’s unorthodox, world-class skills developed in a vacuum in a country not known for its gaming scene.
And there’s the 10-hour version (of course) for when a batshit-crazy, cultist conservative whinges about freedom and liberty and censorship and free markets and privatization and regulation and “corporations are people” and the incipient Demise of Western Civilization (due to ‘Marxists’ and Feminists and Immigrants) a little more than usual.
I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity.
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?”
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.
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[^another], “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.
Cached. “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.” ↩︎
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 🇺🇸
This is the "the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world" and dates from “either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD.” It was found engraved on a tombstone and was “dedicated by Seikilos to Euterpe, who was possibly his wife.” (Wikipedia)
While you live, shine have no grief at all life exists only for a short while and Time demands his due
Kashyap on his journey to become one of India’s most important filmmakers.
The cover picture is clickbait. No “shocking” revelations. Just a good story about pursuing one’s chosen vocation with grit and perseverance (with a bit of luck along the way.)
On “Josh Talks”, who look like a TED clone and are “on a mission to raise the aspirations of Young India.”
TL;DW: This is “anti-fouling” that repels barnacles, algae, and mollusks by emitting “biocides”. This is desirable because they cause drag (think fuel) and structural damage. Red because traditionally some oxide of Copper.
I cannot get over how maddeningly cute this is. Reddit user pendragwen’s comment makes it even better:
Awww! But look at how they test out their chromatophores first thing after hatching! It’s speculated that color-changing is how they communicate and show emotion. Almost like a little joyful stretch and squeal. “Yay! I’m alive!”
Excellent talk by Chris Toomey on Mastering the Vim Language. Features a lot of must-read Vim resources and nice-to-have plugins. Key takeaway for me: Prefer text objects to motions when possible (corollary: “Is this repeatable?”)
Developed in England during the 17th and 18th centuries, minute repeaters sound the time in hours, quarters and minutes—hence their name. Repeaters served a practical purpose: telling time in the dark. When streetlights were rare and matches and candles precious, chiming watches were a logical solution but not a simple one.
[. . .]
A minute repeater chimes different sounds for the hours, the quarter hours and minutes. The lowest tone—dong—is for hours, the highest tone—ding—is for minutes and a combination of both—ding-dong—counts quarter hours. If the slide is pushed at 12:59, the sounds heard are: 12 dongs for the hour then three ding-dongs for the quarter hours followed by 14 dings for the minutes.
How delightful! Watches with these complications are very difficult to make and are hence very expensive. Here’s a video of Patek Philippe’s entire line of minute repeaters. Cursory Googling tells me that the nine watches on the table are worth a total of ~$5.4M.
Part of the Titanic parable is of arrogance, of hubris, of the sense that we’re too big to fail. Well where have we heard that one before? There was this big machine, this human system that was pushing forward with so much momentum, that it couldn’t turn, it couldn’t stop in time to avert a disaster. And that’s what we have right now. Within that human system onboard that ship, if you want to make it a microcosm for the world, you have different classes, you know, you’ve got first class, second class, and third class. Well in our world right now you’ve got developed nations and undeveloped nations. You’ve got the starving millions who are going to be the ones most affected by the next iceberg that we hit, which is going to be Climate Change.
We can see that iceberg ahead of us right now, but we can’t turn we can’t turn because of the momentum of the system. Political momentum, business momentum. There are too many people making money out of the system the way the system works right now, and those people, you know, frankly have their hands on the levers of power and aren’t ready to let them go. Until they do, we’re not going to be able to turn to miss that iceberg and we’re gonna hit it. When we hit it, the rich are still gonna be able to get their access to food, to arable land, to water, and so on. It’s going to be the poor, it’s going to be the steerage, that are gonna be impacted. It was the same with Titanic and I think that’s why this story will always fascinate people. Because it’s a perfect little encapsulation of the world and all social spectra. But until our lives are really put at risk, the moment of truth, we don’t know what we would do.
Bill Hader is made to faceshift when doing his impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s weird and brilliant and I love it. Here’s another where he does Al Pacino.
Excellent stuff again from Jordan Peele. Thought the first half was about slavery and lost identity. Wisecrack has a great video on the movie’s various interpretations.
Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video.
The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one:
Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a while. Like the top YouTube comment notes, “Cordyceps is evolving to trick us into believing it is medicine.”
Here’s the making of. They did it over 17 days. I wonder when they got any sleep. At one point he says “we got 2 seconds after 4 hours.” ~3 minutes of video = 360 hours, or 15 days 😬
This video of a ball swinging in front of concave mirror (starts at 2:00, cannot embed for some reason) reminded me of simulations of what it would be like if one fell into a Black Hole.
Here’s a Schwarzschild Black Hole, one “with mass, but with no electric charge, and no spin.” (Source)
Amar Bose on education, teaching, purpose, creativity, not whinging, Norbert Weiner (under whom he was a grad student), and working with the right (and ethical) people. Starts around 24:00.
As the final season of HBO’s blockbuster television series Game of Thrones hits screens around the world today, audiences in China are begging for the explicit scenes of sex and violence not to be censored. [. . .] Disgruntled viewers in China have previously compared the significantly edited version to a “medieval castle documentary”.
Which natually leads to (which won’t embed for some reason so here)
Best thing I’ve seen this year. About as spiritual as it gets.
After an unimaginable length of time, even the black holes will have evaporated and the universe will be nothing but a sea of photons, gradually tending towards the same temperature, as the expansion of the universe cools them towards absolute zero. Once the very last remnants of the very last stars are finally decayed away to nothing and everything reaches the same temperature, the story of the universe finally comes to an end. For the first time in its life, the Universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disordered.
Nothing happens. And it keeps not happening forever.
A black hole with the mass of the sun will last a wizened 1067 years. Considering that the current age of our universe is a paltry 13.8 times 109 years, that’s a good amount of time. But if you happened to turn the Eiffel Tower into a black hole, it would evaporate in only about a day.
It will take hundreds of trillions of years for the first stellar remnant to cool completely, fading from a white dwarf through red, infrared and all the way down to a true black dwarf. By that point, the Universe will hardly be forming any new stars at all, and space will be mostly black.
BLN and I spoke about how we simply have no good strategy to attempt a comprehension of “hundreds of trillions” of years.
Features, in my estimation, the greatest solo special ops scene ever committed to film. No expert, but the knee-pillow fire might be related to why Seal Team Six attempted to destroy one of their damaged choppers.
I think my job doesn’t have an end goal. Words like “finished” or “complete” don’t exist. We do our best with today’s menu and entertain our guests. That’s all for today, it’s repetition.
Oh how I love a good David Mitchell rant. This one’s on avoiding taxation via pension contributions:
[. . . ] what we’re essentially saying is that people get to choose, if they’re rich, how much they reckon they out to pay. Where on this moral scale do they place themselves, what can they square with their greed and their conscience.
And that’s an insane system because ultimately, that is a tax on conscience. That means that the conscience you’ve got, the better person you are, the more you pay in tax. So we’re taxing being nice.
Now any economist will tell you that what you do in government is you tax the thing you discourage and you don’t tax the thing you want to encourage. So we tax nicotine, because we want to discourage smoking. We tax alcohol, we want to discourage drinking. But we don’t tax pension contributions because we want to encourage people to put things into their pensions.
So what we’re doing is we’re discouraging people from being nice and having a conscience by taxing it. And that is the most fucking bonkers system that we could’ve possibly come across.
NPR on why many of us can identify with little Agnes:
The study found that for the entire group of participants, cuter creatures were associated with greater activity in brain areas involved in emotion. But the more cute aggression a person felt, the more activity the scientists saw in the brain’s reward system.
That suggests people who think about squishing puppies appear to be driven by two powerful forces in the brain. “It’s not just reward and it’s not just emotion,” Stavropoulos says. “Both systems in the brain are involved in this experience of cute aggression.”
The combination can be overwhelming. And scientists suspect that’s why the brain starts producing aggressive thoughts. The idea is that the appearance of these negative emotions helps people get control of the positive ones running amok.
“It could possibly be that somehow these expressions help us to just sort of get it out and come down off that baby high a little faster,” says Oriana Aragón, an assistant professor at Clemson University who was part of the Yale team that gave cute aggression its name.
TL;DW? Denzel Washington is Liam Neeson from Taken (with a lot of that movie’s tropes.) Over on Reddit, an essential discussion of who would win a fight. Features my favorite hipster-henchman, Tait Fletcher whom I last saw in The Accountant.
Via co-worker DH. Dara Ó Briain on how Racism is better than Astrology:
Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?
Minute Physics on how Muons reaching terrestrial detectors from the upper atmosphere are direct proof of time dilation/length contraction in Special Relativity.
Chauhan: One day the Guru summoned a meeting of his closest male devotees. There were about 400 to 500 people. He said “We are going to remove your virility. After that, your mind isn’t going to wander. You’ll come closer to God.”
Narrator: Chauhan says he didn’t understand that the Guru was talking about castration.
[. . .]
Chauhan: Guru had put a lot of property under the names of castrated devotees. He knew that we would never get married or have children. When we died, we would leave the property here and he would put his name on our Power of Attorney.
The charlatan is responsible for the most horrifying song I’ve ever seen:
Some critics are barking “appropriation!” on Twitter and online, but where Ghost in the Shell and Doctor Strange (and there are many more) took a Japanese story and cut-and-pasted in white people, here Anderson engages with Japanese culture and references on an almost scholarly level, while the cast is filled with Japanese names1, from Ken Watanabe to Yôjirô Noda, lead singer of Radwimps to, er, Yoko Ono.
Isle of Dogs is a movie that seems custom-made to set off appropriation dog whistles but, for all its questionable moves, the result is a story that’s one of a kind. If we police boundaries too strictly, we’re stifling the possibility of cross-fertilisation and invention. If you do it well enough, it’s not appropriation, it’s conversation.
