The Imaginary Worlds podcast looks at Doctor Who’s regeneration, which began nearly 60 years ago as a gimmick to replace a lead actor whose health was failing, and has become central to the Doctor’s story, “about an alien being who is striving to be better but keeps overshooting the mark."
Podcast host Eric Molinsky says the source of regeneration’s narrative power may be that we all change over time and when we look back on our past selves they seem like other people.
I went around and around the house looking for my phone, searching the usual places again and again, and finally got down on my hands and knees with a flashlight next to the bed and discovered the black phone had fallen off the nightstand and into a black shoe.
Ryan O’Neill: Let me repeat that back to you.
One of the most effective communications strategies I use is repeating back, in my own words, what was just explained to me.
I do this sometimes when doing interviews, but I find the people I’m interviewing will interrupt me to make the point themselves, or elaborate on whatever point I’m repeating back.
The Hyperloop was always a scam.
The tech industry’s move into transportation was not only a failure; it was an active campaign to deny the public access to better transit and trains because the billionaires of Silicon Valley don’t personally want to get around that way. The Hyperloop was one part of that, but so were the Boring Company, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars. The Hyperloop’s failure provides a lesson we’re learning far too late: that Silicon Valley won’t deliver us a better world if they can’t find some way to profit off it.
What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President. Historian Jill Lepore: After the Civil War, attempts to prosecute Jefferson Davis bogged down in politics, racism and legal pettifogging and went nowhere.
These kinds of lists are catnip for me.
Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
I encounter the Focusing Effect regularly. I live in San Diego and do business with people from all over the world. I think they think my life is just surfing and campfire parties on the beach with Gidget.
I saw this sign on the ground next to an impressively large poop.
It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google.
Journalist JS Tan, writing at The Baffler, argues that Google has become a cesspool of bullshit jobs—engineers rewarded for building projects that are never deployed, or deployed and quickly abandoned, and bloated middle management. The company is trying to change its culture.
I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s observation that Google only ever built 1-1/2 products—search and I forget what else. It bought its ad business, which was like Jed Clampett luckily striking oil in his backyard. Google also bought other businesses that have been successful for it: YouTube, Google Maps, and Waze. (Maybe Gmail is the half-business of which Cory speaks?—Google did develop that.)
Google’s spectacular failures with Google Glass, Google+ and Google Reader, to name just three examples, suggest a company whose innovative powers are far more hype than reality. On the other hand, it’s no mean feat for Google to build and maintain its vast, global infrastructure of data centers and subsea cables, and keep its businesses—acquired or otherwise—successful.
Ars Technica rates 20 time travel movies by entertainment and scientific plausibility.
What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up thusly: You can travel to the future, but you probably can’t travel to the past, although to be honest, we’re not really sure.
Their list includes a personal favorite of mine: “Time After Time” (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell as time-traveling H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his plucky feminist 1970s galpal and David Warner as Jack the Ripper.
The IMDB trivia page for “Time After Time” does not disappoint.
All four of the real H.G. Wells’ children were still alive at the time of this film’s release.
…
Malcolm McDowell listened to recordings of H.G. Wells to prepare for the role. According to him, Wells’ voice was high-pitched and Cockney-accented, so he decided not to imitate
…
The movie’s title inspired Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time After Time”, when in 1983 she browsed through a copy of TV Guide for “imaginary song titles”.
…
A deleted scene featured Wells meeting a punk who was playing extremely loud boom-box music on a bus in San Francisco. [Director] Nicholas Meyer later reused this idea in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
Much of the action of “Time After Time” takes place in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, as do a few scenes in Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety.” I stayed in the same hotel in 2017; it hadn’t changed much, other than becoming deliciously dark and gloomy. A monument to 70s futurism.
One quibble with the Ars Technica list. Authors Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll rightly praise the first Christoper Reeve “Superman,” including Gene Hackman’s “marvelous selection of outrageous wigs,” but add:
We’re knocking off a point for the cheesy “Read My Mind” spoken song as Superman takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic flight over Metropolis, which has aged poorly.
No, that scene did not “age poorly.” It was always terrible. It was cringe in 1978 and it is cringe today.
Now I want to see “Superman” again, to enjoy Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine hamming it up as villains.
Reading “A Christmas Carol” as antisemitic is pretty easy. The main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, is a moneylender who doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Full stop there. But there’s more: the name Ebenezer is Hebrew, deriving from the phrase eben ha-ezer, meaning “stone of the help.” Scrooge’s dead friend and former business partner, Jacob Marley, sports a fully Jewish moniker – his first name one of the Jewish forefathers, and his Hebrew family name meaning “It is bitter to me.” Scrooge not only doesn’t observe Christmas festivities, he hates it. He’s a mean and nasty guy, and Dickens even gives him a “pointed nose” to boot.
The supermarket did not have Chianti. I talked to four employees, and they did not know what Chianti is. (“Candy?”) Does no one watch “Silence of the Lambs” anymore? What do hippie college students use for candleholders if they don’t have Chianti bottles?
We saw this festive holiday display of leg prostheses. Please enjoy it.
The premise of the movie “Noelle” is that Santa Claus is a family business, with each Santa passing the pom-pom to his son. A few months ago, the last Santa died, and the responsibilty to pilot the sleigh falls on son Nick, who doesn’t want to do it and is terrible at it. Nick’s sister, Noelle, advises him to take a weekend to relax in someplace warm, and he does so—and disappears.
Now everybody in the North Pole is mad at Noelle. “Noelle” continues the tradition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in portraying most of the denizens of Santa’s village as jerks.
Noelle tracks Nick to Phoenix, where Nick has reinvented himself as a yoga instructor, and she attempts to get him to return to the North Pole and fulfill his responsibility.
All of this is in the movie trailer, and if you watch the trailer, you can figure out how the movie ends.
Noelle is played with, well, elfen adorableness by Anna Kendrick of the “Pitch Perfect” trilogy, which I haven’t seen, and the 2009 Great Recession dark comedy “Up in the Air,” starring George Clooney as a consultant who specializes in laying people off. I did see that one—on the day I myself got laid off—and loved it.
Nick is played with gormless charm by Bill Hader, of “Saturday Night Live” and “Barry.”
Also featured are Shirley MacLaine as a grouchy elf; Julie “Airplane” Hagerty as Mrs. Claus; and several scene-stealing CGI reindeer, particularly a little white reindeer named Snow-Cone.
Kingsley Ben-Adir plays a divorced father facing his first Christmas alone without his family, in a storyline that’s surprisingly moving for such a fluffy movie.
Both Julie and I enjoyed “Noelle.”
“Noelle” is the latest of my ongoing series of completely avoiding important or consequential entertainment, because the news is consequential enough, inspired by John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watches.
Here’s Scalzi’s review of “Noelle.”, from which I learn that “Noelle” was written and directed by Marc Lawrence, who also wrote and directed “Music & Lyrics,” which starred Hugh Grant as a washed-up 80s pop music star who experiences a career comeback as a songwriter after he meets and partners with aspiring lyricist Drew Barrymore. “Music & Lyrics” is a solid romantic comedy—like “Noelle,” it’s fluff entertainment—and also a surprisingly thoughtful exploration of the value of fluff entertainment. I’d like to see “Music & Lyrics” again.
“Some thoughts on the real world by one who glimpsed it and fled." Bill Watterson’s 1990 commencement speech at Kenyon College.
Lately, I’ve been realizing the value of having something that excites me enough to jump out of bed for it. So, I’ve decided to fully immerse myself in whatever comes next, knowing that these enjoyable times might not last forever.
Here’s the thing: whether or not these obsessions lead to something useful in work or life isn’t the main point, although they often do. More importantly, as various monks and philosophers say, the greatest happiness for humans is to live in the moment.
Apparently, when humans have free time, they tend to stress over the past and future instead of focusing on the present.
Thus, those who discover a hobby they can deeply immerse themselves in are fortunate….
Tyler Cowen: Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
Stackexchange discussion: Can Microsoft Flight Simulator help me learn to fly (or make me a better pilot)?
Ace Atkins bids Robert B. Parker’s Spenser farewell. After 10 novels, Atkins looks back at what makes the Boston detective character so compelling.
The Surprising Possibilities of See-Through Wood. Transparent wood is tougher than transparent plastic and glass and has potential practical applications in smartphone screens, insulated windows and more.
How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections. Continual reinfection was not the “new normal” Biden advertised. How did we get here?
Walking the dog in the park this morning, I saw a runner wearing a Santa hat, a runner wearing a Christmas sweater, and a pack of bicyclists that included one wearing a rope of Christmas lights around his neck—the old-style, big teardrop-shaped lights.
Every once in a while, I pick up a call from an unidentified caller rather than letting it ring through. It’s almost always a telemarketer or other variety of scammer. And then I’m disappointed because I can’t think of a way to mess with them.
Maybe I should take improv classes?
I’m intrigued by Dave Winer’s distinction between conversation and publishing. He’s talked elsewhere about blogging as a kind of thinking out loud.
BlueSky upgrade: Now you can see Profiles and posts on the web without logging in, and it also supports RSS feeds.
I want a single client for all the Twitter spinoffs: Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads all in one place. RSS and Tumblr too. This step by BlueSky is a step in the right direction.
This was a pain for me to figure out but once I got it figured it, it was simple.
Use the line tool. Instead of clicking and then dragging—which will draw a single line—click at the start of your shape, then click on the next corner, and then the next corner, and so on until you’re done.
To close the shape, your final click should be on the starting point. You can customize with the fill tool—if you do, then when you close the shape, you’ll automatically get a color fill.
Use the curved-line selection for wavy edges, and the straight-line selection for nice, straight edges.
If you don’t close the shape, you end up with a multi-point or wavy line instead.
Here’s a video that shows you how to use the line tool with clear written instructions in the extended caption.
I should illustrate this with screenshots but I need to move on now. Maybe another time.
I needed to draw an L-shaped box for a diagram. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to draw it using Excalidraw. I found this YouTube video. I then had to figure out why the audio wouldn’t play. I had this problem yesterday and thought I had resolved it but I guess not.
After ten minutes of that, I tried a different video and the audio played just fine.
Aha, I said to myself—audio does not play because there is no audio.
I scrubbed back and forth in the video trying to figure out what they were doing. No luck.
Then I expanded the caption and discovered there are also detailed instructions in the caption. Hooray!
I fiddled for about two minutes and got a nice, L-shaped box.
That was easy! I declared to myself.
Conclusions:
Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker: In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War. Alt creators such as YouTube stars and Substack authors are overtaking traditional media, and traditional media is oblivious to the race.
One of the things I absolutely adore about A Knight’s Tale is that it makes no pretense at historical accuracy anywhere within its length.
Another one for the to-rewatch list.
I think Democrats wake up every morning and they look at the calendar on the iPhone and it says January 6th. The date never changes. And then they get into an electric vehicle and go get an abortion.
— Kellyanne Conway
I like to have coffee first but otherwise can confirm.
Federal Judge Blocks New California Law Banning Concealed Handguns in Public Places. I bet U.S. District Court Judge Cormac Carney does not allow guns in his courtroom, other than sheriff’s officers and police.
Deborah Cohen at The Atlantic: IBM has a history of more than a century of innovation.
The company was the Watson family business for 60 years, and offered lifetime employment, though it’s recently been sued for age discrimination.
The System/360 mainframe, announced in 1964, was one of the greater products of the 20th Century, as important as the Model T. The System/360 introduced computing architecture that ran across a line of computers—some bigger and more powerful, and others smaller, meaning users could re-use their software between different models in a line.
The company’s technological accomplishments are still recognizable as the forerunners of the digital era, yet its culture of social responsibility—a focus on employees rather than shareholders, restraint in executive compensation, and investment in anti-poverty programs—proved a dead end. A mashup of progressivism and paternalism, communalism and cutthroat competition, the once ballyhooed “IBM Way” was, for better and worse, inextricably intertwined with the family at the top.
JULIE: “I’m going to try a new herb and rice.”
ME: “I don’t think I should be eating rice.”
JULIE: “Not rice. Spice. Urban spice.”
ME: “Oh, ok. Sounds good.” (pause) “What’s urban spice?”
JULIE: “Not urban spice. Herb. And. Spice.”
Julie, exhausted, fainted.
Threads is getting an API. This seems to be separate from ActivityPub. I’m looking forward to this being implemented—I haven’t been posting to Threads as much as I do elsewhere, because doing it manually is inconvenient . @manton, have you seen this?
I am quite enjoying John Scalzi’s December Comfort Watch movie list and have added about half the titles to my to-be-watched-list.
I’m done with challenging and important entertainment for a while. The news is challenging enough nowadays.
We went to the San Diego Natural History Museum Sunday, which proved to be a personal milestone for me—my first time receiving a senior discount.
My chagrin at having the word “senior” applied to me was offset by getting a discount. So, um, yay I guess?
The Everywhereist: Every Relationship In Love, Actually, Listed In Order of How Dysfunctional They Are.. I love this movie and agree with every criticism against it, including this one.
RIP Luiz Barroso, who pioneered the modern data center for Google and made the modern internet possible. Until Barroso, data centers were populated by enormously powerful and expensive computer servers. Barroso instead used massive numbers of relatively inexpensive, disposable machines.
“… we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer,” Barroso said.
Barroso was one of those immigrants that Republicans say are vermin polluting America’s blood.
Sivraj and Me. Phil Gomes created a personal AI advisor using GPT Builder, with a sarcastic personality based on Jarvis from the Iron Man movies.
This is brilliant. I’m going to try something like it.
Humans are a basically civilized species. We know not to go barefoot in restaurants, treat our friends’ living rooms like landfills or nap on the shoulder of our office cubicle mate. And yet, as soon as we step inside an airport or onto a plane, our manners seem to vanish. Perhaps it’s the delirium of travel or the belief that everyday rules do not apply to vacations, much like calories don’t count on holiday and foreign currencies aren’t real money. Or maybe there has never been a canon for proper passenger behavior — until now.
Amazon would rather ask its workers to humiliate themselves instead of paying living wages.
Meanwhile, founder and chair Jeff Bezos is worth $172 billion, and the company tripled its profits to $9.9B in its most recent quarter.
John Scalzi has a delightful short essay on “Die Hard," a movie that works so well because of its wonderful cast. Even small parts get their moments to shine.
And of course “Die Hard” created thousands of variations and ripoffs. My favorite “Die Hard” variation is “Paul Blart, Mall Cop.” The way I remember it (it’s been a few years), Paul Blart is a hero–and he was a hero all along: Courageous, loyal, and ingenious.
Thankfully, Scalzi spends only a little time on the question of whether DH was a Christmas movie. That was a good joke the first year it came up but enough already. Sometimes the Internet can be like a four-year-old that just wants to keep telling the same knock-knock joke over and over and over and over…..
Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon in the last scene of The Gilded Age. Oh boy.
Merry Christmas from these grizzly bears at the Natural History Museum at Balboa Park.
The iPhone’s Notes App Is the Purest Reflection of Our Messy Existence.
If you want to know who someone truly is—what they eat, what books they read, what movies they watch, or how furious they get inside their own minds—you should probably check their Notes app.
Alexandra Petri: GOP baffled that ‘We Don’t Care if You Die’ is not a winning slogan
Jason Snell @jsnell@zeppelin.flights makes the case for clipboard managers—software that saves a history of what you copy to your clipboard.
I find clipboard managers to be essential. The lack of a clipboard manager on the iPad is a big reason why I find it difficult getting real work done on those tablets.
My earliest memory of using a clipboard manager was the late 1980s. 35+ years later, a clipboard manager should be standard on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. Instead, it’s a third-party add-on for the Mac and you can’t get one at all on the iPad and iPhone.
Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr: How the NYPD defeated bodycams. “NYPD leadership were accountability’s adversaries, not its partners.”
Police control bodycams in New York—as they do in other cities, including Minneapolis (site of the George Floyd murder); Montgomery, Ala.; Memphis—and they use that control to protect murderous, brutal cops.
Bodycams could be a source of accountability for cops, but for that to be true, control over bodycams would have to vest with institutions that want to improve policing. If control over bodycams is given to institutions that want to shield cops from accountability, that’s exactly what will happen.
And it’s exactly what does happen.
I hate to say I told you so but Death’s hand rests on the shoulders of some of the largest Western telecom equipment cos. Steve Saunders predicts imminent shake-out in the telecom vendor market.
I bought supermarket coffee beans yesterday—and like them. My status as a coffee snob is in grave danger.
At the supermarket today I was in line at the cash register behind a rotund voluble middle-aged gentleman who chatted up not one but TWO middle-aged women, also in line. He laughed “HURH HURH HURH” with every sentence. A real John Candy “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” vibe.
I also saw another gentleman, sinewy build, with leathery skin, wearing plaid shorts, a sweatshirt, a leather tyrolean hat and a small knapsack on his back. His clothes were weathered and so was he. It was a good look.
Apple buried the setting in WatchOS 10.2 for re-activating swiping to change watchfaces. You need to go into the Settings app, and then Clock -> Swipe to Switch Watch Face. And you need to do it on the Watch itself, not in the Watch app on the phone.
My latest: Cloud cost-consciousness is having a moment. Companies are rediscovering cost awareness, which Amazon CTO Werner Vogels calls a “lost art.”
What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately?
As ChatGPT gets “lazy,” people test “winter break hypothesis” as the cause
Terry Gilliam and Jonathan Pryce on making “Brazil.”
“Robert De Niro prepared to play a plumber by watching a brain surgeon.” …
De Niro agreed because he was a Python fan, Gilliam cast his daughter but she cut her hair off in protest and Pryce needed a wig as he’d just been playing a friar with a tonsure.
“Ask a Manager” says “this is the best office holiday party date story of all time.”
It’s EVEN BETTER THAN THAT.
I’m glad to see work is continuing on ActivityPub support in Tumblr (here’s a statement on Tumblr from CEO Matt Mullenweg), and also not surprised to find there isn’t much interest in WordPress ActivityPub support.
Most people who want something with ActivityPub support just go to Mastodon. At least for now.
We brought Minnie in for a good dog wash for the first time in too long. We tried a new place. They did a good job, but they used perfumed shampoo on her, and now my office, where she sleeps at night, smells like a New Orleans whorehouse.
“… blogging never died…. journalists just stopped paying attention.”
Bruce Schneier: It’s easy to think of generative AI as a friend rather than a service, making us vulnerable to profit-seeking corporations. “AI models, controlled by large corporations, inherently prioritize profit over ethics.”
It was very enjoyable. I see fans ranking it as third of the five Indy movies. I’ll go with that.
They did a great job de-aging Harrison Ford for the opening sequence. Apparently this was a result of skilled direction as much a CGI; I noted they cut the camera away from Indy when he was about to do something too athletic, and then cut back to him when the athletic thing was complete. Often, action featuring Indy was shot from the rear.
This quick-cutting was also done in scenes where 1969-Indy is being athletic. For example, in the scene where Indy steals a police horse, we see him standing next to the horse, then we see him on the horse, but we don’t see him getting on the horse. Presumably octogenarian Harrison Ford understandably had a little trouble there.
Still, Ford is in fantastic shape for an 80-year-old. He’s in good shape for any age.
When we watched the second “Ant-Man” movie, where they de-aged Michael Douglas for flashback scenes, I noticed that Douglas looked young, but moved like an older man, a little stiff, like his joints bothered him. Ford doesn’t have that stiffness.
In another instance of casting an older man in an action movie: The 1996 “The Rock” starred Sean Connery, then 66 years old. I noted at the time that the camera cut away whenever the action called for Connery to run.
They had the right amount of pathos at the beginning. A friend who works in Hollywood said Hollywood writers eventually come to hate their characters, and start to torture them, which often makes long-running TV shows hard to watch. Similarly, at least one of the Tobe Maguire Spider-Man sequels was a downer, featuring depressed Peter Parker. “Dial of Destiny” could have gone that way, as we open the 1969 sequence with washed-up sad lonely Indiana Jones. But the movie spent just the right amount of time on that bit, before launching into the action, where Indy perks up.
They had the right amount of fanservice. Sometimes it seems like you need to take a college class to appreciate the Marvel movies, or Star Trek, or Doctor Who, what with all the references to events and characters from previous movies and TV. “Dial of Destiny” had just the right amount of that kind of thing. Hey, it’s John Rhys Davies, and there’s Indy’s fedora, bullwhip and leather jacket. Cool.
Harrison Ford does a great oh-shit face. I feel like this is a formula in every Indiana Jones movie. Indy does something swashbuckly and sneers at his enemies. He enjoys the triumph for a moment and then realizes he’s badly outnumbered and outgunned. Oh, shit.
I was surprised by character development and feelings at the end. Didn’t expect quite so much heart.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge almost stole the movie. And stealing an Indiana Jones movie from Harrison Ford is something. I could absolutely watch a series of Indiana Jones sequels featuring Waller-Bridge. There’d be a scene at the beginning of each movie where her character consults with Indiana Jones for a few minutes, but that would be the extent of Indy’s involvement in the movie.
I could also watch a series of movies featuring Archimedes as Bronze Age Indiana Jones. I don’t think the ancient Greeks or Romans had giant arrows that could be used to shoot down fighter planes. I don’t think they had much in the way of artillery at all, unless you count catapults as artillery. Did they even have catapults? Idk. But the Ancient Greece bits were fun.
The movie did a great job recreating 1969 New York. I grew up on Long Island, and spent time in New York in in the mid-late 1970s, and it was like that.
Life for the Lowest Class in Ancient Pompeii? It Was Awful. Excavations in the ancient ruins have unearthed a cramped space where enslaved workers and donkeys performed their grueling tasks.
Jim Geraghty at National Review: “Hunter Biden’s entire life, so far, has been a bold, defiant, shameless declaration that laws are for the little people, not for the Bidens.”
I will gladly support Joe Biden against any plausible Republican candidate. I think he’s done a pretty good job as President. Not great, but pretty good.
However, let’s not kid ourselves: If Hunter Biden came from a different family, he’d be doing prison time by now. And it remains to be seen how much Joe Biden knew.
The first record of donuts appears in a 1400s German cookbook.
I think this is the first year I’m hearing about jelly donuts and Hanukkah. We always had latkes when I was a kid.
Fantasy disguised as science fiction disguised as fantasy: Roger Zelazny’s “Lord of Light.” Jo Walton: “I have never liked Lord of Light. If I’ve ever been in a conversation with you and you’ve mentioned how great it is and I’ve nodded and smiled, I apologise.”
Making DevSecOps more than just lipstick on a pig. If your answer to implementing DevSecOps is dumping more responsibility on overworked developer teams, you’re doing it wrong. My latest.
Everyone and everything is pissing me off today.
Not you. You’re awesome.
The presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania said calls for genocide against Jewish people don’t violate their school policies. When I covered crime in New Jersey in the 1980s, making death threats was a crime. I assume that’s true today in most US jurisdictions—but not at Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania if you’re threatening Jews.
After a recent discussion with friendly fellow journalists, I started using Reddit again. I’d dumped Reddit after the whole dustup this summer between the Reddit CEO and the developer of the Apollo client. It left me feeling like the CEO was a petty jerk, and I didn’t want to support him.
But after Friday I decided to give Reddit another try, and I find I like the discussion there. And call me a sucker but I like watching the karma points rack up.
And it’s a good opportunity to promote articles.
But I miss Apollo. Reddit is barely usable on the iPhone and iPad without Apollo.
On a private discussion group, a friend asked what we use to clean our computer screens. I said I cover mine with peanut butter and let the dog lick them clean. I enjoy opportunities like that to share my deep technical knowledge with the less-informed.
I’m trying the Spark email app for Mac and iPhone. Impressive but confusing.
Lucid dream startup says you can work in your sleep.
Despite the linkbait headline, the article itself is very interesting and goes into claims by the startup that they’ve created technology to induce lucid dreaming at will.
What would be the ramifications of something like that, where most people were able to lucid dream at will? Would it be like the movie “Inception?”
The most popular articles on Wikipedia in 2023: ChatGPT is #1. The list also includes Taylor Swift, the Barbie movie and Matthew Perry. I’m interested to see how many listings are international, particularly Indian.
Jewish women’s advocates share graphic descriptions of Hamas’s brutal rape, mutilation and torture of Israeli women and girls. In the US and West, progressives march to support Palestinian victims—and rightly so—but are quiet when the victims are Jews.
Also: The World’s Feminists Need to Show Up for Israeli Victims: Solidarity for victims of sexual assault should trump other politics.
WSJ: Meta Is Struggling to Boot Pedophiles Off Facebook and Instagram
The headline and deck on this article are too kind to Meta. The companies do not seem to be “struggling” to get rid of this content. They don’t seem to be trying very hard at all.
More from Casey Newton (paid sub required I think) who points out the difference between “Internet problems” and “platform problems.” “Internet problems” arise from the fact that we live in a world where evil exists, and will inevitably find its way onto the Internet. “Platform problems” are unique to a particular platform.
Pedophilia content on Meta platforms isn’t an Internet problem. Facebook and Instagram are actively promoting that content to pedophiles.
I’m not feeling good about being on Facebook right now.
“Bertie Sheldrake was a South London pickle manufacturer who converted to Islam and became king of a far-flung Islamic republic before returning to London and settling back into obscurity.”
The number of supercentenarians in an area tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after accurate birth records are introduced.
Ukrainian defenders print out giant 1:1 life-size aerial photographs of damaged airfields. Once the site is repaired, they hang the images over the sites so they look damaged and not worth attacking again.
First Zoom meeting of the week is in 20 minutes. I’m ready.
I’m going back to cross-posting from mitchw.blog to @mitchw@mastodon.social. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse (of course), but it’s not one with the fediverse.
This system may need further adjusting later today or this week, and almost certainly need adjusting in the near term as the fediverse evolves.
Neil Barsky at The Guardian:
One gray Sunday in the middle of the Covid lockdown, I received an unwelcome call from my family doctor. Until then, for virtually my entire life, I had managed to stay out of a doctor’s office, except for routine checkups. My luck had run out.
“I am sorry to disturb you on a weekend,” she said. “But your tests just came back and your blood sugar levels are alarming. I am pretty sure you have diabetes.”
Barsky controls his diabetes with lifestyle changes.
I did the same more than 10 years ago—diet, exercise, and losing 100 pounds of weight.
My diet is different than Barsky’s. I do eat carbs—pizza on Fridays, plenty of fruit every day, and 4-6 cookies as a bedtime snack.
But I eat a lot less carbs than I did in my pre-diabetes life.
I rarely eat sandwiches anymore, or potatoes, nachos and other chips, or rice.
I almost never have a burrito anymore, even though I live in a Mexican-food capital of America,
I do miss that Mexican food.
I question the advice that the author initially got from his doctor. When I was diagnosed with diabetes, 20 years ago, my doctor told me that both lifestyle changes and medication were the answer to managing the disease. Barsky’s doctor seemed to brush off lifestyle changes and focus just on meds.
A new theory of “wobbly spacetime” potentially reconciles quantum mechanics and relativity—one of the greatest scientific mysteries of the past century.
The macroscopic world of relativity and the subatomic world of quantum physics are fundamentally different. And both those worlds are different—and mostly incomprehensible—to humans and the other complex life forms that inhabit Earth.
WSJ: Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’? Intel is competing with nearly every other tech giant, including longtime joined-at-the-hip partner Microsoft.
.. you know the kind of movies I’m talking about: Movies set on submarines; movies set on aircraft carriers; movies where lawyers are good guys; movies where guys secure the perimeter and/or the package; movies where a guy has to yell to make himself heard over a helicopter; movies where guys with guns break the door into a room decorated with cut-out newspaper headlines. … Movies that dads like. I love these movies pretty unreservedly and only somewhat ironically.
This essay starts great and just gets better.
I have seen most of these movies and enjoyed every one. These are the only movies I need to see for the rest of my life.
What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem. The Metaverse failed, but metaverses like Fortnite are big and growing, with more to come. By Wagner James Au.
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