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What does living in a dictatorship feel like?

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 30, 2018

According to writer G. Willow Wilson, living in an authoritarian society does not look like “something off the Syfy channel”.

It’s a mistake to think a dictatorship feels intrinsically different on a day-to-day basis than a democracy does. I’ve lived in one dictatorship and visited several others—there are still movies and work and school and shopping and memes and holidays.

The difference is the steady disappearance of dissent from the public sphere. Anti-regime bloggers disappear. Dissident political parties are declared “illegal.” Certain books vanish from the libraries.

How does a society go from a democracy to an autocracy? It’s like that line of Hemingway’s from The Sun Also Rises about how to go bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

So if you’re waiting for the grand moment when the scales tip and we are no longer a functioning democracy, you needn’t bother. It’ll be much more subtle than that. It’ll be more of the president ignoring laws passed by congress. It’ll be more demonizing of the press.

Until one day we wake up and discover the regime has decided to postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other. Or until it can ‘ensure’ that the voting process is ‘fair.’

I don’t know about you, but Trump and the Republican Congress working to “postpone the 2020 elections until its lawyers are finished investigating something or other” seems like a completely plausible scenario. I would not be surprised if we see conservative pundits start floating this idea, slowly normalizing it over a matter of months until it seems like a plausible option. After all, it’s much easier for Republicans to remain in office if they got rid of those pesky elections (in lieu of gerrymandering and voter ID laws).

Update: In a poll from August 2017, 56% of Republicans polled said that they would support postponing the 2020 election if Trump and Republicans in Congress were in favor of it. (via @taestell)

And a rebuttal: Skincare Is Good and Also Works

The skincare industry is a racket. Your skin is an amazing organ and spreading fancy acid on your face is not healthy.

You Have to See This Place. "Pick a spot on the globe and I'll send you a print of my nearest photo."

An interview with a designer whose infographic-style resume template went viral

The Mosaic web browser just turned 25 years old

An entertaining and informative video about why the NYC subway system is so screwed up right now (short answer: politics)

Massive undersea walls built near large Arctic & Antarctic glaciers may cause them to melt more slowly, buying humanity some time in the fight against climate change

Graph of career Grand Slam match victories suggests five contenders for best tennis player ever: Serena, Federer, Graf, Chris Evert, and Navratilova.

Queens Museum director resigns because her "activism for immigrants and other progressive causes clashed with the museum's conservative board members".

The fight over diversity at Google, inside and outside the company, continues

There's no quick links archive yet. If you'd like to see 'em all, follow @kottke on Twitter.

Verena, an iOS app to help protect people in abusive situations

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 30, 2018

Verena

Verena is an iOS app designed to protect and help guide you through situations like “domestic violence, hate crimes, abuse, and bullying”. The app was developed with the LGBTQ+ community in mind, but can be used by anyone facing abuse or harassment.

Create an account, and develop a network of emergency contacts, who can be alerted without leaving a trace on your phone.

Use the emergency feature to be guided through your problem, giving you the resources you need to get out of the emergency safely.

Create incident logs to keep track of abuse, hate crimes, or bullying for reference and later reportation.

Select the preferences that match your situation, such as using incognito mode to hide the app behind a math user interface, shutdown which can permanently disable the app if found by an abuser, and emergency access which allows you to alert all of your contacts with the press of a button.

Open resources to find and get routed to hospitals, shelters, and police stations near you.

Use timer to set a specified amount of time. If the timer isn’t canceled, Verena will send an emergency alert to all contacts with your last known location.

Select location to see your current location, the distance between you and your different contacts, and get routed to them as well.

Verena was built by Amanda Southworth, a 16-year-old iOS developer who created the app to help her LGBTQ+ friends in the aftermath of the election of a known abuser to the White House in 2016:

Seeing her friends — many of whom are part of the LGBT community — worry the day after the presidential election in November 2016 inspired her to create the app. “That day I saw all of my friends crying and it was really upsetting, you know, when people you love are scared,” she says. “So I decided, I’m going to make something so that I know they’re safe.”

Verena, which takes its name from a German name that means “protector,” allows users to find police stations, hospitals, shelters, and other places of refuge in times of need. They can also designate a list of contacts to be alerted via the app in an emergency.

Southworth, whose first iOS app was a “mental health toolkit” called anxietyhelper, attended Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this past summer and wrote about it for Teen Vogue. She also gave a TEDx talk about “how her struggle with mental illness and suicidal thoughts inspired her start coding”.

A visual introduction to the Fourier Transform

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 30, 2018

The Fourier Transform is an incredibly useful mathematical function that can be used to show the different parts of a continuous signal. As you can see from the Wikipedia page, the formula and the mathematical explanation of the Fourier Transform can get quite complicated. But as with many complex mathematical subjects, the FT can also be explained visually. In the video above, 3blue1brown breaks down the Fourier Transform into a really intuitive visual system that’s surprisingly easy to follow if you’re not a science or math person. This would have been super helpful in my physics and math classes in college.

See also Better Explained’s interactive guide to the Fourier Transform, which describes the FT metaphorically like so:

What does the Fourier Transform do? Given a smoothie, it finds the recipe.
How? Run the smoothie through filters to extract each ingredient.
Why? Recipes are easier to analyze, compare, and modify than the smoothie itself.
How do we get the smoothie back? Blend the ingredients.

The guide includes interactive graphs that you can play around with. Stuff like this always gets me so fired up about math and science. Ah, the path not taken…

A pair of oil paintings algorithmically pixelized into treemaps of color

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 30, 2018

Dimitris Ladopoulos

Dimitris Ladopoulos

Greek visual designer Dimitris Ladopoulos took two of his favorite oil paintings, one by Rembrandt and the other (confusingly) by Rembrandt Peale, and used a piece of 3D modeling software called Houdini and pixelized them into treemaps of color. They look great in 2D (above), but he also rendered them in 3D with a worn texture:

Dimitris Ladopoulos

Those worn plastic rectangles with the beveled edges are reminding me of something in particular, like a piece of electronics. Something from Sony maybe? Anyone? (via colossal)

A Mister Rogers biopic starring Tom Hanks (WHAT!!?)

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

Variety is reporting that Tom Hanks is set to play Fred Rogers in a biopic called You Are My Friend.

“Now more than ever, we all need a re-introduction to Fred Rogers’ message of uncompromising love and kindness between all living things. Mari Heller is the perfect visionary filmmaker to bring Noah and Micah’s script to life and because of her vision and this remarkable script, we have the quintessential actor to play Fred Rogers,” said Turtletaub and Saraf.

The script is loosely based on Tom Junod’s Esquire piece about Rogers, Can You Say…Hero?, which is very much worth a read if you’ve never had the pleasure.

Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself… and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: “Well, Tom, I guess you’ve already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.”

Oh, I hope this doesn’t get derailed. Unless it’s going to be bad, in which case: shelve away!

John Williams conducting the opening fanfare for Star Wars: The Last Jedi

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

Director Rian Johnson has posted a short clip of the legendary John Williams conducting the opening fanfare (aka the Star Wars theme) for The Last Jedi. It is difficult to think of the Star Wars films without Williams’ music.

An HBO documentary about Andre the Giant

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

A documentary film about pro wrestler Andre the Giant is going to air on HBO starting on April 10.

André René Roussimoff was born in 1946 in Grenoble, France. In his early teens, he exhibited signs of gigantism though he was not diagnosed with acromegaly until his twenties. He began his training in Paris at 17 and eventually became known in wrestling circuits around the world. In 1973, Andre joined the organization now known as World Wrestling Entertainment, where he became a superstar and rival of WWE legend Hulk Hogan.

I loved watching pro wrestling when I was a kid and Andre was always a favorite.

The original US patent drawing for the Lego brick, filed 60 years ago

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

Lego Patent

This is one of two drawings that accompanied Godtfred Kirk Christiansen’s US patent application for the Lego toy building brick. The application was submitted 60 years ago yesterday on Jan 28, 1958, an occasion that is celebrated annually as International LEGO Day. (thx, david)

Surfer rides a wave 115 feet tall

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

The waves off the coast of Portugal near Nazaré are some of the biggest in the world. Nearly two weeks ago, a German pro surfer named Sebastian Steudtner rode a wave estimated at 115 feet high and didn’t crash or kill himself. If you watch the video, even at a larger size, it’s difficult to pick Steudtner out from the wall of the cartoonishly massive wave.

Curiously, the current world record for the largest wave ever ridden (also set at Nazaré) is 78 feet. And if you look at the video and compare, Steudtner’s wave is definitely much bigger.

Recommendation: Slate’s podcast series about Watergate, Slow Burn

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

There are many cultural and political lenses through which to view the Trump Presidency — reality TV, Mike Judge’s alarmingly prescient Idiocracy, the OJ Simpson case, Germany in the 1930s — but perhaps the most relevant is through the lens of Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. A lot of what I know about Watergate came through cultural osmosis (Johnny Carson and SNL were still doing Watergate jokes in the 80s when I started watching) and movies like All the President’s Men, and I suspect that’s true of many Americans who are too young to have lived through it. We may know the broad strokes, but that’s about it.

Enter Slow Burn, a podcast by Slate about some of the lesser known stories surrounding Watergate and what it felt like to experience it as the scandal unfolded. Here’s series host Leon Neyfakh describing what the show is about:

Why are we revisiting Watergate now? The connections between the Nixon era and today are obvious enough. But to me, the similarity that’s most striking is not between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon (although they’re both paranoid, vengeful, and preoccupied with “loyalty”), or their alleged crimes (although they both involved cheating to win an election), or the legal issues in the two cases (although they both center on obstruction of justice).

Rather, it’s that people who lived through Watergate had no idea what was going to happen from one day to the next, or how it was all going to end. I recognize that feeling. The Trump administration has made many of us feel like the country is in an unfamiliar, precarious situation. Some days it seems like our democratic institutions won’t survive, or that permanent damage has already been done. Pretty much every day, we are buffeted by news stories that sound like they’ve been ripped out of highly stressful and very unrealistic novels.

The point of Slow Burn is to look back on the most recent time Americans went through this en masse, and to put ourselves in their shoes.

Historical events like these make great podcast subjects; I’ve also listened to LBJ’s War recently. Reading articles or books about these topics is one thing, but actually listening to the investigators, journalists, lawyers, and Congressmen talk about about their roles in and perceptions of Watergate, both in contemporary interviews and recordings from that period, adds a lively and engaging aspect to these stories. I mean, just hearing Nixon on those secret tapes and then in press conferences saying that he had done nothing wrong…it’s completely gripping. I’ve been thinking up excuses to go for drives this past week just so I can get my Slow Burn fix.

A woman’s place is at the South Pole

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 29, 2018

Why is this 16-year-old girl holding a ham & cheese sandwich at the South Pole?

Jade Hameister

At 14, Jade Hameister became the youngest person to ski to the North Pole from outside the last degree of latitude. After she gave a talk about the journey at TEDx Melbourne, a video of the talk was posted online and the comments — like “Make me a sandwich” — rolled in from men presumably upset that Hameister isn’t preparing for a life of cooking & cleaning rather than polar exploration. After skiing across Greenland and then to the South Pole, Hameister had a message (and some lunch) for those men:

Tonight (it never gets dark this time of year) I skied back to the Pole again… to take this photo for all those men who commented “Make me a sandwich” on my TEDX Talk. I made you a sandwich (ham & cheese), now ski 37 days and 600km to the South Pole and you can eat it xx

How’s that Hameister & cheese sandwich taste, fellows? *bicep flex emoji* *dancing woman emoji*

Tycho DJ set from Dec 2017

posted by Jason Kottke   Jan 28, 2018

Tycho is one of my favorite electronic artists and he recently did this 90-minute DJ set at the SnowGlobe music festival that’s currently powering me through some lazy Sunday chores and work.

See also his most recent Burning Man DJ set. Oh, and he’s also got some sets coming up in Boston, NYC, Houston, and DC.

The improbability of Mark E. Smith

posted by Tim Carmody   Jan 26, 2018

Geeta Dayal writes about the late singer, founder, and driving force behind The Fall, one of the most influential and least likely indie bands of the last forty years.

The members of the group shifted constantly and erratically from album to album, or even from month to month, with Smith as the only constant presence. Nearly 70 people have been members of The Fall over the course of the past four decades — an eye-popping number. “If it’s me and your granny on bongos, it’s The Fall,” Smith once famously quipped — less a joke than a statement of fact.

On Twitter, I described it this way: Mark E. Smith was like Old Dirty Bastard, if ODB had somehow managed to assemble and reassemble two dozen different versions of the Wu-Tang Clan, they released an album every year, and half of them were unpredictable masterpieces.

Dayal quotes Mark Fisher, one of The Fall’s best critics, who also died in the past year:

A group like The Fall — working class and experimental, popular and modernist — could not and should not exist, and The Fall are remarkable for the way in which they draw out a cultural politics of the weird and the grotesque.

If you’re looking for a place to start with The Fall, I recommend four albums that bridge their early art-damaged punk period with their 1980s pop-damaged indie rock peak:

1. Totally Wired: The Rough Trade Anthology
2. Hex Enduction Hour
3. The Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall
4. This Nation’s Saving Grace

Pope Francis’s definition of ‘fake news’

posted by Tim Carmody   Jan 26, 2018

“Fake news” is kind of a catch-all family-resemblance concept that’s abused as often as it’s used with real insight. But I was impressed by Pope Francis’s clear definition, given as part of an official message by the Vatican to mark World Communication Day:

While President Donald Trump has often dismissed news outlets and stories as “fake news,” Francis defined it as “the spreading of disinformation online or in the traditional media. It has to do with false information based on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader.”

He added, “Spreading fake news can serve to advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests.”

Francis’s main example of fake news? The serpent’s message to Eve and Adam about the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This example shows that “there is no such thing as harmless disinformation; on the contrary, trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences. Even a seemingly slight distortion of the truth can have dangerous effects.”

Maybe along with Bishop of Rome and father of the Church, the Pope would make a good public editor.