Ok, if you haven’t seen this before (or even if you have), I need to warn you that Emoji Kitchen is just a little bit addictive. They’re mashup apps for making new emoji like these:
Curiously, the eggplant seems to be missing from both kitchens… 🤔
Sadly, the site you link to about emoji kitchen (.dev) is not mine. This developer has taken my artwork without permission 😐 and worse, hosts a repo so others can steal it too
I’ve found in my twenty-something years of messing about with Buddhism is that what it has to teach is pretty simple; you could read up on the essentials in a day, probably in an hour, possibly in a quarter of an hour. But the point is to somehow so deeply embed those values, perspectives, and insights in yourself that they become reflexive, your operating equipment, how you assess and react to the world around you. That’s the work of a lifetime — or of many, if you’re inclined to believe in reincarnation.
Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.
You see things happen “gradually, then suddenly” in all sorts of places, including, as Solnit notes, both the climate and the fight for climate justice.
The other day I posted a quick note of appreciation for my trusty rice cooker. I have what you might call a fancy rice cooker — it has all sorts of different settings and “advanced Neuro Fuzzy logic technology” — and it cooks my rice perfectly, every time. I am sure it is an engineering marvel.
But this $20 one-button rice cooker also cooks rice perfectly, every time. And it does so using some very simple and clever engineering involving magnets:
This button thing is made of an alloy that has a Curie temperature just a bit higher than the boiling point of water. This allows it to function as a temperature-dependent kill switch. Thanks to the outer spring, it’s always held firmly in contact with the bottom of the pot, which ensures it and the pot are at nearly equal temperatures. So long as there’s liquid water sitting in that pot, the pot itself cannot get hotter than water’s boiling point.
This means that the button remains magnetic, and the magnet is able to overcome the force of the inner spring, so the device stays in cook mode. But, once the rice has absorbed all of the water (and/or once all the remaining water has boiled away) the energy being added to the pot by the heating element is no longer being absorbed as latent heat.
Now, the pot can quickly start to exceed the boiling point of water. And once it gets past the Curie point of that little sensing button, the magnet is no longer attracted to it, so the spring overcomes the magnet and… *click* the rice cooker switches back to the warming mode.
How Threads Will Integrate with the Fediverse, some notes by Tom Coates of a closed meeting with Facebook about their federating plans. “My sense after this meeting was that Facebook are seriously interested in integrating Threads with the Fediverse.”
One of the many reasons that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off works so well as a film is that the music kicks ass *and* it meshes so well with the action. In the heyday of MTV, this was no accident — parts of the movie function almost as elaborate music videos. No scene illustrates this more than when Ferris is hurrying across backyards and through homes to beat his parents & sister back to the house. As good as that scene is, I think Todd Vaziri improved it by re-cutting it to music from Inception. So good!
Platformer, the tech news site, is leaving Substack. “We’ve seen this movie before — and we won’t stick around to watch it play out.” (I’m making exceptions to my no-linking-to-Substack policy for why-we’re-leaving-Substack posts.)
Using an iconic Superman pose, artist Mike Mitchell has translated all sorts of familiar characters onto that pose, including C-3PO, Velma from Scooby Doo, Charlie Brown, Ned Flanders, Pee-wee Herman, Bert from Sesame Street, Steve Zissou, and Spongebob Squarepants. Here’s an animation of all them. (via moss & fog)
In a video for the Royal Society, physicist Brian Cox explains the science of snowflakes, from how they form to where their shape and symmetry comes from. Plus this bombshell: “Snowflakes aren’t actually white.” (via aeon)
You all know I love a good photography contest and it’s hard to pick favorites, but the Close-up Photographer of the Year competition is always up there for me. The results of this year’s contest are fantastic and it was difficult to pick out just a few of my faves above. From top to bottom: Chris Gug, Csaba Daróczi, René Krekels, Barry Webb. (via colossal)
All the Types of Science Fiction. Incl. “3. Technology creates problems 😕 (future bad)”; “14. A list of legally non-binding patents disguised as a narrative”; and “42. The Turing Test, but sexy”.
Techdirt on Substack: “A site that caters to Nazis is not a site that caters to free speech. Because (as we’ve seen time and time again), such sites drive away people who don’t like being on a site associated with Nazis.”
Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day: It’s time to leave Substack. “If only Substack had invested time and energy into building more products like that instead of making a new right-wing playpen.”
Anil Dash: “The NYT is now just Facebook. The platform dictates narrative to normies, is totally gamed by the right, and is still so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable even by those who see how broken it is.”
Labyrinth and its many variants generally consist of a box topped with a flat wooden plane that tilts across an x and y axis using external control knobs. Atop the board is a maze featuring numerous gaps. The goal is to move a marble or a metal ball from start to finish without it falling into one of those holes. It can be a… frustrating game, to say the least. But with ample practice and patience, players can generally learn to steady their controls enough to steer their marble through to safety in a relatively short timespan.
CyberRunner, in contrast, reportedly mastered the dexterity required to complete the game in barely 5 hours. Not only that, but researchers claim it can now complete the maze in just under 14.5 seconds — over 6 percent faster than the existing human record.
CyberRunner was capable of solving the maze even faster, but researchers had to stop it from taking shortcuts it found in the maze. (via clive thompson)
I’m still catching up from being blissfully away from the internet in December so apologies to those of you for which this is old news, but Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga looks %$&*#@ good. My expectations for this film couldn’t be any higher — Fury Road was one of my favorite films of the past 10 years. Crucially, the Furiosa production team includes editor Margaret Sixel and several other folks who won awards for Fury Road — that’s a great sign.
Vice News visited the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine, where incarcerated people eat food that they’ve grown and cooked themselves, augmented by other locally grown and raised food (beef, chicken, etc).
Mark McBride is the culinary director at Mountain View Correctional Facility, a 350-person prison where inmates don’t eat processed chicken fingers and sloppy joes.
“When I started 6 years ago, the majority of the food was processed foods, and I wanted to try to see if we couldn’t replicate more homestyle cooking - scratch cooking - using raw local ingredients. But the truth is, by taking these raw products from farmers and putting the work into breaking this down, we’re actually able to save money. In 2018, our two kitchens saved $142,000 off of their budget.
It’s heartening to see an American prison that takes seriously the well-being and rehabilitation of the people in its care. (via neatorama)
Origin chronicles the tragedy and triumph of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson as she investigates a global phenomenon of epic proportions. Portrayed by Academy Award nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“King Richard”), Isabel experiences unfathomable personal loss and love as she crosses continents and cultures to craft one of the defining American books of our time. Inspired by the New York Times best-seller “Caste,” ORIGIN explores the mystery of history, the wonders of romance and a fight for the future of us all.
I’m intrigued! Origin is set for a wide release in theaters on Jan 19th.
Shout out to my trusty rice cooker, which patiently keeps my rice warm for 15 hours after I forget to put it away after dinner. (Seriously, this thing is the best — love a tool that does one thing incredibly well.)
Both incidents could have been much worse. And that everyone on both airliners walked away is, indeed, a miracle — but not the kind most people think about. They’re miracles of regulation, training, expertise, effort, constant improvement of infrastructure, as well as professionalism and heroism of the crew.
But these brave and professional men and women were standing on the shoulders of giants: competent bureaucrats; forensic investigators dispatched to accident investigations; large binders (nowadays digital) with hundreds and hundreds of pages of meticulously collected details of every aspect of accidents and near misses; constant training and retraining not just of the pilots but the cabin, ground, traffic control and maintenance crews; and a determined ethos that if something has gone wrong, the reason will be identified and fixed.
As Tufekci notes, when the capitalists are left to their own devices, corners are cut in the pursuit of shareholder value:
The Boeing 737 Max line holds other lessons. After two eerily similar back-to-back crashes in 2018 and 2019, killing 346 people total, the planes were grounded. At first, some rushed to blame inexperienced pilots or software gone awry. But the world soon learned that the real problem had been corporate greed that had taken too many shortcuts while the regulators hadn’t managed to resist the onslaught.
Tyromancy is a fortune-telling practice that uses cheese to predict the future. “People used cheese to divine all sorts of things: who committed a crime, whether the year would bring a fruitful harvest, and how a child’s life would turn out.”
In 1953, shortly after taking office and Joseph Stalin’s death, President Dwight Eisenhower gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors that has come to be known as the Chance for Peace speech.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Some 70 years later, the theft not only continues but has been outsourced around the world and into our communities. (via clayton cubitt)
I always look forward to David Ehrlich’s annual love letter to cinema and his favorite films of the year. So put this thing on the biggest screen you can find, slap on some headphones, and get ready to put a bunch of excellent films on your must-watch list. This year in conjunction with the video, Ehrlich is raising money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
