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Entries for November 2019
A short documentary of two rival alt-right groups beefing at a Denny’s. This is surreal but also completely predictable.
Robert Lang on the 11 Levels of Complexity of Origami
In this video for Wired, physicist and origami master Robert J. Lang demonstrates the 11 increasingly complex levels of origami. How all the legs and antennae and other small features are designed at the more complex levels is fascinating.
See also Susan Orlean’s 2007 piece about Lang in the New Yorker and Lang’s TED Talk on the mathematics of origami.
The first magazine profile of Adam Sandler since 1996. “Being rich, he told me later, can buy you a chef or a personal trainer, but it cannot buy the self-control to not pound a whole thing of ice cream on the weekend.”
A Quick Cyber Shopping Guide for Black Friday
So, I’ve begun working on my annual holiday gift guide (here’s 2018’s guide) and hope to have it done as early as next week. If you’re a pal or a regular reader that has a product or service you think should be on the gift guide this year, let me know! Would love to get more small business stuff on there.
But I wanted to make this quick mini-guide for Black Friday / Cyber Monday because if you’re savvy about it, this weekend can be a good time to find some good deals on holiday gifts for your friends and family. Here’s what I dug up.
The best Kindle, the new waterproof Kindle Paperwhite, is only $85 (35% off). I have one of these and have read a few dozen books on it since I bought it in March.
You can order a Cybertruck from Tesla with only $100 down and then get a refund on your deposit later. It’s a little bit thrilling to push the “Place Order” button on a $77,000 item with the styling of a 1st gen Kindle.
The 5 Qt KitchenAid mixer is on sale for $240 (48% off). Today only so hop on this one.
My Tattly pals are offering 30% off on almost all of their awesome temporary tattoos.
23andMe’s Health + Ancestry DNA testing kit is $99 (50% off). AncestryDNA’s kit is only $50 (51% off). There’s also a DNA kit for dogs on sale for $90 (40% off) if you want find out what breeds make up that rescue you just adopted.
My friend Jodi is offering 15% off today at her Legal Nomads shop…just use the code HOLIDAYSALE19.
The 8 Qt Instant Pot is discounted down to $95 (47% off) while the 6 Qt WiFi-enabled Instant Pot is $90 (40% off).
The New York Public Library would like to remind you that everything at the library is free (with free returns).
Apple is offering gift cards if you buy select products like iPhone XR, AirPods, iPad Pro, and Beats headphones.
It’s not the most current retina-screen model, but this Macbook Air is only $650 (35% off).
A 3-month Audible subscription is $6.95/mo (53% off).
Need a VPN for private browsing? TunnelBear is just $50 for the year today (58% off).
Amazon has a slight discount (6%) on AirPods Pro, but they’ll likely arrive after the holidays (“usually ships within 1 to 2 months”). The Apple Watch Series 5 is also on sale for $380 (5% off).
I have zero idea if this product is any good, but you can buy a 50-inch 4K TV for just $217.
Hulu is $1.99/mo for 12 months for their ad-supported plan (regularly $5.99/mo).
I love my electric toothbrush and it’s on sale for $30 (40% off).
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Go champ Lee Se-dol retires because AI is unbeatable. “I’ve realized that I’m not at the top even if I become the number one through frantic efforts.”
Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving
Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has been writing a near-daily political dispatch called Letters from an American for the past several weeks (her archives go further back on Facebook), mostly about the impeachment proceedings and their historical context.
In today’s letter, Richardson reminds us why Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.
Everyone generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early colonial leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and — with luck — prosperity.
But this is not why we celebrate Thanksgiving.
We celebrate thanks to President Abraham Lincoln and his defense of American democracy during the Civil War.
Northerners elected Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 to stop rich southern slaveholders from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. When voters elected Lincoln, those same southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union and set out to create their own nation, the Confederate States of America, based in slavery and codifying the idea that some men were better than others and that this small elite group should rule the country. Under Lincoln, the United States government set out to end this slaveholders’ rebellion and bring the South back into a Union in which the government worked for people at the bottom, not just those at the top.
Ornitographies, Time-Merged Images of the Paths of Birds Through the Sky
For his Ornitographies project, Xavi Bou takes photographs of birds and stitches them together into single images so that you can see their flight paths through the sky.
My guest editor Patrick briefly shared one of Bou’s images on his exit post a couple of weeks ago, but I thought they were worth another look.
Ed Yong wrote about the slow heart rate of deep-diving blue whales (2 beats per minute). The piece is designed so that when you’re reading it, each paragraph takes one whale heart beat to read. “(Ba-bum.)”
Ten Years Ago, I Called Out David Letterman. This Month, We Sat Down to Talk. “It’s not often that you speak truth to power and power responds, ‘Oops, sorry.’”
415 Hours of East German Home Movies from 1947-1990
Open Memory Box houses what they say is the largest digitized collection of home movies from East Germany. The 415 hours of footage was filmed between 1947 and 1990 by 149 different families, who captured scenes of what it was like behind the Iron Curtain. Here’s one of the few videos they’ve posted to YouTube (the rest are presented on the site with a custom video player):
Some interesting searches are Trabant, sports, Berlin, China, and Brandenburg Gate. Light NSFW warning…East Germans went about in the nude more often than one might have guessed. Also, a lot of the footage has a huge watermark over it, which can make it difficult to focus on the actual subject matter.
33 Ways to Remember the 2010s. Unsurprising but still incredible how the internet enabled and infused everything on this list.
A ranking of movie journalists, from Nightcrawler’s Louis Bloom to Anchorman’s Ron Burgundy to Woodward & Bernstein in All the President’s Men. No Phil Connors from Groundhog Day tho?
Beautiful News Daily
Each day since the beginning of October, the team of designers, technologists, and researchers at Beautiful News Daily (a project by Information Is Beautiful) have been posting infographics and data visualizations that share some good news about the world. The site’s tagline is “unseen trends, uplifting stats, creative solutions”.
The bad news we see everyday on news websites, newspaper front pages, and magazine covers is important (or can be, if it’s not designed to keep people frightened and hooked on the news), but the good news is just as significant (or can be, if it doesn’t cause you to forget the world’s true suffering and turmoil).
You can keep up with Beautiful News via their website, their weekly newsletter, or Twitter & Instagram. (via moss & fog)
Watching Teen Superstar Billie Eilish Growing Up
It is an understatement to say that a lot has happened to Billie Eilish in the past three years. She has gone from being a well-regarded but little-known singer/songwriter to being Grammy-nominated and one of the biggest young stars in the world. For the third year in a row, Vanity Fair sat down with Eilish to ask her about her life and career, what being famous is like, and how she views her past selves.
As I said last year, the video is fascinating to watch, like a teen celeb version of the 7 Up film series. She seems much happier and more confident — “I want to stay happy. That’s a big goal for me.” It will be interesting next year to see how this bit ages:
I like being famous. It’s very weird and it’s very cool.
(via @fimoculous)
The top 100 films directed by women. The Piano is #1; Lost in Translation, The Hurt Locker, and Lady Bird all make the top 25. I have not seen enough of these…
The Origins of Stop Motion Animation
In this episode of the Almanac video series from Vox, Phil Edwards takes a look at how an early film using stop motion animation, a 1912 short of dancing bugs made by an insect collector, showed the promise of the technique.
Though people have been experimenting with stop motion since the beginning of film, the new art really took off when an insect collector named Wladyslaw Starewicz (later Ladislas Starevich, among other spellings) wanted to see his beetles move.
His 1912 film, The Cameraman’s Revenge, was the most significant of those early experiments. By that time, he’d been discovered as a precocious museum director in a Lithuanian Natural History Museum, and that enabled him to make movies. The Cameraman’s Revenge was his boldest experiment yet, depicting a tryst between star-crossed (bug) lovers.
Starevich’s later films influenced the stop motion work of Terry Gilliam and Wes Anderson, as well as its earlier use in King Kong. Here’s the The Cameraman’s Revenge in its entirety:
A Deepfake Nixon Delivers Eulogy for the Apollo 11 Astronauts
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed safely on the Moon in July 1969, President Richard Nixon called them from the White House during their moonwalk to say how proud he was of what they had accomplished. But in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin did not make it safely off the Moon’s surface, Nixon was prepared to give a very different sort of speech. The remarks were written by William Safire and recorded in a memo called In Event of Moon Disaster.
Fifty years ago, not even Stanley Kubrick could have faked the Moon landing. But today, visual effects and techniques driven by machine learning are so good that it might be relatively simple, at least the television broadcast part of it.1 In a short demonstration of that technical supremacy, a group from MIT has created a deepfake version of Nixon delivering that disaster speech. Here are a couple of clips from the deepfake speech:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
The full film is being shown at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam and will make its way online sometime next year.
The implications of being able to so convincingly fake the televised appearance of a former US President are left as an exercise to the reader. (via boing boing)
Update: The whole film is now online. (thx, andy)
But technology is often a two-way street. If the resolution of the broadcast is high enough, CGI probably still has tells…and AI definitely does. And even if you got the TV broadcast correct, with the availability of all sorts of high-tech equipment, the backyard astronomer, with the collective help of their web-connected compatriots around the world, would probably be able to easily sniff out whether actual spacecraft and communication signals were in transit to and from the Moon.↩
The rights to the .org registry are being sold to a private equity firm and price caps have been removed. I don’t know how concerned I should be about this…
Thanksgiving Dinner Served on the L Train
File this under “I Love NYC”. On Sunday night, riders on a Brooklyn-bound L train were treated to a full Thanksgiving dinner, courtesy of some of their fellow straphangers. For more than 20 minutes, a group of riders dined and passed out plates of turkey, collards, stuffing, squash, and mashed potatoes to other folks in the car. Here’s a 21-minute chunk of the action:
They started the meal with a prayer and everything. An onlooker said of the event:
It was a 7 PM Sunday L from union square and was not crowded at all. They said it was an inclusive gesture to emphasize no one should go without food on Thanksgiving. They were loud but not rowdy or a nuisance. They even handed out plates to everyone in the car — I got one and the turkey was a solid 7/10 and collard 8.5/10. I’m glad I got to experience something like this. Makes a great story!
There were even MTA employees amongst us but no one objected.
Here’s a shorter video with some of the highlights:
(thx, johana)
Can You Copyright Work Made by an Artificial Intelligence?
In a recent issue of Why is this interesting?, Noah Brier collects a number of perspectives on whether (and by whom) a work created by an artificial intelligence can be copyrighted.
But as I dug in a much bigger question emerged: Can you actually copyright work produced by AI? Traditionally, the law has been that only work created by people can receive copyright. You might remember the monkey selfie copyright claim from a few years back. In that case, a photographer gave his camera to a monkey who then snapped a selfie. The photographer then tried to claim ownership and PETA sued him to try to claim it back for the monkey. In the end, the photograph was judged to be in the public domain, since copyright requires human involvement. Machines, like monkeys, can’t own work, but clearly something made with the help of a human still qualifies for copyright. The question, then, is where do we draw the line?
NYC bans foie gras starting in 2022. Meanwhile, the US production of most chicken, eggs, and pork is much more cruel & unethical and happens on a much larger scale.
An Official High-Resolution 3D Model of the Bust of Nefertiti Is Available for Download
The spectacular bust of Nefertiti, some 3300 years old, is currently housed at the Neues Museum in Berlin. A few years ago, high-resolution scans of the sculpture were released without permission of the museum. Now, after three years of pressure on the museum related to their claim on the bust, an official “full-color, 6.4 million-triangle 3D scan of the Bust of Nefertiti” has been released under a Creative Commons license. Cosmo Wenman has the story of how he eventually got the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation to release the scans.
For more than a decade, museums around the world have been making high-quality 3D scans of important sculptures and ancient artifacts. Some institutions, such as the Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Denmark, have forward-thinking programs that freely share their 3D scans with the public, allowing us to view, copy, adapt, and experiment with the underlying works in ways that have never before been possible. But many institutions keep their scans out of public view.
The Louvre, for example, has 3D-scanned the Nike of Samothrace and the Venus de Milo. The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence 3D-scanned Michelangelo’s David. The Bargello has a scan of Donatello’s David. Numerous works by Auguste Rodin, including the Gates of Hell, have been scanned by the Musée Rodin in Paris. The Baltimore Museum of Art got in on the Rodin action when it scanned The Thinker. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has scans of works by Bernini, Michelangelo, and many others. But instead of allowing them to be studied, copied, and adapted by scholars, artists, and digitally savvy art lovers, these museums have kept these scans, and countless more, under lock and key.
In Berlin, the state-funded Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection has a high-quality, full-color 3D scan of the most iconic portrait sculpture ever produced, the 3,364-year-old Bust of Nefertiti. It has held this artifact since 1920, just a few years after its discovery in Amarna, Egypt; Egypt has been demanding its repatriation ever since it first went on display. The bust is one of the most copied works of ancient Egyptian art, and has become a cultural symbol of Berlin. For reasons the museum has difficulty explaining, this scan too is off-limits to the public.
Rather, it was off-limits. I was able to obtain it after a 3-year-long freedom of information effort directed at the organization that oversees the museum.
(via open culture)
This Algorithm “Removes the Water from Underwater Images”
As detailed in this Scientific American article by Erik Olsen, engineer and oceanographer Derya Akkaynak has devised an algorithm that “removes the water from underwater images” so that photos taken underwater have the color and clarity of photos taken in air. She calls the algorithm “Sea-thru”.
Sea-thru’s image analysis factors in the physics of light absorption and scattering in the atmosphere, compared with that in the ocean, where the particles that light interacts with are much larger. Then the program effectively reverses image distortion from water pixel by pixel, restoring lost colors.
One caveat is that the process requires distance information to work. Akkaynak takes numerous photographs of the same scene from various angles, which Sea-thru uses to estimate the distance between the camera and objects in the scene — and, in turn, the water’s light-attenuating impact. Luckily, many scientists already capture distance information in image data sets by using a process called photogrammetry, and Akkaynak says the program will readily work on those photographs.
The paper says the process “recovers color” and in the video above, Akkaynak notes that “it’s a physically accurate correction rather that a visually pleasing modification” that would be done manually in a program like Photoshop.
Nick Paumgarten writes about his year of concussions playing “beer league” hockey. “The thud was thicker than I’d expected. It felt as if my head had been slammed in a car door.”
How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
The Grist has compiled a list of articles written by Coby Beck “containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming”. Here are some snippets from a few of the articles.
The temperature record is unreliable:
There is actually some truth to the part about the difficulties; scientists have overcome many of them in turning the hundreds of thousands of measurements taken in many different ways and over a span of more than a dozen decades into a single globally averaged trend.
But this is the nature of science — no one said it was easy. It’s taken the scientific community a long time to finally come out and say that what we have been observing for 100 years is in fact exactly what it looks like. All other possible explanations (for example, the Urban Heat Island effect) have been investigated, the data has been examined and re-examined, reviewed and re-reviewed, and the conclusion has become unassailable.
Global warming has been going on for the last 20,000 years:
If you have look at this graph of temperature, starting at a point when we were finishing the climb out of deep glaciation, you can clearly see that rapid warming ceased around 10,000 years ago (rapid relative to natural fluctuations, but not compared to the warming today, which is an order of magnitude faster). After a final little lift 8,000 years ago, temperature trended downward for the entire period of the Holocene. So the post-industrial revolution warming is the reversal of a many-thousand-year trend.
There has been work done reconstructing the solar irradiance record over the last century, before satellites were available. According to the Max Planck Institute, where this work is being done, there has been no increase in solar irradiance since around 1940.
It’s cold today in Wagga Wagga:
The chaotic nature of weather means that no conclusion about climate can ever be drawn from a single data point, hot or cold. The temperature of one place at one time is just weather, and says nothing about climate, much less climate change, much less global climate change.
Go forth and spread the truth as you travel to dine at various holidays tables around the country. (P.S. I first posted a link to this series in 2006. That it’s almost more necessary now than it was then is beyond depressing.)
Slow Motion Ocean
MOCEAN is a mesmerizing short film by cinematographer Chris Bryan of ocean waves crashing and surging in slow motion.
The feeling of jumping off the rocks in the dark by myself just to capture the very first rays of light hitting the ocean without another sole in sight is unexplainable, its one of the most amazing feelings ever, its like my own personal therapy.
Bryan worked as a cinematographer on the BBC’s Blue Planet II. Distracting URL watermark aside, I could have watched footage like this for another hour, especially of waves from underneath the water.
The Typologies of New York City
Using almost 1300 photos from Instagram of iconic/stereotypical shots of NYC, Sam Morrison spent 200 hours creating what he calls a crowdsourced hyperlapse video of the city. I love it. Reminds me a little of the old Microsoft application Photosynth, which could stitch together hundreds of online photos of, say, the Eiffel Tower or Golden Gate Bridge into a composite 3D image. (via a newly resurgent waxy.org)
2019 Films as Simpsons Screencaps
On Twitter, Hannah Woodhead posted a thread of screencaps from The Simpsons that uncannily encapsulate movies released in 2019. My two favorites are Parasite and The Lighthouse:
If you’d like, you can make your own using Frinkiac, the Simpsons screencap search engine. I did this one for Booksmart:
How to Move Abroad. “You’ve always dreamed about working by the beach, but how do you make that a reality?”
Spotlight and the Difficulty of Dramatizing Good Journalism
For the lastest episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak reviews the history of movies about journalism and shows how the makers of Spotlight (and also All the President’s Men) show the often repetitive and tedious work required to do good journalism
I loved Spotlight (and All the President’s Men and The Post), but I hadn’t realized until just now how many of my favorite movies and TV shows of the last few years are basically adult versions of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?
Speaking of, watching this video I couldn’t help but think that David Simon1 faced a similar challenge in depicting effective police work in The Wire. Listening to wiretapped conversations, sitting on rooftops waiting for drug dealers to use payphones, and watching container ships unloading are not the most interesting thing in the world to watch. But through careful editing, some onscreen exposition by Lester Freamon, and major consequences, Simon made pedestrian policing engaging and interesting, the heart of the show.
Puschak shared a quote from Simon near the end of the video and Spotlight director Tom McCarthy played the dishonest reporter Scott Templeton in season five of The Wire.↩
Sacha Baron Cohen Says Tech Companies Built the “Greatest Propaganda Machine in History”
In a keynote address to the Anti-Defamation League, entertainer Sacha Baron Cohen calls the platforms created by Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other companies “the greatest propaganda machine in history” and blasts them for allowing hate, bigotry, and anti-Semitism to flourish on these services.
Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It’s why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It’s why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it’s no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history- — the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, “Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook.”
On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel Prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.
When I, as the wanna-be-gansta Ali G, asked the astronaut Buzz Aldrin “what woz it like to walk on de sun?” the joke worked, because we, the audience, shared the same facts. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, the joke was not funny.
When Borat got that bar in Arizona to agree that “Jews control everybody’s money and never give it back,” the joke worked because the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages.
But when, thanks to social media, conspiracies take hold, it’s easier for hate groups to recruit, easier for foreign intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections, and easier for a country like Myanmar to commit genocide against the Rohingya.
In particular, he singles out Mark Zuckerberg and a speech he gave last month.
First, Zuckerberg tried to portray this whole issue as “choices…around free expression.” That is ludicrous. This is not about limiting anyone’s free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly, there will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites and child abusers. But I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.
Second, Zuckerberg claimed that new limits on what’s posted on social media would be to “pull back on free expression.” This is utter nonsense. The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law” abridging freedom of speech, however, this does not apply to private businesses like Facebook. We’re not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society. We just want them to be responsible on their platforms.
If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants kill Jews, would the owner of the restaurant be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not! The restaurant owner has every legal right and a moral obligation to kick the Nazi out, and so do these internet companies.
The world record for the fastest Formula 1 pitstop is now 1.82 seconds. The footage is incredible…all four tires changed in under 2 sec.
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