I don’t know exactly when it switched over. Maybe 75 years ago? A century? I’m not in the mood for much research today, so I’ll just wing it. Many, many years ago, artists decided they didn’t want to make art anymore. They started making blobs and splotches and women with their nose on the side of their heads. Luckily for us, illustrators took up the slack. There’s more art in a pinup calendar than a modern art museum. Among the many things I’m grateful for today, illustrators like Leyendecker are right up there. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Co-author Professor Gareth Williams (UCL School of Pharmacy) said, “Nanofibers, such as those made of starch, show potential for use in wound dressings as they are very porous. In addition, nanofibers are being explored for use as a scaffold to regrow tissue, as they mimic the extra-cellular matrix—a network of proteins and other molecules that cells build to support themselves.”
Will spaghetti bandages with a neosporin sauce require a red wine, or a white wine IV drip?
Samual [sic] Brooks was the first to break ranks, converting his Moseley Street house into a warehouse and building a new suburban villa for his family far enough away from the smog and dirt of the city but near enough to be able to travel to work in his carriage every day. But he did not just build a house for himself, he built an entire neighbourhood where his fellow merchants (horrified that one of their neighbours was now a warehouse) could live permanently. Whalley Range, the world’s first suburb, was born.
Cities seem to have an interesting life cycle. First the posh people want to live there, and then they don’t, and then they do again. I’ve saved myself a lot of trouble by simply avoiding them.
Internet echo chambers and nasty e-commerce tricks that analyze your behavior to milk you for more cash are set to be banned – in China.
Beijing’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), on Sunday launched a campaign to crack down on such practices and the recommendation algorithms that power them.
What many refer to as echo chambers, the CAC has called “information cocoons.” It wants to force tech providers into coming up with ways to prevent them, and has called for a ban on pushing “highly homogeneous content.”
Highly homogeneous content has never been a problem on this site. Having the attention span of a goldfish helps.
More recently, YouTube and other platforms like TikTok have faced scrutiny from the European Commission under the Digital Services Act for not being transparent about how their recommendation systems work. This includes concerns about promoting harmful content or amplifying misinformation. Regulators are now pressuring these platforms to reveal more about how their algorithms mitigate risks like election manipulation and mental health issues for minors.
What flavor government internet intervention do you prefer? Ramen or spaghetti?
The median score on the test was 60%, only a little above chance. The mean was 60.6%. Participants said the task was harder than expected (median difficulty 4 on a 1-5 scale).
How meaningful is this? I tried to make the test as fair as possible by including only the best works from each category; on the human side, that meant taking prestigious works that had survived the test of time; on the AI side, it meant tossing the many submissions that had garbled text, misshapen hands, or some similar deformity. But this makes it unrepresentative of a world where many AI images will have these errors.
The author cheats a bit by favoring really bad human artists. What difference would it make if a machine or Basquiat painted something?
Morris, like thousands of other customers, was snared in the collapse of a behind-the-scenes fintech firm called Synapse and has been locked out of her account for six months as of November. She held out hope that her money was still secure. Then she learned how much Evolve Bank & Trust, the lender where her funds were supposed to be held, was prepared to return to her.
“We were informed last Monday that Evolve was only going to pay us $500 out of that $280,000,” Morris said during a court hearing last week, her voice wavering. “It’s just devastating.”
I went to the Yotta website. It’s a ridiculous lottery website. The apotheosis of “stupid games.”
On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland’s government announced a new and very strange policy.
All Finns were required to take out a pair of scissors and snip their banknotes in half. This was known in Finland as setelinleikkaus, or banknote cutting. Anyone who owned any of the three largest denomination Finnish banknotes — the 5000 markka note, the 1000, or the 500 — was required to perform this operation immediately. The left side of the note could still be used to buy things, but at only half its value. So if a Finn had a 1000 markka note in their wallet, henceforth he or she could now only buy 500 markka worth of items at stores. As for the right side, it could no longer be spent and effectively became a bond
I’m sure the average Finn would have preferred to cut all the bankers in half instead, but they probably weren’t consulted on the matter.
Independent researchers in Arizona have unearthed a bronze cannon linked to the Vázquez de Coronado expedition, making it the oldest firearm ever found in the continental United States. The discovery sheds new light on the artillery used during the 1539–1542 expedition into the American Southwest.
I can’t imagine what the local dudes wielding bows and arrows and stone clubs thought when the conquistadors touched off that bad boy.
That’s Manfred Mann performing Pretty Flamingo in 1966. Nifty video to accompany it. People have always spent a lot of time on their appearance, and still do. We have recently, however, forgotten that becoming exquisitely unpleasant-looking wasn’t the point of the exercise.
Manfred Mann is a person, and the name of the band. It makes for pronoun trouble, but we’ll carry on regardless. Pretty Flamingo made it to Number 1 on the UK pop chart, and deserved it. It’s a sprightly little tune. Manfred Mann was no stranger to the number one slot. They had already covered The Exciters’ Doo Wah Diddy, and even though it’s a half-step removed from a novelty song. it made it to Number 1. They later recorded Bob Dylan’s Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn), another odd but interesting choice, and had another number 1.
The band was one of those nurseries for other bands. Cream’s Jack Bruce, and Klaus Voorman were Manfredians. Voorman is just about the most famous person you never heard of. He played the bass. He was friends with the Beatles, and lived in their shared flat for a while. He ended up playing on many of their assorted solo records after everybody met Yoko Ono. Klaus was an artist, too, and designed the LP sleeve for Revolver, among many others. He had more offers than he knew what to do with. The Hollies and the Moody Blues tried to hire him to no avail, although he appeared with the Hollies on TV a couple of times. He could play the flute well enough to be recorded, too. Versatile? Hell, he appeared as Von Schnitzel the Conductor in the movie Popeye. Mad Magazine hired him to draw the cover for one of their issues. He collaborated, one way or another, with everyone from Howlin’ Wolf to the Bee Gees.
None of the members of Manfred Mann wrote Pretty Flamingo. If I asked you to guess who wrote it, and stood on one leg and held my breath while you took a stab at it, I’d fare worse than Yoko Ono’s audiologist. Mark Barkan wrote it. Who? Well, he was American, and he also wrote this:
Not exactly Ode to Joy, but I dare you to get it out of your head by the end of the day. Sorry.
Pretty Flamingo is one of those songs that has legs, as we used to say in the cover band business. It’s recognizable enough to elicit a kind of enthusiasm when you start playing it. It’s also obscure enough to seem like a potent re-discovery.
The song is pleasant enough and interesting enough musically to make even a bad rendition of it pretty good. Or a good one:
The only real work for humans in the modern factory involves judgment. They inspect what the machines have done to make sure it’s correct. Later on in the process, some people crawl around in the passenger compartment to install the electronics and the trouble lights I’ll be looking at when I buy the car second hand in fifteen years or so. It’s not automated, but it sure is mechanized to a fare-thee-well. Again, they are relying more on judgment and experience than a strong back.
It’s 1960 in software. People who push a little javascript around on a virtual desktop, in a fit of self-importance, call themselves engineers, and they think they’re immune to the same forces that made all those thousands of blue-collar workers superfluous in the space of a single lifetime. Open AI or LLMs, or whatever you want to call almost-thinking-bots are going to perform all the IT drudge work going forward. This is not conjecture on my part. This website uses seven plugins I installed that I coded using AI. They all work better than the human-coded plugins they replaced.
The only thing that will be really valuable for computer coding is going to be judgment. And if you’re wearing wool socks and sandals, a man bun, and a neckbeard, I’m afraid you’ve already demonstrated exactly how valuable your judgment is going to be going forward.
Get Smart was harmless fun. The movies and teevee were awash with James-Bond-ish spy stuff back then, and it was inevitable there’d be plenty of comedic riffs on the genre to follow. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry got plenty of mileage out of it. Don Adams made an amiable Agent 86. The term “86 something” is in wide use now, but it was a kind of in-joke back then. If a diner was out of something, they’d “86 it” They’d also refer to an unwanted customer in the same way. Deli humor.
The show was a catch-phrase generator. People wandered the earth saying, “Missed it by that much,” and “Sorry about that chief,” whether it fit the occasion or not. But it was the opening credits ended up being the only truly memorable thing about the show.
The theme song was written by a mostly unknown dude from Quincy, Mass, named Irving Szathmary. He also composed the score and bumper music for the show. I guess it paid well. When the show was retired, Irving retired too.
Stamford Ska is a rollicking band from Old Blighty. They certainly took the theme song one step beyond with panache. You can hire them if you want. Their website says you can get the whole eight-piece outfit for about $1,500, only paid in spondulicks or dosh or bob or shrapnel or whatever it is they use over there. I don’t understand their money.
Ludwig van Beethoven: I cannot hear them, but I know they are making a hash of it. What do you think? Music is… a dreadful thing. What is it? I don’t understand it. What does it mean?
Anton Felix Schindler: It – it exalts the soul.
Ludwig van Beethoven: Utter nonsense. If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism.
The model tested is called the Suzuki Dzire. Starting at the equivalent of $8,000, buyers can get a 1.2-liter 80 horsepower engine or go the CNG route and make do with just 69 hp 75 pounds-feet of torque. Despite the cheap price and lower power, the Dzire aced Global NCAP crash tests, receiving five stars for adult impact safety and four stars for child impact safety.
The rest of the world drives small, inexpensive cars. The US has seven-year mortgages on freight train pickup trucks never used for any work.
The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them.
Simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons? The booms are already pretty big, don’t you think? Why not use the computer to figure out why I always hit every red light on the way to the supermarket? That would be useful.
In 1937, primarily young, working women, a typical week consisted of a strict allotment of responsibilities and enjoyment. They spent 48 hours working, 56 hours sleeping, 31 hours on home obligations, and 24 hours eating or running errands. What remained, a rather precarious 9 hours per week, was time spent in the pursuit of what could generously be called pleasure. This pleasure time was parsed among automobile rides, movies, social activities, and a small smattering of reading or passive activities like listening to music.
The modern analysis is faulty. They entirely discount that people used to enjoy taking care of their homes and families, and cooking and eating. The idea that many hours of each day should be spent staring at Netflix and Instagram for “pleasure” is a category error.
More than half of all American adults, almost 137 million people, could be candidates for the blockbuster GLP-1 drug semaglutide, a new analysis finds. Sold as Ozempic for treating diabetes and Wegovy to spur weight loss, the medication could be indicated for those two purposes or to help prevent heart disease, explained a team led by Dr. Dhruv Kazi, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Americans are now paying 13.8 billion dollars for drugs that are simply bulimia in a tube. Use your finger instead, and you’ll have more dough for donuts.
A new survey from Norway reveals that 50% of young people under 30 believe that pirating content is an acceptable way to save money. The survey, conducted by Ipsos, highlights that the high cost of streaming services is a key driver behind this attitude. Links between piracy and organized crime or malware, appear to be of less concern.
Half say it’s acceptable, the other half are lying.
Another student at Cathedral came to the same conclusion last school year, in Grade 9. She says that, during group projects, classmates failed to pull their weight because they spent all their time on their phones. She gets distracted as well, and at 15 years old experiences phone-induced eye and back pain from constant hunching and neck-craning. Most days she uses Instagram for at least four hours and TikTok for another two, plus a little time on Snapchat. That’s still less than most of her friends. “The way I see people using their phones in school, on the bus, when they go out, it’s alarming,” she says. “People don’t communicate.”
Yes, but how people spent their time in the 1930s made for a miserable hellscape.
Koehler emailed us out of the blue over the weekend with an irresistible opening line: “I think you might like to see me doing static burnouts in my Caddy.” She elaborated further by saying she has eight grandkids and while she’s relatively new to the car hobby, she’s “hooked” after winning a few burnout contests. What’s more, she asked us for a hand: “I am looking for more contests. If you know of any, please let me know. I can do rolling burnouts but prefer the standing still ones. I think the radical, moving ones might be too hard on my old Caddy.
A ’57 Caddy prolly weighs close to 5,000 pounds. You can burn rubber down to the rims just trying to get it to move.
For context I work production in local news. Recently there’s been developments in AI driven systems that can do 100% of the production side of things which is, direct, audio operate, and graphic operate -all of those jobs are all now gone in one swoop. This has apparently been developed by the company Q ai….
…There are people I work with in their 50’s, single, no college education, no family, and no other place to land a job once this kicks in. I have no idea what’s going to happen to them. This is it guys. This is what our future with AI looks like. This isn’t creating any new jobs this is knocking out entire industry level jobs without replacing them.
I guess AI tools can now decide who is Hitler without any human intervention needed.
In the evolutionary history of birds, there is a 70-million-year gap filled with questions. During this time, all the modern bird groups we know today emerged, but science has yet to fully explain how the transition from the ancient, more dinosaur-like birds to modern birds occurred. Now, an analysis of a fossil with an unprecedented degree of preservation — belonging to a previously unknown bird species that lived in what is now Brazil 80 million years ago — could help illuminate how this process occurred. The discovery is being hailed as a “Rosetta Stone” for the study of bird evolution, as it may unlock many of the mysteries surrounding their evolution.
They probably went extinct while flying around looking for a car to poop on.
A few years back, Vimeo got angry at me for one reason or another and erased my account. We only had the equivalent of home movies on it. If memory serves, they said they received some form of copyright complaint. This was probably bosh. They just erased everything and closed my account. When I inquired about it, they replied that they had sent an email to me. You know, to an email address I no longer used, and wasn’t the current one I had in their info stash.
Like most little bits of ephemeral moments in people’s lives, it’s simultaneously trivial and earthshaking to lose certain things. I’ve seen videos of people picking through homes destroyed by fire and flood and tornadoes and similar calamities. They always seem to be looking for their photo albums, first and foremost. Boy howdy, do I understand that.
I currently have eleven broken or abandoned desktop computers in my office. Some belonged to my children, most to me over the years. It’s been many moons since I was able to buy a new computer. I kept buying used ones, or had some given to me, and simply got another one and kept going when each gave up their silicon ghosts. I kept them in the hope I could someday pillage their hard drives, at least. Today is someday.
There was this precious video I recalled that I featured fourteen years ago. My Son Invented President Math. It’s had a blank placeholder for many years because the embed link led to Vimeo’s version of the River Styx. Well, I finally got around to hooking up a SATA drive docking station and yanking the hard drives out of my computer graveyard, and searching through the old, mostly unlabeled files. Lo and behold, I give you, once again, President Math:
The video is hosted right here on my server. No one’s ever going to steal my children’s lives again.
The public school in the town we were living in when this video was made had declared that this child was mentally substandard. So we took him out of that school, moved away, and my wife taught him at home. He eventually attended a statewide charter high school in Maine, and was a Valedictorian. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Security from the University of Maine. Summa cum Laude. In three years.
Perhaps they’d be willing to admit, after all these years, that he at least turned out standard. Prolly not. I won’t lose any sleep over it.
But over the years, as ’80s music began to sound dated and ludicrous—and no song sounds more ’80s than “We Built This City”—it developed a hideous reputation: the worst song of all time. Blender magazine first crowned it thus in 2004, and the label has stuck, thanks to a series of online polls, thickening into something close to empirical fact.
I was a musician in the eighties. It sounded dated and ludicrous in real time, IIRC. But the worst song of all time? The author has obviously overlooked Muskrat Love.
Our goal was to analyze shopper behavior in grocery stores, and use that data to help stores and brands improve the customer experience and store profitability. But we had a challenge: how do you anonymously track hundreds of shoppers per day in a store? We thought we had the answer: active RFID tags on every shopping cart. We ponied up $25,000 to purchase a massive customized Oracle server and 50 active tags, and outfitted our first test store. The results came in, revealing fascinating insights around where shoppers spent time, and what opportunities existed to change the store to improve the experience.
Your data scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. You’re creeps doing creepy things. And “learnings” is not a word, and never will be.
Netherlands-based food delivery company Just Eat Takeaway.com said on Wednesday that it is selling its U.S. business Grubhub to New York-based Wonder Group in a deal valued at $650 million — a stark 91% less than the $7.3 billion Just Eat Takeaway paid for the company just four years ago.
I looked up Just Eat Takeaway. Their supervisory board has a rule: The Supervisory Board shall consist of seven or more members, of which at least three should be female. I’ve never seen “ovaries” listed on a job listing before. How’s it working out?
To find the right fit, I took a deep dive into the top 25 email marketing tools. Along the way, I battled unhelpful chatbots, squinted through pages of fine print, built a detailed comparison spreadsheet, and, naturally, sent real emails with each tool.
Yecchh. This guy certainly took one for the team while looking for a MailChimp replacement for annoying people via email.
How a 16th-Century Sailing Ship Works:
Probably comes under the heading: News you can’t use, but want anyway. Durn inneresting.
Large language models can do impressive things, like write poetry or generate viable computer programs, even though these models are trained to predict words that come next in a piece of text.
Such surprising capabilities can make it seem like the models are implicitly learning some general truths about the world.
But that isn’t necessarily the case, according to a new study. The researchers found that a popular type of generative AI model can provide turn-by-turn driving directions in New York City with near-perfect accuracy — without having formed an accurate internal map of the city.
File that, in your card file, under “Duh.” Generative AI reads the internet. No one on the internet has a coherent understanding of the world.
San Francisco’s Forward, a once high-flying startup that failed to popularize its tech-laden “AI doctor’s office,” is abruptly closing down. The homepage of the company’s website currently reads a shutdown notice. It says Forward is closing clinics, canceling patients’ scheduled visits and turning off its mobile app. The company wrote, “We know this news is abrupt,” and promised that its medical staff would be reachable by email until Dec. 13. Per Business Insider, Forward also shared the message with customers in a late-night email Tuesday.
Unshaven CEO in a sweatshirt should have been a dead giveaway.
The investigation report, which the Marine Corps released Thursday, found Del Pizzo’s F-35B malfunctioned and its primary displays and communications cut out as Del Pizzo was attempting to land through rain at Joint Base Charleston, South Carolina. However, the report said its standby flight display and backup communication system “remained basically functional.”
No biggie. An F-35 only costs 110 million or so. That’s only about 172,000 toilet seats.
In the air fryer category, as well as knowing customers’ precise location, all three products wanted permission to record audio on the user’s phone, for no specified reason. The Xiaomi app linked to its air fryer connected to trackers from Facebook, Pangle (the ad network of TikTok for Business), and Chinese tech giant Tencent (depending on the location of the user). The Aigostar air fryer wanted to know gender and date of birth when setting up an owner account, again for no clear reason, but this was optional. The Aigostar and Xiaomi fryers both sent people’s personal data to servers in China, although this was flagged in the privacy notice.
The short answer to the question: Because you let it.
In a shocking turn of events, Spirit Airlines is reportedly preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This news comes on the heels of the airline’s failed merger attempts with Frontier Airlines, which has left the company grappling with significant financial challenges.
What, exactly, is “shocking” about Spirit Airlines going bankrupt? From what I can gather, it was like flying Greyhound, only less elegant.
Please feel free to be shocked, or not shocked in the comments section, to taste.
That’s the Young Rascals on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1967. They were a blast.
They mostly get lumped in the “Blue-eyed Soul” category. That’s semi-amusing, because with one exception, they’re goombahs with olive oil voices and guinea charm, and definitely sans blue eyes.
Ed Sullivan featured scads of interesting music on his shows over the years, usually before they’d become well-known. He was famous for introducing Elvis and the Beatles to mass audiences, but if you look over the rosters of his show, you’ll find dozens of acts like the Young Rascals that got notable for the first time by appearing on his stage.
Ed was the coolest square that ever lived. He was a popular sportswriter in New York, and eventually sidled over to doing reviews of Broadway shows and a smattering of gossip. That was enough to get him a gig on the early days of teevee. He started broadcasting in 1948, when very few people even had a teevee, and he lasted until 1971, setting a record for the longest run of a variety show in history.
Ed’s great gift, if you want to call it that, was encapsulated by comedian Alan King: “Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else in television.” And the Young Rascals proved Fred Allen’s quip, that “Ed Sullivan will last, as long as other people have talent.” They did, and he did.
Month: November 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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