📸 Day 8: Grinch.
No photos of the guy on my camera roll, but is this Tawny Frogmouth we saw at the Norfolk Zoo not a spitting image? Just paint him green and call it a day.
📸 Day 7: Solstice.
These stone pillars at the Kadinjača monument in Western Serbia are not exactly Stonehenge, but maybe they do align with the stars? Incidentally, the Yugoslav World War 2 monument architecture is the only kind of brutalism I can get behind.
HBO not renewing Scavengers Reign was bad enough, but I recently learned that the news was even worse. Netflix, too, had passed on the opportunity even with the Season 2 teaser being everything I could have hoped for.
Time for Apple TV to pick it up! How do we make it happen?
📸 Day 6: Sparkle.
You don’t have to wait for the holiday season to light some sparklers. This one was from a trip to the Outer Banks, cropped to protect the innocent.
📸 Day 5: Beard.
The owner of the beard is Father Damien of Molokai, a 19th century Belgian Catholic priest whose statue stands in front of the Hawaiʻi State Capitol. He cared for leprosy patients on the island for more than a decade until himself succumbing to it, age 49.
In today’s episode of Dithering Gruber and Thompson are mystified that Shadowrocket was the second most downloaded paid app in the US App Store, because why would so many Americans want to hide without VPN? The answer, of course, is that those “US” App Store customers are actually Chinese.
📸 Day 4: Evergreen.
The Yamaki Pine celebrated its 400th birthday this year. It survived the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima; 30 years later it became the 200th birthday present to America from the people of Japan. It is now at the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum, part of the National Arboretum.
A story of white male millennials being blocked from career advancement because of DEI. The fields he highlights are scripted television shows, news magazines and academia which aren’t exactly thriving now but per Savage did back when these policies were being implemented (early to mid-2010s). The rise of the “manosphere” and crypto brotherhood was therefore revenge of the jilted, which sounds plausible. One does not become an NFT peddler because they want to but because they couldn’t fulfill their life-long dream of being a tenured Women’s Studies professor.
Note that only early-career positions seem to have been affected, where people with no skill and/or time to choose among many qualified candidates decided to simultaneously switch from one discriminatory heuristic to another. So maybe not everyone should have done it at the same time (a good policy to follow for any change)? Would a method for unbiased selection of early job candidates have to involve an AI? And what are the demographic of OpenAI and Meta’s leadership again?
A Y Combinator company tries to use machine learning to discover new drugs. No, they didn’t figure it out and are now pivoting to selling pickaxes instead of digging for gold themselves. Godspeed.
Retelling of the story of penicillin’s discovery and mass manufacturing, which is much more complex than the typical serendipity-is-important (or, sometimes, luck-favors-the-prepared-mind) tale that begins and ends with Alexander Fleming’s accidentally contaminating a bacterial culture with mold. This is not to disparage the more popular variant: a big part of my childhood was soaking up wild tales of invention via Discoveries Unlimited which originally came out in the year of my birth but was dubbed to Serbian and played on repeat on state TV in the early 1990s. Of course, my own children now have something infinitely more majestic than the “Video Encyclopedia” from that show… and use it to play Roblox.
This also took me back! And not only because of Dune, which I played several times through the end and liked much more than the sequel, one of the first real-time strategy games. No, this article is also about It came from the desert and Sid Meier’s Pirates! and many other games that used short-but-sweet bursts of different mechanics to tell a coherent story, which is qualitatively different from a collection of mini-games sold to highlight the multi-functionality of Nintendo’s new controller. I hope an indie game studio somewhere is working on bringing them back.
