The people vs tyranny: the secular martyrdom of John Lilburne | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/the-people-vs-tyranny-the-secular-martyrdom-of-john-lilburne

What Einstein meant by ‘God does not play dice’ | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/what-einstein-meant-by-god-does-not-play-dice

The Journal of Controversial Ideas”academic freedom sans responsibility is reckless | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/11/the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-academic-freedom-sans-responsibility-is-reckless/

Bad idea of the day: furniture modeled on cray equipment, with spaces to put your own computers in

Bad idea of the day: Sieze the amazon.com domain and point it to the wikipedia article for the Amazon river

Bad idea of the day: transpose Pretty Hate Machine into a major key, shift every word in the lyrics to the least semantically distant word with a more positive sentiment score, and call the result Pretty Great Machine

Why the Enlightenment was not the age of reason | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-the-enlightenment-was-not-the-age-of-reason

A Big Little Idea Called Legibility https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/

We still live in the long shadow cast by the idea of Man-the-Hunter | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/we-still-live-in-the-long-shadow-cast-by-the-idea-of-man-the-hunter

The idea of intellectual property is nonsensical and pernicious | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-of-intellectual-property-is-nonsensical-and-pernicious

Bad idea of the day: to combat writer’s block, use automatic writing as a divinatory method to predict what you would have written if you didn’t have writer’s block

Bad idea of the day: Rather than having a ‘madness’ mechanic, have a ‘stress’ mechanic that causes perceptual distortion (tunnel vision, increased color contrast, blurred vision, louder environmental sounds) & motor distortion (worse aim, movement delays)

Bad idea of the day: replace whitespace with color changes

Bad idea of the day: sort r/all by controversial

Bad idea of the day: A full performance of Smoke on the Water built by remixing clips of people at Guitar Center failing to perform Smoke on the Water & random words spoken by people in Guitar Center

Bad idea of the day: a smartphone with a full-sized model m keyboard and a full-sized bell handset but a regular smartphone sized screen that is also e-ink

Bad idea of the day: a smartphone with a full-sized model m keyboard and a full-sized bell handset but a regular smartphone sized screen

Bad idea of the day: drawing a unicursal hexagram in the center of the Magic Roundabout in Hartfordshire

Bad idea of the day: A gritty reboot of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In starring Rowan Atkinson and Dmitri Martin

Bad idea of the day: run deOldify on manga pages, consider the new color schemes canon, move to a surreal universe of floating pastels

Bad idea of the day: a social network where post literally fade because the contrast is computed with the inverse of time. A spinoff where bugs slowly eat away at posts.

Bad idea of the day: style transfer every frame of the new suspiria to look like the old suspiria

Bad idea of the day: Prevent any party from having representatives in more than 10% of the seats in congress or senate, including at the state level. If any party goes over 10% we redo the election in all affected areas.

Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/acting-like-an-extravert-has-benefits-but-not-for-introverts

Bad idea of the day: write poems, one a day, each on the back side of a tile, cementing it into place after you write it. your bathroom wall becomes a hidden book. tell no one.

Bad idea of the day: a database of maps of conceptual spaces that are drawn like maps of physical spaces (ex., xkcd’s map of the internet & Knuppe’s map of the fields of mathematics)

Bad idea of the day: a self-adhesive battery-powered white noise generator & speaker, which can be affixed to the microphone on your laptop

Bad idea of the day: a NOT operation on types, such that a type can be define as the failure to qualify as some other combination of types or some other boolean type expression

Bad idea of the day: deep fried peanut butter and mayonaise sandwiches

Bad idea of the day: aromatherapy vapes

Bad idea of the day: A vibrator implanted in the pelvis that is controlled by reports of earthquake severity

Bad idea of the day: plan 9 from whitespace, a full implementation of plan9 in an extended version of the whitespace programming language, which ships with a printed copy of the source code (a blank notebook)

Bad idea of the day: a minikanren in prolog

Bad idea of the day: The Same Oblique Strategy Card Every Day. (‘repetition is a form of change’, obv.)

Bad idea of the day: twitch plays strip poker

Bad idea of the day: twitch plays cards against humanity

Bad idea of the day: twitch plays exquisite corpse

CEOs should have been the fall guys; why are they still heroes? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/ceos-should-have-been-the-fall-guys-why-are-they-still-heroes

Bad idea of the day: an extension that replaces ‘OK’ on every button with ‘Dolt’, like God & the original Macintosh UI team intended

Bad idea of the day: serious & well-researched answers to stupid questions, as a podcast

Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.

Bad idea of the day: Multi-cursor and annotation support for vim

Bad idea of the day: An algorithm that creates textual descriptions of images watches TV, creating a description from each frame, which is then used to generate a new image & the video is resynthesized

Bad idea of the day: watching FEWER horror movies in october because you need a break from the rest of the year

Hot take: ambient computing is actually a cool & good idea, as long as no for-profit entities are involved in it. It only becomes horrible when you add business.

Bad idea of the day: turn music into text by substituting note frequency with word frequency

Bad idea of the day: A video game adaptation of Lethem’s Gun With Occasional Music in the style of the Monkey Island series, with a mechanic involving mixing custom blends of forgetol/regretol/etc & replacing people’s stashes with them.

Bad idea of the day: a d20 where every face is labeled 1

Bad idea of the day: a bot that posts random joke punchlines but not the actual joke

Bad idea of the day: a robot that spills or dribbles paint onto canvas until the image is recognized as an object, then names the painting after that object.