What would space exploration look like if it starred more women? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/what-would-space-exploration-look-like-if-it-starred-more-women

Teleconferencing is like being on IRC, if everybody was a noob, two people typing at the same time made both of their posts into gibberish, and half the channel has a cat on their keyboard the entire time.

Telekon has a piano cover of Down in the Park & it makes me laugh ever goddamn time I hear it. It’s like having a muzak cover of Bulls On Parade.

Is there a term for absurd euphemisms constructed for censoring dialogue for television – like ‘melon farmer’ and ‘this is what happens when you meet a stranger in the alps’? Is there a database of them?

Thread by @Aelkus: “Strange Days is seriously underrated The aesthetic of the movie, like Blade Runner is, very good and timeless due to its combination of futu […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1069354595527344128.html

81: normal. except, if you pop off ‘esc’, there’s an actual key under it. like, metal. I think it fits this keyhole in my screen?

Hot take: like most things that are good, Cowboy Bebop is mostly good because they stopped making it before it became bad. (If you don’t believe me, watch the movie or read the tie-in manga.)

Remember: if a family member asks about your politics this thanksgiving, tell them you’re an anarchist & would like to abolish the concept of money. It’ll shut them up and it’s probably even true.

Why your Netflix thumbnails don’t look like mine - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axCBA3VD5dQ

Conspiracy theories are the result of the same legibilitization process described in ‘Seeing Like a State’: it replaces actual mechanism with a simpler one & drops details that don’t fit, for the sake of ease of representation

Beware parasitic spells: Drawn to conduits of mana like practitioners, they attach themselves to larger spells to hitch a free ride, force themselves into invocations as intrusive thoughts

Why There’s No Place Quite Like the American Garage - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-architecture-of-garages

Easy XMPP with WhatsApp like contact discovery via phone number: https://quicksy.im/ #xmpp #quicksy #conversations

We will never know what it’s like to be the person the K-Mart PA system’s 1994 holiday playlist wants us to be.

What It’s Like to Be a Bot “ Real Life https://reallifemag.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-bot/

Amiga like OSes on QEMU http://zero.eik.bme.hu/~balaton/qemu/amiga/

Slower-than-light biosphere arks start out large but become smaller with tech level, some of the most advanced interstellar ships look like bottle gardens that just happen to travel at 0.1c

One of those cult cinema distribution companies owns an actual video store – and it’s only like an hour or two from my house. I’ll have to make a trip out there at some point…

Cesar Sayoc and others on Twitter are behaving like bots. https://slate.com/technology/2018/11/cesar-sayoc-twitter-humans-behaving-bots.html

Science Is Full of Mavericks Like My Grandfather. But Was His Physics Theory Right? - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/science-full-mavericks-like-my-grandfather-was-his-physics-theory-right/574573/

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

For #NaNoGenMo I converted two of Stravinsky’s ballets to tone-poems by converting note frequencies to word frequencies. I dare somebody to do a dramatic reading of these; it’ll sound like an Underworld track: https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/nanogenmo-2018/stravinsky.md https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/nanogenmo-2018/stravinsky_pg.md

In one sense, ‘the computer revolution is over’ because the period of exponential growth behind the tech ended 10 years ago. In another sense, it hasn’t begun: we have sheltered ourselves from the social and intellectual ramifications of computing. Documents are still simulations of paper, & capitalism still exists. So it’s like that period where printing presses existed but everybody used a faux-calligraphic font.

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

Characteristic for planets in certain stages of civilization are weather patterns that look like stock markets

Isn’t it great that outlook just prevents people from emailing jar files to each other? Like, it’s not as though people occasionally need to send each other internal proprietary jars that aren’t conveniently hosted.

Love it we have a “contract” developer but he is not in the right group to push commits to the code repo. When I suggested that he be added to the right group one of the other developers was like that will give him access to everything. I’m sorry but what is everything? It’s not like he can pull from any of the repos as it is. Right now he just can’t commit.

It really pisses me off when people use ‘infinite’ to mean ‘really big’. If something’s actually infinite, adding more to it produces the same number (like in Hilbert’s hotel)

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)

Acting like a psychopath is great for male CEOs, not so much for women | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/acting-like-a-psychopath-is-great-for-male-ceos-not-so-much-for-women/

SisterWriter is so weirdly lazy at times. Like, just rotating a cut 90 degrees and doing a static panning shot… Though, the characters are constantly off model and rarely animated or properly posed, so that might be for the best…

The protagonist of Bunny-Girl-senpai is almost the Kyon-style deadpan snarker (not distinct enough to really be a variant yet, like in Denpa Onna) but I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at reconstruction like in Seiren…

Language is a technology & we ought to start acting like it

If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR https://longreads.com/2018/10/18/review-of-winners-take-all/

ways of thinking that aren’t language:↵- climbing/dancing in ideaspace, problems as shifting mazes and solutions as lines of sight↵- letting flowers or cities grow before your inner eye↵- breathing in a concept so it unfolds like spiderwebs on the inside of your skull

Is there already a term for going into a piece of media with the expectation that it won’t be a waste of time / there’s something to be gained by paying attention & thinking? (Like ‘good-faith viewership’?)

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

Seminars on Long-Term Thinking are hit-or-miss (like TED talks) but the latest with Julia Galef is pretty good.

Apparently hot take: automation tools don’t obviate abstract discussions about how best to think about decisions (like ‘should translations be precise or should they be accurate’ or ‘what is the good’) but make them more important.

The Internet’s keepers? “Some call us hoarders”I like to say we’re archivists” | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/10/the-internets-keepers-some-call-us-hoarders-i-like-to-say-were-archivists/

Elites like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos think they’re being philanthropic. But they could do so much more. - Recode https://www.recode.net/2018/10/3/17930990/anand-giridharadas-winners-take-all-book-changing-world-kara-swisher-decode-podcast-jeff-bezos

The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don’t feel like updating. Or haven’t logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.↵The Content must flow.↵(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)

simulator arxiv is probably full of physics papers that despite titles like “an autoethnography of living in universe [kolmogorov description]” are quite serious

Computers can solve your problem. You may not like the answer. - The Boston Globe https://apps.bostonglobe.com/ideas/graphics/2018/09/equity-machine/

warnings of the end appear in the stars, in randomness streams, on the insides of banana peels↵↵the last day goes by, the last night, and then↵time freezes, stutters, the sun smears across the sky like a video glitch

Moderan reads like if dril was a battle-cyborg & tried to write his autobiography but kept on getting distracted by how COOL it is to PLASTIC-WRAP THE EARTH.

Hot take: disambiguation in symbolic AI is probably a mistake, & we’d be better off with systems that pun uncontrollably because they operate on the locus of concepts rather than on their boundaries. You know, like a person.

Can somebody with access to SciAm or Nature summarize the substance of this SciAm article ‘Subliminal Messages Can Cause Forgetting’ for me? Is it just something stupid like ‘priming can interfere with reencoding via jamais-vu’?

No I know they’d like to study it harder, but now imagine something that’s both as ravenous as life and as competent as technology hitching a ride back up and escaping onto the interstellar stage, we’d lose that whole galaxy

sculpture ideas for zero G:↵- stones held by nothing but extremely thin threads↵- a magnetic orrery, without all the supports one needs in gravity↵- lego metacrystals↵- like strandebeests, but they snake lazily through the air when an eddy comes their way↵- light chimes