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Pilot makes a smiley face
(warning, a couple f-bombs) a couple guys captured in pilot making a smile, smiley face in the air above them.
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Confronting JK Rowling’s bigotry
Sandy Ernest Allen Confronts J.K. Rowling’s Virulent Transphobia.
Here was an extremely wealthy and culturally powerful woman who, for some reason, insisted on making her bigoted views about people like me openly and widely known. And so, having long debated what to do about this situation, I dug a fire pit in my backyard and burned my complete set of hardcover Harry Potters.
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Alexandra Petri attempts to be the government
What happens when you send a humorist to do investigative reporting? You get a story about how absolutely insane it is when the government won’t do his job. Alexandra Petri set out to perform tasks usually allocated to a government agency employee.
What became a five-month quest to assume government responsibilities took me from the overgrown fields of Antietam to the cramped basket of a hot-air balloon about 1,400 feet over Ohio; from a biology lab at Johns Hopkins University, where I beheaded flies, to a farmstead in Maryland, where I inspected the fly-bothered udder of a cow named Melissa.
And the potential duties kept piling up as I learned about each round of cuts. Since I started typing this paragraph, Donald Trump has fired many of the people who surveil infectious diseases; before I finish typing this paragraph, he may have hired them back. I hope so! I would do almost anything for a good story, but perhaps I should draw the line at “monitor Ebola.”
Amanda MullJohn F. Kennedy famously implored us: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Well, I asked! And the answer is: lots of things. If you don’t mind doing them wrong.
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The Moylan Arrow
That little arrow on your dashboard that points either left or right, tells you which side of your gas tank is on. It’s such a simple design, and it even has a name, The Moylan Arrow, named after the engineer, Jim Moylan.
“I would like to propose a small addition,” he wrote, “in all passenger car and truck lines.”
The proposal he had in mind was a symbol on the dashboard that would tell drivers which side of the car the gas tank was on.
“Based on personal experience,” he wrote, “I feel that this little indicator would remove the guesswork of which side I want to park.” He continued: “For the minor investment involved on the company’s part, I think it would be a worthwhile convenience.”
Very soon, everything became a standard design feature in nearly every car
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Backing up Spotify
Anna’s Archive backed up Spotify. The whole article is interesting about the process and the analysis that they did on the data set. They walked in the home process and including charts class, they even offer a truly random song selection.
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Dragonsweeper
Here’s a fun Minesweeper clone that combines dungeon-crawling elements with a Minesweeper-like grid, called Dragonsweeper. The numbers indicate the hit points of the monsters in those squares. You need to collect gold in order to level up and earn more hearts to take on larger monsters.
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Open Source Industrial Construction Equipment
An interesting idea: 3D printed, open-source industrial construction equipment that could create a village or small town if necessary, called the Global Village Construction Set.
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AI recreates Minesweeper
Minesweeper is complex enough in its rule set that it needs a little bit of thought in order to program, whoever, it’s not so complex that it needs extra libraries and all sorts of fancy programming tricks. Researchers gave four different AI code assistant instructions to recreate the game, and each delivered different results.
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A neat JavaScript calendar generator
If you have ever done any web development at all and tried to make a calendar, you’ll know that it is one of the more difficult things to get right. It’s more than just generating boxes and numbers. There’s other sorts of logic that need to be taken into account. Here is a neat JavaScript calendar generator.
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The Cassandras predicted our current political reality
Back in 2015, 2016, there was a minority group of people who saw what Trump really was, Modern-day Cassandras who had a vision but were not listened to.
Why were they afraid of this? Or, put better, how did they correctly see all this coming? Virtually all the Cassandras would make the same points. They used different examples and discussed them in different ways, but the bones of the argument were the same. The experience for me, as interviewer, was like hearing the same song played by different musicians—once by a folk guitarist, then sung by an opera singer, then played by a heavy metal band, then a string quartet, and so on. Very different styles, but clearly working from the same sheet music.
I started to think of this as “The Cassandra Song.” It plays as follows:
- Trump (or senior people in the movement) said (insert bad outcome or values).
- We had good reasons to think he/they meant it.
- We had good reasons to think his base wanted it.
I still remember how the arguments with family members were that this was not going to go well. While they may not concede that I was right, they can definitely see that a lot of things did come true.
