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FAFAnomics
Recent economic policy has turned into FAFAnomics – Fuck Around and Find Out Economics,
F*ck Around and Find Out Economics, something that feels like the policy equivalent of a TikTok influencer doing increasingly dangerous stunts off the side of a building for views. The goal isn’t good governance; it’s capturing attention at any cost. And it’s working! While we debate whether each new crisis is legal, ethical, or even real1(as we should) the broader transformation of American fiscal policy continues.
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Trading card game where local Japanese men are the stars
The small town of Kawara in Fukuoka Prefecture created a Pokemon like card game featuring local middle-aged men as the stars.
The creator of the game is Eri Miyahara, the Secretary General of the Saidosho Community Council.
“We wanted to strengthen the connection between the children and the older generations in the community. There are so many amazing people here. I thought it was such a shame that no one knew about them,” she said in an interview with Fuji News Network (FNN). “Since the card game went viral, so many kids are starting to look up to these men as heroic figures.”
The plan worked. Kids have started attending local events and volunteering for community activities — just for a chance to meet the ojisan from their cards. Participation in town events has reportedly doubled since the game launched.
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Making music after death
Popular Mechanics with an interesting art installation involving posthumous brain matter to make music.
American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn’t the end of his lifelong musical odyssey.
Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier’s “brain matter”—hooked up to an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates—to create electrical signals that triggered a mallet to strike the varying plates, creating a kind of post-mortem musical piece. Conceptualized in collaboration with Lucier himself before his death, the artists solicited the help of researchers from Harvard Medical School, who grew a mini-brain from Lucier’s white blood cells. The team created stem cells from these white blood cells, and due to their pluripotency, the cells developed into cerebral organoids somewhat similar to developing human brains.
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The S Thing clock
There’s a very good chance you learned how to draw the diamond S in your younger days. Someone turned it into a clock.
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Subtitles in smart glasses
An interesting and useful application for smart glasses, real time subtitles in the lens. I am curious how well these will work in noisy situations like a crowded restaurant.
Meant specifically for the hard of hearing, the Captify glasses create closed captions from the audio they pick up with dual beamforming microphones, focusing directly on the person in front of you while cutting out any surrounding chatter. The speech is transcribed by your phone, which is connected to the glasses over Bluetooth, and the resulting transcription is projected in front of your eyes in glowing green text only you can see.
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Man sinks in quicksand, rises with a girlfriend
Any millennial will tell you, we thought quicksand was something we’d have to deal with given how all the cartoons warned us about it. We encountered metaphorical quicksand *gestures all around* instead. Well, for one man, he stepped in actual quicksand.
The quicksand depicted in films, when a daring adventurer is suddenly ensnared in a life-threatening vortex of sand, is largely a myth. But that didn’t make it any less scary when Mitchell O’Brien slowly began to sink.
Mr. O’Brien was on Van’s Beach on the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan with his friend Breanne Sika last weekend hunting for Leland bluestones, a byproduct of the iron ore furnaces that operated in the nearby fishing village that attract rock hunters.
Some dredging had been taking place on the beach, and Mr. O’Brien, 37, from Traverse City, Mich., said he had thought the sand felt unstable.
“‘That looks really dangerous,’” he recalled Ms. Sika saying. “I turned around and ended up walking right to the spot she said was dangerous.
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Tool Libraries
It’s good for everyone to own a basic set of tools: hammer, monkey wrench, phillips and flathead screwdriver. But not everyone is able to afford those, and most home projects require more. This is where a tool library, where you can check out tools like you can books, can come in handy.
With the price of materials climbing (or set to), many DIY projects have become more difficult to finance overnight. But what if Curtin’s friend didn’t also have to purchase pricey tools to complete the project? What if he borrowed them all from neighbors instead, and returned them when he was finished? And what if those neighbors helped him through the project each step of the way?
This is more or less how tool-lending libraries work.
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The Savannah Bananas on 60 Minutes
60 Minutes hits the high points about the excitement The Savannah Bananas and their style of baseball is bringing to the sport. Athletic, Globetrooter-esque plays, stilts, and innovation to the rules.
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CVE Program saved by private foundation
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exploitations database is a collective and comprehensive database for computer security. It’s critical for maintaining nearly any computing device. The US Government helped fund it as a necessary resource until April 16, 2025. A consortium of partners foresaw this and were prepared, establishing a foundation to keep it running.
