Month: February 2017

The leakiest administration

The constant flow of embarrassing information paints a fractious and incompetent White House, an unstable and immature Commander-in-Chief, and near-daily blunders both diplomatic and domestic. And beyond the daily embarrassment, the persistent leaks reveal ongoing counterintelligence investigations. The hull is taking on water, and yesterday the Administration sacrificed its first crewmember in a desperate maneuver to stay afloat.

excellent, this couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of idiots.

Law School Glut

the surplus ones ought to close:

A recent review of the 205 accredited law schools, by the nonprofit Law School Transparency, found that 51, including Charlotte Law, were in the “extreme risk” or “very high risk” category for graduate success. Still, the A.B.A. has been reluctant to clamp down on schools

Ataraxya

Club drugs: when they’re good, they’re good, and when they’re bad, they’re better. 5 directors collaborated on this trippy animation that stands among the best depictions of a club trip I have seen. Headphones, full screen, and dark room strongly recommended.

Elbphilharmonie

The up-tempo video takes us through the many impressive features which recently helped the building win the Cultural Architecture Prize in ArchDaily’s Building of the Year Awards. From the gently curving escalator at the building’s entrance which becomes less steep as it ascends, to the curved glass which gives the building’s exterior its signature look, to the CNC-milled acoustic walls in the performance spaces, #donotsettle takes an uncompromising look at the project’s finer details. Given the building’s fraught construction process which generated so much controversy that it was deemed worthy of a spot at discussion in the 2012 Venice Biennale, it is heartening to see that (almost) all of those around the vlogging duo seem enthused about the building’s much-awaited opening.

Clever slot machine cheat

wow:

operatives use their phones to record 25 spins on a game they aim to cheat. They upload that footage to a technical staff in St. Petersburg, who analyze the video and calculate the machine’s pattern based on what they know about the model’s pseudorandom number generator. Finally, it transmits a list of timing markers to a custom app on the operative’s phone; those markers cause the handset to vibrate 0.25 seconds before the operative should press the spin button.

Cities Too Small?

Large American cities might be undersized by 33%. And we may have 2x as many cities as we need.

Wind Games

this never gets old

Human capability

A couple of people talked about how the quest for “optimal Go” wasn’t just about one game, but about grading human communities. Here we have this group of brilliant people who have been competing against each other for centuries, gradually refining their techniques. Did they come pretty close to doing as well as merely human minds could manage? Or did non-intellectual factors – politics, conformity, getting trapped at local maxima – cause them to ignore big parts of possibility-space? Right now it’s very preliminarily looking like the latter, which would be a really interesting result – especially if it gets replicated once AIs take over other human fields.

Hebocon

the crappy robots championship.

timeless fictional London

The number of geographical references kept increasing, but they remain essentially localized in the City and in the West End. The rest of London—where most of the growth was actually taking place—never really mattered. In the course of the 19th century, real London radically changed—and fictional London hardly at all.