Sapere Aude
Month: September 2017
Apparently, the amount of human excrement that people come into direct contact is causing a public health crisis, and in an effort to educate the Indian public on the necessity of using toilet facilities, UNICEF has come up with the most unbelievably insane PSA of all time.
San Francisco needs this.
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the 2nd expedition ended in mass suicide; the 3rd expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the 11th expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer.
Like everyone, I like to leave as much client drama, work stress, and general responsibility at the office as possible. But there’s something about business jargon I can’t let go of. My partner and I have found a use for these ridiculous phrases while navigating our day-to-day post-work edginess. We use it as a polite code to communicate our anger and frustration. It’s truly helped us avoid many conflicts and stuff our issues so far down we’ll only remember them in 10 years when he buys a Porsche or I fall in love with my ceramics teacher Amy.
“HOW ABOUT WE STREAMLINE THIS PROCESS” When your partner isn’t moving as quickly as you’d like or doing something the way you do, suggest that you work together to streamline the process, but really just take over and do it your way until your partner slowly backs away from the dishwasher, Ikea furniture, gift wrap, remote control or thank you notes.
Robert Penney created a pixel-perfect animation of Stranger Things as a turn-of-the-1990s adventure game a la Secret of Monkey Island. Turns out that he’s got a knack for these displaced artifacts, each pulled from a parallel universe where 20th century game systems still received rushed, sloppy games based on inappropriate movies and shows.
It is clear from his work that Awdry disliked change, venerated order, and craved the administration of punishment. Henry wasn’t the only train to receive a death sentence. In one episode, a manager tells a showoff engine named Smudger that he’s going to “make him useful at last,” and then turns Smudger into a generator, never to move again. In another episode, a double-decker bus named Bulgy comes to the station and talks about revolution—“Free the roads from railway tyranny!” he cries. He is quickly labelled a “scarlet deceiver,” trapped under a bridge, and turned into a henhouse. A recurring storyline involves the “troublesome trucks,” which are disciplined into fearful obedience through public, symbolic punishments. Their leader, S. C. Ruffey, is pulled in 2 different directions until he breaks into pieces—“I guess the lesson is that if someone is bullying you, kill them?” a YouTube commenter writes—and, in another episode, a “spiteful” brake van is crushed into bits.
a form of aluminum that floats on water.
If you restructure aluminum at the molecular level, as Boldyrev and colleagues did using computational modeling, you could produce an ultra-light crystalline form of aluminum that’s lighter than water
Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns that are the endgame of Aggregation Theory.
A group of scientists discovered an underwater “octopus city” off the coast of Australia in Jervis Bay, and they’ve named it “Octlantis.” This discovery of octopuses interacting in a high-density den challenges scientists’ previously held belief that octopuses are solitary and antisocial creatures.
Ex Libris turns out to be riveting, a monument to the collections and people clustered inside the NYPL’s 88 branches. Chalk that up to the generosity and curiosity of Wiseman’s lens, and the filmmaker’s desire to cede the spotlight to patrons, guests, and staffers, who appear to be coexisting with the camera instead of performing for it. Over the course of weeks spent embedded in the library’s buildings, Wiseman’s crew “became the fabric of the room”.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 