Month: June 2019

Al-Aqsa

“This bread is straight from Jerusalem!” was stated at least 5 times during our stay and it could be felt how significant this was to him. Even in Palestine the bread is unique to the city, travelers from other parts buy many loaves to bring as gifts to their friends and family. The crust is soft and covered in sesame seeds, the bread inside even softer and so light. Despite being almost 1 meter long before cutting, it is not heavy and feels like it might float away.

Chain Letter Evolution

Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter more secular letters appeared in the US that promised good luck if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of these “luck chain letters” circulated in the next 100 years. As they replicated through the decades, some accumulated copying errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped them prevail in the competition with other chain letters.

Mars Geology

This week’s map is an artistic rendition of the geologic map of Mars designed by the USGS. I used the same geology data as the original map, but I added more topographic and label data, redesigned the visual style, and also edited the key for a more general audience. One of the most difficult parts of making this map was translating the key into plain English. The original USGS map was designed for geologists, so I had to look up almost all of the vocabulary. For example, my abbreviated definition for a caldera rim was “The rim of an empty magma chamber left behind after a volcanic eruption.” The original description was “Ovoid scarp, outlines single or multiple coalesced partial to fully enclosed depression(s); volcanic collapse, related to effusive and possibly explosive eruptions.”

Rent-Stabilized EV

Requests for visual descriptions yielded memories of “that old kind of toilet with the oak box,” rooms that were “all rhomboids,” and “the roaches.” Asked what they liked about their place, tenants mentioned “the cross-ventilation,” “the exposed brick,” and “the fact that the bathroom is now in the apartment.” Schiffman elicits stories from people who are both dreading a prospective rent hike and reconsidering the decision to keep a “Mao room.” A neighborhood blog, EV Grieve, runs the answers once a month, along with Schiffman’s photos.

What the Celts drank

Our analyses confirm that they indeed consumed imported wines, but they also drank local beer from the Greek drinking bowls. In other words, the Celts did not simply adopt foreign traditions in their original form. Instead, they used the imported vessels and products in their own ways and for their own purposes. Moreover, the consumption of imported wine was apparently not confined to the upper echelons of society. Craftsmen too had access to wine, and the evidence suggests that they possibly used it for cooking, while the elites quaffed it in the course of their drinking parties

Totally not robots

If Only Turing Was Alive To See This

There’s a silly subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like “SINCE I AM A HUMAN, THIS SMALL FELINE GENERATES POSITIVE EMOTIONS IN MY CARBON-BASED BRAIN” or something like that. There’s another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output. Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.