Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss

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.

Fake Politician

A well-respected local politician is elevated to one of the most powerful positions in France, but keeps his head down and gets on with the job instead of making an international media personality of himself. The perfect target for a most audacious identity theft.

“Everything about the story is exceptional. They dared to take on the identity of a serving French minister. Then they called up CEOs and heads of government round the world and asked for vast amounts of money. The nerve of it!”

Fast Revolutions

Everything about this system is extreme. But it’s the stars themselves that get to me. Think of it this way: The Earth’s gravity is strong enough to keep the Moon going around it with an orbital period of a little over 27 days. At the same distance, J17062’s gravity whips its companion around over 1000x faster.

Quantum amplification

Their method achieves 50 times more precision than the previous best techniques, which also means that they can make measurements 50 times faster than before. Now they can narrow down the particle’s location to an atom-sized space in less than a second. The key to their method is to accept the noisiness decreed by the uncertainty principle, and control where it manifests itself. To measure the ion’s position, they basically transfer the uncertainty into its speed, a value they happen to care less about.

Very Italian NYC

New York has never had a shortage of old-school red-sauce spots or exuberantly expensive odes to Italian cooking, but the last few months have seen a serious uptick in restaurants and cafés from Italians eager to introduce New Yorkers to the way Italy eats now, whether that’s sandwiches served on the Florentine answer to focaccia, strong cocktails poured in a bar bedecked in dark wood and Carrara marble, or regional cooking from Piedmont, Tuscany, and Emilia-Romagna. Here are the new molto Italian restaurants that demand your immediate attention.