Good disguise

This video is loaded with lots of fascinating techniques of high stakes disguise. There’s light disguise, which uses glasses, caps, and facial hair, to hide in a crowd, says Jonna Mendez, the CIA’s former Chief of Disguise. And there’s advanced disguise, which is used to hide your identity in face-to-face encounters. And good disguise is more than just makeup and prostheses. It’s about behavior, too. For instance, an American posing as a European can give themselves away by holding a cigarette the wrong way, resting while standing on one leg, or holding a fork in their right hand.

Pagans against Genesis

The final great pagan opponent of Christianity was the emperor-philosopher Julian the Apostate (331-363 CE), so called because of his conversion from Christianity to Neoplatonism. He ruled the Roman Empire for only the final 2 years of his life, and during his short reign he did his utmost to restore and promote pagan Hellenism at the expense of Christianity. His major literary attack on the Church, Against the Galileans, underwent the same fate as the anti-Christian writings of Celsus and Porphyry: we have only fragments quoted by his later opponents (especially, in Julian’s case, the bishop Cyril of Alexandria in his Against Julian). In his polemics, Julian pays attention to the book of Genesis, particularly its early chapters. He admired Judaism because it adhered to its ancestral traditions and he castigated Christianity for its having abandoned these traditions, especially Judaism’s sacrificial worship. His attempt to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem was part of his program to restore ancient religious practices. Yet that did not prevent him from regarding many Old Testament passages as absurd.

Precision Engineering

Precision Engineering enabled Modernity.

This corresponding concept of “tolerance” turns out to be equally important. The ancient world was certainly capable of creating complex machinery (see the Antikythera Mechanism above), and the early modern period was able to put together the scientific method and new ways of conceptualizing the universe. But it’s the Industrial Revolution that created — or was created by — this notion that machines could be made in parts that fit together so closely that they could be interchangeable. That’s what got our machine age going, which in turn enabled guns and cars and transistors and computers and every other thing.

Skibidi

Skibidi is the latest release by the Russian dance/rave/art/electro/satire Little Big. The band/collective have a reputation for their videos, which include the Disney-lawyer-baiting AK-47, Kim Jong Un tribute LollyBomb, the gangster culture Give me your money, to the retirement home Faradenza, the street life With Russia from love, the nightmare-inducing Hateful Love, and the unforgettable {definitely NSFW} piano-playing Big Dick.

Battle for the Home

While the home may be the current battleground in consumer technology, is it actually a distinct product area — a new epoch, if you will? When it came to mobile, it didn’t matter who had won in PCs; Microsoft ended up being an also-ran. The fortunes of Apple, in particular, depend on whether or not this is the case. If it is a truly new paradigm, then it is hard to see Apple succeeding. It has a very nice speaker, but everything else about its product is worse. On the other hand, the HomePod’s close connection to the iPhone and Apple’s overall ecosystem may be its saving grace: perhaps the smartphone is still what matters. More broadly, it may be the case that we are entering an era where there are new battles, the scale of which are closer to skirmishes than all-out wars a la smartphones. What made the smartphone more important than the PC was the fact they were with you all the time. Sure, we spend a lot of time at home, but we also spend time outside (AR?), entertaining ourselves (TV and VR), or on the go (self-driving cars); the one constant is the smartphone, and we may never see anything the scale of the smartphone wars again.

Village Cafe

In this week’s review, Times critic Pete Wells highlights Village Cafe — a restaurant in the back of a tiny Midwood parking lot with hearty Azerbaijani dishes that stand out among similar dining spots in the area. In the 2-star review, Wells commends several of the restaurant’s dishes from the qutab; a flatbread stuffed with minced chicken, lamb, or greens; to the kufta-bozbash soup, a lamb broth containing chickpeas and a single lamb-rice meatball.

NYC Street Tree Map

The NYC Parks department maintains an online map of the city’s street trees — currently 679K mapped trees from 422 different species. Our tree map includes every street tree in New York City as mapped by our TreesCount! 2015 volunteers, and is updated daily by our Forestry team. On the map, trees are represented by circles. The size of the circle represents the diameter of the tree, and the color of the circle reflects its species. You are welcome to browse our entire inventory of trees, or to select an individual tree for more information.