Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Till the end of the world
Neil Cicierega - Just a Baby from Mouth Dreams
My newest source of level-headed legal analysis for political news is Teri Kanefield, an author and former defense attorney; a recent post of hers gives an uncomfortable look at some the legal questions left unanswered by the prosecution of the Manhattan case. And of course I continue to recommend Empty Wheel and Lawfare, although the latter mostly covers topics of less interest to me.
Today I learned a cloud chamber is not a metaphor but involves literal clouds. Ionizing particles are fired through a volume prepared with super-saturated water and/or alcohol vapors. The high-energy particles ionize the molecules they interact with, leaving a trail of ions which serve as highly efficient condensation nuclei. The fine mist of cloud droplets that form on the trail are then large enough to see.
There have been so many political scandals since 2016 that inevitably one slips through the cracks unnoticed. None-the-less I am astonished I did not know this already: Charles McGonigal, the former head of the FBI’s New York City office and in charge of investigating Russian interference in US elections, was sentenced to 4 years in prison for conspiring with the targets of the investigation to protect Russia. He later received another 2 years for accepting bribes from Albania. It is shocking how brazenly the investigation into Russian interference was corrupted from the inside.
Do you owe people money and don’t want to pay? Just do the Texas two-step bankruptcy to rid yourself of all your liabilities! Corporate divisions are considered mergers in Texas, and after splitting your debts from your assets the liable subdivision can declare bankruptcy in the Western District of North Carolina. For whatever reason this works better if asbestos are involved. For example, Johnson & Johnson owed $2B (or more!) for causing cancer by putting asbestos into baby powder, so they split off LTL Management which reformed in NC and filed for bankruptcy two days later (an example of “new debtor syndrome”, apparently).
From the 2017 nanocar race:
The race on the gold surface was won by the Swiss team that crossed the finish line first after covering a distance of 133 nanometers. […] The American team from Ohio University turned back for no apparent reason after 20 nanometers, the German team broke 2 vehicles without being able to restart, and the Japanese team ended up giving up. The French team lost sight of its vehicle on its surface area, and was also obliged to abandon, comforting itself with the symbolic prize of “the most elegant car in the competition”.
An ingenious Earth jigsaw puzzle that is the net of an icosahedral approximation of the Earth’s surface. This allows the solver to choose exactly how they want to lay out the puzzle, subject to the constraint that the 12 vertices of the icosahedron are immutable; the orientation of the icosahedron was chosen so that these would be in the ocean. Costs $120, though. They also have a galaxy puzzle with the topology of a klein bottle. (Funny enough I have an ordinary 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with that same galaxy image… took me many, many hours to assemble all those stars.) A much harder Earth-assembly puzzle was made by mathematician Henry Segermen. (After I wrote the above they also released a Spectre tile puzzle, which gives some indication of the timescale at which I produce these links posts.)
Sometimes you just need to produce
FizzBuzz output at 31 GiB per second when memcpy caps
out at only 6 GiB per second.
Monte Testaccio is a 35 meter high hill, almost a kilometer in circumference, just outside of Rome that is made out of 53 million shattered amphorae, which had collectively been used to import 6 billion liters of olive oil to Rome. The hill would originally have been much larger. The hill was terraced, with retaining walls made of intact amphorae filled with potsherds (N.B. “sherd” refers to the remains of ceramics, and “shard” to glass, in archaeology); donkeys would bear empty amphorae to the top where they were shattered and the pieces laid on the ground. The path up the hill was paved with sherds. About 7 million liters of olive oil were imported each year; this includes only state-sponsored mass imports, and not the extensive private trade. It is unclear why the amphorae were not recycled; most were manufactured in southern Spain, and were of a shape that may have been unsuitable for reuse, and the oils interfered with working as concrete filler. Rome similarly imported massive quantities of wheat and wine in amphorae but did not dispose of those amphorae in such a way. Markings on the amphorae tracked the weight of the contained oil, where it was grown, and the names of the sellers and inspectors.
Arthur Conan Doyle, who practiced as a physician, writing about compulsory smallpox vaccination in 1887:
Colonel Wintle bases his objection to vaccination upon two points: its immorality and its inefficiency or positive harmfulness. Let us consider it under each of these heads, giving the moral question the precedence which is its due. Is it immoral for a Government to adopt a method of procedure which experience has Proved and science has testified to conduce to the health and increased longevity of the population? Is it immoral to inflict a Passing inconvenience upon a child in order to preserve it from a deadly disease? Does the end never justify the means? Would it be immoral to give Colonel Wintle a push in order to save him from being run over by a locomotive? […] Some parents have an amusing habit of ascribing anything which happens to their children, from the whooping-cough to a broken leg, to the effects of their vaccination. It is from this class that the anti-vaccinationist party is largely recruited.
Well There’s Your Problem is a podcast-with-slides that discusses industrial disasters with irreverance and many rambling digressions. They recently produced an episode on the Boston Silver line; skip 35 minutes to get to the main content, or skip to 1 hour 33 to get to the part discussing the silver line in specific.
Why do chess pawns only go forward?
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