"A photo posted to Twitter on Friday morning by journalist Nolan Peterson showed a burned-out Russian T-72 tank on a roadside supposedly near western Kyiv. Along the barrel, scrawled in white spray paint, was the word 'Wolverines,' another seeming homage to the 1984 Cold War-era movie 'Red Dawn'." -Max Hauptman, "‘Wolverines’ graffiti straight out of ‘Red Dawn’ showing … Continue reading Red Dawn “Wolverines” in Ukraine
Category: articles
Words: Inclusion, Exclusion & Questioning
"Dictionaries project an image of disinterested expertise. This is because they are produced with stunning care by a professional team whose job it is to monitor a culture’s temperature. Consequently, they project authority. Yet what makes culture, particularly in a country like the United States, move is often an anti-authoritarian drive: rebellion, protests, marches. We … Continue reading Words: Inclusion, Exclusion & Questioning
Centralization vs. Decentralization
"Recently, a reader asked me to lay out the concerns about centralization and decentralization in relation to the internet......The people who own networks can change the rules at any time, and not just from a free-speech standpoint: Recently, Vimeo faced controversy over how it changed its business model to charge heavy consumers for the bandwidth their videos … Continue reading Centralization vs. Decentralization
Thucydides and Realism
"In the face of hard realities, Thucydides embodied the dual concern of classical realism, consciousness of external threats while being wary of our capacity for self-destruction, to fall prey to irrational emotions and false hope. An age of blood and iron is well and truly now underway, and the bitter winds of economic warfare are … Continue reading Thucydides and Realism
Spoiled Militaries
"“Even those with military experience, you’ve got to realise that there isn't a war that has been fought like this in a long time,” Le said. “What's different with the US military and all the other NATO militaries—they're spoiled. When it comes to fighting a war, they have air support, medivac, logistics, all kinds of … Continue reading Spoiled Militaries
Reversing Hearing Loss With Regenerative Therapy
"'I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 or 15 years, because of the resources being put into this space and the incredible science being done, we can get to the point where [reversing hearing loss] would be similar to Lasik surgery, where you're in and out in an hour or two and you can completely … Continue reading Reversing Hearing Loss With Regenerative Therapy
Becoming a Better Smeller
"How could I become a better smeller? I like how you shifted away from questions of connoisseurship. You didn’t want to cultivate better aesthetic taste than other people. You just wanted to take in more of the world. Fredric Jameson once said, paraphrasing Adorno, that when you’re doing aesthetics as a Marxist, you can’t get away … Continue reading Becoming a Better Smeller
The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance
"We document a decline in the dollar share of international reserves since the turn of the century. This decline reflects active portfolio diversification by central bank reserve managers; it is not a byproduct of changes in exchange rates and interest rates, of reserve accumulation by a small handful of central banks with large and distinctive … Continue reading The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance
A Male Birth Control Pill
"Scientists are still racing to create the first male contraceptive that isn’t a condom or surgery. In new preliminary research, a team says they’ve developed a non-hormonal form of male birth control, one that kept lab mice sterile for four to six weeks with seemingly no side effects. Early human trials of the pill are … Continue reading A Male Birth Control Pill
Pseudonymity & cafebedouin
"These tensions are igniting an increasingly common desire to explore pseudonymity, shedding irl identity to move across the internet more freely. Importantly, pseudonymity is distinct from anonymity. Platforms like 4chan, where you cannot create a username, are anonymous. Platforms like Reddit, where you post under a consistent moniker, are pseudonymous. A pseudonym can garner history … Continue reading Pseudonymity & cafebedouin
Nightmare Fuel: Artificial Intelligence for Drug Discovery Repurposed to Discover New Chemical Weapons
"Our company—Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, Inc.—had recently published computational machine learning models for toxicity prediction in different areas, and, in developing our presentation to the Spiez meeting, we opted to explore how AI could be used to design toxic molecules. It was a thought exercise we had not considered before that ultimately evolved into a computational proof … Continue reading Nightmare Fuel: Artificial Intelligence for Drug Discovery Repurposed to Discover New Chemical Weapons
Typical & Atypical Aesthetic Taste
"Aesthetic experience seems both regular and idiosyncratic. On one hand, there are powerful regularities in what we tend to find attractive versus unattractive (e.g., beaches versus mud puddles). On the other hand, our tastes also vary dramatically from person to person: what one of us finds beautiful, another might find distasteful. What is the nature … Continue reading Typical & Atypical Aesthetic Taste
[Minimum] Steps to Get There
This is a follow-up on my post, The Maximum Human Life Span and Conjecture on Step Counts to Get There (15,000 Steps a Day). According to this research: "By analyzing data on tens of thousands of people across four continents compiled between 15 existing studies, a team of researchers has now landed on a more … Continue reading [Minimum] Steps to Get There
bash: Getting a Cryptocurrency Price From Console Using Ergopad
#!/bin/bash printf -v coin '%s' -1 # ergopad.sh sigrsv price() { # A function that pulls cryptocurrency price data from ergopad # and formats it into a multi-currency banner for the console curl -X 'GET' 'https://ergopad.io/api/asset/price/'"$1"'' \ -H 'accept: application/json' 2> /dev/null | # sends download data to /dev/null sed 's/.*://' | # Removes everything … Continue reading bash: Getting a Cryptocurrency Price From Console Using Ergopad
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