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The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/science/math-conway-game-of-life.html

nicely done with some good insights

  On 3/8/2021 at 8:22 AM, iococoi said:

https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

That's an awful article.  If the author needs to see people fucking, go watch a porn (where ironically, they're not horny either).

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We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films.

How can you watch any of the movies that had that relationship and not see that there is an intimacy between the two? I don't understand how much more obvious it needs to be in its exposition.

Basically, the author needs to either fuck, or hand out (in secrete of course).

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How do mushroom foragers make safe and efficient decisions under uncertainty, or deal with the genuine risks of misidentification and poisoning? This article is an inquiry into ecological rationality, heuristics, perception, and decision-making in mushroom foraging. By surveying 894 Finnish mushroom foragers, this article illustrates how socially learned rules of thumb and heuristics are used in mushroom foraging, and how simple heuristics are often complemented by more complex and intuitive decision-making.

http://journal.sjdm.org/20/200330/jdm200330.pdf

 A very interesting article (the journal is open-access) on the carrying capacity of American agricultural land that compares 10 different diets:

https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/doi/10.12952/journal.elementa.000116/112904/Carrying-capacity-of-U-S-agricultural-land-Ten

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2016-war-stories/how-berkeley-eccentric-beat-russians-and-then-made

early hackers and Klein bottles. very cool.

The real urban jungle: how ancient societies reimagined what cities could be (Guardian)

Eraser Men: censoring the roads of the Tour de France

https://www.rouleur.cc/blogs/the-rouleur-journal/the-eraser-men

About the people that make sure you aren’t bombarded with graffiti penises when you watch the TdF (they are paid by the race organizers to turn them into butterflies).

good read ...

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In 2007 I had the chance to interview Japanese animator and director Satoshi Kon for the Montreal Mirror, the alt-weekly where I worked at the time, in advance of the North American release of his fourth and final movie, Paprika.

https://markslutsky.substack.com/p/something-good-28-satoshi-kon

With all the noise around the upcoming Dune remake, this article on David Lynch is a pretty decent read:

David Lynch Folds Space: Because He Is the Kwisatz Haderach

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/pig

Newly Unearthed Work by a Revered and Reviled Novelist Causes a Stir in France  A legal battle is raging over manuscripts written by the antisemitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline that disappeared almost eight decades ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/world/europe/celine-manuscripts-france.html

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[H]uman studies have found that exposure to higher phthalate levels in the womb is associated with asthma in childhood. And in boys, it’s linked to more behavioral problems and shorter distances between their anuses and genitals — a measure linked to lower testosterone levels and semen quality later in life.

https://www.nytimes.com/article/plastics-to-avoid.html

goodish read

https://chelseatroy.com/2021/07/30/the-oxymoron-of-data-driven-innovation/

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Why didn't Gandalf own a Colt .45?

Part I of Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

https://featherlessbipeds.substack.com/p/why-didnt-gandalf-own-a-colt-45

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George Orwell's 1940 Review of
Mein Kampf

http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html

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“If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, you’d think this guy wouldn’t pass a qualifying exam. He’s very slow.” So slow, in fact, that at first Wang thought they were wasting a lot of time on easy problems they already understood. But then he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/

Chemigram: A new approach to lensless photography

http://faculty.cooper.edu/willia/handouts/1574733.pdf

  On 4/19/2023 at 8:45 PM, Freak of the week said:

Chemigram: A new approach to lensless photography

http://faculty.cooper.edu/willia/handouts/1574733.pdf

most IDM 2023 (or 1982?)

https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/may-2023/the-last-gamble-of-tokyo-joe/

This will obviously be a movie at some point, but it's a good read.

Stochastic Composition and Stochastic Timbre: GENDY3 by Iannis Xenakis

http://sites.music.columbia.edu/cmc/courses/g6610/fall2012/week4/Gendy3.pdf

Paul Viminitz - The Deer Hunter Paradox

https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1783&context=ossaarchive

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Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter contains a scene so riveting and nuanced that it is destined to enter - if it is not there already - the canon of ‘great moments in cinema’, along with the baby carriage scene from Battleship Potemkin, the shower scene from Psycho, and the faked orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. But dramatic impact aside, an analysis of the first Russian Roulette scene from The Deer Hunter also provides a metaphor for virtually the entire corpus of social and political philosophy. A full and more formal cashing out of these parallels is subject for another day - or lifetime!1 But the scene also depicts at least one - but arguably several - egregious errors in interactive reasoning. And so here I want to confine myself to the following question: Are those errors just Kahneman-Tversky-type glitches in the characters’ capacities to reason - glitches which are certainly understandable given the highly stressful conditions under which they are required to perform? If so, there is grist aplenty for psychology in The Deer Hunter, but little or none for rational choice theory. Or does the scene reveal a genuine inadequacy in our current understanding of interactive rationality - the resolution of which would have profound implications for rational choice theory and its myriad applications? I suspect the latter. Let’s see if I am right.

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