UV Dye + water, video.
UV Dye + water, video.
I’m going to be on the road the next couple days so my availability through thursday will be spotty. My laptop died this afternoon and I don’t think I’ll be doing any long text production using an iOs keyboard.
Various links of weirdness led me to this collection of wonders:
I was fortunate to grow up almost completely irreligious; I’ve never felt a need to replace some “lost” faith or to seek my meaning in the gift of the gods. Reading a lot of history as a kid teaches you that the gods elevate and destroy everyone more or less randomly. Epicurus was right – if they exist, their affairs are complex and elevated enough that they’re more or less irrelevant to us.
The origin of the expression “walking back the cat” is lost in the early cold war, but it refers to the process of decompiling and recompiling intelligence after a breach, usually caused by a mole.
This is cool stuff: (Via Atlas Obscura) dynamically creating fantastical maps of places that never existed. I remember creating maps when I was doing D&D worlds; it’s harder than you’d expect, if you’re trying to make something that looks semi-realistic.
I’m not fond of the “Putin is a chessmaster” meme.
I am, however, willing to say he’s nobody to piss off; it’s just not a good idea to mess with someone whose idea of subtle revenge is to poison an enemy with Polonium-209. Putin doesn’t just say “fuck you” – he says “fuck you” and he means it.
This one is eerily similar to the one on Orly airport. To the point where I had to do a double-take on the news, and then a triple-take, to make sure the facts were somewhat clear. [stderr]
The idea that you can tell things about a person from their appearance underlies the entire point of dressing up, wearing make-up, and being concerned with our appearance. There are probably some things you might be able to assume from a person’s looks, but it’s still going to be pretty unreliable: you can’t tell someone’s a terrorist because they “look muslim” because “looking muslim” is a vague concept to begin with.
What about people who look like criminals?
In a humorous piece in the New Yorker, Andy Borowitz [ny] has Jared “The Kettle” Kushner dissing Kim “The Pot” Jong Un for being inexperienced at leadership and implying that he got his job through nepotism. It’s a funny piece, because the underlying point is important and interesting.