Erik Hoel in The Intrinsic Perspective:
As reported credulously and breathlessly by just about every major media outlet, there are strange lights in the night sky all over the East Coast; particularly, it seems, in areas heavy with air traffic. Residents are going on “drone hunts” to look at the heavens (a direction that humans don’t usually examine for long periods) and suddenly seeing all sorts of things they can’t explain. “Something’s going on,” a New Jersey town mayor says; President-elect Trump says the same. “New Jersey drones” are being spotted as far away as California. ‘“Shoot them down already!” demands a NJ Assemblyman.
In response, locals are shining lasers at drones that turn out to be planes (like poor FedEx flight 3926) because it’s hard to judge distance well in the night sky. The FBI had to release a statement yesterday begging people not to shoot.
In the rare cases where people use flight trackers appropriately, like when New Jersey Senator Andy Kim went out on a drone hunt with local police, he found that what he saw was… just planes. Meanwhile, ABC News aired this picture of what is probably Venus or Jupiter.
More here.
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A novelist’s name is writ in water, and come a drought may be reduced to a wisp of spume. In his day Anthony Burgess was a very big fish in the literary pond, most famous, or infamous, for the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, written in a wonderfully clever Russo-English patois of the author’s invention. The book was adapted for the screen by Stanley Kubrick, who later suppressed the film because of its perceived infatuation with or even encouragement to extreme violence.
When Javier Milei was sworn-in as Argentinian president a year ago, the smart money was on a spectacular train wreck. Impulsive, thin-skinned, hyper-ideological and irresistibly drawn to every culture war controversy, no matter how dumb, Milei doesn’t immediately strike you as the kind of leader that gets results. Taking over one of the world’s most notorious economic basketcases at a time of absolute fiscal disarray, Milei’s coming doom seemed all too predictable.
Nate Bargatze loves fast food. He loves big-box stores and the suburbs and TNT marathons of Die Hard. He finds felicity in the familiar, comfort in the caloric, originality in the ordinary.
I’ve often considered poetry as a core piece of therapy for myself. Ever since I was a child, it’s been my biggest way of understanding the world and my own experiences. I see my life through the lens of a poem, and it helps me process and heal whatever I may be going through. I’ve been writing poetry since I was six, and I have always credited it for getting me through traumatic experiences and helping me celebrate the beautiful ones.
The town of Macondo never existed. It was never supposed to. And yet, here it is.
I
It’s always been a personal fascination of mine what words a culture uses — and what words it lacks. Not only is it a good indication of how native speakers tend to think and feel; the creation of new words reflects new thoughts and new emotions that have become common enough to require a shorthand. Nowhere is this happening faster than on the internet. Every year, dozens of new slang terms spread like wildfire in people’s vocabularies. I thought I’d cover some of the terms I find most interesting that are circulating on the Chinese internet right now.
It is unlikely the dark conjecture would have occurred to me were I not offspring of one, but my prejudicial lens has no bearing on whether Shakespeare died a suicide. I have scoured biographies old and new and find that nobody over four centuries has entertained the idea in print. Hardly an exception is Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo—the character Shakespeare, guilt-ridden for failing to thwart land enclosures near Stratford, takes sugar-coated poison tablets left behind for him by Ben Jonson. Is our myriad-minded Shakespeare, the suicide taboo silently at work, above the degradations of Dante’s seventh circle, reserved for suicides, who must keep company with usurers and sodomites? Or is there no evidence?
Not long
Prioritizing fundamental research over deployment
The thing about gay life is that you have countless mini-adventures, which years later leave only the faintest grooves on your cortex. The handsome big blond with the sweetest smile and strongest Boston accent I’d ever heard, who wanted to get fucked only and moved out to San Diego, where he caught the eye of many a sailor, got infected with AIDS, and died.
But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.