Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Stop exhaling carbon dioxide.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) February 20, 2020
• • • google suggested • • •
Shamanizm Parallelii is a Russian psychedelic rock, downtempo, and dub band founded by Pavel Yashan and Arkadiy Tronets (also known as JBC Arkadii) in 2008. Their music can be described as ’70s psyrock meets psychedelic dub, all wrapped up with interesting melodies and space rock atmospheres.
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
Nivikkana Iskandar, of Greenland, declared herself “Empress of the North Pole”—and attempted to invade a land mass that didn’t exist.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 21, 2018
Life Along the Border That Cuts Cyprus in Two
In Nicosia, physical barriers separate the Greek and Turkish communities—but many residents don’t seem to mind.
A young woman stands near the barricades of the U.N. buffer zone in the Greek-Cypriot part of Nicosia.
A SHARP LINE CUTS ACROSS the island of Cyprus. It runs through the middle of Nicosia, the capital, marked by stacked barrels, makeshift walls, and barbed wire. Soldiers in camouflage stand guard behind the barricades, and the letters “UN” loom in thick black letters on various buildings. To an outsider, this border within a country may feel like the markings of a battleground, but the city is not at war. The line through Nicosia exists to separate the city’s Turkish and Greek ethnic communities.
Just south of the stacked barrels and blocked roads, on the Greek side of town, a store called Phaneromenis 70 sells local artworks and serves as a kind of creative nucleus for Nicosia. Monika Ioakim, a DJ and associate of the Phaneromenis 70 collective, has seen this corner of Nicosia transform during her 48 years. “When I was growing up, we were told not to go too close to the border for fear of being shot or stepping on a landmine,” she says. “There was a lot of fear.”
Today, the border is little more than a formality. A civilian can cross to the other side by flashing a passport at Nicosia’s Ledra Street checkpoint. But the history of the border that divides Cyprus is long and troubling, and it haunts the city to this day.
A 1597 map of Nicosia that Giacomo Franco, of Venice, created for his book Viaggio da Venetia a Constantinopoli per Mare.
Cyprus experienced almost eight centuries of foreign control, first under King Richard I of England and then the Knights Templar, the French family of Lusignan, the Venetians, and the Ottomans, whose descendants are Turkish Cypriots. The British returned in 1878 as the last in this chain of invaders, and they ruled the island for approximately 80 years. During that time, Cypriots grew resentful. Roughly 80 percent of the population identified as Greek Cypriots and believed that Cyprus belonged to Greece. …
Tea leaves spelled out Napoleon’s doom—but were they actually nanotechnological life forms?
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 21, 2017
The First Days of the Trump Regime
The president has interpreted the Republican-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit as a writ of absolute power.
THERE ARE TWO KINDS of Republican senators who voted to acquit Donald Trump in his impeachment trial two weeks ago: those who acknowledged he was guilty and voted to acquit anyway, and those who pretended the president had done nothing wrong.
“It was wrong for President Trump to mention former Vice President Biden on that phone call, and it was wrong for him to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine declared, but added that removing him “could have unpredictable and potentially adverse consequences for public confidence in our electoral process.”
But Collins, like her Republican colleagues Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, was an outlier in admitting the president’s conduct was wrong. Most others in the caucus, like Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, deliberately missed the point, insisting that Democrats wanted the president removed for “pausing aid to Ukraine for a few weeks.”
What all these senators share is a willingness to ignore the nature of the offense. Both Collins, who has worked in government in some capacity since the 1970s, and Cotton, a Harvard-educated attorney, understood the basic constitutional arguments for removing a president who attempts to rig a reelection campaign in his favor, which is why they simply ignored them. Collins insisted that the matter be decided by the forthcoming election, disregarding the fact that Trump was impeached because he tried to use his official powers to manipulate that election, while Cotton simply pretended to be clueless about what was at issue. …
The vampire video game that sinks its teeth into the 1%
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 mixes sex and the shadow economy in a fiercely political horror fantasy.
‘Stockpiling resources, preying on the vulnerable’ … the creators of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 present a city in thrall to unaccountable elites.
Vampires have stood for many things over the centuries. In European medieval folklore, they were metaphors for disease and for the outsider, roaming the darkness beyond the village bounds. In the world of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, however, the bloodsuckers have made it inside the gates. They’ve found their way into the organs of finance and the state, creating an unseen society parallel to our own, and they’re doing rather well for themselves.
Set in a parallel version of present-day Seattle, Bloodlines is a knowing feast of vampires new and old, from sewer-dwelling ghouls redolent of Count Orlok to impeccably dressed matriarchs who recall the Underworld movies – but it’s all woven around a complex investigation of a city in thrall to unaccountable elites. As senior narrative designer Cara Ellison explains, the developers have conceived of vampires as “parasites on society, the 1%, stockpiling resources for themselves. Removing things from general circulation and preying on the vulnerable.”
Players take the role of a fledgling ‘thinblood’ in Seattle’s complex world of warring vampire clans.
Bloodlines 2 casts you as a fledgling “thinblood”, suddenly endowed with immortality during a mysterious vampire rampage. In this version of Seattle – which forms part of White Wolf Publishing’s World of Darkness universe – the undead are forbidden from revealing themselves to humans. As an unauthorised convert, you are lugged before a council of elders and slated for termination, but an explosion of in-fighting sets you loose on the city. Playing in first-person, you’ll need to get to grips with powers such as the ability to become mist, as well as sate your mounting bloodthirst and find your niche in an underworld of warring factions.
Like the somewhat goofy original 2004 game, Bloodlines 2 is a tale of two cities. There are the crowded thoroughfares and open spaces of human existence, where vampires must keep up the masquerade of the title, and a series of back alleys and catacombs where you’re free to scuttle up buildings or glide about on batwings to your (unbeating) heart’s content. The Resonance system, a kind of psychic profiling app, helps you track down the tastiest prey. It tags passersby according to their mood, which charges their blood with beneficial properties. Feed on a clubgoer who is in a state of lust, for instance, and your character may become more charismatic for a period thereafter. …
Sci-Fi Predictions About Life In 2020 That Fell Flat
If there’s one thing sci-fi has taught us, it’s that it’s way easier to predict technology than people. Writers of the past knew that our computers would only get smaller, and that eventually we’d have screens on our wrists. When it came to guessing how we’d apply that technology, though, they stumbled. Having arrived in the futuristic decade of the 2020s, we now know that …
4. Housework Is Way Too Complicated For Even The Best Robot
You can see it in everything from shows like The Jetsons to ’80s-era interviews with children. Everyone thought we would have humanoid robots helping out around the house by now. Not just sad little Roombas that vacuum your floors and get hung up on the curled corner of a rug every five minutes, but full-on maids and butlers that do everything from washing dishes to cooking dinner to ironing your sports coat. Rocky Balboa even had one in a movie set in present-day 1985.
But it turns out that mundane stuff like ironing clothes is actually incredibly complex. Let’s pick one “simple” household task: washing dishes. Dishwashers exist, of course, though they can cost up to a thousand bucks with installation. But think about what it would cost to get a dishwasher that does the whole task: taking the plates from the table, scraping off the uneaten food, washing them, drying them, then putting the dishes back in the cabinet. A robot capable of just doing that seems to exist only in the realm of Boston Dynamics demonstration videos.
Even if Elon Musk himself demanded such a machine for his home and said money was no object, he couldn’t get one that actually does the job without a human having to step in and help it out. You know, it’s almost as if futurists assumed the housework their wives were doing was a lot easier than, say, stacking boxes or welding cars in a factory.
The reality is that if you wanted to fully automate your house without having to hire a human to be a butler to your robot butler, you’d have to get a robot for every step of every chore. A machine that just folds laundry costs $980, is still stuck in the prototype stage, and still requires humans at both ends of the process. You’d need a whole slew of support robots to prep the other robots to be able to do your bidding.
But there’s probably a bigger obstacle that no futurist saw coming: children. For example, Walmart plans to unleash Bossa Nova on humanity, a robot that makes sure boxes are displayed on shelves correctly and lets humans know if something is out of stock. The problem? It’s no match for kids. The robot’s sensors are easily overwhelmed by children who try to touch it and even ride it, because as civilized as we get, children will forever remain wild animals. If all-in-one housekeeper bots are still decades away, a version that can’t be destroyed by a few rambunctious tots will be decades behind that. …
Why Does It Cost $750,000 to Build Affordable Housing in San Francisco?
As California’s governor vows to tackle the state’s homelessness crisis, housing “insanity” stands in the way.
MacArthur Commons is a high-density housing complex under construction in Oakland. The high cost of building affordable housing is a seen as a huge part of California’s homelessness problem.
The average home in the United States costs around $240,000. But in San Francisco, the world’s most expensive place for construction, a two-bedroom apartment of what passes for affordable housing costs around $750,000 just to build.
California’s staggering housing costs have become the most significant driver of inequality in the state. On Wednesday, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, mentioned the issue 35 times during an impassioned speech, urging lawmakers to solve the state’s homelessness crisis by building more and faster.
But the vertiginous prices of housing in California show how difficult that will be.
Building affordable housing in California costs on average three times as much as Texas or Illinois, according to the federal government.
The reasons for California’s high costs, developers and housing experts say, begin with the price of land and labor in the state. In San Francisco a construction worker earns around $90 an hour on average, according to Turner & Townsend, a real estate consulting company. …
Revealed: quarter of all tweets about climate crisis produced by bots
Draft of Brown study says findings suggest ‘substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages’
The researchers examined 6.5m tweets posted in the days leading up to and the month after Trump announced the US exit from the Paris accords on 1 June 2017.
The social media conversation over the climate crisis is being reshaped by an army of automated Twitter bots, with a new analysis finding that a quarter of all tweets about climate on an average day are produced by bots, the Guardian can reveal.
The stunning levels of Twitter bot activity on topics related to global heating and the climate crisis is distorting the online discourse to include far more climate science denialism than it would otherwise.
An analysis of millions of tweets from around the period when Donald Trump announced the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement found that bots tended to applaud the president for his actions and spread misinformation about the science.
The study of Twitter bots and climate was undertaken by Brown University and has yet to be published. Bots are a type of software that can be directed to autonomously tweet, retweet, like or direct message on Twitter, under the guise of a human-fronted account.
“These findings suggest a substantial impact of mechanized bots in amplifying denialist messages about climate change, including support for Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement,” states the draft study, seen by the Guardian. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
School choice is an education reform movement that promotes charter schools and voucher programs as alternatives to traditional public schools. One of the biggest advocates for “choice” over the past two decades, Betsy DeVos, is now serving as President Trump’s secretary of education.
VICE’s Gianna Toboni traveled to DeVos’ home state of Michigan to see school choice in action and understand what the future of public education might look like.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
In this episode listen to These American Lies, hosted by Desi Lydic and Michael Kosta, where they explore President Trump’s claim that 3-5 million people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. It’s sure to be the talk of your next Upper West Side dinner party.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
The Heretic is a short film created by Unity’s Demo Team.
The film uses every aspect of Unity’s High Definition Rendering Pipeline, features advanced effects created with the VFX Graph, and showcases Demo Team’s first realistic digital human.
Read more at https://on.unity.com/36jOXHY
Mmmmm. Happy Time.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Me critical analysis of that savage 1000 degree glowing knife.
A weekly show hosted by John Green, where knowledge junkies get their fix of trivia-tastic information. This week, John debunks 50 common misconceptions that most people have about topics such as vikings, exploding birds and peanut butter.
The infamous “trollface” is said to be inspired by Atapuk, the ancient Mohitian god of trickery and evil
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) February 21, 2018
FINALLY . . .
For Sale: Royally Minted Coins, Decorated With Dinosaurs
It’s change 165 million years in the making.
The Royal Mint coins—available in bronze, silver, and gold—are a testament to English paleontology.
ENGLAND IS FAMOUS FOR ITS rich archaeology, a result of the island nation’s long-standing habitation and record-keeping. But deep below the Victorian, Georgian, Anglo-Saxon, and Roman strata of Albion, the paleontological record speaks to a time long before any simian stepped foot in the region.
Now, the legacy of the country’s extinct proto lizards will be commemorated by the Royal Mint, on coins depicting three dinosaurs.
“There’s a lot of pressure involved, because this is a big deal,” says Paul Barrett, a paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum and an adviser to the mint on its new coins. “[T]hey’re producing coins, and these are things that can’t just be changed. They’re real things, made of metal. You can’t just put an eraser to them if something’s wrong.”
Each coin is adorned with the name of an affiliated paleontologist. Ancient flora frame the large lizards.
Millions of years before there was such a thing as “England,” the site was an archipelago surrounded by a shallow tropical sea—a haven for dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes (mainly large). In the early 19th century, a bit of paleontological mania consumed the Brits, from Mary Anning on the Dorset coast to Gideon Mantell in Oxfordshire and Sussex. Mantell’s crowning achievements are two of the dinos included in the mint’s project, over 150 years after the paleontologist-cum-physician-cum-geologist’s death. …
When Georg Wilhelm Rutgers died, medical examiners discovered that he was actually the outer covering for something else
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) December 21, 2017
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Perhaps, maybe.