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Hash Tables
About 70 years ago, an engineer at IBM named Hans Peter Luhn quietly changed the course of computer science ... in a 1953 internal IBM paper, he proposed a new technique for storing and retrieving information that is now built into just about all computational systems: the hash table. (article title: "Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time").
A hash table is a data structure that implements an associative array, also called a dictionary, which is an abstract data type that maps keys to values.
Here's a video explaining hash tables.
Prison industrial complex in our food
Modern slave labor at prison farms
It's incredibly widespread. I wish the article had a list of all the companies that are using prison labor - the extent is shocking. CW for very upsetting read. More - ACLU report (starts with financial ask, sorry) Grauniad article less focused on food specifics
We are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been
Though the city has survived a series of local and national recessions in recent decades, San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises. from In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit [LRB; ungated]
The Paranormalization of the Plastic Bag
No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth. Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?
via Longreads. "Thoughtful, sensible-seeming, non-crankish people at Harvard, at The New Yorker, at the New York Times, and at the Pentagon seemed to be drifting ever closer to the conclusion that alien spaceships had visited Earth. Everyone was being appallingly open-minded. Yet even after more than 70 years of claimed sightings, there was simply no good evidence. In an age of ubiquitous cameras and fancy scopes, there was no footage that wasn’t blurry and jumpy and taken from far away."
“Maybe the kid in the hole was always a bad idea.”
WHY DON'T WE JUST KILL THE KID IN THE OMELAS HOLE, by Isabel J. Kim. An excellent Omelas riff that's just what it sounds like.
Christian Nationalism and the Battle 'Verse
We've all seen footage of the January 6th insurrection. But do you know what you saw? A recently released short documentary, Spiritual Warriors: Decoding Christian Nationalism at the Capitol Riot, identifies and explains this movement's involvement in the day's events, and its influence in producing them.
How wind turbines can become homes for marine life
"Like a shipwreck on a seabed": How wind turbines can become homes for marine life. Experts say wind turbines can create new marine habitats for marine life.
Pekka Haavisto could become Finland's first Green and gay president
The 65-year-old former foreign minister is second in the opinion polls
“You could see that people could never imagine that gay men could be elected. But this has been changing.”
‘Lake Mungo’ (2008): The Oral History
Lake Mungo made a modest impact when it was first released in 2008. It premiered at the Sydney Film Festival, screened at South by Southwest in 2009, and premiered in the United States as part of the After Dark 4 horror anthology in 2010. Yet residencies on Tubi, Shudder, and Amazon Prime exposed new audiences to this sad, frightening, and fascinating film more than a decade after its release, and its explorations of grief fit more comfortably with a horror landscape influenced by The Babadook (2014) and Hereditary (2018) than the 2000s post-Blair Witch Project (1999) found footage explosion.
Not the Quiet One
Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out
(SL Cracked Interview) Jillette has renounced libertarianism (after being asked to MC an anti-masking event) and is terrified of Trump. He still has a lot on his mind.
Oscar Nominations 2024
Oppenheimer 13, Poor Things 11, Killers of the Flower Moon 10 ...
There were so many wonderful movies last year!
The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty
She was pressured into convicting a man she believed was innocent
—and was haunted by remorse. Three decades later, she did something about it.
i've heard of chiptunes but
Warning: sharp, startling static sounds
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
Turns out if you crash a GBA game and wait a couple hours, it will start singing the entire content of its memory to you: Dumping the ROM of a GBA game by crashing it
It's not you, it's SERP
Research confirms that search is getting worse.
We all feel it. Some scientists have measured it. "We can conclude that higher-ranked pages are on average more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and they show signs of lower text quality." Link above is to an article on The Register. Link to original paper.
I can't accept drum 'n' bass, we need jungle I'm afraid.
Brainy quiz show University Challenge gets pedantic over the difference between drum 'n' bass and jungle, and Nathan Filer calls for remixes of Amol Rajan's insistence that "We need jungle I'm afraid!!" The internet responds. My favourites: One Two Three Four. Amol explains his delight at going viral.
BBC Micro Bot - The 6502-powered webpage
BBC Micro bot runs your Mastodon toot on an 8-bit computer emulator and replies with a video. Toot-sized programs are written in BBC BASIC - a language created by Sophie Wilson in 1981 for the BBC Micro.
What Enrapturing Magic Lies In That Lustre....
Sometime last year, the World Gold Council tapped Idris Elba to host a corporate documentary about the gold industry; it was released in October. Yesterday, Dan Olson of Folding Ideas released his own documentary about that documentary and the gold industry overall.
The biggest COVID wave since Omicron
"By wastewater levels, JN.1 is now associated with the second-biggest wave of infections in the United States in the pandemic, after Omicron. We have lost the ability to track the actual number of infections since most people either test at home or don’t even test at all, but the very high wastewater levels of the virus indicate about 2 million Americans are getting infected each day. In several countries in Europe, wastewater levels reached unprecedented levels, exceeding Omicron. ... There is, however, some good news about this big wave of infections. It has not resulted in the surge of hospital admissions seen with Omicron." The U.S. is facing the biggest COVID wave since Omicron. Why are we still playing make-believe? (Eric Topol, LA Times, 4 Jan 2024)
Gamedev Willie
By the time works resumed passing into the public domain in the US in 2019, countless people had grown up believing nothing would ever do so again. Techdirt invented a unique solution: an annual game jam in which all entries must include material from at least on newly public-domain work. The sixth has just begun - Gaming Like It's 1928! (Itch page. Pages for previous jams including submissions: 1927, 1926, 1925, 1924, 1923. Previously on Techdirt (including winner announcements and spotlights), Metafilter. Recent MeFi post on newly PD works.)
Maine's Secretary of State has barred Trump from the primary ballot
Maine has now joined Colorado in finding Trump ineligible for primary ballot. (NY Times article, Internet Archive link.) Maine's Secretary of State Shenna Bellows speaks to CBS News about her decision. Maine becomes the second state to bar Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Something In The Water (Does Not Compute)
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again
// Anil Dash on how the new year offers many of the promises of an online moment we haven’t seen in a quarter-century [archive]
2024 Anti-Trans Legislative Risk Map
I have tracked anti-transgender legislation for 3 years @erininthemorn on Twitter and TikTok. Every day, I’ve gotten messages from worried people wondering how they are supposed to assess their risk of staying in their home state. The messages range from parents of trans youth wondering if their children will be taken from them to trans teachers wondering if their jobs will be safe in coming years. Sometimes people just want to know if there is a safer state they can move to nearby. Writer and trans activist Erin Reed has mapped the United States from the perspective of safety for trans individuals.
"how did they let Greta Gerwig make this movie"
Deconstruction is a term that has a very academic meaning but in faith circles deconstruction has a different meaning. And while this video covers a really wide range of topics that are brought up by the movie, at its center Barbie is a Deconstructionist Text [1h30m] holds forth that the destruction of previously-held personal belief systems is intrinsic to the Barbie experience. It's an in-depth look at this movie that I wasn't expecting but probably needed.
Private equity. Hospitals.
Paper: "Private equity acquisition of hospitals, on average, was associated with increased hospital-acquired adverse events despite a likely lower-risk pool of admitted Medicare beneficiaries, suggesting poorer quality of inpatient care." Press release. CNN article. Rebecca Watson video with transcript. Private equity response.
But what is the plot of IRIS?
IRIS: A Space Opera by Justice (Official Video) [~1h] reminds me a bit of The Chemical Brothers, but I'm sure there are other things going on in here. I liked this enough to post it here.
"The Times hereby demands a jury trial for all claims so triable"
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. [so many previouslies]
Southern Poverty Law Center writes about Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience
GROUP DYNAMICS AND DIVISION OF LABOR WITHIN THE ANTI-LGBTQ+ PSEUDOSCIENCE NETWORK [SPLC.org] is a really really long article outlining the exact way networks of funding and people work to promote anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience, and discusses its ties to white supremacy and the religious right. It gets into specifics and details, but the greater picture it paints is one of coordinated efforts to move public opinion and accepted science against LGBTQ+ existence in society.
"The upshot is that nowhere in Gaza is safe."
"Put simply, one does not have the right to self-defence against a territory that one occupies."
- Avi Shlaim writes for Prospect magazine || Jewish Currents: Israel’s “Humanitarian” Expulsion || WashPo: How Israel pushed over a million Palestinians into a tiny corner of Gaza (ungated) || NYT: Skepticism Grows Over Israel’s Ability to Dismantle Hamas || Guardian: Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to discuss postwar plan for Gaza Strip || CTV News: Israel's forces raid a West Bank refugee camp as its military expands Gaza offensive || Democracy Now: As Phone Line Breaks Up, Palestinian Journalist Akram al-Satarri Describes "Dire" Conditions in Gaza; Palestinian Christian Pastor [Rev Munther Isaac] Slams Western Silence on Genocide in Gaza & his Christmas sermon, "Christ in the Rubble"
You can no longer get so low that we will not be beside you.
How Finland is solving homelessness.
An incredible video to me, about Finland's housing and accompanying support solutions for homeless people. Showing so many benefits to everyone involved (as well as 'saving the tax payer money') by providing housing for everyone, however low they get.
Oh, the Weather Outside is Frightful, but Inside It’s Even Worse
It’s Solstice 2023, the dark nights are at their peak (at least in the northern hemisphere) and The Magnus Protocol has crowdfunded and is forthcoming. Anyway, here’s another roundup of weird audio dramas! They may help you spend time while doing chores, or coping with personal, global, or holiday stress, or simply ease the pain of living in this terrible world with stories about even more terrible worlds. Most of the series are audio dramas with paranormal elements, but anthologies, fantasy, and science fiction are included.
One of the great unsolved murders in Berlin
When I spoke to people from East Berlin who remembered the Hanno Klein case, they were generally inclined towards the view that the letter-bomb must have been sent by men involved with West Berlin’s construction companies: businessmen who were keen to be seen as dominant figures and now found themselves dismissed by Klein. People who would have liked a piece of the action but kept finding Klein standing in their way. People driven by greed for profits and fear of losses. from The Killing of a Berlin Power Broker [Granta; ungated]
Henry Potter + Biff Bannon = Donald Trump
George Bailey Was Never Born [podcast website with all episodes] is a 10 episode podcast which deep dives into the 1946 film It's A Wonderful Life [Wikipedia] through the lens of economic justice and populism, and how Mr. Potter seems to be winning in all aspects of THIS universe in which George Bailey was never born. The playlist on YouTube is in the wrong order but here is Episode 1: The Public’s Movie (1974-’92), and the rest can be found from there. Episodes average about 1 hour.
The retail theft crime wave was bad data, viral videos, and lies
The National Retail Federation had said that nearly half of the industry’s $94.5 billion in missing merchandise in 2021 was the result of organized theft. It was likely closer to 5 percent, experts say. The NRF retracted its claims. The If Books Could Kill Podcast has an episode on the organized retail crime panic, released a few weeks before the retraction.
Pharmacies routinely share data with police
The nation’s largest pharmacy chains
have handed over Americans’ prescription records to police and government investigators without a warrant, a congressional investigation found, raising concerns about threats to medical privacy.
WaPo gift link
I’ve had a really good time on here. I’ve also had a really bad time.
2023 Will Go Down as the Year Twitter Died.
A multipart package from The Verge looking at Twitter, for better and for worse.
In the Name of the Place
Together, Chin and his students made the most critical decision: It had to be secret. No one could know they were the ones sneaking avant-garde art onto television—indeed, no viewer should be aware that any art project was happening at all.
Jezebel is back
Jezebel has arisen from a fresh grave.
Previously the death knell of an influential, if not universally loved, staunchly feminist, and fond of snark has a resurrection story by way of Paste Magazine.
"A functional (but expensive) cure".
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved two new gene therapies treating sickle-cell anemia, called Casgevy and Lyfgenia.