Wile E. Coyote Files a Product Liability Lawsuit Against Acme Company

Wile E. Coyote Files a Product Liability Lawsuit Against Acme Company

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Coyote V Acme

In a classic New Yorker article from 1990, Ian Frazier writes about an imagined lawsuit filed by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company in which he “seeks compensation for personal injuries, loss of business income, and mental suffering” due to the company’s defective products.

Mr. Coyote states that on December 13th he received of Defendant via parcel post one Acme Rocket Sled. The intention of Mr. Coyote was to use the Rocket Sled to aid him in pursuit of his prey. Upon receipt of the Rocket Sled Mr. Coyote removed it from its wooden shipping crate and, sighting his prey in the distance, activated the ignition. As Mr. Coyote gripped the handlebars, the Rocket Sled accelerated with such sudden and precipitate force as to stretch Mr. Coyote’s forelimbs to a length of fifty feet. Subsequently, the rest of Mr. Coyote’s body shot forward with a violent jolt, causing severe strain to his back and neck and placing him unexpectedly astride the Rocket Sled. Disappearing over the horizon at such speed as to leave a diminishing jet trail along its path, the Rocket Sled soon brought Mr. Coyote abreast of his prey. At that moment the animal he was pursuing veered sharply to the right. Mr. Coyote vigorously attempted to follow this maneuver but was unable to, due to poorly designed steering on the Rocket Sled and a faulty or nonexistent braking system. Shortly thereafter, the unchecked progress of the Rocket Sled brought it and Mr. Coyote into collision with the side of a mesa.

See also the rules followed by animator Chuck Jones and his team while making the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.

Tags: cartoons   Ian Frazier   legal

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Two Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

Two Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

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Armed terrorists menacing legislators in state capitol buildings is pretty much what the Second Amendment had in mind, right? [twitter.com]

Modern pattycake [youtube.com]

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The Official Recipe for Ikea Meatballs

The Official Recipe for Ikea Meatballs

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Ikea Meatballs Recipe

On Twitter the other day, Ikea UK shared the official recipe for their iconic meatballs and cream sauce,— in the form of Ikea instructions naturally. As a midwesterner of partial Swedish heritage, this sort of thing is right up my alley.

It’s kind of amazing that society has collectively decided to give up all its secrets and control in the face of the pandemic — museums putting their collections online, filmmakers streaming their movies for free, people indiscriminately sending each other nudes, bands putting live performances on YouTube for free, and now this Ikea meatballs thing. The world has turned upside down. (via why is this interesting?)

Tags: food   Ikea

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Famous Art Recreated at Home During the Pandemic

Famous Art Recreated at Home During the Pandemic

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With art museums closed and people quarantined at home, some folks have taken to recreating famous artworks using stuff laying around the house. Some of the best recreations are from the Covid Classic Instagram account.

Covid Art Recreations

Covid Art Recreations

Covid Art Recreations

Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine is pretty good too.

Covid Art Recreations

Covid Art Recreations

Museums like Rijksmuseum and the Getty have also been getting into the act, challenging people to send in their creations.

Covid Art Recreations

Tags: art   remix

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Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

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Audio Deepfakes Result in Some Pretty Convincing Mashup Performances

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Have you ever wanted to hear Jay Z rap the “To Be, Or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet? You are in luck:

What about Bob Dylan singing Britney Spears’ “…Baby One More Time”? Here you go:

Bill Clinton reciting “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-A-Lot? Yep:

And I know you’re always wanted to hear six US Presidents rap NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police”. Voila:

This version with the backing track is even better. These audio deepfakes were created using AI:

The voices in this video were entirely computer-generated using a text-to-speech model trained on the speech patterns of Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump.

The program listens to a bunch of speech spoken by someone and then, in theory, you can provide any text you want and the virtual Obama or Jay Z can speak it. Some of these are more convincing than others — with a bit of manual tinkering, I bet you could clean these up enough to make them convincing.

Two of the videos featuring Jay Z’s synthesized voice were forced offline by a copyright claim from his record company but were reinstated. As Andy Baio notes, these deepfakes are legally interesting:

With these takedowns, Roc Nation is making two claims:

1. These videos are an infringing use of Jay-Z’s copyright.
2. The videos “unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice.”

But are either of these true? With a technology this new, we’re in untested legal waters.

The Vocal Synthesis audio clips were created by training a model with a large corpus of audio samples and text transcriptions. In this case, he fed Jay-Z songs and lyrics into Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture developed by Google.

It seems reasonable to assume that a model and audio generated from copyrighted audio recordings would be considered derivative works.

But is it copyright infringement? Like virtually everything in the world of copyright, it depends-on how it was used, and for what purpose.

Celebrity impressions by people are allowed, why not ones by machines? It’ll be interesting to see where this goes as the tech gets better.

Tags: Andy Baio   artificial intelligence   Bill Clinton   Bob Dylan   Jay-Z   legal   music   remix   video

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Colorful New Geological Map of the Moon

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Moon Geological Map

Moon Geological Map

In collaboration with NASA and the Lunar and Planetary Institute, the USGS has released the first complete geological map of the Moon’s surface.

This new work represents a seamless, globally consistent, 1:5,000,000-scale geologic map derived from the six digitally renovated geologic maps (see Source Online Linkage below). The goal of this project was to create a digital resource for science research and analysis, future geologic mapping efforts, be it local-, regional-, or global-scale products, and as a resource for the educators and the public interested in lunar geology.

Strange Maps has more information on how the map came to be and what it shows.

The map was created by the U.S. Geological Service’s Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. In collaboration with NASA and the Lunar and Planetary Institute, it combined six ‘regional’ maps of the Moon made during the Apollo era (1961-1975) with input from more recent unmanned lunar missions.

This included data on the polar regions from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) and close-ups of the equatorial zone from the Japanese Space Agency’s recent SELENE mission.

The two images above show the entire map and a detailed view of a single area (which includes the landing sites of 3 Apollo missions) while the video shows a rotating globe version of the map.

Tags: astronomy   geology   maps   Moon   NASA   space   USGS   video

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Three Quick Links for Wednesday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Wednesday Afternoon

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Hubble Telescope Watches the Rare Disintegration of a Comet

Hubble Telescope Watches the Rare Disintegration of a Comet

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Last month, I told you about Comet ATLAS, which at that time looked capable of putting on a real show in the night sky.

Except, since its discovery, the comet has been brightening at an almost unprecedented speed. As of March 17, ATLAS was already magnitude +8.5, over 600 times brighter than forecast. As a result, great expectations are buzzing for this icy lump of cosmic detritus, with hopes it could become a stupendously bright object by the end of May.

It turns out the increase in brightness was fleeting — and possibly due to the comet breaking apart. In the past week, the Hubble Space Telescope has gotten two good looks at the disintegrating comet, identifying that the main mass has broken into about 30 fragments.

Comet Atlas Hubble

Comet Atlas Hubble

“This is really exciting — both because such events are super cool to watch and because they do not happen very often. Most comets that fragment are too dim to see. Events at such scale only happen once or twice a decade,” said the leader of a second Hubble observing team, Quanzhi Ye, of the University of Maryland, College Park.

The results are evidence that comet fragmentation is actually fairly common, say researchers. It might even be the dominant mechanism by which the solid, icy nuclei of comets die. Because this happens quickly and unpredictably, astronomers remain largely uncertain about the cause of fragmentation. Hubble’s crisp images may yield new clues to the breakup. Hubble distinguishes pieces as small as the size of a house. Before the breakup, the entire nucleus may have been no more than the length of two football fields.

Tags: astronomy   comets   Hubble telescope   photography   space

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Music That’s Perfect for Working

Music That’s Perfect for Working

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I like to listen to music while I work, but it can’t have any vocals or I get too distracted when I’m writing or reading. So I end up listening to a lot of electronic, classical, and soundtracks. During the pandemic, I’ve been sharing my daily work soundtrack in this Twitter thread with selections like the Amelie soundtrack, Burial, Tycho, Nine Inch Nails, and Philip Glass. I’m no musical expert or connoisseur, but I know what I like and what works to keep me focused.

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting a lot of good music recommendations from the Flow State newsletter, so I was happy to write a guest issue for them today recommending music from Ben Prunty.

Today we’re listening to Ben Prunty, a composer of video game soundtracks. His first release was the chiptune soundtrack for the critically acclaimed FTL: Faster Than Light, a video game released in 2012. The music is chill and retro, the perfect backdrop for gameplay that’s more about careful planning and execution than fast-twitch reflexes. Inspired by fans who listened to the FTL soundtrack while working or studying, Prunty released Color Sky a couple of years later, describing the album as an “epic journey across your own subconscious.”

You can find the links for the albums I mentioned if you click through and so many more recommendations in their back issues.

Tags: Ben Prunty   music   working

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Three Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

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The Changing Profile of Covid-19’s Presenting Symptoms

The Changing Profile of Covid-19’s Presenting Symptoms

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As Ed Yong notes in his helpful overview of the pandemic, this is such a huge and quickly moving event that it’s difficult to know what’s happening. Lately, I’ve been seeking information on Covid-19 presenting symptoms after seeing a bunch of anecdotal data from various sources.

In the early days of the epidemic (January, February, and into March), people were told by the CDC and other public health officials to watch out for three specific symptoms: fever, a dry cough, and shortness of breath. In many areas, testing was restricted to people who exhibited only those symptoms. Slowly, as more data is gathered, the profile of the presenting symptoms has started to shift. From a New York magazine piece by David Wallace-Wells on Monday:

While the CDC does list fever as the top symptom of COVID-19, so confidently that for weeks patients were turned away from testing sites if they didn’t have an elevated temperature, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, as many as 70 percent of patients sick enough to be admitted to New York State’s largest hospital system did not have a fever.

Over the past few months, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been compiling and revising, in real time, treatment guidelines for COVID-19 which have become a trusted clearinghouse of best-practices information for doctors throughout the country. According to those guidelines, as few as 44 percent of coronavirus patients presented with a fever (though, in their meta-analysis, the uncertainty is quite high, with a range of 44 to 94 percent). Cough is more common, according to Brigham and Women’s, with between 68 percent and 83 percent of patients presenting with some cough — though that means as many as three in ten sick enough to be hospitalized won’t be coughing. As for shortness of breath, the Brigham and Women’s estimate runs as low as 11 percent. The high end is only 40 percent, which would still mean that more patients hospitalized for COVID-19 do not have shortness of breath than do. At the low end of that range, shortness of breath would be roughly as common among COVID-19 patients as confusion (9 percent), headache (8 to 14 percent), and nausea and diarrhea (3 to 17 percent).

Recently, as noted by the Washington Post, the CDC has changed their list of Covid-19 symptoms to watch out for. They now list two main symptoms (cough & shortness of breath) and several additional symptoms (fever, chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat, new loss of taste or smell). They also note that “this list is not all inclusive”. Compare that with their list from mid-February.

In addition, there’s evidence that children might have different symptoms (including stomach issues or diarrhea), doctors are reporting seeing “COVID toes” on some patients, and you might want to look at earlier data from these three studies about symptoms observed in Wuhan and greater China.

The reason I’m interested in this shift in presenting symptoms is that on the last day or two of my trip to Asia, I got sick — and I’m been wondering if it was Covid-19.

Here’s the timeline: starting on Jan 21, I was in Saigon, Vietnam for two weeks, then in Singapore for 4 days, and then Doha, Qatar for 48 hours. The day I landed in Doha, Feb 9, I started to feel a little off, and definitely felt sick the next day. I had a sore throat, headache, and congestion (stuffy nose) for the first few days. There was also some fatigue/tiredness but I was jetlagged too so… All the symptoms were mild and it felt like a normal cold to me. Here’s how I wrote about it in my travelogue:

I got sick on the last day of the trip, which turned into a full-blown cold when I got home. I dutifully wore my mask on the plane and in telling friends & family about how I was feeling, I felt obliged to text “***NOT*** coronavirus, completely different symptoms!!”

I flew back to the US on Feb 11 (I wore a mask the entire time in the Doha airport, on the plane, and even in the Boston airport, which no one else was doing). I lost my sense of taste and smell for about 2 days, which was a little unnerving but has happened to me with past colds. At no point did I have even the tiniest bit of fever or shortness of breath. The illness did drag on though — I felt run-down for a few weeks and a very slight cough that developed about a week and a half after I got sick lingered for weeks.

According to guidance from the WHO, CDC, and public health officials at the time, none of my initial symptoms were a match for Covid-19. I thought about getting a test or going to the doctor, but in the US in mid-February, and especially in Vermont, there were no tests available for someone with a mild cold and no fever. But looking at the CDC’s current list of symptoms — which include headache, sore throat, and new loss of taste or smell — and considering that I’d been in Vietnam and Singapore when cases were reported in both places, it seems plausible to me that my illness could have been a mild case of Covid-19. Hopefully it wasn’t, but I’ll be getting an antibody test once they are (hopefully) more widely available, even though the results won’t be super reliable.

Tags: COVID-19   David Wallace-Wells   Ed Yong   Jason Kottke   medicine   science   travel

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The British Museum Puts 1.9 Million Images Online for Public Use

The British Museum Puts 1.9 Million Images Online for Public Use

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British Museum Collection

British Museum Collection

British Museum Collection

British Museum Collection

British Museum Collection

As part of a website refresh, The British Museum has made over 1.9 million photos of its collections freely available to the public. Visitors to their online collections website can download images, and share & adapt them for non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Museum director Hartwig Fischer said of the refresh:

The British Museum Collection Online makes millions of objects accessible to the citizens of the world, wherever they might be. Whether you are a student, an artist, a scholar or are a lover of history and culture, this is an unparalleled resource to explore the richness, diversity and complexity of human history contained in the British Museum’s collection. It is also a platform where we can share the latest knowledge and research. We are delighted to be able to unveil this major revamp early, and hope that these important objects can provide inspiration, reflection or even just quiet moments of distraction during this difficult time.

Pictured above from the collection are the Townley discobolus, a drawing by Raphael, a Greek amphora, the Sloane astrolabe, and a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. And pictured below are a print by George Cruikshank, a portrait of William Shakespeare, marble metope from the Parthenon, the Rosetta Stone, and Albrecht Dürer’s print of a rhinoceros.

British Museum Public

British Museum Public

British Museum Public

British Museum Public

British Museum Public

However useful the new online collection is, it must be noted that the ownership of several of the items in the British Museum’s collection — including the Parthenon Marbles & Rosetta Stone — is disputed.

For more large collections of images for public use, see also Paris Museums Put 100,000 Images Online for Unrestricted Public Use, Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million High-Res Images Into the Public Domain, A Virtual Tour of the Van Gogh Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50,000 High-Res Images from Their Collection Online, and Met Puts Huge Digital Image Trove Online. (via ianvisits)

Tags: art   British Museum   museums   UK

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Social Distancing As Demonstrated in Wes Anderson Films

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Characters in Wes Anderson’s films are often misfits, outcasts, or are estranged from one another for various reasons. That apartness is often depicted cinematically using physical distance between individuals onscreen, with the aesthetic side effect of using all of that gorgeous 1.85:1 or even 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Luis Azevedo made a short supercut of moments in Anderson’s movies where the characters are practicing good social distancing techniques.

Tags: Luis Azevedo   movies   remix   video   Wes Anderson

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Jason Polan Postage Stamps

Jason Polan Postage Stamps

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The artist Jason Polan passed away in January from colon cancer. A group of his friends are trying to memorialize Polan and his art with a commemorative postage stamp from the USPS. Kelli Anderson created mockups for the stamps.

Jason Polan Stamps

Jason Polan Stamps

Polan loved mail and the USPS. A few years ago at his own expense, he took out a small ad in the New Yorker for the post office:

Jason Polan USPS Ad

FWIW, here’s how the USPS’s stamp selection process works.

Tags: art   Jason Polan   Kelli Anderson   stamps   USPS

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Seven Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish

Seven Quick Links for Tuesday Noonish

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The “Mile an Hour” Marathon

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Over the course of 24 hours, Beau Miles ran around his mile-long block once every hour (plus a few more at the beginning) to complete a marathon in a day. But he also did a bunch of other stuff along the way: cooked dinner, made a table, fixed things, picked up trash, played Scrabble, got a bit of sleep, and made the short film above.

A different kind of marathon; running one lap an hour, for 24hrs, around my perfectly mile long block. The rest of the time I do as much as possible; making things, odd jobs, fixing stuff. It’s about running, doing, and thinking.

Tags: Beau Miles   marathons   running   sports   video

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Watch a Monarch Butterfly Swarm (Filmed by a Drone Disguised as a Hummingbird)

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For an upcoming episode of a show called Spy in the Wild, PBS’s Nature used a tiny drone disguised as a hummingbird to capture footage of a swarm of half a billion monarch butterflies as they overwinter in Mexico. The butterflies pay the hummingbird robot little mind:

Hummingbird Drone

The monarch butterfly is under increasing pressure due to habitat loss, pesticides, and climate change, driving down their population.

The current state of the smaller western population of monarchs that overwinter in California is more dire than their eastern counterparts. The western population crashed by 99% in the latest count, reaching a historic low of fewer than 30,000 butterflies for the second year in a row, down from 1.2 million two decades ago.

Both butterfly populations are below the threshold at which government scientists predict the migrations could collapse. Federal scientists estimate there is nearly a 60% chance the monarch’s spectacular, multigenerational migration in the eastern half of the country could completely collapse within the next 20 years.

(via @MachinePix)

Tags: butterflies   drones   video

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Four Quick Links for Monday Afternoon

Four Quick Links for Monday Afternoon

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Homemade Maps of People’s Limited Surroundings During the Pandemic

Homemade Maps of People’s Limited Surroundings During the Pandemic

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Covid Maps

Covid Maps

CityLab asked its readers to “draw maps of their worlds in the time of coronavirus”. They drew floor plans, neighborhood walking diagrams, and more abstract representations of their surroundings.

You charted how your homes, neighborhoods, cities and countries have transformed under social distancing and stay-at-home orders around the planet, from daily work routines and the routes of your “sanity walks,” to the people you miss and the places you fled.

While most used markers, pens, and computer-based drawing tools to sketch maps by hand, some used watercolors, clay, and photography. Some were humorous, others heart-wrenching - between them all, a full spectrum of quarantine-era emotion emerged.

(via @ctsinclair)

Tags: COVID-19   art   maps

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Two Quick Links for Monday Noonish

Two Quick Links for Monday Noonish

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“Glowing” Dolphins Swimming in Bioluminescent Waters

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Well, this is just beautiful. Photographer Patrick Coyne was lucky enough to capture some dolphins swimming through bioluminescent algae off the coast of Newport Beach, CA. When this kind of algae is disturbed, it emits a bluish light, which causes the dolphins to glow as they move through the water. He wrote about the experience — “one of the most magical nights of my life” — on Instagram:

Conditions have to be absolutely perfect for the bioluminescence to show up and to have an animal swim through it so we can film it. On top of all that just trying to nail the focus at such a wide aperture with something moving in the water was a nightmare. We were out for a few hours and on our final stretch back we finally had 2 Dolphins pop up to start the incredible glowing show. A few minutes later and we were greeted by a few more which was insane. I’m honestly still processing this all…

Coyne also captured some glowing waves crashing on the beach. More dolphins swimming in bioluminescent waters here. Incredible. (via bb)

Tags: Patrick Coyne   video

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Chris Ware’s NYC Still Life

Chris Ware’s NYC Still Life

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Chris Ware's Still Life of NYC

For the cover of this week’s New Yorker, Chris Ware drew several vignettes of NYC arranged in his trademark grid as a companion to this incredible piece about a single day of the Covid-19 crisis in the city. About the cover, Ware wrote:

Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense — or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense. We’re at low tide, but, as my wife, a biology teacher, said to me this morning, “For a while, we get to just step back and look.” And really, when you do, it is pretty marvellous.

Tags: art   Chris Ware   COVID-19   illustration   NYC

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A Virtual Tour of the Van Gogh Museum

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Van Gogh Self Portrait

One of my favorite museums I’ve visited in the past few years is the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Van Gogh’s art career lasted for only 10 years, and the museum provides a fascinating account (through his work, letters, and other material) of how a talented but unremarkable painter made the conceptual breakthrough for which he is now known the world over.

The museum is closed due to the pandemic, but anyone with an internet connection can experience the collection at home thanks to the museum’s dedication to accessibility. This 15-minute tour of the museum filmed in 4K resolution should get you started — here are the first two parts:

The museum has also digitized and put online hundreds of the artist’s paintings, sketches, and letters. The high resolution scans allow you to see details that you probably couldn’t in person. This is a close-up view of the 1887 self-portrait pictured above:

Van Gogh Self Hat Detail

It’s mind-blowing to see all of those brushstrokes in such detail.

The museum’s website offers a number of other ways to engage with van Gogh’s art, including coloring activities and lessons for children. And for those who exhaust the museum’s offerings, try browsing van Gogh’s works at Google Arts & Culture, MoMA, the Met, and the Rijksmuseum. (via open culture)

Tags: Amsterdam   art   museums   Van Gogh Museum   video   Vincent van Gogh

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A Microscopic Chemical Reaction Goes Supernova

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This short film by Roman Hill shows a chemical reaction at microscopically close range, all filmed in a single shot over an area of a third of an inch square. The result looks like a tour of a vast colorful cosmos, a reminder of how similar the different scales of our universe can appear sometimes. (thx, cs)

Tags: mesmerizing   Roman Hill   video

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Three Quick Links for Friday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Friday Noonish

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Top 15 Countries By Military Spending (1914-2018)

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Using data from the Correlates of War Project and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, this bar chart race shows the annual military spending of the world’s top spending countries from the start of WWI in 1914 to 2018. See also military spending info from Our World in Data.

Tags: economics   infoviz   video   war

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A Doctor Calls Patients to Tell Them Their Covid-19 Tests Were Positive

A Doctor Calls Patients to Tell Them Their Covid-19 Tests Were Positive

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In early March, Dr. Caroline Schulman was responsible for calling patients at her hospital to tell them they had tested positive for Covid-19. She shared some of her experiences in a piece for Stat.

Erik lives with his entire family in a one-room rental house with eight other occupants. He didn’t understand the precautions for preventing the spread of Covid-19 and had regularly been socializing in the apartment. He kept asking how to file for unemployment and how to isolate the household when the house itself could barely hold those living in it.

Jeff lives alone. He has a chronic blood condition and is struggling to get by. A few hours before we talked, he had resumed his job as a ride share driver because he needed to make ends meet.

Angela is 40 years old and has one of the preexisting conditions that put people at high risk for serious complications of Covid-19. When we spoke, she told me that she was feeling better, but that her home life was difficult. Her children had returned home after Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a stay-at-home order for the District of Columbia. She asked her kids to take precautions, but they continued to leave the house often. One son brought home his girlfriend, who had a cough, and displaced Angela from her room. She was unable to make an appointment with her primary doctor and couldn’t afford her medical supplies because of insurance issues. When I spoke with her, she sounded well and had no classic symptoms, but something didn’t sound right. I arranged a televisit that afternoon to have her evaluated more closely. By the time she got the call two hours later, she was so short of breath she could barely speak. When an ambulance arrived to take her to the hospital, her oxygen levels were dangerously low.

Reading through these stories, I just kept thinking about the measures that are going to be necessary if we’re going to safely restart public life in America — hygiene, mask wearing, some social distancing, and eventually a vaccine — and how our collective safety is going to depend on individuals doing the right thing. And most people will. But it’s clear that, especially without coherent national leadership & economic support, some people will be unable to take the necessary precautions for economic reasons and others won’t because they don’t understand why these measures are necessary, don’t trust science, or a dozen other reasons.

Tags: Caroline Schulman   COVID-19   economics   medicine   USA

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Four Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

Four Quick Links for Thursday Afternoon

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Build Your Own Magically Floating Lego Tensegrity Sculpture

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Ok, take a look at this short video of a Lego structure. Whaaaaat kind of sorcery is this?!

The top part of the structure appears to be floating, held aloft by plastic chains seemingly incapable of supporting the load. This is an example of a tensegrity sculpture, in which tension (and not compression) is used to carry weight.

If you want to build your own, the instructions and parts list are available and you can watch this tutorial as well:

(via colossal)

Tags: how to   Legos   video

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Blade Runner - The Lost Cut

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Of the various cuts of Blade Runner done over the years, Blade Runner - The Lost Cut is perhaps the oddest. Billed by creator Leon Chase as “a radical re-envisioning of Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi classic”, this cut boldly includes footage from other films like The French Connection, Star Wars, The Jerk, and The Blues Brothers. A few of the films whose footage was used, including the Coen brothers’ Fargo, were released well after Blade Runner came out.

Daring! But does this cut go too far? Or not too far enough?

Tags: Blade Runner   Leon Chase   movies   remix   video

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Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Thursday Noonish

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A Relaxing Walk Through the Cherry Blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

A Relaxing Walk Through the Cherry Blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

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It’s unfortunate that places like the Brooklyn Botanic Garden need to be closed during this stressful time, because the cherry blossoms are in bloom right now and what a balm that would be to so many souls. Luckily, cinematographer Nic Petry was granted access to the garden a couple of weeks ago to capture a relaxing and meditative walk through the Japanese Garden.

The historic garden is one of the oldest extant Japanese gardens in the United States, and its collection of cherry cultivars was in lovely bloom during filming. Petry, a specialist in moving camera techniques, conceived the piece as a way to recreate the meditative experience of walking through the garden on a glorious, early spring day.

(via laura olin)

Tags: Brooklyn Botanic Garden   Nic Petry   NYC   video

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No Man Is an Island

No Man Is an Island

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From director Robert Bingaman, a video interpretation of a timely passage from John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasionswhich was written by Donne in 1623 while recovering from a serious illness. The passage is from Meditation XVII and is paired in the video with images of businesses and public places emptied out by the pandemic.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Tags: COVID-19   John Donne   Robert Bingaman   video

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Three Quick Links for Wednesday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Wednesday Afternoon

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A Social Distance

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Using crowd-sourced clips sent in from all over the world, filmmakers Ivan Cash and Jacob Jonas made a poignant short film called A Social Distance about how things are going as people shelter in place at home.

In the self-submitted videos, people dance, play music, take us on a tour of their refrigerator, and introduce us to their pets. Edited together, these intimate moments create a synchronicity of humanity — a feeling of togetherness that’s difficult to conjure when you’re sequestered at home.

The score for the film is by Steve Hackman, who I previously featured for his mashups of pop & classical music:

Hackman, the film’s composer, wrote sheet music that he distributed to musicians across the world. When he received their recordings, Hackman combined the performances to create an original score.

See also Living Through Coronavirus Around the World. (via colossal)

Tags: COVID-19   Ivan Cash   Jacob Jonas   video

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The Earth Day 2020 Awards, Presented by Ze Frank

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In partnership with PBS Nature, Ze Frank (narrating as the Earth) presents The Earth Day 2020 Awards to a deserving group of fascinating animals, including the decorator crab (Best Dressed) and the salmon (Best Travel Story). I am upset on behalf of the planet’s plants though. WHERE ARE THE PLANTS ZE? Did a dandelion bully you as a kid or something?

See also The Atlantic’s photo essay on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

Tags: Earth Day   Ze Frank   video

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Three Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

Three Quick Links for Wednesday Noonish

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Selling the Imperfection of Handmade Art Paper

Selling the Imperfection of Handmade Art Paper

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This short film profiles a small company in Somerset, England called Two Rivers Paper. Using water power, the company makes paper by hand for artists and designers, and they have a healthy appreciation for the unpredictability of their product.

Anything that’s made by a craftsman is imperfect. So, a hand-forged nail will be imperfect — every one will be slightly different. Handmade paper — every sheet is slightly different. So if you want perfection, if you want uniformity, then it has to be done by a machine. I often tell people that we sell imperfection, that’s what we do.

Two Rivers Paper operates one of the few remaining hand-mills in Europe.

The mill is over 400 years old and still retains much of the ancient wooden milling machinery. It’s been restored over the last 15 years to a working water-powered traditional paper mill, using a 100 year old metal wheel from Wales and an 1841 Hollander Rag-Breaker.

The wheel itself is a 10ft overshot wheel weighing two and a half tons and standing eleven foot high. In combination with the rag breaker, Two Rivers will be the only place in the UK where water power is used to make paper from old rags. Showing a continuing commitment to manufacturing using environmentally appropriate methods, a full array of solar panels were fitted to the mill roof in 2011. Electrical heating is used to gently dry our paper in the mill loft.

This short video segment from the BBC provides a closer look at how their paper is made. You can get yourself some Two Rivers paper from their online shop.

See also 700-Year-Old French Mill Still Cranking Out Handmade Paper and this short film on how marbled paper is made.

Tags: video

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Ella Fitzgerald Masterfully Butchers “Mack the Knife”

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If you listen to more than 20 seconds of any song by Ella Fitzgerald, you can instinctively tell how amazing a singer she was. But taking a closer look reveals just how special. In this episode of NPR’s Jazz Night in America, they took a look at Fitzgerald’s 1960 performance of Mack the Knife (where she forgot half the words and improvised the rest) and her talent for referencing other songs while improvising, creating live “mix tapes” of popular songs using just her voice.

By 1960, Fitzgerald had become a global sensation. That February she gave an unforgettable performance in West Berlin for an audience of thousands. On the set list was “Mack The Knife,” a huge hit first made popular by Bobby Darin and Louis Armstrong. Fitzgerald sang the song flawlessly until about halfway through, when she forgot the lyrics. But she didn’t stumble — instead, she playfully freestyled her way to the end with nonsense syllables and improvised words — the singular jazz style called scatting. This unforgettable and Grammy Award-winning performance demonstrated her masterful grace under pressure.

You can listen to her Grammy-winning version of Mack the Knife on Spotify:

I love how confidently she sings “Oh, what’s the next chorus…” — Fitzgerald belts it out like those are the right lyrics. Her self-assurance sells it. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: Ella Fitzgerald   music   remix   video

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Three Quick Links for Tuesday Afternoon

Three Quick Links for Tuesday Afternoon

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A Virtual Performance by the Chicago Sinfonietta Orchestra

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Forced to cancel performances due to the pandemic, the members of Chicago Sinfonietta (“North America’s most diverse orchestra”) gathered together via video for a lively virtual performance of Leroy Anderson’s Plink, Plank, Plunk!, which is played primarily by plucking string instruments. Tag yourself…are you bored triangle lady or clarinet banana?

Tags: Chicago Sinfonietta   music   video

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Two Quick Links for Tuesday Morning

Two Quick Links for Tuesday Morning

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Children’s Story Time with Michelle Obama and PBS Kids

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For the next several Mondays, Michelle Obama will read a favorite children’s book in partnership with PBS Kids. The first reading (of The Gruffalo) is already in the can and archived on YouTube:

(via barry)

Tags: Michelle Obama   The Gruffalo   books   video

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Two Quick Links for Monday Afternoon

Two Quick Links for Monday Afternoon

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How We Reopen the Country: A Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience

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Working under the direction of The Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, a bipartisan group of experts in public health, economics, technology, and ethics have produced a plan for a phased reopening of public life in the United States through testing, tracing, and supported isolation. The video above summarizes the plan and here’s the full plan in the form of a 56-page PDF.

“Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience: Massive Scale Testing, Tracing, and Supported Isolation (TTSI) as the Path to Pandemic Resilience for a Free Society,” lays out how a massive scale-up of testing, paired with contact tracing and supported isolation, can rebuild trust in our personal safety and re-mobilize the U.S. economy.

Among the report’s top recommendations is the need to deliver at least 5 million tests per day by early June to help ensure a safe social opening. This number will need to increase to 20 million tests per day by mid-summer to fully re-mobilize the economy.

Pandemic Resilience

From the paper, here’s a quick overview:

What we need to do is much bigger than most people realize. We need to massively scale-up testing, contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine-together with providing the resources to make these possible for all individuals.

Broad and rapid access to testing is vital for disease monitoring, rapid public health response, and disease control.

We need to deliver 5 million tests per day by early June to deliver a safe social reopening. This number will need to increase over time (ideally by late July) to 20 million a day to fully remobilize the economy. We acknowledge that even this number may not be high enough to protect public health. In that considerably less likely eventuality, we will need to scale-up testing much further. By the time we know if we need to do that, we should be in a better position to know how to do it. In any situation, achieving these numbers depends on testing innovation.

Between now and August, we should phase in economic mobilization in sync with growth in our capacity to provide sustainable testing programs for mobilized sectors of the workforce.

The great value of this approach is that it will prevent cycles of opening up and shutting down. It allows us to steadily reopen the parts of the economy that have been shut down, protect our frontline workers, and contain the virus to levels where it can be effectively managed and treated until we can find a vaccine.

We can have bottom-up innovation and participation and top-down direction and protection at the same time; that is what our federal system is designed for.

This policy roadmap lays out how massive testing plus contact tracing plus social isolation with strong social supports, or TTSI, can rebuild trust in our personal safety and the safety of those we love. This will in turn support a renewal of mobility and mobilization of the economy. This paper is designed to educate the American public about what is emerging as a consensus national strategy.

The plan seems consistent with what economist Paul Romer has been saying — Without More Tests, America Can’t Reopen (And to make matters worse, we’re testing the wrong people) — and with the approach Hong Kong has been taking — Test and trace: lessons from Hong Kong on avoiding a coronavirus lockdown. See also the 4 plans to end social distancing, explained.

Unfortunately for this plan and for all of us, I have a feeling that the first true step in any rational plan to reopen the United States without unnecessary death and/or massive economic disruption that lasts for years is the removal of Donald Trump from office (and possibly also the end of the Republican-controlled Senate). Barring that, the ineffectual circus continues. (via @riondotnu)

Tags: COVID-19   USA   economics   medicine   science   video

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South African Safaris Broadcast Live Online Twice a Day

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A group in South Africa called WildEarth is broadcasting live safaris on YouTube twice a day, once at sunrise and again at sunset. The safaris take place in Greater Kruger National Park, run for about three hours each, and are archived online. Here’s a sunrise safari from last week:

Here’s their daily schedule:

The Sunrise Safari starts at 06:00 local time, which means start times of 00:00 PM ET, 21:00 PM PT, 04:00 in the UK [GMT], 05:00 in Central Europe, and 15:00 Sydney time.

The Sunset Safari starts at 15:30 CAT local time, 09:30 AM ET, 06:30 AM PT, 14:30 in the UK [BST], 15:30 in Central Europe, and 00:30 Sydney time.

Check out the safari archive for past shows and this playlist for some of the highlights. (thx, philip)

Tags: South Africa   video

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The Rolling Stones Perform “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” While Sheltering at Home

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As part of the One World: Together at Home fundraiser organized by the WHO, Global Citizen, and Lady Gaga that raised $127.9 million for Covid-19 relief efforts, the members of the Rolling Stones, each in their own home, got together via video to perform You Can’t Always Get What You Want. It’s a lovely messy & spare performance and the choice of song is timely — plenty of people around the world are definitely not getting what they want right now, but hopefully we will eventually end up getting what we need.

Tags: COVID-19   music   The Rolling Stones   video

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Two Quick Links for Monday Noonish

Two Quick Links for Monday Noonish

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The Emerging Science of What SARS-CoV-2 Does to the Human Body

The Emerging Science of What SARS-CoV-2 Does to the Human Body

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Thousands of scientific research papers on Covid-19 and SARS-CoV-2 are being published each week and with them comes a clearer picture of the virus and the disease it causes. There’s still a lot we don’t know, but this piece from Science magazine is the best synthesis of the emerging science that I have read. It details a virus that “acts like no microbe humanity has ever seen” and affects not only the lungs but also the kidneys, heart, brain, and the intestines.

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 surges past 2.2 million globally and deaths surpass 150,000, clinicians and pathologists are struggling to understand the damage wrought by the coronavirus as it tears through the body. They are realizing that although the lungs are ground zero, its reach can extend to many organs including the heart and blood vessels, kidneys, gut, and brain.

“[The disease] can attack almost anything in the body with devastating consequences,” says cardiologist Harlan Krumholz of Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital, who is leading multiple efforts to gather clinical data on COVID-19. “Its ferocity is breathtaking and humbling.”

Understanding the rampage could help the doctors on the front lines treat the fraction of infected people who become desperately and sometimes mysteriously ill. Does a dangerous, newly observed tendency to blood clotting transform some mild cases into life-threatening emergencies? Is an overzealous immune response behind the worst cases, suggesting treatment with immune-suppressing drugs could help? What explains the startlingly low blood oxygen that some physicians are reporting in patients who nonetheless are not gasping for breath? “Taking a systems approach may be beneficial as we start thinking about therapies,” says Nilam Mangalmurti, a pulmonary intensivist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP).

How Covid-19 attacks the human body

I’ve been hearing that although Covid-19’s attack begins in the lungs, it is as much a vascular disease as it is a respiratory disease — and there is some evidence emerging to support this view:

If COVID-19 targets blood vessels, that could also help explain why patients with pre-existing damage to those vessels, for example from diabetes and high blood pressure, face higher risk of serious disease. Recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data on hospitalized patients in 14 U.S. states found that about one-third had chronic lung disease-but nearly as many had diabetes, and fully half had pre-existing high blood pressure.

Mangalmurti says she has been “shocked by the fact that we don’t have a huge number of asthmatics” or patients with other respiratory diseases in HUP’s ICU. “It’s very striking to us that risk factors seem to be vascular: diabetes, obesity, age, hypertension.”

What struck me most about this piece is the sheer energy of the vast network of minds bent towards understanding this thing with the hope of beating it as soon as possible. This is the scientific method at work right here, in all its urgent & messy glory.

Tags: COVID-19   medicine   science

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