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Here’s a story of how I tried to remove a fake story marginally related to COVID-19 from Wikipedia, and, at least for now, achieved the opposite and contributed to its dissemination and perpetuation.
fawkes — image “cloaking” for personal privacy:
At a high level, Fawkes takes your personal images, and makes tiny, pixel-level changes to them that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these “cloaked” photos as you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends, printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would any other photo.
The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, “cloaked” images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you. The cloak effect is not easily detectable, and will not cause errors in model training. However, when someone tries to identify you using an unaltered image of you (e.g. a photo taken in public), and tries to identify you, they will fail.
I strive to be grateful for my material possessions and not fall into the trap of consistent consumption. For the last several years I limit my purchases to consumables and replacing items that wore out for most of the year. Think of this has intermittent fasting for purchasing.
I have finished yet another statistics article which might be of interest to everyone who reads studies now and then: quick statistical power estimate.
Otherwise: A week with Grizzly.
Please Print (A Journaling Rant):
Yes. Print. On paper. Why? Because, unlike your app, paper has a proven track record for lasting thousands of years if the conditions are right.
After some labiorious days, I finally completed it: Who cares if I listen? A study of dodecaphonic music enjoyment.
Thanks to everyone who helped, it is an article I have wanted to write since a long time.
I am running a small experiment on present-day dodecaphonic music appreciation.
If you have a few minutes — three, no longer than that — please take the dodecaphonic survey.
As with every statistical inference, the bigger the sample, the higher the chance of finding a significant result. So consider sharing it with your classical-lovers friends and on social media!
I Thought Stage IV Cancer Was Bad Enough:
Rilke taught us not to seek the answers but to love the questions. Good advice. Now I’m stuck in my house muttering, “Stage IV cancer during a pandemic! Could it get any—oh, never mind.”
Libertà, un racconto di Giovanni Verga:
Non importa! Ora che si avevano le mani rosse di quel sangue, bisognava versare tutto il resto. Tutti! tutti i cappelli! - Non era più la fame, le bastonate, le soperchierie che facevano ribollire la collera. Era il sangue innocente.
I spilled milk on my laptop, I had to buy a new one.
After a little experimentation, I decided that if I wanted to draw linear features, there were three characters that were best to use:
! / _. Together, I could create rudimentary lines that roughly connected together in a pseudo-vector style, even if the typewriter grid itself is basically a raster.
Aisle started out as a game which would not need the usual meta-verbs… i.e. a game with only one turn. The initial idea was: How do I make a game with only one turn interesting?
SARS-C0V-2 musing:
cannocchiale.txt) is 31685 lines long. If my laptop dies, I am screwed. I am trying to think of a solution.Anesthetic art:
Miscellaneous:
Can crimes be discussed literally?
In American medicine it is routine to officially certify that a standard= of care was provided, that cannot possibly have been provided (e.g. some policies as to the timing of medication and tests can’t be carried on but given how many patients each nurse has to care for, but it’s less trouble to fudge it as long as something vaguely resembling the officially desired outcome happened). The system relies on widespread willingness to falsify records, and would (temporarily) grind to a halt if people were to simply refuse to lie.
Novelty and influence of creative works, applied to common practice music (via Stefano). On baroque/classical transition:
First, Scarlatti overtakes Bach in influence shortly before the Classical period, in agreement with the well-acknowledged significance of Scarlatti on the Classical period […]
I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.
A witty puzzle. The introduction on DataGenetics contains a mild spoiler = so I will copy it here without comment:
Three athletes (and only three athletes) participate in a series of track
and field events. Points are awarded for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place in each
event (the same points for each event, i.e. 1st always gets “x” points,
2nd always gets “y” points, 3rd always gets “z” points), with
x > y > z > 0, and all point values being integers.
The athletes are named: Adam, Bob, and Charlie.
Adam finished first overall with 22 points.
Bob won the Javelin event and finished with 9 points overall.
Charlie also finished with 9 points overall.
Who finished second in the 100-meter dash (and why)?Writing is not for everybody. It is really hard, lonely and above all, financially disasterous.
I am a great example of things gone wrong,
Recently I was procrastinating by checking out an old handwritten music volume. It is a compilation of Harpsichord pieces, authored by famous musicians for a Venetian noble-woman, Maria Venier.
The score is unpublished, and probably unperformed since the 1750s. I picked a simple minuet by Baldassarre Galuppi, here is what it sounds like:
Venzone, an ASCII platform/adventure made by me.
Grab it while it is hot; if you like it, spread the word!
<brewton> San Diego is the world centre of taco gatekeeping.Recently I was looking for scientific articles on the differences between composing with a pen rather than a pencil (the latter becoming my writing instrument of choice after the former leaked on my suit).
The search returned empty handed, but one paper on “writing strategies and writers’ tool” was nontheless initriguing; let me share the findings with you.
First table displays the percentage of “frequent use” of writing tool X in different research areas. Keep in mind the article was published in 1993!
Then the author introduces a “writing strategies” variable; I find the descriptions of the different approaches to composing striking and amusing:
Finally, crosstabs of strategies/area and tools/strategies:
Writing strategies and writers' tools, Daniel Chandler - English Today April 1993 (I feel guilt in saying I got it via Sci-Hub)
more: catchpenny prints.
Read The Queen of Spades, a very short story by Alexander Pushkin.
“That same evening my grandmother went to Versailles to the jeu de la reine. The Duke of Orleans kept the bank; my grandmother excused herself in an off-hand manner for not having yet paid her debt, by inventing some little story, and then began to play against him. She chose three cards and played them one after the other: all three won sonika, and my grandmother recovered every farthing that she had lost.”
“Mere chance!” said one of the guests.
“A tale!” observed Hermann.
“Perhaps they were marked cards!” said a third.
“I do not think so,” replied Tomsky gravely.
“What!” said Narumov, “you have a grandmother who knows how to hit upon three lucky cards in succession, and you have never yet succeeded in getting the secret of it out of her?”
Shifts to the keys at the side of the spacebar) and awkward wrist pain after a typing session is no more. Recommended!At regular intervals the Power Station emitted a dry, low sound; the one you feel more than hear.
I find myself using the pencil as my writing instrument of choice more and more: pleasant feedback, good line variation, does not leak while flying. I just needed a very small sharpner to keep in my pocket along a tiny notebook.
Yesterday I found this one, by Muji, which does the job fine (sharp point, shaving reservoir, pocket-sized).
Archivio Diaristico Nazionale: “un archivio pubblico, che raccoglie scritti di gente comune in cui si riflette, in varie forme, la vita di tutti e la storia d’Italia: sono diari, epistolari, memorie autobiografiche”.
Speaking of which, I just finished reading Viaggio in America (en: Diary of a Woman at Fifty). Enjoyable, witty and insightful on French revolution:
But abandoning preambles, let us return to our entrance into the port of Boston. Our ecstacy, I admit with shame, was entirely concentrated upon an enormous fresh fish which the pilot had just caught and which, with a pitcher of milk, fresh butter and white bread, composed what the captain called “a welcome breakfast.” While we were eating with voracious appetites, we were advancing, towed by our boat, up this magnificent bay. At two cables’ length from the land, our captain dropped the anchor and then left us with the promise to return in the evening after having found us a lodging.
Play Los amores de Brunilda, a mystery retro adventure.
Available for ZX Spectrum and MSX2 and translated to a plethora of languages.
<@BrutalSlakt> we looked in a magazine I have from 2000, and the things in it
are suppose to be "omg how crazy", but looking in it today it was
more "yeah, that's things people do these days.." xD
<me> haha like?
<@BrutalSlakt> some guy killed by his friend, a hippo. a girl that can dive 35m.
some fat people. some dudes that put patterns of diseases (what
you see in the microscope) on clothes. some psychologist that
uses a therapy which one person pretends to be dead and the others
tell them stuff they couldn't "when they were alive".
<@BrutalSlakt> some hindu festival called Holi.
<me> haha
<@BrutalSlakt> a hotel under the waterNot in the 2000s:
Photography has created a chronic voyeuristic relationship to the world that cheapens the meaning of all events.
A study of paper vs. computers: an excellent experiment on how to write on both paper and PC and integrate the two with indexing.
My answer, actually, is that we’ve built a false dichotomy for ourselves. There is no reason why a system needs to be limited to one medium, or why a system should be limited to one medium, except for lack of imagination, laziness, and the kind of technological elitism described above.
Alyssa is not flying, on the beauty (and usefulness) of moving by train.
It’s 06:00 UK time, and the first of my 4 trains of the day just departed. Edinburgh to London, London to Brussels, Brussels to Cologne, Cologne to Berlin.
My friend Carina has finally found some time to try her typewriter. Ribbon might need to be replaced, results are encouraging:
