Posts Tagged ‘modeling’
Massive Monday Super Mega-Links!
* Well they can’t take it back now.
* SFRA 18 attendees! Apply for a travel grant, if you have a need!
* Extrapolation 59.1 is here! With articles on climate fiction, Fahrenheit 451, Ballard’s Crash, and fantasy maps.
* Think of yourself as a planet.
* One year later, Marquette Magazine remembers “Buffy at 20,” with an unforgivably bloated and sweaty picture of me.
* I have a piece coming out in LARB this weekend that talks about the epilogue to The Handmaid’s Tale and why there shouldn’t have been a second season to the Hulu series. The early reviews seem to bear that intuition out.
* Diary of a Settler of Catan.
* Janelle Monáe’s About to Drop the Afrofuturist Art Film We’ve All Been Waiting for. How Janelle Monáe Found Her Voice.
* How to write great SF about disability law.
* Louis Cha, who is ninety-four years old and lives in luxurious seclusion atop the jungled peak of Hong Kong Island, is one of the best-selling authors alive. Widely known by his pen name, Jin Yong, his work, in the Chinese-speaking world, has a cultural currency roughly equal to that of “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” combined.
* AI researchers call that observation Moravec’s paradox, and have known about it for decades. It does not seem to be the sort of problem that could be cured with a bit more research. Instead, it seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.
* Why Is the Human Brain So Efficient?
* Players Have Crowned A New Best Board Game — And It May Be Tough To Topple.
* Ever since the 2016 presidential election, we’ve been warned against normalizing Trump. That fear of normalization misstates the problem, though. It’s never the immediate present, no matter how bad, that gets normalized — it’s the not-so-distant past. Because judgments of the American experiment obey a strict economy, in which every critique demands an outlay of creed and every censure of the present is paid for with a rehabilitation of the past, any rejection of the now requires a normalization of the then.
* Premediating the end of the professorate without even so much as a token consideration of how we might fight back. At the Chronicle, of course!
* A real free speech infraction on campus. This is such a cut and dry case of administrative malfeasance that of course it’s being treated as a major controversy. Lawsplainer.
* Here’s another “actually existing free speech” issue for you.
* Contingent work and free speech.
* Three months’ severance after negotiating yearlong contracts in bad faith.
* How to Hold Predators in Academia Accountable.
* Inside a university’s controversial plan for Baltimore.
* How Liberty University Build a Billion-Dollar Empire Online.
* Who will send me checks for $60 now? University Press of New England Will Shut Down.
* The right-wing plot to take over student governments.
* Students, employees scour college finances for waste, proof of unfair pay.
* Palantir Knows Everything About You.
* A cure worse than the disease: The “fake news” hysteria is unleashing a wave of free-speech crackdowns worldwide.
* Neil Gorsuch voted with the liberal justices, but his opinion should chill you to the bone.
* Pulling Back the Curtain on the Labor of Professional Sport.
* Seven Days of Heroin in Cincinnati.
* War is over (if you want it).
* The lie pictures tell: an ex-model on the truth behind her perfect photos.
* Sarah Nicole Prickett on the Myth of the Wonder Woman.
* Is Your Body Appropriate to Wear to School?
* How Games Can Better Accommodate Disabled Players.
* Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes.
* Maria Bamford files restraining order against Trump over nuclear war threats. Trump challenges Native Americans’ historical standing. Gee, weird, what could explain it. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There’s going to be nothing left.
* How the FBI Helped Sink Clinton’s Campaign. ‘What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama.’ The DNC sues.
* ICE vs children. ICE vs. marriage. ICE vs. journalism. ICE vs. farmers. ICE deports its first Dreamer. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
* Utah Man Shot and Killed While Complying with Police Commands to Show His Hands.
* The US Army is developing AI that can recognize faces in the dark and through walls. Keep scrolling, human…
* Top Republican Official Says Trump Won Wisconsin Because of Voter ID Law.
* I honestly don’t see how any of our existing press norms can accommodate this technology.
* Sean Hannity, forecloser and slumlord.
* Greetings from Cape Town at the end of the world.
* The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data. Fucking lightweights.
* It turns out Oregonians are good at growing cannabis—too good.
* Rare Mutation Among Bajau People Lets Them Stay Underwater Longer.
* Hans Asperger, hailed for autism research, may have sent child patients to be killed by Nazis.
* Philly’s prison population has dropped 9 percent since our new DA took office earlier this year.
* Florida Police Allegedly Crash Funeral Home to Unlock Phone With Slain Man’s Fingerprints.
* Darwinist literary criticism. Parenting. Life is a journey. Dance like no one’s watching. The Death Spot. Eu-antisociality. Do we own the cats, or do they own us? Moneybattle. Oops.
* Cynthia Nixon Has Already Won.
* The first person on Mars should be a woman.
* National Geographic’s Photography Erased People. It’s Too Late For An Apology.
* 4 baboons at Texas research center back after brief escape.
* Slow-Motion Ocean Apocalypse: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years.
* Smartphones Are Killing The Planet Faster Than Anyone Expected.
* Meanwhile the dinosaur puppet is already on its second tour in Afghanistan.
* We are discovered; flee at once.
* Places people! We open in two days!
* If I ever do get around to writing about Chloe Sullivan, this will be a very odd footnote.
* And see? All that schooling is good for something.
Friday: Steven Salaita Link Roundup and More
* Shit and Curses, and Other Updates on the Steven Salaita Affair. Return of the blacklist? Cowardice and censorship at the University of Illinois. Academic Freedom, Except When I Disagree. Bérubé on Salaita. The national AAUP’s statement. Cary Nelson, the AAUP, and the privilege of bestowing academic freedom. Cary Nelson’s Case. John K. Wilson. The definition of academic freedom, for many, does not accommodate dissent. The University of Illinois Is Not an Island. A Love Letter to Twitter. A New Birth of Academic Freedom.
* One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a familiarity with, the limits that you’ll spend the rest of your life talking about and pushing against. So it’s probably natural for college students to be a little ironic, a little unsettled. It’s time, meanwhile, to admit that the college years aren’t for figuring out some improvised “sense of purpose.” They’re more like a period of acclimatization—a time when realizations can dawn. If you’re feeling uneasy about life, then you’re doing the reading.
* Matthew Cheney has a call to read Survivor over Octavia Butler’s objections, inspired in part by my recent series at LARoB.
* Princeton Considers End to Limit on Number of As.
* The University of Colorado is moving to fire a tenured faculty member after the Boulder campus paid $825,000 this week to settle a graduate student’s allegations that the philosophy professor retaliated against her for reporting she was sexually assault by a fellow student.
* Watch NJ cop go rogue: Since Obama ‘doesn’t follow Constitution, we don’t have to.’
* Forcing Kids To Stick To Gender Roles Can Actually Be Harmful To Their Health.
* Is Student Debt Harmful to Your Health? Student debt correlated with nagging sense that life is pointless.
* Oh, there’s your problem, your culture produces monsters: Telling white people the criminal justice system is racist makes them like it more.
* On not being cynical enough: LeBron James just leapt from one carefully constructed superteam to another. Of course I’m talking about you; I was always cynical about this. #cynicprivilege
* The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view “Marooned” as a curiously precise description of the Delaware Art Museum. It, too, has been ostracized by its peers. In June, it was formally sanctioned by the Association of Art Museum Directors, which has asked its members not to lend artwork to Delaware or assist with its exhibitions.
* An interview on death and mourning with Thomas Laqueur, from the great TNI issue on mourning I was hyping the other day.
* When stock photography modeling goes wrong.
* Endless Adjunct: The Game! From @readywriting.
* “Ole Miss Struggles to Be a New Miss.” On trying to rebrand.
* The Wonder Years: An Oral History.
* I guess in Obama’s America it’s not always legal to randomly murder people for no reason.
* Run Cruel optimism, Liz, run cruel optimism!
* “Punk archaeologists” explain why they dug out the Atari landfill. I should have been a punk archaeologist.
* Christina Hendrick’s time-travel-centered Mad Men spinoff looks pretty promising. The Mary Poppins one is good too.
* Lost in Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam trying to make Don Quixote again, which is now about trying to make Don Quixote.
* There’s only one thing Disney/Marvel loves more than money, and that’s not making inclusive superhero movies.
* Perhaps most importantly to everyone outside of Broadway, this production basically puts the kibosh on any new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm—at least until it’s over. David said he “hadn’t ruled out” doing more Curb, but that he’s “not going to mentally do that to myself right now.” Also, if he did do another season, “this play would push that schedule back.” So we’d say that if he did do a ninth season, it could be about how Larry David starring in a Broadway show ends up irritating everyone else. But of course, he already did that.
* Everything old is new again: Straczynski bringing sci-fi classic Babylon 5 back to life with movie reboot in 2016. NBC has great idea for family show starring Bill Cosby.
* Slot-machine science: How casinos get you to spend more money. A Good Way to Wreck a Local Economy: Build Casinos.
* The arc of history is long, but bends towards justice: Cops no longer desire photo of teenager’s erection.
* Over the cliff: Almost 20 percent of people near retirement age have no retirement savings.
* The headline reads, “Experts Split If Robots Will Usurp Human Workers By 2025.”
* Google Saved by the Bell Truth. Wake up sheeple.
* My god. The bureaucracy works.
* And SMBC presents: The Darwinist!
Gerry Canavan 