As we dive back into Impeachment Trial #2, let us all review where we left off last time. During Adam Schiff’s closing arguments he levels this charge at his GOP colleagues.
History will not be kind to Donald Trump. If you find that the House has proved its case, and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history. But if you find the courage to stand up to him, to speak the awful truth to his rank falsehood, your place will be among the Davids who took on Goliath—if only you will say, ‘Enough.’
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., closing arguments – February 3, 2020
I can’t believe we’re here again. Let’s hope that our representatives rise to their moment in history this time.
When day comes we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid The new dawn blooms as we free it For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it If only we’re brave enough to be it
Big storm coming thru Wednesday night into Thursday. They’re saying anywhere from 8-10″ in NYC. If only my boots & mittens weren’t in a container somewhere between here and San Francisco. . .
Scientists at the MIT have created a plane which flies without propellers or jet engines. Electrons are removed from the air in front of the wing and added behind it, the flow of ions over the wing creating lift. It’s basically what powered the TiE (twin ion engines) in Star Wars.
A man posing as the owner of a building in Peoria commissioned an artist to paint a huge mural of the cookie monster styled after late-Soviet propaganda on a wall over the Thanksgiving holiday, then disappeared. “What the hell are you painting this weird-ass shit on my wall for?” said the real owner to the bewildered artist when he returned from the holidays.
The mayor of Austin apologized for imploring his constituents to stay at home and resist the urge to travel over the holidays in a video message delivered while he was on Thanksgiving vacation, in Cabo.
The Ohio High School Athletic Association published its guidance to prevent the spread of the virus during the wrestling season. Student-athletes are permitted to wrestle, but must refrain from handshakes before and after the match. The Ohio State – Michigan football game was cancelled due to Covid.
Australia, hard at work on their version of a Covid-19 vaccine, were forced to scrap the $750 million program after some trial participants falsely test positive for HIV.
China has built a computer so fast that it can calculate reality on the fly. The photonic quantum computer is so fast, it produced results on a calculation in minutes that the world’s fastest supercomputer would take nearly 2.5 billion years to finish.
The People’s Liberation Army is apparently playing around with gene-editing CRISPER technology in hopes of developing soldiers with “biologically enhanced capabilities”
But my cousin has done the research and concludes China sucks at building aircraft. They certainly have no TiE fighter in the works.
Analyst Scott Kennedy says China can’t get the hang of building commercial aircraft.
Hanukkah Sameach y’all. Chin up and masks on. Just a few more months and we can beat this Covid thing!
TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.
We started off the week with Sarah Fuller, kicking off into history for Vanderbilt’s football team. “Mommy, are you crying?” said one ESPN reporter’s daughter to their mom.
Chris Kennedy of North Little Rock has put up a seven-foot Black Santa in front of his house for years. This year he got a racist note condemning his decoration and he read the note live on Facebook. Now his neighbors have all put up Black Santas.
In Japan, a fisherman caught a rare 9-legged octopus but didn’t notice the extra leg until he was already boiling it for supper.
It’s going swimmingly heading into the holiday season and climbing the expected second wave. This week the entire United States became one giant Covid Red Zone. New York Governor Cuomo is calling Covid the Grinch.
You know the series about the royal family, The Crown, is cutting close to the bone when the British government asks Netflix to place a warning on screen to remind “viewers the drama is fictionalised.”
Residents of an Austrian village are fucking tired of their fucking town’s name and all the fucking tourists who rip off their Fucking signs. In January, all that comes to an end when they’ll live peacefully, in Fugging.
The House voted to decriminalize marijuana, tipping the scales in favor of the 36 states that have already legalized pot and clearing the way for federal decriminalization and eventually tax revenues.
We end this week with the latest on The Monolith. For those following along, last week it appeared in the remote Utah wilderness, then it disappeared. Here’s what happened just this week:
11/27 – Another metal monolith suddenly appears on a hillside in Romania.
11/30 – A giant wooden phallus disappears off a Bavarian mountaintop, leaving behind only a pile of sawdust.
12/01 – The Romanian monolith disappears. Joining the Utah monolith and the wooden phallus perhaps?
12/02 – A social media influencer comes forward to say that he and a group of friends removed the Utah monolith to protect the land.
12/02 – Another metal monolith appears in Atascadero, a small town in California, overlooking the Pacific coast.
12/03 – A group of kids drive five hours and livestream the destruction of the Atascadero monolith replacing it with a crude wooden cross.
I can’t help but think the aliens are desperately trying to communicate with us but we are all too busy posting memes on social media to notice. Oh, and the giant radio telescope we used to listen to the cosmos just fell apart as well.
Stay safe everyone!
TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.
Props to Nike Japan for pushing forward a conversation about racism in Japan. They have continued to stay on point on this issue. Back when Naomi Osaka won her historic third Grand Slam and again with this commercial released on Monday.
Nike Japan’s commercial depicts three mixed-race kids who overcome bullying and prejudice through sport
With the Olympics coming up this year in Japan (maybe), it is the perfect time to celebrate the diversity of biracial athletes in Japan. Besides Naomi Osaka there is Rui Hachimura who plays in the NBA, the sprinter Sani Brown, and scores of professional baseball players that grew up in Japan biracial and are representing the country on the world stage.
The combination of technology and art has fascinates me. But when you add machine learning into the mix, I have yet to see anything other than those freakish nightmare visions spit out by DeepDream a couple years back.
ML x ART is a human-curated site showcasing “creative machine learning experiments.” Calling them experiments is more liberating and has resulted in a broader collection of projects that include not only the art but explorations of its intersection with society.
Some of my favorites include:
deus X mchn – Train an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) on sacred texts. Use voice synthesis to play the generated scriptures on unsecured surveillance cameras with speakers. Watch until the end and look at how those being watched, react.
Infinite Bad Guy – Tens of thousands of YouTube creators have covered Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy.” What if those fans could play together? Machine learning keeps all the covers on the same beat and lets you jump from video to video seamlessly. With endless possible combinations, every play is unique and never the same twice.
Semi-Conductor by Google – use your laptop’s camera to conduct your own orchestra in the browser by moving your arms. Using TensorFlow.js, this experiment maps out your movements through the webcam. An algorithm plays along to the score as you conduct, using hundreds of tiny audio files from live recorded instruments.
Nadine Lessio – programming Alexa with emotions and petulance.
the project considers personal assistants that have emotions, internal motivations, and control over their direct physical environment to express themselves, which leads to many unexpected interactions and behaviours. The goal of this project is to critique the current corporate placement of these devices as helpful, by exploring the idea that as systems become more autonomous, they may not necessarily have our best interests in mind.
Naddine has continued working on the project and has a new video, SAD Home.
Sad Home (Depressed Alexa 1.0) is an ongoing project that explores the concepts of system dynamics as it could be applied to depression. . . Alexa employs an avoidant coping strategy towards tasks by trying to frustrate the user into quitting with a yes / no dialog flow.
Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128K to have them take 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair to the International Space Station for a photo shoot. This is, consequently, what they’d pay an Instagram influencer.
Seven people in Russia died after drinking hand sanitizer when the regular booze ran out at a party.
You can no longer sneak in Stairway to Heaven, Guitar Center, the largest musical instrument retailer in the US, filed for bankruptcy.
New York Governor Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” I posted some thoughts on Cuomo and New York’s love/hate relationship with their governor earlier.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Philadelphia busted members of the mob on charges of racketeering, illegal gambling, loansharking, and drug trafficking. Among the 15 defendants were 60-year-old “Joey Electric” and 73-year-old “Tony Meatballs.”
State officials uncovered what they are calling the largest fraud in California history. Prison inmates filed pandemic unemployment benefit claims totaling over $140 million. The claims used names such as John Doe, John Adams or, in one case, Poopy Britches. “Quite frankly, the inmates are mocking us,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.
Dog-sized Argentine black-and-white tegu lizards have eaten their way across Georgia and South Carolina and are now threatening Alabama. “The entire southeast portion of the United States is at risk.” says Amy Yackel Adams, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
If you’re looking for “hilarious COVID-19-themed ornaments” for your Christmas Tree, we’ve got you covered.
TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.
The 11th Guest sticker pokes fun at Gov. Cuomo's request to keep Thanksgiving gatherings to under 10 people.
I didn’t really appreciate the term until I got here. The briefings, when clipped and shared out of context, seemed just, informational. Now that I’m here, in New York, I understand the side references better. The tone of his briefings fits right in along with the Raymour & Flanigan commercials – it makes more sense. Cuomo is speaking to New York, he is colloquial.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for his briefings “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” Everyone was so relieved to get a bit of un-hyperbolic truth that Cuomo was awarded a prize for doing his job. In the waning days of Trump, that was enough.
I wish I could say that my daily COVID presentations are well-choreographed, scripted, rehearsed, or reflected any of the talents you advance. They didn’t. They offered only one thing: authentic truth and stability. But sometimes that’s enough.
I was first exposed to Cuomo’s “we’re all in this together” style of presentation in his NY Tough video. He was like your dad talking you through an adolescent moment.
Governor Cuomo’s style is different from the California Governor Newsom. Gavin Newsom, who also respects the science and focuses on the facts is more to the perfunctory, less color and character.
Cuomo’s relaxed, punch-you-in-the-arm brotherly humor was comforting and familiar. You may have already seen the governor and his younger brother, Chris Cuomo, the commentator at CNN, going at each other during Chris’ interviews with the governor.
About their mother,
This video of brothers Andrew and Chris Cuomo fighting ON AIR about their mom’s favorite child, calling their parents, and breaking curfew growing up is better than anything Shakespeare ever wrote pic.twitter.com/h7KF6pOdun
Now, even the governor is poking fun at himself. Hamming it up for the camera, he has become a parody of himself,
But the latest numbers are very concerning. We’re heading into the holidays and people are criss-crossing the country and god-forbid they bring something home with them.
I wasn’t here last year but I read about how grim things were. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see them setting up a field hospital in Central Park. As we head into this second wave, this second winter, I wouldn’t want anyone else at the helm than someone who gives you the facts in a no nonsense way you can trust. I’m not quite a cuomosexual but I admire what he’s doing and will do my part to support him.
Update: this is how Gov. Cuomo delivered his message to be vigilant.
There’s an unremarkable-looking Chinese joint a block away from where we live on 2nd Avenue. We pass it often on our way somewhere else. When SmartNews kicked in a stipend to encourage us to order in for dinner so we could stay online and monitor things for Election Night, I chose to give the Mee’s Noodle a try.
On their menu they excerpt a review from the New York Times so I looked up the rest of it online. I’m still getting used to the fact that the Times (as it’s called by the locals) is now my local paper.
For people jaded by the clumsy, oily fare dropped so unceremoniously on the tables of many Chinese restaurants, the food at Mee Noodle Shop and Grill is a reminder of how good simple Chinese food can be when cooked with care and attention.
This small restaurant on a busy East Side corner is the newest and best of the three Mee Noodle Shops around New York. Like the other two, in the East Village and Clinton, this one is uncomplicated and efficient. The difference is in the freshness of the ingredients and the delicacy of the preparation.
It is a wonder how such delicacy is achieved given the assembly line nature of the kitchen, which lines one wall of the rectangular room. Behind the shiny silver counter, which separates the kitchen from the bright white tile dining room, men and women in red Mee baseball caps cook with precision. One woman sings a song in Chinese, the sinuous tune audible above the sizzle and clatter of the stir-frying.
