BC CULTURE
Saved by @ThomassRichards

Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.

 it's like a classic twilight zone episode.
in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.
they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town
the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.
TNG's The Neutral Zone is that, but with the entire concept of money itself.
Future humans: *unfreezes investor*
Investor: MWAHAHAH! I LIVE! I must be rich now.
Future humans: Well, you were dead, so your will probably distributed all your money, so... no
Investor: Noooo!!!!
Future humans: But don't worry: We don't have money anymore
Investor: NOOOOOOOOO
Inventor: But how can I be rich now!?
Future humans: What is this thing you call "rich"? Like a good chocolate? You want some chocolate? This machine can make it. HEY COMPUTER, GIVE ME CHOCOLATE
Replicator: *Buzzes, Chocolate appears*
Investor: No, "rich" is when you have a bunch of things!
Future human: Oh, I see. Good news then: You're rich.
Investor: Yes!!!
Future human: We're all rich. We can have as many things as we want. This machine can make them.
Investor: Noooooo!
Future humans: What's wrong? You're "rich", isn't that what you wanted?
Investor: It's not fun being rich unless there are people who aren't rich to compare yourself to!
Future humans: Ahhh, so what you really wanted was to be be better than other people?
Investor: YES!
Future humans: well that's ok then, we still have that.
Investor: Oh?
Future humans: Yeah, you can just, you know, work harder, discover new things, write the best stories, create new theories, design better starships, create the best music.
Investor: oh...
Future humans: Yeah, isn't that what you were telling everyone back in your time? You can be better, you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, devote yourself, work harder, get up early, skip the coffees?
Investor: Uhh... kinda?
Future humans: Well, good news, you can still do that, just without the cheating complexities of "money" to get in the way!
Investor: *softly* but that's what I was good at...
Future humans: And it can work better now. Because back in your time, you'd have complications like people inheriting money, or getting money because of systems that priviledged them over others. Now it's an even playing field!
Future humans: It's a much purer form of that meritocracy you were talking about. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" and all that. And that's not even the best part!
Investor: Is there a best part?
Future human: "Mocha Frappuccino, extra mocha."
Replicator: *bzzzzzzz*
Future human: You don't even have to skip the coffee this time.
I'm just saying that there's a lot of inherent comedy in the idea taking someone devoted specifically to making money, and bringing them into a future where WHOOPS while they were gone, we got rid of money and made the world a paradise.
GOOD NEWS, you know that one thing you devoted your life to? We don't need that anymore, it doesn't matter. But now you can devote your life to creating and exploring and self-improvement! Isn't that great? ISN'T IT?

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
So there's a class of puzzles called "river crossing puzzles" which involve having to cross a river on a boat/bridge containing some set of individuals/items with restrictions on which ones can be on the boat/left on each shore, right?

and the most common subclass of these problems is the one where you have 3 items/animals to cross with.
This is alternatively called the "fox, goose, and bag of beans" or "wolf, goat, and cabbage" puzzle.

the idea is that your boat can only carry one item at a time, but if you leave the wolf/fox unattended with the goat/goose, the wolf/fox will eat the goat/goose.
and similarly, the goose/goat will eat the beans/cabbage if left alone

so you have to set up a set of actions that never leaves either side of the river in one of the lose-states.

the solution to this variant being:
1. take the goat/goose over
2. return empty
3. take the wolf/fox over
4. return with the goat/goose
5. take the cabbage/beans over
6. return empty
7. take the goat/goose over
GAMES
foone
foone
@Foone
You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?
OK, so there's a physical problem with our eyes: We move them in short fast bursts called "saccades", right? very quick, synchronized movements.
The only problem is: they go all blurry and useless during this

having your vision turn into a blurry mess every time you move your eyes is obviously not a good idea, so our brains hide it from us. Now, imagine you're an engineer and you have this problem.

You've got some obvious solutions you could do.
1. make the vision go black during movement. (Some VR games do this!)
2. just keep showing the last thing we saw prior to movement

both are good options with different downsides, but OH NO. this is assuming everything makes sense and is chronological and (regular) logical.
Your brain does neither of these options, really.

first, it basically puts your visual system on "pause". You're not seeing blackness or even nothing, you're just not seeing period.
then when you finish your saccade, it shows you what you now see at the new position. and then it pretends it can time travel.
ALL
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foone
foone
@Foone
Do I look like I know what an MPEG is?


di i look like i know what an mpeg is


do i liook like i pw what am ,[eg os
FUN
foone
foone
@Foone
maybe it's just leftover urges from being a toddler putting round pegs in square holes but every time I see a video card like this on ebay I want to buy it and also some RAM chips to fill it with


when I win the lottery I'm gonna buy all of these and a bunch of RAM chips, put them together, and then relist them right back onto ebay


I have a dream that one day all the super VGA cards on ebay will have full ram expansion sockets


that's a nice VLB video card you have there
be a real shame if someone were to UPGRADE ITS RAM


huh, I don't think I've ever seen RAM in that package
QFP DRAMs?
TECH
foone
foone
@Foone
Lockpicking Floppies!

I don't know why twitter is refusing to insert a card for this one. In any case, It's the @LockPickingLwyr, and it's a floppy-drive-lock.


so I've been meaning to do a video or thread on these sorts of locks myself. I have several, of different designs.

generally they're all designed vaguely like this one: it's a plastic insert that goes into the floppy drive, then it has some bit that rotates with the key to hold itself inside.

and they pretty much universally use super-cheap low-security tubular locks like this. You can probably pick most of them with a ballpoint pen
TECH

More from Culture

Paras Chopra
Paras Chopra
@paraschopra
1/ Here are my notes from @robertwrighter's book - Nonzero: the logic of human destiny. I enjoyed the book very much.

The basic premise of the book is that history has a direction which favors co-operation and non-zero sum games, and that causes an increase in complexity.


2/ Starting from the first replicating molecule which co-operated with an outer layer to form first proto-cell, evolutionary and cultural history is full of examples where two entities come together to survive and progress a lot more than they would have done individually.

3/ This co-operative entity fares much better than two individual entities because of specialization. If two entities are in the same boat - that they win together or lose together - then trust is implicit.

4/ In a non-zero sum game, trust causes entities to focus on what they do best.

For example, eukaryotic cells - the ones animals and plants have - emerged when two proto-cells merged, and one took the role of energy generator (mitochondria), the other specialized in protection.

5/ Some scientists believe that even nucleus in a cell is a result of an early cell merging with another cell.

So M&A is not a recent phenomena, entities have been merging because of common interests ever since life started.
CULTURE
Noah Berlatsky
Noah Berlatsky
@nberlat
I've completely fallen down a well of reading crappy superhero comics. (virtually all superhero comics are crappy.)

it's a comfort food thing. takes me back to my ill spent youth.

read a bunch of Dan Slott's she hulk run, which is depressingly sexist, all things considered. (the old, there's something wrong with you if you're a powerful woman who enjoys being powerful trope.)

Gail Simone's Birds of Prey is pretty fun; character interactions are great but she's got trouble figuring out worthwhile plots. all the villains are pretty eh.

read some Bendis avengers and new avengers. he writes fun characters, but the crossover stuff is so omnipresent it's hard for him to develop any narrative cohesion.
CULTURE
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Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
Today in pulp I look at the scandalous history of lady jeans!

Well there's a turn-up...


The denim jean and its predecessor the dungaree have a long history, and were traditionally seen as work wear for men.

But WWII changed all that...


As women headed for the factories and shipyards they found that a sturdy denim bib-n-brace, paired with a stout headscarf, was the way to go!


Coarse heavy 'jeens' were fine for riveting work, but 1940s women didn't take a shine to them as leisure wear. For one thing they were voluminous and shapeless.


Jeans were also seen as clothing for children. No adult wanted to be seen wearing kid's dungarees in public.

Or did they?
CULTURE
Piers Robinson
Piers Robinson
@PiersRobinson1
.@bellingcat's attempt in their new book, published by
@BloomsburyBooks, to coverup the @OPCW #Douma controversy, promote US and UK gov. war narratives, and whitewash fraudulent conduct within the OPCW, is an exercise in deception through omission @marydejevsky @freddiesayers


1) 2000 words are devoted to the OPCW controversy regarding the alleged chemical weapon attack in #Douma, Syria in 2018 but critical material is omitted from the book. Reading it, one would never know the following:

2) That the controversy started when the original interim report, drafted and agreed by Douma inspection team members, was secretly modified by an unknown OPCW person who had manipulated the findings to suggest an attack had occurred. https://t.co/QtAAyH9WyX… @RobertF40396660


3) This act of attempted deception was only derailed because an inspector discovered the secret changes. The manipulations were reported by @ClarkeMicah
and can be readily observed in documents now available https://t.co/2BUNlD8ZUv….

4) .@bellingcat's book also makes no mention of the @couragefoundation panel, attended by the @opcw's first Director General, Jose Bustani, at which an OPCW official detailed key procedural irregularities and scientific flaws with the Final Douma Report:
CULTURE
Itchy Bacca
Itchy Bacca
@ItchyBacca
Question:

1/10


2/10

@MissingWords retweeted the following:


3/10

But isn't the #StarWars franchise itself partly a simplistic comparison to the Holocaust?


4/10


5/10

https://t.co/OP5Tbb42w7
CULTURE

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Loren Brichter
Loren Brichter
@lorenb
So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
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Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...


It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
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Elon Musk\u2019s Meme \U0001f171\ufe0fot
Elon Musk’s Meme 🅱️ot...
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Thats a gg, Satan
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Corey Lynn \U0001f64f\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
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@CoreysDigs
1) OBSERVATION: The frequencies are changing. I would have to assess stats on the electromagnetic field to see its fluctuations. All I know is, I am highly sensitive to energy/frequencies, and they are changing, because…

2) 2 Weeks ago, my dog was effected by it as well. He is hearing things that aren’t technically audible. I can tell by his body language and sounds. One week ago I began feeling a pressure in my head and ears. It wasn’t painful at all, but it was intense for a bit.

3) It reminded me of taking off in an airplane a bit. I felt like I was in a vacuum. It went on and off for a couple of days. I’ve picked up on frequencies and high pitched sounds (not audible to most) for 30 years, and today my right ear began to ring for longer than usual.

4) This is nothing unusual for me, with exception of the duration. This happens often with me. No, it’s not tinnitus. Only this time, when I spoke, there was reverb creating a high pitch in my ear from my voice. This lasted for about 30 minutes. It did not hurt, just annoying.

5) So yes, the frequencies are changing. What this means exactly, I am unsure of at the moment. Some will say electromagnetic fields, others will say ascension, and some will say pole shift. I honestly can’t say at this very moment.
SCIENCE
Ottoman History Podcast
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@OttomanHistory
Here is a special thread introducing our series on “The Making of the Islamic World.” It offers 10 episodes about the transformation of Islamicate societies between the 7th and 17th centuries. You can find the series page here: https://t.co/7mL9eWmMmz


This is Chris Gratien posting. I created this series during Fall 2020 for my students as asynchronous material supported by readings and discussion. This is going to be a long thread, but it will be a great shortcut for those looking to make similar use of these materials.

There are two items worth pointing out: 1. This is an overview of the political, social, and cultural history of Islamicate societies. It does not deal with the origins of Islam or many theological questions. It does discuss Islam’s spread and the transformation of Islamic law.

2. This is the first part of a two-part sequence that takes the history of the Islamic world into the present. It emphasizes developments and themes that have particular relevance for later periods.

This is really a multivocal narrative of Islamic history. We feature over 20 scholars from almost as many institutions. Many of those who worked on it, myself included, study the early modern and modern era but have teaching obligations that take us further back in history.
RELIGION