Meet Cheddar Man.
He's from just north of Glastonbury, circa 8,000 B.C.
Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project, said: “It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all.”
Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed, saying the connection often drawn between Britishness and whiteness was “not an immutable truth. It has always changed and will change”.
Love that smile! If you're British, you've reportedly got about a 10% chance of descending from this guy's tribe. I suppose the more intellectually kempt white supremacists can remind themselves he isn't really black in the modern pseudoscientific or culturally-significant sense, but you know that's not how they feel about these things.
The instantly self-owning strategy among the crypto-racist morons of British punditry is to find white people who don't actually look like him in an attempt to suggest he's basically a Somerset lad with a tan.
Which he is. Read the rest
CORDELL! CORDELL! WHERE'S MY RUBBER CEMENT?
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"Who are these people?"
Megan Fogarty posted this wonderful video of kindergarteners singing "Happy Birthday" to a hatching chicken.
UPDATE: Chickens return the compliment:
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A Logitech keyboard is sacrificed to Saturn in this remarkable video posted by Amazing Timelapse. Plunged into acetone, the device melts slowly until only a cloudy congealment of undissolved plastics remains.
This is a regular pc keyboard dipped in acetone for over 70 hours. This is the satisfying result after more than 11.000 photos, enjoy.
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Kelsey Hightower's Nocode [github] fixes all the problems associated with modern web app development: "Write nothing; deploy nowhere."
Now that you have not done anything it's time to build your application:
Yep. That's it. You should see the following output:
A number of issues are open at github, mind you. Perhaps it wasn't ready for prime time. Read the rest
Usagi Yojimbo, my favorite ronin rabbit, is to star in his own TV series.
Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo takes place amidst a rich fantasy setting in 17th century Japan and features a diverse world of anthropomorphic characters. Miyamoto Usagi, otherwise known as Usagi Yojimbo, is a ronin warrior with the heart of a hero. A skilled swordsrabbit, and one-time bodyguard for a Japanese War Lord, he’s now masterless, and explores his world of immense castles and humble villages, encountering dinosaurs, Yokai (ghosts/monsters), cats, bats, bounty hunters, giant snakes, and even aliens, facing exciting adventures at every turn, always ready to help.
Usagi's turned up as an interdimensional guest star now and again on the Ninja Turtles, but it's high time Stan Sakai's world hit the screen in its own right. Read the rest
What does this DeWalt knife, posted to the "midly interesting" subreddit by turltlecam_son, look like?
a) a chicken
b) a unicorn
c) a fish
d) a knife
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Most of us want rid of heavy old TV sets: they're piled high in warehouses, a dangerous waste mountain resulting from a huge recycling scam. But some of us are desperate to keep their old CRTs going.
The CRT’s slow extinction is also becoming a pressing problem for arcades, especially with the rise of arcade bars over the past decade. Establishments like San Francisco’s Brewcade, Portland’s Ground Kontrol, and Chicago’s Emporium Arcade Bar all line their walls with dozens of nostalgia-inspiring cabinets and by extension, dozens of CRT displays. ... Arcades generally have in-house teams of employees with varying levels of expertise. Ground Kontrol, which describes itself as a “hands-on museum,” is owned by two electrical engineers and two software specialists. They initially repaired machines themselves, until finally hiring a full-time technician. Barcade employs two dedicated repair specialists, and a number of other staff can do some work on the machines.
The only remaining manufacturer of CRTs left the business just last year. Read the rest
Nintendo's last game console, the Wii U, didn't do so well. The Switch, though, is doing very well indeed. One key reason: lots of games. Gizmodo:
By day 279, the Switch had 191 games available, a number the Wii U didn’t match until it’s 857th day – as many games in nine months as as its predecessor had in two years and four months.
How to explain this is up for debate. Could it be better support for developers from Nintendo? Could it be smaller games in the e-shop making the barriers to entry lower so games can be pumped out more quickly?
It's not enough to have good launch titles. Quantity is a well-established factor in almost every console success going back to the 1970s -- and nowadays, that means hundreds of games. The Switch is also way ahead of the PS4 and XBone; though both have been out for more than four years, the Switch's curve vaguely suggests it could catch up within two.
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I enjoyed reading David Joiner's (aka Talin) retrospective about game development in the early days of the Commodore Amiga: like many creators of the era, he not only had to cultivate his artwork, but also needed to devise incredible technical hacks just to get his ideas working on the frustratingly limited (yet wildly malleable) hardware.
Loading the data in the background was a challenge, and I could not figure how how to get the Amiga filesystem layer (AmigaDOS) to load data without pausing the program. So instead, I cheated: instead of writing out the terrain as files on disk, I wrote them directly to the floppy tracks as raw data blocks. I could then use the low-level floppy device driver to load the data in the background while the game was running.
This meant that when you put the Faery Tale disk into the computer and listed the files on it, all you would see was a few files needed to ‘bootstrap’ the game — most of the game content was hidden from view.
His game, Faery Tale Adventure, is an essential minor classic of the 16-bit era. It's offbeat and seems superficially rough-edged compared to the arty tours de force that would define the Amiga when it had to compete with Japanese consoles, but has a dedicated fanbase to this day, because it has soul. One of the counterintuitive lessons that we can draw from Joiner's retrospective is that a lot of one-person indie game devs would benefit from not trying to do everything themselves. Read the rest
There's the shot; here's the chaser:
We're a ways short of the term 'racism' being proudly reclaimed, but there's not much ground left between here and there. Read the rest
Peter Lik is one of the world's most successful photographers. He reportedly works in-camera and without significant compositional retouching. But he appears to have been caught with his shoop down. The tl;dr, as Steve Cullen has it: a recent moon shot has a perfectly spherical disc when at that resolution mountains would be visible on its horizon; it's impossible to get that particular angle on the moon from the place where the photograph was taken; and, haha, the same moon shot is already in an earlier composition.
Here's the bottom line: I don't believe that the moon in either of Lik's photographs was there when the picture was taken. I am not saying there couldn't be a moon in his raw images, it just is not the moon we see in the final works. ... At the end of the day, photography is an art form and there certainly are many interpretations about what is right or wrong and good or bad. I believe what the folks are asking for from Lik and his associates is for them to speak the truth about the work, whatever that truth may be. Nothing more and nothing less.
It's funny because the photo seems so obviously shopped. We think we can tell by the pixels, it's the cold cruel harmony of the spheres that shows it.
I can't help but feel Peter left something out...
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Guldies (previously) posted this weirdly satisfing stop-motion animation of life in the woods. The visuals are amazing -- 2500 still pictures taken with a Canon DSLR and sequenced at 18 frames per second in Dragonframe -- but it's the way it works with sound that I really felt. Read the rest
Simple Print is a website that converts web articles into nice, easily-printed PDF files. It was remarkably effective on the URLs I fed it.
It uses Full-Text RSS and PDF Newspaper to extract the article's content and produce a clean HTML copy. It then relies on Headless Chromium to generate the PDF. To avoid situations where an article will use an extra printed page for a small overrun, Simple Print produces 3 PDFs with slighly varying font sizes and keeps the copy with the fewest pages and largest font size.
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Ram used a sound clip from a Martin Luther King Jr. sermon, played over a montage of stereotypically patriotic imagery, as an ad for a truck. In response, Nathan Robinson took another quote (reportedly from the same speech) of MLK's thoughts on advertising--specifically, automobile advertising--and put it to the same video.
The agency knew what it was doing. They knew it would upset people. What a rotten, cynical ad. Read the rest
In Freedom House's 2018 world freedom map, 71 countries registered declines while only 35 saw gains: "emboldened autocrats, beleaguered democracies, and the United States’ withdrawal from its leadership role" have created a crisis.
Among those slipping into "not free" status were Turkey and the Central African Republic, which each saw dramatic declines of more than 30 percent in the last year, according to Freedom House's criteria. Ukraine, Mali, Nigaragua and Honduras were among those countries slipping from freedom to "partial" freedom. In Europe, Hungary slipped 20 percent, to stand only 2 points within the range of free countries. Tunisia, though, the Arab world's only "free" country, clung to that status despite domestic strife.
Democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets—including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law—came under attack around the world. ... Perhaps worst of all, and most worrisome for the future, young people, who have little memory of the long struggles against fascism and communism, may be losing faith and interest in the democratic project. The very idea of democracy and its promotion has been tarnished among many, contributing to a dangerous apathy.
Most alarming, though, is America's drop to 86/100. Though still well within the range of free countries, it has slipped noticeably behind all those Northern European democracies lurking in the 90s. It's turning into a big crap Italy.
The president’s behavior stems in part from a frustration with the country’s democratic checks and balances, including the independent courts, a coequal legislative branch, the free press, and an active civil society.
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The New York Times' Joanna Klein reports that plants express qualities of consciousness. May as well enjoy those dolphinburgers after all!
“Plants are not just robotic, stimulus-response devices,” said Frantisek Baluska, a plant cell biologist at the University of Bonn in Germany and co-author of the study. “They’re living organisms which have their own problems, maybe something like with humans feeling pain or joy.” “In order to navigate this complex life, they must have some compass.”
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