In the original 1992 Castle Wolfenstein 3D, you fought off Nazis and their dogs.

Now there's a mod called Woof3D -- also known as "Return to Castle Woofenstein" -- which removes all the nazis and the guns, and all you do is ... pet the dogs.

As the creator explains:

There's a big ol' castle full of dogs wanting pats and you're the one to pet them. Sorry, they jump up on you, I hope you don't mind dog paw prints on your jeans. Just pat them and they'll fall asleep pretty quick.

Windows only! My son installed the game on his Windows PC and we played it, and I was surprised to find that it's actually kind of hard -- I'd expected that the dogs just, y'know, licked you or stuff, but it turns out they also jump on you and deplete your health, so you can be licked to death, I guess. They do seem to fall asleep pretty quickly with a pat or two, though.

There's some fun in-game art, too ... Read the rest

Vim is a text editor greatly loved by many programmers, because of its radically keyboard-centric design.

When you're coding in Vim, you generally never touch the trackpad or mouse; everything is done with the keyboard. Indeed, your hands don't even move around very much on the keyboard, because Vim doesn't even use the arrow keys. To move the cursor left by one character, for example, hit the "h" key. The "l" key moves you one character right, "k" takes you up one line, "j" down one line. There are also tons of clever little key-commands that speed up text-editing: Type "dw" and it deletes the word you're currently on, type "d$" to delete to the end of the line.

The upshot is that once you've mastered Vim, there's a glorious feeling of Csikszentmihalyian flow: Your fingers move in a blur of supremely economic, efficient movement. Your fingers spend far more time on the home-row keys.

But wait, you might wonder: How does this work? What if you want to use h/l/k/j to type letters, not to navigate?

Well, Vim has two modes -- "command" and "insert" mode. You enter command mode to use all those nifty shortcuts, and go back into insert mode when you want to type text. When you write in Vim, you're constantly shifting back and forth between those two modes, using the "esc" key to enter command mode.

That shift -- between those two modes -- is the only thing I've ever heard coders occasionally complain about with Vim. Read the rest

Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness is awesome: She's trained neural nets to invent all sorts of hilarious material, from the names of new colors to odd new food recipes to original Dungeons and Dragons spells.

Recently she decided to train a neural net on knitting patterns, and it began spitting out new ones. They were predictably strange, and to get a sense of precisely how strange, the fine folks at Ravelry -- a discussion site for those who knit, crochet, weave, and the like -- offered to actually produce some of patterns IRL. They've dubbed it "Skyknit".

If you belong to Ravelry you can see the results in the thread, but in case you aren't, behold pix of some of the creations above and below. The one above was knitted by MeganAnn, and it looks vaguely... organic? You can see some repeating patterns in it, but mashed together in a pretty strange fashion.

Here's another one knitted by MeganAnn ...

That one looks a bit more like a human-crafted pattern. Here's a really strange one made by datasock ...

... and winding-serpent pattern crafted by michaela112358 ...

Here's a pretty one by BellaG:

A sort of ... undersea creature? Created by also by michaela112358 ...

... and some that are pretty normal-looking! Like this one by geckogirl ...

... or this one by booksprink ...

... or this last one, by Farah Colchester:

Janelle Shane did a tweetstorm where she talked about the experience of watching the Ravelry crowd bring these things to life. Read the rest

Zeynep Tufekci was researching Trump videos on Youtube back in 2016 when she noticed something funny: Youtube began recommending and autoplaying increasingly extreme right-wing stuff -- like white-supremacist Holocaust-denial videos.

So she did an interesting experiment: She set up another Youtube account and began watching videos for the main Democratic presidential contenders, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. The result? As Tufecki writes in the New York Times:

Before long, I was being directed to videos of a leftish conspiratorial cast, including arguments about the existence of secret government agencies and allegations that the United States government was behind the attacks of Sept. 11. As with the Trump videos, YouTube was recommending content that was more and more extreme than the mainstream political fare I had started with.

Intrigued, I experimented with nonpolitical topics. The same basic pattern emerged. Videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism. Videos about jogging led to videos about running ultramarathons.

It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

This is an incredibly interesting and subtle point: That the problems of Youtube's recommender algorithms might be that they overdistil your preferences. Since they're aiming for "engagement" -- a word I am beginning to loathe with an unsettling level of emotion -- the real problem with these algorithms is they're constantly aiming to create an epic sense of drama and newness. Read the rest

This is fascinating: Millions of clocks across Europe have lost time, because of a dispute over electricity generation.

Citizens across Europe had been noticing that clocks in certain devices -- LED-style alarm clocks, stoves, and microwaves -- had been gradually losing time over the last few weeks. Why? Because those devices keep time based on the frequency of the European electrical grid, which is normally 50 hertz.

But in the past few weeks, the frequency of the grid has dropped slightly -- it's down to 49.996 hertz. So all those clocks have gradually run more and more slowly. People had noticed ...

Ah ha!! Thought I was going nuts that our cooker had slowed down! https://t.co/XpT2x25ROf

— Allan Howe (@allan_howe) March 7, 2018

Okay, so ... why has the grid's frequency dropped? As NPR explains, it's because of a political fight:

The problem, affecting some two dozen countries from Spain to Turkey, originates from a political disagreement between Kosovo and Serbia, ENTSO-E said.

Reuters reports Kosovo was using more power than it generated and Serbia, responsible for righting an imbalance, failed to do so, resulting in the deviation.

Tensions have been rising between the two for some time. Kosovo broke away from Serbia in 2008 after the brutal war of the 1990s, but Belgrade still does not recognize Kosovo's independence. And Reuters reports that while Serbia and Kosovo agreed to jointly operate a power grid in 2015, disagreements over distribution have stalled implementation of the deal.

ENTSO-E spokeswoman Susanne Nies told NPR on Wednesday that Kosovo began producing enough power for its population on Tuesday, thus stopping the deviation.

Read the rest

The Disconnect is a literary magazine published on the web with a fun wrinkle: You can only read it if your wifi is off.

You can load the magazine by going to its URL, but once you're there, it displays a message telling you "Please Disconnect from the Internet".

I duly turned off my wifi, started reading the first issue, and got to the note from the editor and founder, Chris Bolin:

This magazine started with a simple thought experiment: what if a piece of the internet made you leave the rest behind?

We created The Disconnect to embrace positive aspects of the internet—ease of dissemination and access—while pushing against some of its nefarious features, like ubiquitous distractions.

The theme of this issue is straightforward: humans and our technology. Every piece in this issue describes an encounter with technology, whether it’s intentional or inconsequential, constructive or devastating. You’ll find a poem about a conflicted hunger for silence, a tale of monetizing the dead, and an exposition of the future of digital divides.

This is not a Luddite rallying cry against modernity. Technology is ingrained in our lives for good and for ill. This is nothing new: humans have altered their reality with technology for millennia, from spoken language to the written word, from agriculture to electricity. We believe that the way to a better life is forward, not backwards. Let’s thoughtfully critique our world, not naively eschew it.

It's a very fun concept! It's part of a whole pile of recent design experiments that tweak our relationship to the always-on interwebs and the casinofied psychologies of social media, ranging from Rob's txt.fyi (which I wrote about here) to Ben Grosser's experiments in "demetricating" Facebook and Twitter, or tools for removing retweets by Andre Torrez and Robin Sloan. Read the rest

I am having too much fun reading A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1788 to provide definitions of the sort of vile, unmannerly slang employed by 18th-century streetfolk.

It was created by William Grose, and as The Public Domain Review notes, Grose's goal was to craft a dictionary of all the naughty words that Samuel Johnson deemed too grody for his famous dictionary a few decades earlier. As they continue ...

While a good deal of the slang has survived into the present day — to screw is to copulate; to kick the bucket is to die — much would likely have been lost had Grose not recorded it. Some of the more obscure metaphors include a butcher’s dog, meaning someone who “lies by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men”; to box the Jesuit, meaning “to masturbate; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society”; and to polish meaning to be in jail, in the sense of “polishing the king’s iron with one’s eyebrows, by looking through the iron grated windows”. Given this was the era of William Hogarth’s famous painting Gin Lane (1751), it’s not surprising to find the dictionary soaked through with colourful epithets for the juniper-based liquor: blue ruin, cobblers punch, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, moonshine, strip me naked. The Grose dictionary also contains hundreds of great insults, like bottle-headed, meaning void of wit, something you can’t say about its author.

Read the rest

The folks at Snarkitecture collaborated with the Portuguese design firm UVA to create the "Slip Chair", which looks like it's tipping over, but is safe to sit in.

Or so they say! Me, I'd like to see a picture of someone actually sitting in one. But for now I'll take their word, as they write on the UVA site ....

Slip Chair is a wooden chair that appears to be sinking into the ground. As it may seem unusable at first, the wooden frame is even out with a tapered stone and a functional surface for sitting is provided. The apparently opposed elements of the chair are counterbalanced through the monolithic volume of the stone. The chair revolves upon two axes and the suggested unsteadiness of the sliding forms conceals the complete stability of Slip.

(Picture via UVA) Read the rest

Another marker of the mainstream-ization of emoji: Dictionary.com is now offering entries that explain their meaning. As Time reports:

As Dictionary.com can now make clear with authority, having researched this emoji with the same tactics lexicographers use when defining a new word, the eggplant emoji is a symbolic penis. The goat emoji is used as a stand-in for the acronym GOAT, meaning Greatest of All Time. And the upside-down face emoji may convey “silliness, sarcasm, passive aggression, or frustrated resignation.”

Dictionary.com is not trying to insist that emoji are words, though they can function like old-fashioned letter-blobs. The company has not even defined them, per se. Lexicographer Jane Solomon compares what they’re providing to usage notes, paragraphs found alongside definitions that give additional context about how and when a word is used. The explanations for the first batch of about 20 emoji are more conversational and informal than your traditional ˈdik-shə-ner-ē fare. They tellingly live on the editorial part of Dictionary.com’s website.

Me, I'm in favor of this sort of codification. Emoji are a genuinely cool evolution of our daily communications; among other things, they have -- as linguists told me when I researched this a while ago for Wired -- consistent linguistic rules for use. (We most often put face emoji before other emoji, because face emoji convey our "stance" -- the emotional tone of the sentence we're constructing out of images.) I'll be interested to see how emoji start cropping up in Strunk-and-White-style writing guides in the years to come. Read the rest

Untitled (the flower game) is a gorgeous game -- playable online, or via a downloadable app -- where you draw a gradually evolving flower, using the left-right keys.

It offers two styles of play -- an "arcade mode", where you race to hit as many red targets as possible, and a "drawing machine" mode, where you just use the game to draw gorgeous, symmetrical designs. I've been zoning out for fifteen minutes using the latter, and I'm calmer than I've felt all week, heh.

The game is a creation of KR Pipkin and Loren Schmidt, who describe it thusly:

This small game is half drawing machine and half bullet-hell. Player characters, enemies and barriers are duplicated geometrically around a center point, creating a kaleidoscopic structure. As these objects are moved through space, they leave trails which are permanent until erased by an enemy or another moving element, drawing patterns in space.

Read the rest

Robin Sloan, the author of wonderful novels like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, also spends his time messing around with neural nets that compose and transform language in delightful ways.

His latest experiment? An engine that lets you input two sentences -- and it generates a "sentence gradient": i.e. a bunch of plausible sentences that gradually slide from the meaning of the first one to the meaning of the second one.

The results are pretty surreal, as you can see from sentence-pair above that Robin uses as an example. As he notes ...

So, does that sentence gradient make sense? I honestly don’t know. Is it useful? Probably not! But I do know it’s interesting, and the larger artifact—the continuous sentence space—feels very much like something worth exploring.

The fun part is you can input your own sentence pairings and see what the system outputs. I did a few, and they're quite surreal, such as ...

Or there's this ...

Then I got the idea to input the first and last sentences of a work of literature. Here's Moby Dick ...

... and here's the American national anthem:

This is pretty mesmerizing, I gotta say. Read the rest

Here's a fascinating finding: When the NRA holds its annual convention, the national rate of gun injuries goes down temporarily by 20% -- seemingly because the 80,000-odd attendees are hanging out and listening to talks, instead of handling their guns.

That's the finding by two researchers -- Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School and Andrew Olenski of Columbia University -- who crunched the numbers. They looked at the rates of hospital ER visits and hospitalizations for firearm injuries, during the actual days of NRA convention dates and in periods three weeks before and after. Sure enough, the accident rate dropped significantly during the convention dates.

One would expect, if you took the NRA's own arguments at face value, for its members to be among the best-trained folks around guns, with a relatively low accident rate. But as Scientific American writes ...

If guns were perfectly safe in the hands of trained NRA members, Jena and Olenski reasoned, they should have found no differences between gun injury rates on convention days versus other days. Yet injury rates were, on average, 20 percent lower on meeting days. “We believe this is due to brief reductions in gun use during the dates of these meetings,” Jena says. “The main implication is that guns carry inherent risk even among individuals who we might consider to be skilled and experienced in the use of firearms.” Importantly, they did not find any corresponding drop in firearm crime rates on convention days, which suggests NRA meeting attendees are not responsible for a large proportion of U.S.

Read the rest

There's a good, long piece in this issue of Smithsonian about the scientific debate over whether trees talk to one another.

Trees certainly communicate. In forests, they're connected to each other through underground fungal networks (sometimes jokingly referred to as the "wood wide web"), and they'll send carbon back and forth as needed, as ecologist Suzanne Simard explained in her wildly viral TED Talk on tree-to-tree networks.

But while scientists agree that trees pick up on each other's signals, there's a question of intent. Are the trees intentionally trying to send messages to other trees? Or are they just broadcasting messages ambiently -- in the matter of course of, y'know, being trees -- that other trees just happen to pick up? Are some tree scientists overly anthropomorphizing trees, with talk of tree "mothers" that warn their child-trees of danger, or younger trees that actively try to keep alive elder, progenitor trees?

It's a damn cool area of science, either way. Here's a taste of the Smithsonian piece, which is really worth reading in full:

Once, he came across a gigantic beech stump in this forest, four or five feet across. The tree was felled 400 or 500 years ago, but scraping away the surface with his penknife, Wohlleben found something astonishing: the stump was still green with chlorophyll. There was only one explanation. The surrounding beeches were keeping it alive, by pumping sugar to it through the network. “When beeches do this, they remind me of elephants,” he says.

Read the rest

Rhino Stew Productions has produced a new game – David Lynch Teaches Typing.

I won't give out too many spoilers here, but suffice to say, it gets weird quickly. Read the rest

Garnette Cadogan, an old-school flâneur and essayist, wrote a fantastic piece describing the differences between walking while black in his home county of Jamaica, compared to New Orleans and New York City in the US.

As he notes, he developed his habit of late-night strolling as a tween in Jamaica of the 1980s, when the streets were wracked with violence, and you could "get killed if a political henchman thought you came from the wrong neighborhood, or even if you wore the wrong color". Yet he found it even more destabilizing to walk in US cities, where he was the subject to endless suspicion from other passersby and the police. He winds up finding it difficult to achieve precisely what city-walking is supposed to permit: That feeling of losing yourself in your surroundings.

There's so much great detail and nuanced observation in this piece, you should go read it all; but this passage near the end struck me as particularly deft. Cadogan talks about the randomness -- the capriciousness -- with which police or other people would suddenly threaten him in US cities, and how that's particularly psychologically wearing:

I realized that what I least liked about walking in New York City wasn’t merely having to learn new rules of navigation and socialization—every city has its own. It was the arbitrariness of the circumstances that required them, an arbitrariness that made me feel like a child again, that infantilized me. When we first learn to walk, the world around us threatens to crash into us.

Read the rest

In this paper, law professor Lynn Lopucki ponders the question: What happens if you turn over control of a corporate entity to an AI?

Pretty terrible stuff. Odds are high you'd see them emerge first in criminal enterprises, as ways of setting up entities that engage in nefarious activities but cannot be meaningfully punished (in human terms, anyway), even if they're caught, he argues. Given their corporate personhood in the US, they'd enjoy the rights to own property, to enter into contracts, to legal counsel, to free speech, and to buy politicians -- so they could wreak a lot of havoc.

The prospect of AI running firms and exploiting legal loopholes has been explored in cyberpunk sci-fi, so it's mesmerizing to watch the world of real-world law start to grapple with this. It's coming on the tails of various thinkers pointing out that Silicon Valley's fears of killer AI are predicated on the idea that AIs would act in precisely the way today's corporations do: i.e. that they'd be remorselessly devoted to their self-interest, immortal and immoral, and regard humans as mere gut-flora -- to use Cory's useful metaphor -- towards pursuance of their continued existence. Or to put it another way, corporations already evince much of the terrifying behavior LoPucki predicts we'll see from algorithmic entities; it's not clear that any world government is willing to bring to justice any of the humans putatively in control of today's crimedoing firms, so even the moral immunity you'd see in AIs is basically already in place. Read the rest

The folks at Priceonomics crunched some data and found that one-star product reviews online are more likely to have incorrect spelling and grammar than five-star ones. As they note:

According to our data, negative reviews have a higher rate of misspelled words and a higher rate of incorrectly used apostrophes. They tend to be longer and have more details as well. Five-star reviews typically are shorter and often don’t include punctuation. Across the board, reviewers make a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes – only 61% of reviews passed all our quality checks.

From our findings, we can say that when people are writing negative reviews, they create longer and more error-filled prose than those who are sharing positive reviews.

One could, of course, shake one's head and conclude that trolls who like to tear things down are more incoherent than people who are trying to praise something. And that's probably not entirely wrong, given the bimodal review-wars online. But the data here are actually kind of intriguing, because it turns out that the reviews with the highest incidence of spelling errors are actually the three-star reviews ...

... and when it comes to using apostrophes, it's the four-star reviews that have the most errors, followed by three-star; here, the one-star reviews are quite good, quite close to the precision-rate of the five-star reviews:

So it looks as though the less-well-appointed grammar is coming out the middle of the review-pack, not the bimodal head and tail.

But! As the Priceonomics folks point out, spelling and grammar aren't necessarily always the best index of coherence. Read the rest