nikhil.io

A highly configurable, free-for-private-use typeface

Oh how I love a good David Mitchell rant. This one’s on avoiding taxation via pension contributions:

[. . . ] what we’re essentially saying is that people get to choose, if they’re rich, how much they reckon they out to pay. Where on this moral scale do they place themselves, what can they square with their greed and their conscience.

And that’s an insane system because ultimately, that is a tax on conscience. That means that the conscience you’ve got, the better person you are, the more you pay in tax. So we’re taxing being nice.

Now any economist will tell you that what you do in government is you tax the thing you discourage and you don’t tax the thing you want to encourage. So we tax nicotine, because we want to discourage smoking. We tax alcohol, we want to discourage drinking. But we don’t tax pension contributions because we want to encourage people to put things into their pensions.

So what we’re doing is we’re discouraging people from being nice and having a conscience by taxing it. And that is the most fucking bonkers system that we could’ve possibly come across.

via DH.

Binged this. Narcos (kinda) + Gangs of Wasseypur. Violent, stylish, predictable. Pankaj Tripathi is excellent.

The 41-year-old actor had nine releases last year, of which he bagged a special mention at the National Film Awards for his performance in ‘Newton’. “With the films I am offered today, I’m satisfied, in the sense that from the last two months, I have been choosing really good scripts. But I’m still searching for that one script which would truly amaze me, challenge me. It will take time and I’ll get what I want. I am an actor here but my approach is still that of a farmer. I’ve sowed the seeds, now I’m waiting for the plant to grow. I’m in no rush,” he said.

As wonderful as the first one. Could not fucking stand Sarah Silverman’s cloying Vanellope von Schweetz, which I suppose was the intended effect.

Venom goes from evil alien mastermind who wants to take over the planet to Toothless in “How to Train Your Dragon” in about five minutes.

His new motivations make no sense whatsoever.

But in the case of Venom, the action follows nothing. There’s no reason for Venom to risk his life because he doesn’t seem to care about people, and it’s never been his arc to learn about why caring for humanity is important. Venom is not about an alien symbiote coming to Earth and learning that people are worth saving. It’s about a cannibalistic, violent force who merges with a hapless shmuck and decides to stick around. Venom’s sacrifice means nothing because even if you buy that he’d be willing to save Earth, that’s different than being willing to die to save it.

– Matt Goldberg, “The Ending of ‘Venom’ Is Familiar Except It Makes No Sense”

Honest Trailers on the movie. I suppose it’s all forgiven if you make $0.9B. Of course there’s a sequel. Of course I’ll watch it.

Watched with LD. Clever, clever! Loved all but the last 15 minutes.

NPR on why many of us can identify with little Agnes:

The study found that for the entire group of participants, cuter creatures were associated with greater activity in brain areas involved in emotion. But the more cute aggression a person felt, the more activity the scientists saw in the brain’s reward system.

That suggests people who think about squishing puppies appear to be driven by two powerful forces in the brain. “It’s not just reward and it’s not just emotion,” Stavropoulos says. “Both systems in the brain are involved in this experience of cute aggression.”

The combination can be overwhelming. And scientists suspect that’s why the brain starts producing aggressive thoughts. The idea is that the appearance of these negative emotions helps people get control of the positive ones running amok.

“It could possibly be that somehow these expressions help us to just sort of get it out and come down off that baby high a little faster,” says Oriana Aragón, an assistant professor at Clemson University who was part of the Yale team that gave cute aggression its name.

– Jon Hamilton, “When Too Cute Is Too Much, The Brain Can Get Aggressive”

Shturmovshchina was a common Soviet work practice of frantic and overtime work at the end of a planning period in order to fulfill the planned production target. The practice usually gave rise to products of poor quality at the end of a planning cycle.

It has three very, very familiar stages

• Spiachka (hibernation) – this is the first third of the planned period. Nobody’s doing anything, mostly because there are no orders to do anything
• Raskachka (buildup) – at this stage it is more or less known what should be done, but there is too much time ahead, and during that time the requirements may change, as well as the management;
• Goriachka (fever) – this is the last stage of the planned period; by the end of this stage the product is supposed to be ready, or the management may be reprimanded; everybody works like crazy, with the bright future being so near.

This is absolutely beautiful. I’m happy there’s a way to generate music that sounds like one of my favorite tracks.

Excellent stuff. Tabu is a National Treasure 🙌 Second Sriram Raghavan movie, first being Ek Hasina Thi.

'Posting’ in the pen world refers to what you do with your pen cap while you write [. . .] when you put the cap on the back of the pen while you write, regardless of whether it pushes on or screws on with threads.

and

[. . .] what do you do with the cap? Do you put it on the desk? Hold it in your hand? Both of these would be ‘non-posting’ or ‘unposted’ writing methods.

– The Goulet Pen Co.

I write unposted, have done so my whole life, and think that people who post are weird, pitiable, and simply wrong.

TL;DW? Denzel Washington is Liam Neeson from Taken (with a lot of that movie’s tropes.) Over on Reddit, an essential discussion of who would win a fight. Features my favorite hipster-henchman, Tait Fletcher whom I last saw in The Accountant.

Loved the first half of this song:

Dan Fogler is as awesome in this one as he was in the first. A role he was born to play:

Did you feel like you had an advantage while auditioning because you’re actually from New York?

I think I brought some real authenticity to it. I grew up in Brooklyn. When I read the part, I thought, “Oh, man, I know this guy. He’s one of my ancestors.” I have a great-grandfather, Isaac, who was a baker in New York on the Lower East Side. It’s really surreal stepping into the role. I felt like it was written for me. I felt like he was family already, so I loved him.

Then I paid homage to a lot of my favorite actors from that era, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton. When Eddie and I are together, it’s like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. I tried to infuse him with all of that great, elegant kind of comedy, that real physical kind of comedy. Also [James] Cagney. I liked how Cagney stood. He was very conservative in his motions – because I’m such a broad, wacky guy, I thought that it helped me stay in the period. Cut to me flailing and running like a maniac. [Laughs.]

– From an interview with The Los Angeles Times’ Meredith Worner

Dijkstra on why numbering should start from zero.

Numbering is done with natural numbers. Let’s take zero to be the smallest natural number¹. For the sequence (2, 3, 4, … ,12), using the convention (2 ≤ n < 13) is appropriate because

• For a sequence starting with zero, like (0, 1, 2, 3), the left hand condition leaks into unnatural numbers if you use “less than”: (-1 < n).
• For an empty sequence, the right hand also leaks into the unnatural if you use “less than or equal to”: (n ≤ 0)

And minorly, because these are the true of another convention (1 < n ≤ 12)

• Difference between bounds (13 - 2 = 11) is the length of the sequence
• I know that these two sequences are adjacent: (2 ≤ n < 13) and (13 ≤ n < 24)

All that’s prep for:

When dealing with a sequence of length N, the elements of which we wish to distinguish by subscript, the next vexing question is what subscript value to assign to its starting element. Adhering to convention a) yields, when starting with subscript 1, the subscript range 1 ≤ i < N+1; starting with 0, however, gives the nicer range 0 ≤ i < N. So let us let our ordinals start at zero: an element’s ordinal (subscript) equals the number of elements preceding it in the sequence. And the moral of the story is that we had better regard – after all those centuries!² – zero as a most natural number.

There’s also this little nugget

I think Antony Jay is right when he states: “In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.”

by Kawanabe Kyosai, Kyosai rakuga¹, 1881.

More of his stuff here. As far as band names go, “Hell Courtesan” is metal as fuck.

An interactive model of the office from The Office 😍

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

via.

Okay, but a paper can publish an article on Gravitational Waves authored by someone with a background in Physics on the same day as an article on makeup in the movies by a veteran showbiz reporter. Maybe I’m cherrypicking and he’s talking about the average overall quality. That being said, I do know that I wouldn’t have any MGM amnesia after reading, say, the The National Enquirer’s offerings on either topic.

Heard this and was made aware of this timeless album for the first time at a very strange party at Iowa State. RIP Sam Zaman.

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

Lawdamercy

by Dani Donovan

For a single project I made the mistake of working on in my Dropbox folder:

Wonder what the downsides are to hardlinking by default. And, fundamentally, why creating an amazing, Python-like standard library is such an intractable problem in the first place.

🤦‍♂️ The portion of the article that listed functionally similar packages and is-* packages was particularly dismaying. As he points out, there’s a good reason why jQuery and lodash are as immensely popular as they are¹.

Megan Garber for The Atlantic

This week, as the allegations against Tyson were gaining attention in the American media, Bloomberg published a report about the men of Wall Street and how they have decided to address the revealed abuses of #MeToo. “No more dinners with female colleagues” is one solution they have come to. “Don’t sit next to them on flights” is another. And “book hotel rooms on different floors.” And “avoid one-on-one meetings.” Having had more than a year to listen and learn and adjust to the new information, most of the men Bloomberg spoke with have looked around, searched their souls, and come to a tidy conclusion: “Avoid women at all cost.” ¹

The consequences of this conclusion, for the women on the other end of it, are obvious: The women will miss opportunities for mentorship and fellowship and advancement. Their very presence will be interpreted as its own potential danger: to men’s reputations, to men’s prospects, to men’s careers. The women will, in this ingenious new strain of American Puritanism, be softly shunned: as seductive, as vindictive—as professional threats.

Emphasis mine. And

Lin Farley ² wrote in The New York Times last year, and in its absence the term sexual harassment has become too unwieldy, too imprecise, too commercialized. As the writer Rebecca Traister put it, “We must regularly remind everyone paying attention that sexual harassment is a crime not simply on the grounds that it is a sexual violation, but because it is a form of discrimination.”

and

They accuse; he denies; sexual misconduct and its defense; point and counterpoint; the scientific method. But what gets lost in the easy binaries? What of the lives and careers and ambitions of the people doing the accusing—people who, in coming forward with their allegations, will have their names permanently entangled with the man they say did them harm? The stories of those who have lived in Tyson’s orbit have served as reminders that, here on Earth, we remain biased toward the stars.

“Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Careers That Weren’t”

The original comic

• Advent of Code (via BE, 25 challenges.)
• The Elevator Saga (via co-worker, 18 challenges.)

Three years late but what an absolutely beautiful game!

“One of my main goals when designing ‘Prune’ was to respect the player’s intelligence and to respect their time, whether that player is 4 or 74,” McDonald said. “So much of the mobile game market just does not do this incredibly simple thing of respecting their players as actual human beings whose time is precious.”

– Business Week, “How a half-fallen tree inspired the hottest iPhone game right now”

Inter UI looks beautiful, comes in all sorts of weights, has thousands of glyphs, and is free 💗 (via Arun Venkatesan’s blog.)

Source

Vulture’s 2018 Guide to Soundcloud Rappers wherein they’re classified by name: “The Lil’s” (Lil Pump/Xan/Skies/Wop/Yachty/Uzi Vert/Peep), “The Adjectives”, “The Creative Spellers”, and “The (Almost) Full Sentences”.

I’ll take this one.

ExecutedToday.com has been publishing “the story of an historical execution that took place on this date, and the story behind it” since October 2007.

The death penalty, as a subset within that vast category of “acts of violence homo sapiens do to their fellows,” blends insensibly into a dozen adjacent territories — murder, assassination, warfare, torture, low crime and high statecraft, even suicide.

That being said, it does not aim to be “an all-purpose chronicle of human cruelty.”

Because Internet. And why not, really?

Via co-worker DH. Dara Ó Briain on how Racism is better than Astrology:

Racism is one of the worst social evils they can imagine. “How dare you do that?” they say. "How dare you ascribe to me personality traits? You don’t even know me, but you tell me that you know me, and you know these things about me, and you say I share these personality traits with this huge group of people, and I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and you say not only do we have the same character traits, but we have some sort of common history and some common destiny, and you make all of these horrible presumptions on the back of what? On the back of a fluke of birth. How dare you do that?

What? Ooh, Capricorn.

Decent thriller. Cannot get over the fact that the antagonist’s makeup was awful and kept reminding me of the coconut and turmeric Varalakshmi Puja heads from my childhood ¹.

Which looks like this in a cheap wig

Because I saw Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher in the cast. And they were excellent.

The climax is an absolute knock-out with an accolade-winning speech by Naseer who becomes a flag-bearer for all those nameless, ordinary people battling with this modern-day scourge, the world over. The highpoint of the film is the class act by the two stalwarts of the industry: Naseer and Anupam pitch in riveting performances as the shuffling, seemingly inconsequential, nameless bomber and the no-nonsense cop. Add to this some finely nuanced acts by Jimmy Shergill and Aamir Bashir and you have a topical, gritty, high-adrenalin drama.

– Times of India

Neeraj Pandey wrote and directed “Special 26” as well.

Title made me think it was a sequel. Not bad as far as remakes go.

Terrible. Expected this, so not sure why I did this to myself. Thought it was a weird mashup of Varsham and Dredd. Features this ‘Grandmaster Shifuji’ who attempts to act like a Kung Fu/Kalari master in the movie and a combat veteran and “special forces trainer” in real life.

Watching what they did to Sunil Grover and Sanjay Mishra’s talents was depressing. As for Kota Srinivasa Rao: they used a North Indian voice actor to dub over his South Indian accent… with a ghastly South Indian accent 😐

Just terrible.

Ross Pomeroy for RealClearScience, “What’s the Most Efficient Language?”

[. . .] travel the world and record at least a dozen speakers of every language reading those passages aloud at their normal cadence. Count the overall number of syllables used for each passage and measure the time it took subjects to read their passage. Divide the syllable count by time to get the number of syllables spoken per second. Next, come up with some value for how much meaning is packed into each syllable, which will give you an average information density per syllable. Finally, use those values to derive an “information rate.”

and

English came out on top, but not by much. Most of languages grouped pretty closely together, however, Japanese lagged behind the rest. Interestingly, the languages that conveyed the least amount of information per syllable, like Spanish, Japanese, and French, tended to be spoken at a faster rate. This allowed these languages (apart from Japanese) to deliver a similar amount of information compared to more meaning-dense languages like Mandarin and English.

Jonathan McWhorter for The Atlantic, “The World’s Most Efficient Languages”

When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself.

In contrast, one cannot help suspecting that not too many adults have been tackling the likes of sǝq’ayǝƛaaɣwǝaɣhaś. Kabardian has been left to its own devices, and my, has it hoarded a lot of them. This is, as languages go, normal, even if Kabardian is rather extreme. By contrast, only a few languages have been taken up as vehicles of empire and imposed on millions of unsuspecting and underqualified adults. Long-dominant Mandarin, then, is less “busy” than Cantonese and Taiwanese, which have been imposed on fewer people. English came out the way it did because Vikings, who in the first millennium forged something of an empire of their own in northern and western Europe, imposed themselves on the Old English of the people they invaded and, as it were, mowed it. German, meanwhile, stayed “normal.”

In Ithkuil, “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx” translates to “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point.” 😐

I think we all know John McWhorter is not to be relied upon when he ventures away from his bailiwick of creole languages, which he is frequently called on to do since he has become the go-to linguistics popularizer, but he does have a pleasant prose style and it’s always fun to argue about his overgeneralizations and sometimes wacky obiter dicta (like the one about the Awful Russian Language).

– Steve Dodson, Language Hat, Efficient Languages

From Soutik Biswas’, “The Simpsons: Not all Indians think Apu is a racist stereotype”

“As I see it, there are two primary products that second generation Indian American comedians sell - the ridiculousness of their parents’ ‘culture’ (arranged marriage and ‘my son, the doctor’ are the commonest tropes); and the racism of white Americans,” Professor Chakravorty, who teaches at Temple University in Pennsylvania, told me in an email interview .

“It is not hard to see why these two lowest hanging fruits are plucked all the time. This is very standard fare. Apu is also very standard fare. What Kondabulu has done is nothing new. He picked almost the most identifiable Indian project possible in the US. And he plugged into the market for identity-based outrage.”

and

“I like Apu, in fact I love him. He has a PhD in computer science, but enjoys running his store, he is a valued citizen of Springfield, a ladies man and adores cricket and is funny,” Sidharth Bhatia, Mumbai-based founder-editor of The Wire, told me.

“It reflects true American diversity. The controversy about the stereotyping is classist snobbery - Indians in America don’t want to be reminded of a certain kind of immigrant from their country - the shop keepers, the taxi drivers, the burger flippers,” says Mr Bhatia.

“They would rather project only Silicon Valley successes, the Wall Street players and the Ivy League products, with the proper accents, people they meet for dinner - by itself a stereotype. The millions of Apus in America, the salt-of-the-earth types, with their less ‘posh’ accents, are an inconvenience to that self-image of this small group of Indian-Americans.”

Bingo.

His accent apart, Apu is a Midwestern pillar. Would the critics really have him speak like the other characters in the show, as if to say you’re not American unless you sound like someone from Des Moines? Are all caricatured accents racist? Should we ban “foreigners” from comedy shows altogether?

Naturally not—because we wouldn’t, then, have Apu. And can you really imagine America without him?

– Tunku Varadarajan, Leave Apu Alone – He’s a Great American

To quote Lewis Black entirely out of context: on a list of priorities, this “is on page six after ‘Are we eating too much garlic as a people?’”

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

and

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

– Alain de Botton, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

Minute Physics on how Muons reaching terrestrial detectors from the upper atmosphere are direct proof of time dilation/length contraction in Special Relativity.

What a Boss 🙏 💯

Mr. Thomas and the photographer Emily Shur rented a home in Los Angeles for a weekend in May. There, they shot several images that harked back to Mr. Rockwell’s “Freedom From Want,” one in a series of four paintings inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 speech to Congress celebrating America’s freedom and democratic values.

“The image haunted me because of the world we live in,” the artist said, referring to today’s divisive political climate. “I wanted to imagine what it would look like today.”

– The New York Times

Some recreations

– Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur

A lot of parodies of the painting here as well.

Roel Nieskens “leveraged the synergy of ligatures” to create a free typeface called Sans Bullshit Sans.

It turns this

The value proposition of our agile mindset and scrum methodology is to enable the emergence of disruptive, convergent, crowdsourced platforms that allow our clients to lean in and engage in collective mindshare on established design patterns using the latest usercentric technologies empowered by the cloud.

into this

Here’s how he made it. Fucking brilliant. I saved a list of the terms and phrases that cause the ligatures. On a related note, I’d be bullshitting myself if maintain any hope of finishing this tiny book at some point.

By Mike Medaglia who’s published an illustrated guide to mindfulness 🙏

As if I needed another reason to fall in love with Tilda Swinton

Swinton penned a phony IMDb biography to keep the secret, and wore fake genitalia, created by makeup artist Mark Coulier, while in character. (“She did have us make a penis and balls,” Coulier told the paper. “She had this nice, weighty set of genitalia so that she could feel it dangling between her legs, and she managed to get it out on set on a couple of occasions.”) Both she and Guadagnino were miffed when their secret got out. “Frankly, my long-held dream was that we would never have addressed this question at all,” Swinton told the Times. “My original idea was that Lutz would die during the edit, and his ‘In Memoriam’ be the final credit in the film.”

– Vulture

😳

Ankeny or Saudi Arabia? If you had to choose one to live in, which would you pick?

Depends. One is full of religious wackos, and the other one is in a desert.

– /r/desmoines

Behold the beautiful Secretarybird 🙌

– Source Unknown

Way out of other birds’ leagues, eats venomous snakes, and “appears on the coats of arms of Sudan and South Africa” 🔥

Designed by Pininfarina all the way back in 1970 (!) 😍 🤤

In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achieving scalability. It’s not because we don’t need to solve scalability problems, but because the infrastructure is good enough for most of companies. Building and operating so called “big data platform” used to be hard, not that hard any more. Building machine learning pipeline used to be hard, not that hard any more for many companies. Of course, it’s still challenging to build a highly flexible and automated machine learning pipeline with full support of closed feedback loop, but many companies can get by without that level of maturity.

– via Hacker News (emphasis mine)

Tech Yaks ranks and lists good tech talks.

Some awesome stuff on there, like one of my favorite talks ever by Guy Steele. “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos” by Bryan Cantrill, the second-most popular one on the list, is very entertaining and needs to be watched many times (and at 0.75x speed.)

Based on “–All You Zombies–” by Robert A. Heinlein. Sarah Snook is phenomenal. But “John Doe” is an extended, uncredited cameo by Leonardo Di Caprio and I won’t be convinced otherwise.

Like if Rashomon and The Usual Suspects had a child. The ending got me.

Deeply upsetting. One of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen. Anthony Lane of The New Yorker on what gives it its potency

Should you want to measure the psychological disturbance at work here, try comparing “Hereditary” with “A Quiet Place.” That recent hit, for all its masterly shocks, is at bottom a reassuring film, introducing people who are beset by an external menace but more or less able to pull through because, as a team, they’re roped together with enough love to fight back. “Hereditary” is more perplexing. It has the nerve to suggest that the social unit is, by definition, self-menacing, and that the home is no longer a sanctuary but a crumbling fortress, under siege from within. That is why there are no doctors in Aster’s film, and no detectives, either, urgently though both are required; nor does a man of God arrive, as he does in “The Exorcist” (1973), to lay the anguish to rest. Nothing, in short, can help Annie, Steve, and the kids, and they sure can’t help themselves, stationed as they are inside their delicate doll’s house of a world. There is no family curse in this remarkable movie. The family is the curse.

The amazing Colin Stetson did the soundtrack which is somehow even more unsettling than Brian Reitzell’s Hannibal.

😴. Watch for Tom Cruise being a stuntmaking beast (esp in the helicopter chase scene.)