Author Archives: Mike Roselli
Maria Cramer, in the New York Times:
Joshua Hawkins said the request seemed “pretty weird,” but the dark-haired man who made it was offering cash, and a lot of it.
The man said his name was Nate and he wanted Mr. Hawkins, a local artist, to paint an enormous Soviet-style mural of Cookie Monster — the voracious, pastry-loving “Sesame Street” creature — and three Russian words on a commercial building in Peoria, Ill.
When the job was done over Thanksgiving weekend, the man paid in full and Mr. Hawkins, 33, proudly displayed the mural on his Facebook page.
But Mr. Hawkins learned C can also be for Caper.
Less than a week after the mural went up, Mr. Hawkins said he received a call from the real Nate Comte, who said he had never commissioned the Cookie Monster mural.
The mural was short lived, but as Cookie Monster likes to say, “No cry because cookie is finished. Smile because cookie happened.”
Published by NASA JPL by Marc Rayman:
In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger.
That’s a pretty small margin of error I’d say.
Nadine DeNinno, reporting for the New York Post:
The show, which is also executive produced by Little Marvin, has fans labeling it a “knockoff” and “copycat” of Peele’s past work while another pointed out it’s “both Jordan Peele movies combined.”
“This feels like someone whos never seen a Jordan Peele movie describing what a Jordan Peele movie is like,” one commenter wrote.
“Jordan Peele has given us two black horror movies and now they’re copying him already,” added another.
One Twitter user even poked fun at the series’ title, “they even ripped off the ‘Us’ title and called it ‘THEM,'”
Amazon has been embracing knock-off practices across the board, I’m surprised it took this long for their foray into original streaming content to do so as well.
“I remember the first meeting where I actually told a city council that it was costing more to recycle than it was to dispose of the same material as garbage,” she says, “and it was like heresy had been spoken in the room: You’re lying. This is gold. We take the time to clean it, take the labels off, separate it and put it here. It’s gold. This is valuable.”
But it’s not valuable, and it never has been. And what’s more, the makers of plastic — the nation’s largest oil and gas companies — have known this all along, even as they spent millions of dollars telling the American public the opposite…
Larry Thomas, Lew Freeman and Ron Liesemer, former industry executives, helped oil companies out of the first plastic crisis by getting people to believe something the industry knew then wasn’t true: That most plastic could be and would be recycled…
“I don’t think anything has changed,” Thomas says. “Sounds exactly the same.”
Its action shares a dynamic split screen series detailing 36 pairings of athletes and relating the kinetic movement of one sport to another. Developed through research of more than 4,000 pieces of footage, the resulting montage underscores commonalities shared by athletes around the world.
This is jaw-dropping video editing. Truly remarkable. I would expect nothing less from a company that has a long history of making a statement with its advertising.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball:
Because it’s not just that Apple’s new $400 iPhone SE offers faster performance than any Android phone money can buy, but that the two-and-a-half-year-old iPhone 8 has better single-threaded performance than any Android phone today — and the iPhone 8 was the phone Apple discontinued for the new $400 iPhone SE. Apple discontinued an iPhone that, if it were an Android phone, would be the fastest in single-threaded performance on the market today.
And on the flip side, what do you get for $400 in Androidtown? Amazon sells the Motorola Moto Z4 for $500. Let’s just spot the Android side $100. The Moto Z4’s single-threaded Geekbench 5 score is about 500. That falls short of an iPhone 6S, a phone from 2015…
What makes our actual situation unprecedented in personal computing history isn’t that one company has maintained a decade-long CPU performance edge over the rest of the industry, but that that one company is keeping those chips exclusively for its own devices.
Seems like The Cook Doctrine is continuing to pay off.
Craig Childs, for The Atlantic:
“Poisonous snakes, reptiles, plants, [and] fish have aposematic coloration that shows off that they are poisonous. Mushrooms don’t,” Bunyard said. “The dangerous ones are all mostly drab or brown, green-brown, bronze. There’s nothing in the taste that tells you what you are eating is about to kill you.”
If a Republican Senate majority leader from Kentucky is willing to squeeze Illinois state pensioners, why would he care about shielding Illinois state taxpayers? The answer is found in the third of the three facts of American fiscal federalism. United States senators from smaller, poorer red states do not only represent their states. Often, they do not even primarily represent their states. They represent, more often, the richest people in bigger, richer blue States who find it more economical to invest in less expensive small-state races…
A federal bankruptcy process for state finances could thus enable wealthy individuals and interest groups in rich states to leverage their clout in the anti-majoritarian federal system to reverse political defeats in the more majoritarian political systems of big, rich states like California, New York, and Illinois.
…McConnell seems to be following the rule “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” He’s realistic enough to recognize that the pandemic probably means the end not only of the Trump presidency, but of his own majority leadership. He’s got until January to refashion the federal government in ways that will constrain his successors. That’s what the state-bankruptcy plan is all about.
Ferris Jabr, in an extremely well researched and written piece for The Atlantic:
Whereas a typical dentist might perform root canals on previously crowned teeth in only 3 to 7 percent of cases, Lund was performing them in 90 percent of cases. As Zeidler later alleged in court documents, Lund had performed invasive, costly, and seemingly unnecessary procedures on dozens and dozens of patients, some of whom he had been seeing for decades.
Absolutely appalling.
It’s easy to see how dentists, hoping to buoy their income, would be tempted to recommend frequent exams and proactive treatments—a small filling here, a new crown there—even when waiting and watching would be better.
When you’re a hammer, the world is your nail. I’ve had my fair share of unnecessary medical work. To this day, I’m extremely skeptical of any proposal from any doctor, especially when there is no perceived problem or pain and the issue is discovered on a routine checkup. There is a significant and inherent conflict of interest when consumers don’t have the ability to understand the recommendations and repercussions of the medical work proposed to them by private doctors whose income is intrinsically linked to the number of procedures performed.