Shardcore (previously) writes, "I took Godley & Creme's seminal 1985 video and sent it through a StyleGAN network." Read the rest

Jon Cog writes, "For Christmas, mathematician Donald Knuth shared some great geeky fun. He revealed how for the last 57 years, he's been incorporating the digits of pi into the exercises of his computer programming books -- a whopping 1,700 times. And before long his annual 'Christmas Tree' lecture 'had turned into a kind of intellectual funhouse,' sharing other mind-boggling pi-related miscellanies." Read the rest

Robbo sez, "As is my wont, I post on social media at this time of year John Lennon & Yoko Ono's Happy Xmas (War Is Over) official YouTube video. It is an anthem for peace and the end of war. This year it has been labelled as "inappropriate content" and requires viewers to sign in to confirm they are 18 years or older. Yes, there are images of war and suffering within the video - but for cryin' out fuckin' loud, YouTube, it's something that deserves and should be seen and heard by everyone, all the damned time - such dumb ass fuckery is going to be the end of our so-called civilization." Read the rest

Andy Moore writes, "My friend the marvelous Ms. Truelove Waits made a song containing election advice for anyone in the UK confused about who to vote for this Thursday." (I am a member of the Labour Party and a donor to the 2019 campaign). Read the rest

Chris Knight recorded a video of the bees in his backyard and wanted to accompany it with a rendition of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 1899 composition "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Read the rest

Today is International Human Rights Day, and Storylab has arranged for a special free online screening of "The Crossing: Your Impact on Modern Day Slavery," via the interactive Hubhub platform, which lets viewers annotate and discuss videos, with comments linked to specific moments in the video. The video includes a special introduction by Emma Thompson, the project's patron. Read the rest

Cards Against Humanity asked Spencer Kelly to teach a computer to write mean, funny joke-cards for a new, AI-based expansion pack to the game; Kelly trained the popular GPT-2 generative language model (previously) on existing cards, and now the company is livestreaming a 16-hour competition between its AI and its human joke-writers, with a voting system to up/downvote the resulting jokes (at the end of the day, these votes will be "tallied up and thrown in the garbage"). You can choose to buy the resulting packs, and if the human team outsells the robots, it will receive a $5,000 bonus. If they fail, they will all be fired. Read the rest

149 families' home movies are archived on Open Memory Box, a massive archive of 415 hours of footage from the former East German, shot from 1947-1990. The video is indexed and searchable by 2700 search-terms, and makes for fascinating browsing as well. (via Kottke) Read the rest

Post 10 is a vlogger who devotes his channel to "videos of unclogging culverts and drains, trains, experiments, machines, animals, trailcams, howto, aquariums, reviews, things I love and much more." I just spent an hour watching this fellow unclog storm drains during ferocious rain storms and marveling as he created gigantic whirlpools that despatched lake-sized puddles in parking lots and roads, leaving behind navigable surfaces. It's not just soothing TV, it's also inspirational to watch this guy play Anarchist Department of Public Works and freelance his town's hydrology problems. If you enjoy Mr 10's videos, you can celebrate them with a DRAIN IT! tee. (via Metafilter) Read the rest

C4D4U's SOFTBODY TETRIS V16 is (as the name implies), the latest in a series of "softbody" simulations of Tetris, in which the tetronimoes are rubbery, jelly-like solids that glisten as they wobble into place. It's an incredibly soothing thing to watch (C4D4U calls them "ASMR for my eyes") and part of a wider genre of softbody sims. JWZ argues that this "becomes intolerable" upon the "realization that completed rows don't liquify" but if that's your thing, you need SOFTBODY TETRIS V9. Read the rest

NZ Green Party MP Chlöe Swarbrick was giving a speech in favour of stricter carbon emissions standards when the 50-year-old National Party Climate Critic Todd Muller heckled her; without missing a beat, she fired back "OK Boomer" and moved on to making a rather good and eloquent point about need for intense action on climate. Read the rest

Vinay Gupta (previously) is a polymath engineer/inventor, whose Buckminster Fuller-inspired "hexayurts" can be found all over Burning Man (and my novel Walkaway). Read the rest

Mark Anderson is the proprietor of Aethervision, which has a simple premise: "Each week, I release a weekly news recap which covers 5 news items using nothing but footage from pre-1924 footage." These are spectacular and mesmerizing. Read the rest

The Activist is a new 5-part series from Peter Sunde (previously), AKA brokep, who cofounded The Pirate Bay and also founded Flattr. Read the rest

The Intercept's political editor Ryan Grim chaired a 10-minute, backstage conversation between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders at a rally in Queens last weekend, just before AOC endorsed Sanders' bid for the Democratic Party's nomination for the 2020 presidential race. The pair describe their theory of change and how they can get their agenda enacted. (I am a donor to both Bernie Sanders' and Elizabeth Warren's campaigns) Read the rest

Trimbandit's Scary Animated Zombie Groundbreaker Instructable uses two pneumatics to make a partially buried zombie jerk and pitch and seem to try to claw its way out of your lawn -- it's an incredibly effective illusion, one that capitalizes on the jerking, sudden motions of the pneumatic to lend a terrifying, otherworldly vigor that makes the mannequin skinned over the pneumatics seem like the living dead. Read the rest

Nathan Davis writes, "When you shuffle a deck, it rearranges the order of the cards and I got wondering what that looked like. Read the rest