Via Tyler Cowen, what a strip mall developer does when he visits a community where his company wants to invest; he calls this a "US suburban vacation." Sounds interesting, actually, if you don't mind talking to strangers.
Many US states have horribly boring flags, but changing them is hard. Utah recently went to a much more distinctive design, only to be met with a loud and angry "restore our historic flag" movement, complete with accusations that the new design (approved by the Utah legislature) is "woke." (NY Times). We in Maryland love our flag, which may be ugly but is immediately distinctive at any scale and can be used for everything from gym shorts to stained glass.
Thousands of female octopi brooding their eggs by hydrothermal vents off the California coast: 4-minute video, NY Times story.
NY Times piece arguing that while many organizations have modified their written job requirements to say that a college degree is not necessary, people with degrees still have a huge advantage in actually getting a job.
Early plantation slavery on Sao Tome.
At the NY Times, more on not being able to understand the dialogue on TV, says a majority of young Americans watch with the subtitles on. This author suggests separate speakers as a partial fix, because those in flat-screen TVs are lousy.
Three-faced statue of Hecate found in Turkey. The tripling of goddesses (three Fates, nine Muses) is one of those weird, very ancient things that nobody understands, although Dumézil tried to relate it to Indo-European grammar. Plato did write that "Klotho sings of the past, Lachesis of the present, and Atropos of the future." But that could equally be a rationalization imposed on an idea whose origin had long been forgotten, and anyway the Fates are far from the only triple goddesses.
Tweet about the "ice city" Austrian soliders carved out insde the Marmolada glacier during WW I. And a web page about it.
What happens to scientists who fail their Ph.D. exams or thesis defense?
A debate in Japan over a book arguing that the nation's shrinking population provides an opportunity to rethink the economic system and focus on something other than growth. (NY Times) The author thinks that since more growth is unnecessary we should focus on health and leisure. He calls this "Marxist" but when you leave out, you know, class struggle, I'm not sure what you have left is Marxism.
The slave bedroom at Civita Giuliana in Pompeii has been reconstructed.
Four of five Emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica failed to breed this year, probably because the nests were drowned in melting sea ice. If the southern oceans stay this warm for a few more years these penguins will be in big trouble.
Long, weird Scott Siskind essay comparing the troubles AI programmers have controlling their AIs to the trouble evolution has keeping human sexuality focused on reproduction.
The history of smallpox and its complete elimination by vaccines, which were angrily opposed at many points along the way. Includes what may be the first modern trial of a medical technique, in 1725, which found that innoculated patients were about one tenth as likely to die as those who caught smallpox naturally.
The crass nepotism and shady characters responsible for the US military's "official" investigation of UFO phenomena. On Harry Reid: why do successful politicians often turn out to be such weirdos?
Ukraine Links
Some Ukrainian soldiers say the biggest threat they face is kamikaze drones, especially the Lancet, and Thomas Theiner says no NATO army has a solution to this problem, either.
Casualty estimates from unnamed "US officials" on August 17. Russia: 120,000 dead, 170,000 to 180,000 wounded. (Meaning seriously wounded.) Ukraine: 70,000 dead, 100,000 to 120,000 wounded. NY Times.
The most popular video game among Ukrainian soldiers at the front is World of Tanks (NY Times).
The Oryx count now has 503 Russian self-propelled artillery pieces visually confirmed as lost. Along with 2260 tanks, 4200 other armored vehicles, 280 towed artillery, 256 multiple rocket launchers, 150 SAM systems, 43 radars, 51 electronice warfare stations, 86 jet aircraft, 103 helicopters, and 2780 trucks. These staggering losses explain why Russia is now on the defensive, slowly losing ground.
When Yevgeny Prigozhin was assassinated, Zelensky's chief of staff tweeted out AC/DC's "Highway to Hell." And a Wagner euology: "Even in hell, he will be the best."
About Prigozhin: I thought that he was a monstrous person who deserved his fate if anyone did, but his career as a weapon used by Putin and then thrown away is another sign that Russia is in a very, very bad place, with no obvious path toward betterment.
On the night of August 24-25, Ukraine seems to have attacked Crimea and Russia with many more drones and missiles than Russia used to attack Ukraine. A shift in the winds?
Russian security forces desecrate graves in Wagner's cemetery. I don't expect any kind of effective Wagner revolt but I suspect this will be another blow to overall Russian morale, since many Russian soldiers and officers admired Prigozhin more than the army leadership.
There's a new wave of mobilization in Russia, including recent immigrants.
The Dutch attitudes I mentioned before:
July 2014: Russian forces shoot down MH17 above eastern Ukraine. All 298 onboard, including 196 Dutch citizens, are killed.
August 2023: the Netherlands officially announces that we will deliver 42 F-16s to Ukraine.
We did not forget about MH17.
7 comments:
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Many US states have horribly boring flags, but changing them is hard. Utah recently went to a much more distinctive design, only to be met with a loud and angry "restore our historic flag" movement, complete with accusations that the new design (approved by the Utah legislature) is "woke." (NY Times). We in Maryland love our flag, which may be ugly but is immediately distinctive at any scale and can be used for everything from gym shorts to stained glass.
I'm a tad confused that you would talk about historic flags being boring, and then bring up the new Utah flag, which I'm tempted to argue is actually objectively more boring, in that it completely eliminates at least half a dozen distinct elements, adds in only one new element which is quite weak (the negative space "mountain" motif), drops the number of distinct colors from nine to four, and vastly simplifies the geometry of every aspect of the design.
Whatever your opinion of it on grounds of taste or aesthetics*, I feel like you can't reasonably deny it's a simpler, less detailed - and thus more boring - design.
* (I personally find it not only immensely ugly, but also far more evocative of a cynical and sanitized corporate logo rather than a state flag.)
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There also a ton of evidence that the design was corruptly forced through legislation via political favors on behalf of very specific private individuals, in exchange for funding.
A shockingly similar earlier design was put forth by "The Organization for a New Utah Flag", which is a privately-funded entity established by one Richard T. Martin, described by his organization as "a former candidate for Utah governor". I tried to find more information about the man, but he apparently keeps a low profile online.
He apparently sought to run for governor in 2010, on a platform standard Republican platform of slashing public services, etc, with the notable oddity of wanting to stockpile gold and create a "Strategic Food Reserve" for the state of Utah. Seemingly he fell out of the running very early on, as I can't find any trace of his actually making it to the ballot (checking sources such as ballotpedia, politico, etc). Articles from that year refer to him as a "businessman" and a "financial broker", and he makes some pretty outlandish claims, but even relatively supportive articles seem to regard him as an 'also-ran' from the very start.
A quote from Martin during his announcement to run for governor: "I think people will come around once they get to know my ideas. People are tired of boring politicians who are married to the system. I have real ideas."
People very much did not come around, and instead voted for the Republican incumbent he had sought to challenge, who won by landslide.
Anyway, in 2018, Martin founded his private organization devoted to changing the Utah flag, and by 2019 he got the backing of Republican state representative Keven Stratton, who introduced legislation which sought to change the flag to Martin's personally preferred design.
The Salt Lake Tribune described his position thusly: "Martin, a Utah County businessman who ran to be Utah’s governor 2010, said he wants to avoid the perils of design-by-committee. A better process, he said, is to put forward a design created by professionals and get it approved without tinkering that takes away the beauty of a simple, powerful flag."
A quote from Martin at the time: "They either will like this flag or not, and virtually everybody likes it."
The people who liked it were very much not "virtually everybody, as there was an immediate and significant outcry, both from the public and from other lawmakers, with particular focus placed on the fact that the public was wholly excluded from the design selection process in the proposed legislation.
Martin and Stratton quickly backpedaled, and soon announced that they were altering the legislation to ensure the design selection included "public feedback". Ultimately the accepted 5703 design submissions from the public, 2500 of which were "submitted by students".
By 2022, they had reduced the number of designs under consideration to 20. They then gave the public a mere month to "comment" on the finalists. They received only 44,000 responses - equivalent to 1.3% of the total state population of 3.338 million people.
Wouldn't you know it? The final design chosen by the committee just so happened to be one of the designs created by one Jonathan Martin - Richard Martin's son, and also the designer of the original proposed design first put forward by Martin! What an incredible and in not-at-all-suspicion-raising coincidence!
Despite statements from Martin's organization that the design was "the #1 flag design as voted by the public and legislature", the public did not in fact vote at any point in the proceedings, and it was solely the decision of the Utah Senate Business and Labor Committee to adopt the new design, with a vote of 6-1.
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At the NY Times, more on not being able to understand the dialogue on TV, says a majority of young Americans watch with the subtitles on. This author suggests separate speakers as a partial fix, because those in flat-screen TVs are lousy.
If you seek out the opinions of actual experts and people with familiarity with the industry, they all say the same things:
1) Improvements in recording technology have caused an unintended shift in production mindsets.
It used to be that audio was captured with a single boom microphone, and was recorded to a single audio track, and that necessitated a heightened degree of attention and care regarding sound on a set - actors had to speak clearly and face toward the microphone, background noise had to be controlled or compensated for, in-scene sound effects had to engineered properly, etc.
But modern microphones are A) much more sensitive, B) much more omni-directional, C) much smaller, and D) much cheaper, which in aggregate means that modern productions simply use a lot more of them. A standard dialogue scene in modern film and television uses two separate boom mics (one for each person in the dialogue), and then at least one additional lavalier microphone hidden on each actor.
The practical upshot of this is that it allows actors to give more "naturalistic" performances, because they don't have to pay as much attention to the location of their microphones. But that's also a downside - the reliance on extra microphones (and more sensitive microphones) to pick up deliveries that would otherwise be inaudible has become something of a crutch.
You can find comments from actors about how they literally cannot hear or understand what is being said by the other actor on stage with them, but the microphones manage to pick it up.
You also find a lot of professional who observe that a great deal of modern actors simply mumble their lines - the microphones pick up what they are saying perfectly, they're just not speaking clearly. Some of this is intentional and stylistic (see actors like Tom Hardy or directors like Christopher Nolan), but some of this is quite accidental, because of slipping production standards regarding controlling sound on set. When you have all these fancy microphones to rely on, you can be lazy about things.
2) This "crutch" problem is similarly mirrored in modern sound editing.
Hollywood has always shied away from having to ADR / rerecord inaudible audio, because they don't like having to pay the actor to come back in and re-act the scene, as well as also pay a sound engineer to record it, and also pay an editor to splice it in.
With modern digital sound editing programs, the once laborious and expensive process of literally cutting and splicing physical film strips together has been replaced with the (relatively) cheap process of having someone sitting at a computer making adjustments.
This has had the unintended effect of making producers even more unwilling to resort to ADR / rerecording, because it's still expensive. Instead, they lean even more heavily on sound editing to fix every problem, because it's far less expensive - even problem that can't really be fixed by editing, and actually need a fresh audio recording.
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3) Modern sound balance in TV and film has changed drastically over time.
With the shift to more "naturalistic" dialogue in film and the reliance on more sensitive microphones to pick up ever quieter deliveries from the actors, the resulting mindset has been that if quiet line is too hard to make out, then they'll just tell the editors to make it louder.
But the harsh reality of sound balance is that there are practical limits on volume - you can't just make a line of dialogue or a sound effect louder and louder forever, because eventually it creates severe distortion, and sound blown out.
In combination with this, different kinds of sounds need to have different levels of volume to them, in order to create contrast - the more you increase the volume of something like a line of dialogue, the less "room" you have to also have other sounds like gunshots or explosions be appropriately louder.
If you're relying on modern microphones to record your actors whispering "naturalistically", and then you're boosting the volume on those whispers to actually audible levels, you're effectively knee-capping your ability to tune the volume of other sound effects which should be louder.
The current prevailing production mindset is out of touch with the actual challenges sound editors face, because everyone on set from the actors to the directors no longer cares as much about the element of sound while filming on set - the expectation is simply that someone at a computer will handle all that. It's not their problem, so they don't care about providing good sound, and instead just have the unrealistic expectation that those editors can work miracles.
4) Hollywood sound mixing decisions are out of step with how people actually consume media.
The standard sound mix for a film is geared toward theater-going experiences - specifically, toward the most widely available surround-sound formats. The industry standard is Dolby Atmos, which has a whopping 128 audio channels available. So when a movie gets made, they tailor the mix to make use of all or most of those channels.
But even the best home theaters have only a fraction of the number of channels available. The higher end standard in home theaters is Dolby Surround 7.1 - named for its mere seven available sound channels. Cheaper, and thus more common, is Dolby Surround 5.1 - which predictably has only five sound channels. In both cases, you're trying to make do with only 3 to 5% of what theaters can achieve.
But it gets worse - a lot of people don't have "home theater" setups, but simply watch on basic TV or monitors, or even their smartphones, tablets, and other cheap consumer devices. These frequently have only two channel basic stereo sound, or even literal single channel mono sound.
And as John pointed out, flat-screens are in fact an issue - they're simply too thin to house big enough / high enough quality speakers, and so they sound much worse, despite playing the exact same stereo or mono sound streams. These speakers are also almost always located on the rear of the display, facing away, as opposed to traditional CRTV units with forward mounted speakers facing toward the viewer.
Of course, these problems aren't lost on TV manufacturers - modern flat screens TVs nowadays tend to include special options which try to clean up audio. But A) people tend to either not even know these features exist, or neglect to use them, and B) it doesn't really solve the problem of the fact that a film or show has mumbly actors, was edited cheaply, has bad sound balance, and was mixed for a movie theater but then drastically down-sampled for home displays.
It's a lot of little factors that combine to create a larger problem. And most of it is the result of out-of-touch decisions on the part of Hollywood, who are refusing to adapt how they make films to suit the consumption patterns of modern viewers.
There's a new wave of mobilization in Russia, including recent immigrants.
Moving to Russia during a war is like moving to Broad Street during a cholera outbreak.
"Too stupid to live", as they say. How depressing.
"We in Maryland love our flag, which may be ugly but is immediately distinctive at any scale and can be used for everything from gym shorts to stained glass."
The first year I lived here in Maryland, I kept wondering why we had a race car flag hanging on the pole in front of our office building.
The crass nepotism and shady characters responsible for the US military's "official" investigation of UFO phenomena. On Harry Reid: why do successful politicians often turn out to be such weirdos?
Fun connection I just realized while reading this!
Keven Stratton - the guy who pushed through the legislation for the new flag in Utah - is named as one of the shady characters responsible for the UFO weirdness in the link above.
Moreover, now that I realized there might be other connections, I note that Richard Martin's son has the same name as the politics bureau chief and senior political columnist at Politico, who has written glowingly about Harry Reid in the past, and has a whole slew of sensationalist articles about UFOs (and presumably that also includes involvement with one of "video articles" that Hoel criticizes Politico for putting out on the same topic, but I have yet to confirm).
I'm as yet unable to piece together if this is merely a coincidence, or if they're actually the same person, but that's a fairly strange coincidence if it is one.
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