Everything about the subject of this article is mind-numbingly awful.
Ars Technica: The NSA’s Skynet program may be killing thousands of innocent people
The NSA have apparently built an artificial intelligence which sifts through mass-surveiled metadata of Pakistani civilians to compile a kill list, which is then executed on by America's fleet of death squads and flying robots.
Now that I have a more professional website, I wanted to include on it a list of publications. It took me a while to figure out a "good" way to do this, and many things I tried didn't work, so here's the solution I eventually settled on.
Maybe it can help you too!
Since I'm perpetually embarrassed by the things I write my name uniquely identifies me on most search engines, I have made caiwingfield.net more basic and professional, and moved my shame here, to cai.zone.
.htaccess redirects should ensure old links still work, but please let me know if they don't.
I'm curious/trepidatious about this recurrent theme in the icons of successful free-to-play iOS games.
Like, there must be a reason. But I'll bet it's either superstition or awful psychology.
Updates below!
Vi Hart (who you may recall, I think is amazing) originally became known (to me) by her "doodling in math class" series of short films.
These started as innocuous doodles which accidentally ended up showing the beauty and fascination in mathematics, but eventually became more elaborate and specific.
Things like this:
In this series she describes hexaflexagons. Watch 'em.
I love people making weird instruments out of weird things. Here’s an organ made out of a matrix of mechanical floppy drives.
You can read more about it on Ars Technica.
I enjoyed Eurogamer’s cute, affectionate retrospective of Gitaroo Man.
I always thought of Gitaroo Man as a somewhat obscure game, so it makes me happy to read other people who also hold it dear. Reading Eurogamer’s retrospective brought to mind an early episode of Michael Abbot’s podcast where he revisits Gitaroo Man, and has some kind words to say.
It’s nice that those who remember this game regard it with such affection.
I never had a PS2, and never owned Gitaroo Man. But I have extremely fond memories of playing late into the night with a particular group of friends, handing off between songs, working our way up to attempting S-ranks on hard on all songs (something I witnessed, but never managed). Very evocative of a particular time in my youth. The soundtrack hasn’t left my playlist since.
Good.
I am, to the best of my abilities, divesting myself of fossil-fuels, monetarily. I don’t have any money invested anywhere (or much full stop), but that doesn’t mean that what little money I do have can be used by others for ill.
So far I have cancelled my bank accounts at Halifax, Natwest and Lloyds (which is particularly bad), and moved completely over to The Co-Operative, which is the only high-street bank which has an explicit policy of not investing money in “any business or organisation whose core activity contributes to global climate change”.
The next step is to check what USS invests its money in, and remove any of mine which is supporting malign corporate interests.
I am more-or-less following The Guardian’s ongoing series on personal divestment.
A while ago, Vi Hart (who I've mentioned before here as an author of the cool interactive essay Parable of the Polygons) made this fantastic short film about mathematics, meaning and music.
It's really something special.