Zackc43

The British Library has digitized 570 loose pages of notes written and drawn by Leonard da Vinci to compile a notebook which is called, The Codex Arundel.

You can view the document online for free, although it's written in Italian and uses his "characteristic left-handed mirror-writing (reading from right to left)." The Guardian suggests enjoying the work of the self-taught Renaissance man as it is, without translation:

The digitised British Library manuscript is a fascinating artefact in itself, just to browse. You don't need a translation to appreciate the beauty and wonder of Leonardo's mind. This is a great work of art, in a precociously conceptual genre that has been emulated by modern artists such as Joseph Beuys and Cy Twombly.

The Codex includes "diagrams, drawings and brief texts" which cover "a broad range of topics in science and art, as well as personal notes." The British Library describes some of Da Vinci's insights:

His notebooks combine detailed observation with notes of experiments. Even if he did not actually undertake the experiments, he described what could be tried. Many of his insights foreshadowed scientific research by many centuries. For example:

Leonardo repudiated perpetual motion, understood the principle of relative motion, and foreshadowed Newton's Third Law by two centuries: "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction."

He rejected the notion that the Biblical flood was responsible for depositing fossils many miles from their origin and deduced the existence of very long spans of geological time.

By dissecting humans and animals, Leonardo made many anatomical and some physiological discoveries.

He investigated optics and perception with subtle experiments, explaining why the sky is blue, arguing that light has a finite velocity and travels in straight lines, and deducing the existence of a surface within the eye that receives light from a wide field of view.

Leonardo formulated the law of the flow of currents: "All motion of water of uniform breadth and surface is stronger at one place than at another according as the water is shallower there than at the other."

(Open Culture)

Previously: Students build working version of Leonardo da Vinci's self-supporting bridge

Here's something to make you feel better: a supercut of people accidentally losing or destroying property.

(more…)

This simulation, called The Evolution of Trust starts with a variation of the prisoners' dilemma. You can choose to put a coin into a slot. Another person has the same choice on a different machine. You can't communicate with the other person. The only thing you know is this: if the other person put a coin in their slot, you will receive 3 coins. And if you put a coin in your slot, the other person will get 3 coins. What's the best strategy?

Trust is falling. Why? And how can we fix it?

My interactive guide to the game theory of trust is now OUT!

👉 https://t.co/2x7BfWehpJ 👈 pic.twitter.com/AjDBJ0w6OB

— Nicky Case (@ncasenmare) July 25, 2017

Case 1: other person inserts coin. If you put a coin in the slot, you will have a net gain of 2 coins. If you don't put a coin in the slot you will gain 3 coins. So the best thing to do is not put a coin in the slot.

Case 2: other person doesn't insert coin. If you put a coin in the slot, you will have a net loss of 1 coin. If you don't put a coin in the slot you lose nothing. So the best thing to do is not put a coin in the slot.

In either case, it's to your advantage not to put a coin in the slot. But what happens when you play several rounds of the game with the same person? Are there better strategies? Yes, and this excellent interactive simulation by Nicky Case walks you through them in an entertaining way. It's a great introduction to game theory.

From the simulation:

Game theory has shown us the three things we need for the evolution of trust:

1. REPEAT INTERACTIONS Trust keeps a relationship going, but you need the knowledge of possible future repeat interactions before trust can evolve.

2. POSSIBLE WIN-WINS You must be playing a non-zero-sum game, a game where it's at least possible that both players can be better off -- a win-win.

3. LOW MISCOMMUNICATION The level of miscommunication can't be too high. And when there's a little bit of miscommunication, it pays to be more forgiving.

Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust.

This is the best deal I've seen on generic Magic Erasers. Less than ten cents a sponge! Here's my earlier review: The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser a plain looking white sponge that looks like a chunk of cheap mattress foam. You wouldn't think it would do good job of cleaning anything. But it removes stains and scuffs from painted walls and other surfaces without damaging the surfaces. Magic Erasers work with water - no soap or detergent is needed.

I used a Magic Eraser once to remove a nail polish stain from some fake leather furniture and it lived up to its name. The stain was completely gone and the upholstery looked as good as new. My friend Mister Jalopy used Magic Sponges to remove decades of built of grime from a pinball machine, making it look like it had just come off the Bally assembly line.

I love Magic Erasers. People think of new uses for them all the time. Here's a car detailers who uses it to remove paint scratches and other kinds of surface damage on cars: https://youtu.be/VkBSlD60rDA

The Magic Eraser is a block of melamine foam. How Stuff Works explains why they are so good at removing stains:

[W]hen melamine resin cures into foam, its microstructure becomes very hard -- almost as hard as glass -- causing it to perform on stains a lot like super-fine sandpaper ... The cavity-ridden open microstructure of melamine foam is where the second major boost to its stain-removing capabilities comes in. Apart from being able to scrape at stains with extremely hard microscopic filaments, with a few quick runs of the eraser, the stain has already started to come away. That's aided by the fact that the dirt is pulled into the open spaces between the spindly skeletal strands and bound there. These two factors combined make this next-generation eraser seem almost magical.

The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser measures 4.6 x 2.4 x 1 inches, and an 8-pack sells for $6.47 on Amazon, where it's got a 4.6 rating. But you can buy 100 generic melamine sponges measuring 4 x 2.3 x 8 for $8.99 on Amazon.

Chris Isner was a regular guy until an ayahuasca trip gave him clear instructions on creating a trippy style of bas relief wood sculptures.

(more…)

A team of public health researchers studies mosquito populations in neighborhoods in Baltimore, looking for correlation between socioeconomic status and mosquitoes. (more…)

Okay, I’m cheating a little. Those aren’t exactly obscure or modern – in fact, they’re some of the best-known, oldest, and most enduring mythical creatures. But they are unique renditions of those creatures, and have influenced modern views of them in surprising ways, including providing the answer to a mystery that has plagued DnD scholars.

In its April 23, 1951 issue, LIFE Magazine ran a short (4 pages) article titled “Mythical Monsters”, subtitled “These Beasts Existed Only In Man’s Imagination”. It featured seven mythical creatures illustrated by another of my favorite illustrators, Rudolf Freund (I really need to do an effortpost on LIFE artists including Lewicki and Freund). They are beautiful, detailed, and feature some… unusual design choices.

The depiction of the su is representative of Freund’s approach. Reading a mustached woman’s face, palm-frond tail, tiger stripes, frog babies, and ample udders into the description is definitely a first.

The griffin, on the other hand, is standard, although modern artists would give it eagle’s forelimbs. Pedants would argue that this isn’t a griffin but an opinicus. They’re wrong.

The yale in particular looks like it could actually exist, and I love the dynamic pose it’s in.

Going to go out on a limb here and claim that this here is the reason why so many basilisks today are drawn as lizards instead of little crowned snakes or freaky reptochickenmutants. Nothing in the text suggest anything lizardy either, so Freund may have been elaborating here.

Disclaimer: the break in its middle is because it’s spread across two pages.

Looks familiar? That’s right, LIFE used Topsell’s gorgon (itself a renamed catoblepas). In turn, I humbly suggest that this was the inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons’ gorgon. You can stop worrying about where Gygax got his gorgon from and start sleeping easy.

Freund’s manticore is scarier than anything else. It’s also the most dapper of manticores. Check out that handlebar mustache and the slicked hair! I suspect the manticore in Page and Ingpen’s encyclopedia of Things That Never Were was based in part on this. References to this manticore pop up in odd places, including…

… that one JLA comic where a manticore and a griffin double-team our heroes. The manticore is yellow, of course.

I always thought that was a cop-out weakness too.

The last and best is this spectacular unicorn. I love the different colors and the mismatched elephant feet. This is exactly what unicorns should look like – garbled third and fourth hand accounts of rhinos.

Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University are currently giving two dozen religious leaders psilocybin, the psychedelic drug in magic mushrooms, to, y'know, see what happens. From The Guardian:

Despite most organised religions frowning on the use of illicit substances, Catholic, Orthodox and Presbyterian priests, a Zen Buddhist and several rabbis were recruited. The team has yet to persuade a Muslim imam or Hindu priest to take part, but “just about all the other bases are covered,” according to (study co-leader Dr. William) Richards....

“It is too early to talk about results, but generally people seem to be getting a deeper appreciation of their own religious heritage,” he said. “The dead dogma comes alive for them in a meaningful way. They discover they really believe this stuff they’re talking about.”

There is also a suggestion that after their psychedelic journey, the leaders’ notions of religion shifted away from the sectarian towards something more universal. “They get a greater appreciation for other world religions. Other ways up the mountain, if you will,” said Richards.

“In these transcendental states of consciousness, people seem to get to levels of consciousness that seem universal,” he added. “So a good rabbi can encounter the Buddha within him.”

"Religious leaders get high on magic mushrooms ingredient – for science" (The Guardian)

The New York Times rounds up direct links to several services surveillance opt-out screens, including some I'd never thought to look for (Amazon), as well as instructions for installing tracking blockers and no-script extensions that will limit the data trail you exhaust behind yourself as you traverse the net. (more…)

Molly Sauter (previously) describes in gorgeous, evocative terms how the algorithms in our life try to funnel us into acting the way we always have, or, failing that, like everyone else does. (more…)

You'd think Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow's "lifestyle brand" for clean-freak whippies, and Infowars, Alex Jones' conspiracy compendium for seething fascists, wouldn't share much in common. But they both have exactly the same business model: selling wellness to people skeptical and fearful of mainstream medicine and healthcare. Nikhil Sonnad took a look at the ingredients on each site and found that it's all the same stuff.

We at Quartz have created a compendium, from Ashwagandha to zizyphus, of the magical healing ingredients both sides of the political spectrum are buying, and how they are presented to each. We looked at the ingredients used in products sold on the Infowars store, and compared them to products on the wellness shops Moon Juice and Goop. All make similar claims about the health benefits of these ingredients, but what gets called “Super Male Vitality” by Infowars is branded as “Sex Dust” by Moon Juice.

Call it horseshit theory: opposite extremes of lifestyle branding converging on a hidden axis of shared appreciation for their audiences.

[h/t Agies]

A mile-long island emerged from the sea 100 yards out from Cape Hatteras.

Since being discovered, countless visitors and locals have made the trek to see if the weeks of rumors about the island’s existence – as well as the stories that it’s a haven for shells – are true.

The answer to both questions appears to be yes.

I superimposed the equivalent view from Google Earth, over Chad Koczera's photo, in the GIF above.

Authorities in St. Petersburg, Florida, are battling an onslaught of graffiti depicting a three-buttocked arse. NBC affiliate WFLA reports that the design has appeared at least twenty times across the city. It is thought to be the calling card of a single anonymous artist, who police stress is breaking the law.

St. Pete is a city known for its beautiful art and stunning murals. Many people are upset by this new graffiti involving a tush trend. They don’t like the fact that the bold buttocks are suddenly everywhere.

“This is not art. At all,” said one woman. “It’s vandalism.”

“There should be consequences. You can’t just take it upon yourself to do whatever you want to do,” another man said.

We shall speak in hushed tones, over the beachfires where the Suwannee meets the shore, of the great triple-arsed god worshiped by those who once lived in the sunken cities of the Florida sea.

Timo Bingman created a demo program for sorting algorithms called "The Sound of Sorting, which both visualizes the algorithms internals and their operations, and generates sound effects from the values being compared." It's a visual and aural treat!

Seth Everman (previously) reports on "when you try all the sounds and beats on your synth while only playing Toto's Africa."

"hello my dudes it has been 9 years but i have returned with some more garbage for you to enjoy."

Though the magic is in his brilliant performance (encore!), his weapon of choice is the Yamaha MM8 workstation, whose mid-range characteristics give it the loaf to model all the genres, but also the cheese to make them taste good on YouTube.

Janelle Shane trained a recurrent neural network with a data-set of more than 2000 ancient proverbs and asked it to think up its own: "A fox smells it better than a fool’s for a day." (more…)

Aubrey Plaza, who played April Ludgate on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation, sat down with the Sisters of the Valley (aka the Weed Nuns) and got really baked.

From Wikipedia:

Sisters of the Valley is a small business that sells cannabidiol tinctures and salves on the craft e-commerce website Etsy. It is based in Merced, California, and its proprietors follow a monastic motif, wearing religious habits and referring to each other as sisters, despite no affiliation with a religious order.

#sistersofthevalley #cali #accidentalnun

A post shared by Sisters of the Valley (@sistersofthevalley) on Jun 16, 2017 at 11:39pm PDT

#sistersofthevalley #420 #cannabiscommunity #powerofhealing

A post shared by Sisters of the Valley (@sistersofthevalley) on Apr 21, 2017 at 1:16pm PDT

Somewhere between "hard to believe" and "of course they do" lurks the music, played over massive PA systems in Pyongyang, by the North Korean regime. Here are two important points of comparison: the unsettling Lavender Town locale in Pokemon, which matches North Korea's oddly melodic eeriness...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNJJ-QkZ8cM

... and Chicago's tornado siren, for sheer nightmare terror quotient. (via)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnkMSmLc6mM&feature=youtu.be

Enjoy Paul De Graaf's gallery depicting the sedimentary layers deposited by 30 years of graffiti on a wall in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

It's a Graffiti Hall of Fame in the city of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. What started as a 70's Hippie cult place, became a center of music and art in the early 80's. One of the first places where it was legal to smoke cannabis. It still a Music studio and Graffiti Hall of fame. The building is surrounded by walls that are all spray painted from top to bottom.

Befriending crows doesn't appeal to me much. Their dark and ominous ways freak me out a little. My neighborhood murder (which really says all you need to know, doesn't it?) perch in the tree outside my front door for hours at a time, squawking loudly, presumably at my indoor tabby cat who's imprisoned behind the front window. 

However, if YOU want to make friends with crows, be my guest.

1. Find some food that the crow seems to like. This requires some trial and error, as they can —or maybe it's just the urban ones who can—be surprisingly finicky. You'll know the crow likes it judging by how quickly it swoops down to grab it. If that pile of leftovers sits all day, they just aren't interested, so try something else, only make sure it's healthy. Crows like junk food, but giving it to them is probably not a kind thing to do..

2. Stock that food. Buy enough so you don't run out. I buy huge bags of unsalted peanuts from Costco...

3. Establish a regular feeding schedule, so they know when to expect you and vice versa. If you don't establish a rhythm for interaction, the relationship may never gel. And don't feed them so much that they become dependent—just a handful of something to show you care.

4. Be dependable, steadfast, and observant. Don't just throw the food out there and walk away. Stay (at a safe distance) to watch them eat (or select carefully and fly off to cache it for later). Since crows have territories, take some time to try to get to know how big your local crow family is...

5. Don't try to get too close. These are wild animals, after all. Your goal shouldn't be to tame them or take them as pets, which is illegal in most states anyway, and ethically dubious. Even after years of friendship, a crow will be skittish and standoffish (but admiring from afar) and it's better this way.

You know they can recognize people's faces, don't you? Godspeed, bird lovers, godspeed.

(RED)

Last October, Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition." Part of the requirement for receiving the award (and the prize money) is a lecture within six months of the Nobel ceremony. Dylan delivered his yesterday, just a few days before the deadline, and it's magnificent. Listen below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TlcPRlau2Q (photo above by Charles Gatewood. Miss you!)

There's something magical about this 2014 video, which very suddenly goes from one YouTube genre (the intringuing at-home science experiment) to another (reality is disaster). You wonder why there aren't more of them out there!

It's early days in the Trump trainwreck, but Rebecca Solnit's astonishing, beautiful, visceral essay "The Loneliness of Donald Trump" may well end up being the defining moment of the Trump presidency, in which Solnit uses the incisive wit that gave us the term "mansplaining" to explain Trump. (more…)

Voice of Baceprot is a hard-driving heavy metal band made up of three hijab-wearing Muslim teenaged women who met at school in West Java, Indonesia, and whose rocking out is designed to "combat the stereotype of Muslim women as submissive or voiceless." (more…)

This malicious tire is a more terrifying than Rover.

[via]

I didn't know that there was a famous copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. It's called "Prado's version" and has been on display in Madrid's Museo del Prado since 1819. According to Wikipedia, it was "considered for decades a worthless copy. However, after its restoration in 2012, the Prado's Mona Lisa was claimed to be the earliest replica of Leonardo's masterpiece." In fact, "the replica was discovered to be possibly painted simultaneously by a student of Leonardo in the same studio where da Vinci painted his own Mona Lisa." Over at Reddit, where I learned about this, commenters overwhelmingly prefer the Prado version:

...much more pleasing

Her neck is more elegant and the folds in the clothing are incredible

At least Prado managed to capture some eye brows!

...she has an attitude

The one on the left is way better

I like the folds better with the Prado.

I prefer the Prado version, the face is much cuter.

Just toss the DaVinci one away, I say. The one on the left is much nicer.

Looks like the student surpassed the teacher

What do you think?

DJ Cummerbund noticed that the world needed a mashup of "Crazy Train" and "September," and the world became a better place. The mashed up video is icing on the cake. (more…)

Amusing session today, the party essentially ninja'd their way to the treasure, avoiding almost all of the opposition.

The party has been on an extended quest, defending their village from the ghostly reawakening of the Martoi. To this end, they've been visiting the six shrines of Tealwood to pick up magic weapons and curry spiritual favor, in the hopes that by mid-summer they'll be able to defeat the ghost-sorcerers.

This has been going well, but true to sandbox form their heads are starting to spin a little bit with all the threads and loose ends that are accumulating. I try to make adventure locations point to one another (via maps, spells that would be slightly better if only they had a such-and-such), and because it's a sandbox they keep encountering wrongs that could be righted, potential treasure spots they don't have time for, etc.

Mostly this is because they've stayed focused on their goal. The ticking clock is wonderfully focusing: the Martoi have put out word that all the villages of Tealwood are expected to bring 'their best' by mid-summer's day, to pay tribute and swear allegiance.

Last session, however, the party's neophyte wizard finally got her way: a trip to Ganer island where they had reason to believe she might learn something that would improve her control over fire magic.

She's been bumbling along, occasionally using it successfully, sometimes frying herself or her equipment. (She's burned through at least a full set of clothing, mundane equipment, and once torched a spellbook with three spells, before anybody could learn them.)



I used *Chains of Heaven* for the top of Ganer island, modifying it to put a Seree spell engine (like the one in Full-Dark Stone) in the sealed tower. (This is what has been calling to Zero.)

I spent a while last night and this morning mulling over the adventure, trying to imagine how Nacharta or Sigordine might react to the players' arrival but.. of course.. it didn't go anything like I had imagined it.

I started off by having a Nuss scout pull 'Agatha' aside as the spread-out party made their way up to the peak.

I'm trying to portray religion as a tapestry of paganistic half-truths, while the players seem to be coming from a standard fantasy pantheon mindset. They're dying to categorize the gods, figure out what they want, what they're each the god of, and so on.

The same bunch of players (different characters) visited a shrine of Deel in a gonzo one-shot version of *The Coming of Sorg*, so upon hearing that the Nuss serve "the daughter of Deel," they were hooked. The party was very candid in the resulting conversations, so the Nuss decided an audience with Sigordine was a-ok. The players were bursting with questions.

Sigordine is a dark glass construct, made from the remains of Deel when the gods destroyed the fortress. Being nearly invulnerable, she has very little to fear from the hedge wizards of the world, scavening bits of Seree magic, so I decided to play her as quite transparent and vulnerable. Maybe a bit of Mother's Day seeped into my consciousness, too.

It's funny how off-the-cuff decisions cascade. Why wouldn't an immortal construct made from the body of a dying god know about other divine powers? Well, maybe uh.. prayer is a mortal gift. Yeah! Long story short, before ten minutes were out the party had pledged to find a shrine of Deel and one day restore the bond between Sigordine and whatever scrap of Deel's power remained in the world.

With this established, the players returned their attention to the business of improving Zero's fire magic.

Waiting until nightfall, they surveyed the castle carefully. Between their stealth and a whole series of random encounter rolls coming up empty, they were able to get to the pink tower, crack it open, bond with the spell engine, and get out again with only a single hapless sentry to dispatch.

Now what?

At this point, a really interesting discussion erupted, which felt like the clash of two different gaming styles.  The players had reason to believe that a green wizard and her retinue were somewhere in the castle: there was obviously much more "adventure" to be had. On the other hand, this wizard wasn't in their way - they had what they wanted. Could they just.. sneak out of here and be on their way?

It's funny. I think a sort of loss aversion kicks in as they realize how much of my prep they're skipping. But this is actually pretty cool. The more tangible threats and opportunities they pass by, the more tangible the world feels. Owlshade, Gorm, Gadna Many-Arms, the gray thing they let out of the land of the dead, Emn and her brother at the shrine, the dead of Ragdar, the danger at Morton village, the Ricalu and Rilga who opened a way to the underworld.. Sigordine worried about Narcharta reopening the pit, could that happen? They know they're leaving all sorts of stuff behind, but it's all still there, and they can come back to it whenever they want to.

Some of the younger players paused just to make sure that if they defeated the Martoi the game wouldn't end, would it?

"No," I said, "it doesn't have to."

Just how overblown was the media panic over ebola? This interactive chart compares media coverage of a dozen health scares, from mad cow disease to zika. (more…)

Trish Vickers of Dorset, England, decided to write a novel. Though blind, she preferred to work the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper, with her son dropping in weekly to type up the results. On one visit, though, she learned to her horror that her pen had ran out of ink fully 26 pages ago. But all was not lost!

Not knowing what else to do, she and Simon called the police. To the Vickers’s surprise, officers at Dorset HQ volunteered to work during their breaks and free time, hoping to use their forensic tools to help. And, five months later, the police reported back with success: they recovered the never-written words. Vickers told a local newspaper that the pen she used to write the pages — even though there was no ink left in it — left behind a series of indentations: “I think they used a combination of various lights at different angles to see if they could get the impression made by my pen.”

Vickers finished the book, Grannifer's Legacy, and died the day it was published. [via MeFi]