Well duh โ€”ย have you ever seen a more obvious handball?

A CONSTELLATION โ€” a remarkable short film by Miriam Hitchcock.

A Surveillance โ€˜Cat-and-Mouseโ€™ Game With AI:

In 2023, a team led by Ming Gao, now a researcher at Nanjing University, used human voices to defeat speech-recovery algorithms in a different way. Its jammer, called MicFrozen, is worn by a speaker who doesnโ€™t want to be recorded. It listens as they talk and then generates a real-time stream of ultrasonic โ€œanti-speechโ€ tuned to the speakerโ€™s voice, much like the noise-cancellation technology in your headphones. The device then sends out another layer of counterfeit speech-shaped sound to mislead any algorithm that tries to reconstruct what was lost.ย 

Note that the โ€œanswerโ€ to digital technologies we hate is always MOAR DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. For previous entries on this point, see this and this.ย 

Via Peter Atwood, a map made by Paramount Studios in 1927 to show directors and producers that they didnโ€™t need to film in exotic locations: California and Nevada offered all the necessary exoticism! (Iโ€™d like to get a closer look, though, at the parts of southeastern California that are supposed to stand in for Sherwood Forest. And at a number of other things, if Iโ€™m being honest.)ย 

Everybody, including me, is shouting VAR MUST GO! (And if it does, then the first time a ref flubs a big call everybody will be shouting BRING BACK VAR! But I solemnly pledge that I will not join that chorus.)

There is no handball rule in European football. Anything might or might not be a handball in any given circumstances. Whenever thereโ€™s a possible handball the ref should just flip a coin.

So much going on in the garden right now I canโ€™t keep it all in focus.ย 

Wow, more than a third of the 100 best novels of all time were written in my lifetime, almost all of them in English. I guess weโ€™re just a lot better at writing novels than non-Anglos and all those mediocrities who preceded us (Balzac, for instance).