This is the world I grew up in. But just a few years later, my elementary-school classroom was integrated. A few years after that, my high school was thoroughly integrated, and though there were still racial tensions, blacks and whites could openly be friends. Then came the white flight from Birmingham: the city’s public schools are now 99% black. Dark forces that seem invincible aren’t; but no victories are permanent either.
Well duh — have you ever seen a more obvious handball?
A CONSTELLATION — a remarkable short film by Miriam Hitchcock.
A Surveillance ‘Cat-and-Mouse’ 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 doesn’t want to be recorded. It listens as they talk and then generates a real-time stream of ultrasonic “anti-speech” tuned to the speaker’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.
Note that the “answer” to digital technologies we hate is always MOAR DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES. For previous entries on this point, see this and this.
Via Peter Atwood, a map made by Paramount Studios in 1927 to show directors and producers that they didn’t need to film in exotic locations: California and Nevada offered all the necessary exoticism! (I’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 I’m being honest.)
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 there’s a possible handball the ref should just flip a coin.
So much going on in the garden right now I can’t keep it all in focus.
