Source: This Gyro-Inspired Casserole Is the Perfect Dish for the Inebriated

Source: Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre

Premature optimization, noted Donald Knuth, is the root of all evil. Mediocrity, you might say, is resistance to optimization under conditions where optimization is always premature. And what might such conditions be?

Infinite game conditions of course, where the goal is to continue the game indefinitely, in indeterminate future conditions, rather than win by the rules of the prevailing finite game. Evolution is the prototypical instance of an infinite game….

Mediocrity is not a position on some sort of performance spectrum, but a metacognitive attitude towards all performance that leads to middling performance on any specific performance spectrum as a side effect.

https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/can-a-male-artist-still-paint-a-female-nude.html

https://medium.com/s/unrulybodies/the-body-that-understands-what-fullness-is-f2e40c40cd75

https://www.racked.com/2018/4/17/17219166/fashion-style-algorithm-amazon-echo-look

We find ourselves in a cultural uncanny valley, unable to differentiate between things created by humans and those generated by a human-trained equation run amok. In other words, what is the product of genuine taste and what is not. (This lack of discernibility also contributes to the problems of fake news, which algorithmic feeds promote like any other content, however inaccurate.)

Source: From Game of Thrones to The Crown: the woman who turns actors into stars | News | The Guardian

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/26/new-led-streetlights-may-double-cancer-risk-new-research-warns/amp/

https://supchina.com/2018/03/26/kuora-mastering-chinese-tones-with-the-dude-system/

https://canadianart.ca/features/dirty-words-representation/

https://thewalrus.ca/the-value-of-a-bear/

With a needle, thread, a few buttons, and 15 minutes, you can convert your couch cushions from sagging, shapeless sacks to sculpted, snugly supports.Here’s how:

Source: $1 Fix for Saggy Couch Cushions

Celebrity serial killers are more than the sum of their crimes; invariably, they represent their particular cultural moment. Much as Jack the Ripper became the avatar for the class anxieties of  19th-century Victorian civilization, Jeffrey Dahmer was 20th century capitalism’s smirking emblem, a monster who played the system. And yet, Dahmer now seems like a throwback to a slower era, a time when serial killers hunted their victims personally. His victim list of 17, while horrific, is currently matched within minutes by guns wielded at American schools, movie theaters, and workplaces.

Source: Serial Killers: A New Breed of Celebrity | CrimeReads

Scale, automation, and unregulated technology?

https://lithub.com/do-we-even-need-men/

Kraemerlooks at how male disadvantage is “wiredin” from infancy and persists to the grave, buthe suggests that we shouldn’t necessarilyconclude that maleness is a genetic disorder.Instead, he argues, we should show more curiosity about the reasons for boys and menbeing so vulnerable, and should pay moreattention to redressing this in child-rearing and in medicine. Although Kraemer does not mention this, it is also reasonable to speculate that patriarchal societies are, ironically,men’s way of trying to assert their own needs in the face of their patent inferiority.

Just non-stop laffs

https://catapult.co/stories/hawaiian-authors-on-the-islands-literature

https://nextcity.org/features/view/bicycle-urbanism-by-design

The last great obstacle for those wanting to secure streetspace for cars were the angry mothers of America who saw their children killed or maimed by cars in the streets. Enter: the playground. That little zoological garden into which we still place our kids was an invention of the automobile industry as a way to appease mothers and get the little rascals out of the way.

Have they always been displacegrounds??

http://prog21.dadgum.com/114.html

https://littleredtarot.com/fat-tarot-much-more-than-a-token-fat-folks-in-tarot-oracle-decks/

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/quiet-places/

http://m.nautil.us/issue/32/space/these-tricks-make-virtual-reality-feel-real

Realism vs believability

https://omenana.com/2018/04/21/kwezi-black-panther-progressive-politics-black-superhero-comics/

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/view/articles/2018-04-18/growing-midsize-cities-like-boise-could-replace-urban-future

A depressing take

https://www.gq.com/story/21-books-you-dont-have-to-read

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=37770

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/

An intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror was weaponized against ordinary Americans at home.

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2018/04/09/whats-new-in-translation-april-2018/

Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau is not new to English speaking readers: his Prix Goncourt-winning novel Texaco and his Creole Folktales are among the most important works of the créolité movement and French post-colonial literature.