As I am approaching 50, and the hair line is starting its retreat - I love this opinion piece by Edith Zimmerman

Bald guys are hot. Bald guys are no-nonsense, bald guys have other things to think about. Bald guys aren’t using a bunch of hair supplies, bald guys have more time to spend doing attractive and useful things, like building houses and making jokes. Bald guys are magnificent. Bald guys seem to have seen something more of life. Bald guys know things, if you know what I mean.

Guys with beautiful hair are wonderful, but they remind me of myself. Not because I have beautiful hair, but because I also want beautiful hair, and there cannot be two of us.

I am a huge fan of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series - and I don’t know how I missed this! Good old organic blues music with real instruments and soul. So good to hear real music played in a sea of pop and rap.

It was the summer of 1985. My parents had just purchased a Commodore 64 from a neighbor for $200 - complete with a 1541 disk drive and a carton of 5 ¼ inch disks - which I had no idea what was contained in them.

After a few hours of reading the manuals and struggling to figure out what I am going to do with this beige colored bread box - I put the first disk in typed the following:

load "*", 8, 1

And after some furious whirring - up came a screen:

For the next three weeks I spent the entire day locked away in our den behind the kitchen avoiding the grues, thieves and plundering The Great Underground Empire. Those were some great times.

The code to most of the Infocom interactive fiction games, written in ZIL (Zork Implementation Language,) have been around since 2019. This was pretty much useless unless you had a ZIL interpreter (AKA Z machine) for your system. There were many open sourced Z machine implementations for just about every machine out there. But the originals were thought to be lost.

Until now.

Andrew Plotkin has published a git repo with all of the source code for the major platforms, details what they are and how he found them in a blog post on his site.

So the game source was big news. Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. This was the game-playing software for each platform: the Apple 2 interpreter, the Commodore 64 interpreter, and so on. A particular Infocom game release (“Zork 3 for the C64”, say) was a floppy containing the C64 interpreter and the Zork-3 game file. Boot the floppy, the interpreter starts up; it loads the game data and the game begins.

These interpreters were well-studied by IF enthusiasts in the early 1990s. That’s how we got the first open-source IF interpreters and the modern Z-machine specification. Functionally, we know how they work.

But we never had their source code. You might ask, who cares? It would have been pretty opaque assembly code anyhow. But it’s a layer of insight into the developers' minds. Comments, variable names, documentation.

This is the best holiday gift for hopeless nerds like myself.

Renowned historian and ‘Sapiens’ author Yuval Noah Harari, in an interview with Ari Melber, who asks Harari about his scholarship, its applications, recent AI developments and criticism of Harari’s writing. Among the many thought provoking insights from Harari - this one really breaks down the current American political climate:

What you see in a lot of modern politics is this delicate dance between conservatives and liberals which I think that - for many generations they agreed on the basics. Their main disagreement was about the pace. That both conservatives and liberals basically agreed we need some rules and also we need the ability to change the rules. The conservatives prefere a much slower pace

[…]

The conservative instinct is to wait it’s it’s dangerous and the liberal instinct is to try it out and see what happens. You see this kind of delicate dance, when things are going to slow people vote in more liberal administration that will speed things up and will be more creative, bolder in its social experiments. When things go too fast then you say okay - liberals you had your chance now lets bring in the conservatives to slow down a little and have a bit of a breath.

And what really I think is happening in recent years and I don’t have a good explanation for that is that in many parts of the world you see a kind of conservative suicide that conservatives are abandoning their kind of traditional role to slow down and conserve institutions and traditions and so forth and they still call themselves conservatives but they become this kind of new radical party which is more about ignoring traditions and destroying institutions

Then it becomes the job of liberals to be the audience of the institutions and the are not good at it. They don’t know how to do it. You know instead of a car that you have one leg on the fuel pedal and one leg on the break you have two legs on the fuel pedal and no leg on the brake and this is a recipe for disaster.

An amazing one hour conversation.

The 3d Demo that would change the course of Nintendo - discovered 30 years later. The fascinating history and story of the discovery of the X demo by the Video Game History Foundation.

Boy this brings back the memories. The 80s was the best time to grow up.

An amazing 20-minute film by Hiroshi Sumi. An homage and loving look back at the earliest days of Industrial Light and Magic. That was a magical time in movie making that we will never see again.

In our digital heavy lives today - a cocktail of TickTock, Facebook, Instagram and Google are destroying us mentally by the minute. In the past, we were were forced to use our brains extensively. From memorizing how to get to anywhere, problem solve and retain knowledge and socialize with our friends and family. With social media, everything is being replaced by a post, a text, or a Google search.

Natalie Worth makes an excellent point:

Dopamine also causes us to spend a lot of time in the limbic area of our brain, which is responsible for our emotions, instead of the pre-frontal cortex, which helps us plan for the future and problem-solve — not an ideal mix. And even worse, when we do get the chance to solve a problem, we’re offloading it to Google.

[…]

Traditionally, we learn by committing information to memory, but because we can look up any information at any time, we don’t need to retain things in our own memory. We’re offloading our retention and memory to Google. In 2011, Harvard researchers coined the term ‘The Google Effect’ when they found that when we’re faced with a difficult question or problem, instead of knowing how to answer it ourselves, we’re instead really good at knowing where to find the answer — our trusty searching tool, Google.

So what to do about this? The solution is to force yourself into using your brain for 1-2 hours a day. Solving puzzles, art, language learning, playing games or musical instruments, reading, or writing.

Basically everything we used to do before social media.

Inaugural edition of Jessica DeFino’s column Ask Ugly:

To self-soothe, I went home and wrote a detailed account of exactly how much time, money and effort it takes to maintain the ageless, expressionless “Instagram face” look for Fashionista.com – roughly 16 cosmetic treatments and $17,000 a year. And that’s without 2023 inflation.

Still, understanding that the youth-centric beauty ideal is an algorithmic black hole designed to absorb my brain space didn’t make me feel better. For a long while after, I felt bad.

Who could blame me? The false equivalence “beauty = good” is everywhere: anti-ageing products are laden with religious significance – “holy grail” moisturizers, “miracle” ingredients. Anne Hathaway’s youthful appearance is credited to her “unproblematic” behavior. “You look good for your age” is a common compliment, with good meaning young – a construct designed to keep people consuming, and consumed by, a need to prove their worth.

Of course, Indigo Girl, you know this! Lots of people know this! It’s why so many are set on rebranding conventionally bad, ugly or negative traits as good, beautiful or positive traits. Stretch marks are now “warrior marks” or “earned stripes”. Wrinkles are now “signs of wisdom”. I saw an influencer refer to her forehead line as “a hard-earned mark of enduring and carrying on” the other day, and I’m sorry to her and the Indigo Girls, but I hate it so much! This “reclaiming” is not better than the original fallacy. It still frames the physical body as a marker of worth and assigns a moral value to a slab of flesh that intrinsically has none.

[…]

To answer your question, Indigo Girl, no, I don’t think you should be more proactive about anti-ageing. Not because your crow’s feet are good or beautiful or representative of some deeper wisdom, but because they come with the territory of having a body.

The Web Design Museum has Taylor Swift’s website from 2002 - including “dialup” and “broadband” download links to her music.

I can’t say I am a fan of her music, but I can’t deny her talent or her technical marketing savvy. Even at a young age, Swift was way beyond in marketing her music than just about anyone in the music business. I am not a bit surprised that she has surpassed 1 billion dollar net worth in jut 16 years since her debut album.

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Robert D. Hershey Jr., reporting for The New York Times:

Charles T. Munger, who quit a well-established law career to be Warren E. Buffett’s partner and maxim-spouting alter-ego as they transformed a foundering New England textile company into the spectacularly successful investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, died on Tuesday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 99.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Berkshire Hathaway. He had a home in Los Angeles.

Although overshadowed by Mr. Buffett, who relished the spotlight, Mr. Munger, a billionaire in his own right — Forbes listed his fortune as $2.6 billion this year — had far more influence at Berkshire than his title of vice chairman suggested.

Mr. Buffett has described him as the originator of Berkshire Hathaway’s investing approach. “The blueprint he gave me was simple: Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices,” Mr. Buffett once wrote in an annual report. […]

A $1,000 investment in Berkshire made in 1964 is worth more than $10 million today.

Mr. Munger was often viewed as the moral compass of Berkshire Hathaway, advising Mr. Buffett on personnel issues as well as investments. His hiring policy: “Trust first, ability second.”

Today most people are hesitant on EV cars for three reasons: initial upfront costs and worry about running out of battery power far from a charging station. In regard to upfront costs, EV vehicles will come down in price as competition increases and range anxiety will diminish as money from the Inflation Reduction Act flows into building more charging stations and making discounts for electric vehicles available right at the dealership.

The third is the campaign by the existing car companies sowing doubt about that such vehicles aren’t really all that much better for the environment than hybrid vehicles that have both gas and electric motors, and might even be worse, because of everything required to manufacture batteries and mine the materials that go into them.

Dr. Stephen Porder in a guest essay for the New York Times:

If you look under the hood, so to speak, these concerns share two fundamental misunderstandings: They assume that the electric vehicle industry is locked in to today’s technology, and they discount the huge environmental drawbacks of gas-powered alternatives. Electric vehicles are like digital cameras in their early iterations. They are already better than the alternative for almost everyone, and improving at a breathtakingly fast clip. And while there are environmental concerns with them, they are dwarfed by the benefit they provide regarding climate change — the biggest environmental threat to human well-being in the 21st century.

But let’s do the math as I’ve done for my family’s two E.V.s. We got the first to replace our 10-year-old, gas-powered Subaru, and after only two years of driving, the E.V. has created fewer emissions over its lifetime than if we had kept the old car. It will take our second E.V. only four years to create fewer emissions over its lifetime than the 2005 hybrid Prius it replaced. That’s counting the production of the batteries and the emissions from charging the E.V.s, and the emissions payback time will only continue to drop as more emissions-free wind and solar power comes onto the grid and battery technology improves.

An amazing new bicycle park in Amsterdam Centraal. Spaces for 7,000 bicycles - cost is free for 24 hours and then 1.25 euro per 24 hours after that.

As a New Jersey commuter that takes the NJTransit into NYC Port Authority - it is embarrassing that a bicycle parking garage is more sophisticated and human friendly than the largest bus terminal in the United States. To people living in the US, something like this is unimaginable.

We Americans loath any from of personal powered transportation - and our waistlines are evidence of that. American cities are not designed for pedestrians or bicycle riders. They are designed for cars. Walking / bicycling in US cities is like playing a Hunger Games inspired version of Frogger - may the odds be ever in your favor.

The FCC under the Biden administration directive will move to outlaw early termination fees on cable and satellite service contracts.

Chelsey Cox reporting for CNBC:

The proposed rule is part of the White House’s larger focus on eliminating surplus fees under President Joe Biden’s July 2021 executive order to promote competition in the U.S. economy.

According to that order, cable television is one sector where fees can stifle competition, due to costs associated with canceling services or switching service providers.

“Companies shouldn’t lock you into services you don’t want with large fees,” President Joe Biden said via X on Tuesday. “It’s unfair, raises costs, and stifles competition. We’re doing something about it.”

Another win for the US consumer and a huge step in breaking the existing abusive cable, cellular and satellite monopolies.

This is in stark contrast to what the Trump administration FCC chairmen Ajit Pai who advocated not only strengthening the existing monopoly infrastructure, but ending net neutrality. Under Pai’s plan, cable and infrastructure operaters would be free to not only have surplus and termination fees, but would be abe to charge different rates depending on what services you used on the internet. For example, accessing websites would be billed at a different rate then say streaming video content. This would have effectively ended the internet as we know it today.

Another meaningful law passed that will benefit the ‘average american’. Elections have consequences.

UK’s Advertising Standard Authority has banned two Toyota adverts for advertising that disregards its environmental impact. Clea Skopeliti writing for The Gaurdian:

The ASA ruled that the adverts “condoned the use of vehicles in a manner that disregarded their impact on nature and the environment … they had not been prepared with a sense of responsibility to society”.

Veronica Wignall, a co-director at Adfree Cities, said: “These adverts epitomise Toyota’s total disregard for nature and the climate, by featuring enormous, highly polluting vehicles driving at speed through rivers and wild grasslands.”

Wignall said there was a disconnect between the way SUVs were advertised – with campaigns often depicting them in rugged environments – and the reality of where they were largely driven. Research has shown that three-quarters of new SUVs in the UK are registered to people in urban areas. “It’s a cynical use of nature to promote something incredibly nature-damaging.”

SUVs are pure f*ck you I got mine individualism. They make the road more dangerous for pedestrians and even other drivers due to their size. And the reasons people give for owning them are usually bullshit. They’re not even more spacious than a van. And the pickup trucks keep getting shorter in the back and longer in the front so the utility is getting worse every year. Unfortunately it has now become an arms race whereby people are almost forced to get a big vehicle.

Here is an excellent video on the ridiculousness of SUV culture.

I bet he hates it if this photo goes viral. pic.twitter.com/evkW9R1Mpn

— Naughtius Maximus 🇺🇦🌻 (@ResisterDude) November 22, 2023

In his new book, “Why We Did It,” Tim Miller details his involvement with the GOP and how political staffers were able to justify the new brand of politics, as he explains to Walter Isaacson in this excellent article.

To put it simply - Trump supporters are in a cult fueled by racism, xenophobia, cruelty, wealth and power.

Natural Landscape Photography Awards winners have been announced for 2023. Here are some of my favorites from this year, in order - Blake Randall, Joshua Cripps, Adam Gibbs and Benjamin Maze:

From a recent Pew Research report:

A majority of Americans say they would tip 15% or less for an average meal at a sit-down restaurant. 2% say they tip nothing. Quality of service is a major factor in most Americans’ tipping practices.

It is important to understand the history of tipping in the United States. Wendy Pollack writing for the Shriver Center on Poverty Law:

Tipping proliferated in the United States after the Civil War, when the restaurant and hospitality industries hired newly emancipated Black women and men but offered them no wage–leaving them to rely on patrons’ gratuities for their pay instead. Simply put, tipping was introduced as a way to exploit the labor of former slaves.

While we don’t have slavery today,the restaurant and hospitality industries have created an exploited economic class of people - effectively asking workers to take a financial risk without the benefits of economic profits of the business.

Tipping should be abolished - pay workers a living wage and transfer the risk of the business back to those who benefit most from the success of the business - the owners.

Tom Nichols defining Fascism in The Atlantic:

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

[..]

Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

In his Claremont, New Hampshire campaign rally - which you can get the full transcript for here, Trump promises to:

… out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

Trump is a fascist and a danger to the US Constitution and rule of law. The media should address him as one.