brian

1. You wonder how much this is going to hurt.

2. You lose track of your drinking.

3. Your stomach is in knots.

4. Holy crap!

5. You keep googling possible outcomes.

6. You fear seeing red.

7. Your phone buzzes with messages from concerned friends and family.

8. The word “probe” makes you flinch.

9. You hear too much noise coming from assholes.

10. You have no idea when the results will be in.

11. People keep saying, “What a mess!”

12. There’s got to be a better, less painful way.

13. There are some very close calls.

14. The night seems like it’s never going to end.

15. Shit! Is this normal?

16. You think about how things might be better if you were somewhere else. Like Canada.

Election night coverage: 1-16
Preparing for a colonoscopy: 1 -16

1. It was founded in Silicon Valley with the sole purpose of amassing a bunch of prospective sociopaths together in one centralized location.

2. It tends to attract Machiavellian-type individuals looking to instill the fear of God in the people.

3. Netflix could make a documentary about it with the tagline “Do you really know your neighbor…?”

4. My stepdad is obsessed with it.

5. It is a microcosm of human psychology that pits average Joes against one another so outside observers can sit around and comment on it.

6. The main byproduct is turning a small community of relative strangers into a gladiatorial arena of imaginary power dynamics.

7. It’s not unusual to hear arguments about curfews, behavioral expectations, and how loud people are during outdoor recreational time.

8. Those not involved think they would be immune, but once you’re in it there is no stopping you from becoming a monstrous pseudo-tyrant almost immediately.

9. Participants are 99.9 percent white boomers.

10. It is widely panned by the world’s leading experts as a deeply unethical endeavor, but it provides endless hours of entertaining reading.

Nextdoor: 1-10
Stanford Prison Experiment: 1-10

KELLER, TX—Calling the new policy a “necessary” safety measure, administrators from Keller Independent School District confirmed Friday that all students were now required to use clear bags in order to prevent them from bringing in books. “As we start the new school year, we’d like to remind students that all…

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It can take years to grow the perfect mullet, and these kids have put in their time to take home the 2022 USA Mullet Championship trophy. Here's a peek at some of the most remarkable contestant 'dos.

(Image credit: USA Mullet Championships)

American Airlines has agreed to purchase 20 supersonic Overture planes from Boom Supersonic, the companies announced Tuesday. From a report: The deal is the second firm order in the last two years for Boom, still years from building its first commercial airplane. United Airlines made a commitment last year to buy 15 Overture jets. "Passengers want flights that are faster, more convenient, more sustainable and that's what Overture delivers," Boom CEO Blake Scholl told CNBC. "Flight times can be as little as half as what we have today, and that works great in networks like American where we can fly Miami to London in less than five hours." Boom says the Overture jet will fly as fast as Mach 1.7, or 1,304 mph, dramatically cutting trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flight times. For example, a flight from Seattle to Tokyo, which typically takes just over 10 hours, could be completed in six hours in an Overture, according to Boom.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robert Pope ran the almost 130-mile route from Galway to Dublin in just 23 hours and 41 minutes.

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Be slow in choosing plans, but fast in canceling them.

Get out while the going is good, or bad, or any kind of vibe, really.

Better never than late.

To err is human; to “umm” fills the awkward silence.

Look before you leap… into small talk.

It takes two to tango but one to fake a back injury to avoid dance lessons.

Birds of a feather avoid eye contact together.

All good solitude comes to an end with group projects.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single nap.

The early bird gets the seat near the exit.

A drowning man will clutch at a straw. An introvert at a pool party will eat most of the cheese tray.

Comfortable silences speak louder than words.

Good things come to those who leave.

There’s no place like home.

Our 7th most-read article of the 2022.

Originally published April 18, 2022.

“The Florida Department of Education announced Friday that the state has rejected more than 50 math textbooks from next school year’s curriculum, citing references to critical race theory among reasons for the rejections.” – CNN, 4/17/21

Here in the great state of Florida, we are committed to protecting our children from any and all forms of indoctrination, and math is no exception. These are the mathematical concepts we find objectionable based on the dangers they pose to children:

Calculus: We stand firmly against any field of mathematics that requires integration.

Multiplication: We believe only certain numbers should be allowed to multiply with one another.

Polygons: We reject the notion that anything can have more than one side.

Order of Operations: The mnemonic Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally is reverse racism. Nobody should have to apologize just because their relative was in the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

The Number Zero: All numbers are either positive or negative. That’s just basic math.

Subtraction: It’s wrong to subtract a fractional number from another number before it has become whole.

Set Theory: We oppose any concept that recognizes the “simple majority” or “plurality” of a group.

Equal Signs: We believe in equality, obviously. Just not the way they’re doing it.

Prime Numbers: The only prime number the State of Florida recognizes is 17—the age at which a woman is in her prime.

Functions: We’re against anything that requires getting input first before it can be executed.

Gradients: We believe all slopes are slippery.

Square Roots: No mathematical concept that encourages using radical symbols should ever be taught in schools.

Mathematical Proofs: We don’t think any assertion requires “proof.”

Limits of Exponential Functions: Powers should not have any limits.

Non-Binary Operations, the Transitive Property, Cis(x), and Homogeneous Spaces: You’re not allowed to say any of these words in Florida.

Division: This one is OK with us.

Read an interview with Carlos Greaves about writing this piece here.

Imagen what else this thing can do

There’s a new hot trend in AI: text-to-image generators. Feed these programs any text you like and they’ll generate remarkably accurate pictures that match that description. They can match a range of styles, from oil paintings to CGI renders and even photographs, and — though it sounds cliched — in many ways the only limit is your imagination.

To date, the leader in the field has been DALL-E, a program created by commercial AI lab OpenAI (and updated just back in April). Yesterday, though, Google announced its own take on the genre, Imagen, and it just unseated DALL-E in the quality of its output.

The best way to understand the amazing capability of these models is to simply look over some of the images they can generate. There’s some generated by Imagen above, and even more below (you can see more examples at Google’s dedicated landing page).

In each case, the text at the bottom of the image was the prompt fed into the program, and the picture above, the output. Just to stress: that’s all it takes. You type what you want to see and the program generates it. Pretty fantastic, right?

But while these pictures are undeniably impressive in their coherence and accuracy, they should also be taken with a pinch of salt. When research teams like Google Brain release a new AI model they tend to cherry-pick the best results. So, while these pictures all look perfectly polished, they may not represent the average output of the Image system.

Often, images generated by text-to-image models look unfinished, smeared, or blurry — problems we’ve seen with pictures generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E program. (For more on the trouble spots for text-to-image systems, check out this interesting Twitter thread that dives into problems with DALL-E. It highlights, among other things, the tendency of the system to misunderstand prompts, and struggle with both text and faces.)

Google, though, claims that Imagen produces consistently better images than DALL-E 2, based on a new benchmark it created for this project named DrawBench.

DrawBench isn’t a particularly complex metric: it’s essentially a list of some 200 text prompts that Google’s team fed into Imagen and other text-to-image generators, with the output from each program then judged by human raters. As shown in the graphs below, Google found that humans generally preferred the output from Imagen to that of rivals’.

Image: Google

It’ll be hard to judge this for ourselves, though, as Google isn’t making the Imagen model available to the public. There’s good reason for this, too. Although text-to-image models certainly have fantastic creative potential, they also have a range of troubling applications. Imagine a system that generates pretty much any image you like being used for fake news, hoaxes, or harassment, for example. As Google notes, these systems also encode social biases, and their output is often racist, sexist, or toxic in some other inventive fashion.

A lot of this is due to how these systems are programmed. Essentially, they’re trained on huge amounts of data (in this case: lots of pairs of images and captions) which they study for patterns and learn to replicate. But these models need a hell of a lot of data, and most researchers — even those working for well-funded tech giants like Google — have decided that it’s too onerous to comprehensively filter this input. So, they scrape huge quantities of data from the web, and as a consequence their models ingest (and learn to replicate) all the hateful bile you’d expect to find online.

As Google’s researchers summarize this problem in their paper: “[T]he large scale data requirements of text-to-image models [...] have have led researchers to rely heavily on large, mostly uncurated, web-scraped dataset [...] Dataset audits have revealed these datasets tend to reflect social stereotypes, oppressive viewpoints, and derogatory, or otherwise harmful, associations to marginalized identity groups.”

In other words, the well-worn adage of computer scientists still applies in the whizzy world of AI: garbage in, garbage out.

Google doesn’t go into too much detail about the troubling content generated by Imagen, but notes that the model “encodes several social biases and stereotypes, including an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and a tendency for images portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes.”

This is something researchers have also found while evaluating DALL-E. Ask DALL-E to generate images of a “flight attendant,” for example, and almost all the subjects will be women. Ask for pictures of a “CEO,” and, surprise, surprise, you get a bunch of white men.

For this reason OpenAI also decided not release DALL-E publicly, but the company does give access to select beta testers. It also filters certain text inputs in an attempt to stop the model being used to generate racist, violent, or pornographic imagery. These measures go some way to restricting potential harmful applications of this technology, but the history of AI tells us that such text-to-image models will almost certainly become public at some point in the future, with all the troubling implications that wider access brings.

Google’s own conclusion is that Imagen “is not suitable for public use at this time,” and the company says it plans to develop a new way to benchmark “social and cultural bias in future work” and test future iterations. For now, though, we’ll have to be satisfied with the company’s upbeat selection of images — raccoon royalty and cacti wearing sunglasses. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. The iceberg made from the unintended consequences of technological research, if Imagen wants to have a go at generating that.

I made my art the way I lived my life—fast, unpredictable, and usually wielding a knife. Whether history calls me an iconoclast, a visionary, or a madman, just know that I was razor-focused on a single artistic goal:

Painting the shit out of sunflowers so that they’d look completely kickass on a pair of socks for your mother-in-law.

I may have been a penniless, desperately depressed artistic genius in nineteenth-century France, but in my soul, I was a one-man merch machine.

There’s not a single piece in my oeuvre I didn’t paint to moeuvre, my friends. There’s not a single composition in my catalog for which I didn’t crave a commemorative calendar.

Is that alliterative on purpose? You bet your sweet patootie.

Give me your ties, your planters, your huddled bathmats yearning to be “buy one, get one free” in the clearance section of a Bed Bath & Beyond. Emblazon them with my irises. Smother them with my intimate nighttime cafés.

And don’t forget my self-portraits—especially the one where my face is bandaged because I cut off my ear. That’s a moment in my life that cries out for worldwide distribution. I always meant for it to show up on jokey stationery with the tagline “I Can’t EAR You, Please Write a Note!”

Hilarious. And one thousand percent what I intended.

Say what you will about my groundbreaking techniques. Laud the way my images breathe with life and vitality. Praise my mastery of texture and form, my thickly-layered canvases that could take decades, even centuries, to dry completely—

That was deliberate, by the way. When I painted those entrancing swirls into The Starry Night, I made the paint as thicc as possible. I wanted my work to reach peak beauty just in time to be printed on a pair of silk boxer shorts.

Why else would I have included that cypress—the phallus of trees—and angled it a little to the left (in a way that is totally normal and okay) as it seductively penetrated the night sky?

I knew exactly what I was doing, and I have zero regrets.

After all, I have been quoted as saying that “great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” The particular small thing on which that quote appears is a refrigerator magnet. You can buy it at the MoMA store. But small things could also be notecards, keychains, or polyester scarves. They could be bookmarks or tins full of breath mints.

It’s not my place, as a dead artist, to micromanage your swag. Just please make sure it’s mass-produced and perfect for a dentist’s office.

But you can think even bigger than dentists. The palette of my life’s work was rich and saturated with every color of my pain. When I knifed those globs of paint onto canvas, I knew how awesome that shit would look projected onto the interior walls of a conference center that smells like a Sbarro’s.

When I died in penury, I thought about the fifty smackers each person would pay to walk through that conference center, immersing themselves in three-dimensional paintings that witnessed my plunge into existential despair.

And I smiled. Because when life brings rain, you can let a smile be your umbrella. And an umbrella will make that conference center’s gift shop $39.99 richer if it’s shellacked with blurry reproductions of works I poured my heart and soul into.

If you can think of a greater achievement than that—a greater dream to which an artist can aspire—please tell me. I’m all ears.

In every American city, long-time residents are being pushed out as wealthier newcomers fight for precious space. We need to stop the tidal wave of gentrification, and we need to make sure we stop it right after I, a young college-educated professional, move into this neighborhood.

Entire families are forced to leave their homes when gentrification raises rents. I saw so many people moving out of the building my mom and I toured. From that day on, I vowed to fight gentrification with every fiber of my being once I was firmly safe from the consequences of that fight.

The people who live here should have a say in what their community looks like. I’m going to live here now, so I’ll happily share my thoughts loudly, clearly, and also very loudly.

Do all these newcomers (the people who will move in after me) need to live in this neighborhood? Every day I bump into former college classmates on the street. I want to scream, We (the neighborhood I’m just about to move into) don’t want you here!

Gentrification is evident in the rapidly rising housing costs. I barely convinced my parents to pay my rent. Thankfully they could afford to subsidize my vague lifestyle, so now I can help fight against others trying to do the same.

The people moving here don’t respect the neighborhood traditions I learned about a week ago and have avoided ever since.

I’m tired of hard-working people having to leave their long-time homes, and I’m really tired of those people saying it’s my fault. Don’t they know I live here now, right in the heart of, uh… well, the neighborhood’s name isn’t important. What matters is keeping people, especially myself, in their homes, however recently they signed their lease.

The fight against gentrification begins now… that I have the key to my new place. I hope you join in the fight! (From afar.)

“Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) posted a quote from a neo-Nazi on Twitter on Sunday and incorrectly attributed it to Voltaire in an effort to attack National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
— Huffington Post, 1/31/22

Actual Source: Joseph Stalin

Actual Source: Dr. Ruth Westheimer

Actual Source: Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump

Actual Source: Dr. Seuss

Actual Source: Laura Ingrahm

Actual Source: Donald Trump

Actual Source: Tony Montana, Scarface

Actual Source: Billy Ray Cyrus

Actual Source: Gandalf, Lord of the Rings

Actual Source: John Rambo, Rambo: First Blood Part II

Actual Source: Kermit the Frog

Actual Source: Kid Rock

I’ve been thinking a lot about games lately. Well… if “thinking” is the right word for this.

But it’s not just silly cartoons. It’s because my new book is all about mathematical games.

It’s a friendly book. A yellow book. A tall book. In short: a Big Bird kind of book. It arrives on April 5th, and it is now yours to preorder:

I devoted two back-breaking years to researching this thing. At times, I feared I would not make it. How could I withstand so many pleasant diversions? So many hidden gems, each taking a minute to learn and a lifetime to master? Such endless hours of thought-provoking fun, requiring only materials you already have at home? It was week after week after week of relentless, agonizing enjoyment. The soul is only so strong.

But I persevered. From over a thousand candidates, I emerged with several dozen of the finest mathematical games that humans have yet devised.

They come from Japanese schoolyards, Parisian universities, and Argentine puzzle magazines.

They come from devoted educators, shameless self-promoters, and humble hobbyists.

They come from yours truly and trues yoursly.

Best of all, each game doubles as a fresh lesson in how play brings out the best in human thought.

The early reviews are already making me blush:

• Hyperbole and a Half‘s Allie Brosh said “I’m loving this” and fondly compared it to “a pill pocket for math.”
• Mindscape‘s Sean Carroll said it “reveals where the fun [of math] has been lurking all along.”
• Stanford’s Jo Boaler called it “a wonderful mix of informed, funny, and creative” and said “I will carry this with me everywhere, and my mathematical thinking will be better because of it.”
• My two-year-old Casey, upon first seeing it, dubbed it “my book.” She added: “I wrote this book,” and then, pointing to the cover: “I draw this.”

High praise indeed. This is my third book (Casey’s first), and I know I always say this, but I really think it’s my best one yet.

You can preorder in all the usual places, but I’m especially excited about the deluxe package on Kickstarter: your preordered copy will come signed (by me; alas, Ernő Rubik was unavailable), along with a plethora of bonus cards, and the chance to win a new game designed in your honor.

(The Kickstarter is U.S.-only, by the way; my apologies to folks elsewhere.)

I could give you the usual spiel here: how preorders count toward first-week sales, which are a book’s lifeblood, which makes them an author’s lifeblood, which is almost enough to attenuate the creepiness of the word “lifeblood.” But I’ll spare you that. Yes, my career (and Casey’s pineapple budget) require me to sell books. But don’t buy this one for me. (I already have a copy.) Buy it for yourself. Buy it for a friend, a game-playing partner, a student, a teacher. Buy it for someone who loves math, someone who loves games, someone who loves Big Bird. Heck, buy a copy for Big Bird himself.

Anyway, thanks for checking it out. I’ll be back to actual blog posts soon, I promise. And one last time, here’s the Kickstarter!

SPOKANE, WA—Saying it played a “dangerous role” in denying perennial all-stars the rings they clearly deserved, Hall of Fame NBA guard John Stockton claimed Wednesday that the Covid-19 vaccine was the No. 1 reason athletes failed to win a single championship. “We have no idea what is in this thing, but it’s obviously…

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SEATTLE—In an attempt to expand its customer base to those for whom home ownership remains out of reach, Zillow rolled out a new feature Friday that lets users track the happy lives of people who outbid them for their dream house. “All you have to do is enter your zip code, have an offer turned down on a home that was…

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SAN ANTONIO, TX—Coming clean about his off-the-court exploits during his 19 years in the NBA, former San Antonio Spurs power forward Tim Duncan reportedly claimed Thursday that he has helped over 20,000 women with sensible retirement planning. “In my playing days, every city we played in, I had at least a couple women…

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Archeologists have unearthed a rare 4,000-year-old board game in a Bronze and Iron Age settlement site in Oman, the game having grid markings that make it look similar to backgammon. What do you think?

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How I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) became one of rock's biggest urban myths.

“If you’ve spent much time on Twitter in recent weeks, you’ve doubtless seen the grids of green, yellow, and gray squares that have swept across the platform. In what felt like the space of a few days, scorecards from the word game Wordle went from novel to unavoidable as a deluge of puzzlers eagerly compared their daily results.” — The Ringer, 1/7/22

Oh, world, life has been so bleak lately. We spend most waking moments wanting to hide under furniture with our cats who are sick of us, our children just sitting there because we literally have no idea whether they’re supposed to be in school anymore.

But at the dawn of the new year, boxes of light and color began infiltrating our sight lines, our screens. We first saw them posted by a guy we worked in cubicles with long ago. He had a toaster oven on his desk, and for three years our hair smelled like singed bagel, but now our continued connection has been worth it, as he’s brought us this, this tiny perfect thing.

It’s Wordle. Not an app, just a site with thirty blank squares and a universe of possibilities. It’s not social media. It doesn’t make us feel as if we’re old, or bad parents, or that we need to make vertical baked ziti and improve our bullet journal game. It is simple, sweet, and true. Our first time, we got BANAL in four tries. It made us forget, for three minutes, that the world is a filthy cesspit filled with rapidly spawning gremlins. It took us back to an earlier time, when there wasn’t a constant buzzing in our left ear, when we could go to seafood buffets without fearing imminent doom, when our biggest worry about school board meetings was running into Cindy. Please, terrible world, just let us have this.

We know that the way things are going, our odds aren’t good. We fear, world, that soon we’ll find out every game we play drains the batteries in our smoke alarms and makes our only streaming service Peacock. Don’t let it turn out that our anti-vax cousin was finally going to get her shot when she found Wordle, and instead she just waits, counting down to midnight for the next game. Don’t make us suddenly realize that it might be weird or sexist, like when we decided to show Love Actually to our teenagers. Just let us type in letters, feeling bold and alive, like our English majors have finally, for once, come in handy.

Maybe Wordle can give us back some sense of control. In this world where we have to constantly slam on our brakes so everyone can back into parking spaces, when the Sex and the City crew has returned after years just to make us watch them go to a series of doctor’s appointments, let us say, “I’ll start with a word with an L and a P and maybe get it on my third try.” Let us say, “This letter’s there, and this letter belongs but in a different spot, and it’s SLUMP, and I got it in two tries, and I’m brilliant. Just a little bit. Right now, at least.”

We know there will be backlash. People will say Wordle represents everything wrong with left-to-right typing, that it’s just Wheel of Fortune without the wheel or the fortune. They’ll say people are no longer listening to their partners, except to notice they just said the word SWEAT, which could maybe be a nice first Wordle word, as it has two vowels and good consonants, plus many Wordle answers are words that seem gross or cranky. As we all are right now, world, because of you.

Let our spouses have the James Webb Space Telescope. Let our parents be excited about Where the Crawdads Sing—we don’t know why. For us, let us have Wordle. And let us be able to continue to love Wordle, even after the think pieces on “Wordle and antiheroes,” after Weird Al’s “Wordle Rain,” after it’s referenced in the third season of And Just Like That, in the episode where Carrie gets bifocals and Charlotte has a hospital scare only to find out she’s lactose intolerant.

Let us still feel that joy we did on our first attempt, and not have it fizzle out, like when we just wanted to buy an air filter online, and sixteen reviews were good, and then one said it would make our children rabid and poison any creature that happens into our backyards. Admit it, world, you keep doing that to us. You do.

Please let us have Wordle. And while we’re asking, let us solve it in one try. You took Betty White, world. It’s truly the least you can do.

What’s going on?You know the 1982 hit song “It’s Raining Men” by the Weather Girls? Well, last week in the East Texas city of Texarkana that happened, but with fish. Wait. What? You heard me. It rained fish. During a brief shower on Wednesday, December 29, multiple Texarkana residents reported seeing dozens of fish falling from the sky. Like the frogs at the end of Magnolia? Exactly. Or the squids at the beginning of Watchmen. Except, you know, with fish. I don’t know if I believe you. Don’t take my word for it! There’s video! And many, many photographs. So what exactly happened in Texarkana? Well, there were a couple thunderstorms in the area this past Wednesday, during and after which folks reported seeing a bunch of dead fish scattered over their yards…View Original Post

The post Fish Fell From the Sky in Texarkana, and No One Is Reel-y Sure Why appeared first on Texas Monthly.

November 8
How I resent the burden of neutrality. It seems that whenever Farmer Brown has a problem, he turns to me.

November 9
The cows have a point. The barn is cold at night. But what is my role in this? Helping exploited labor use the printed word to organize and advocate for their rights?

November 10
The cows held their emergency meeting last night. Everyone believes Moo is understood only by cows. But I understand Moo. Knowing what I know, can I even trust myself to be neutral? I feel I’m being dragged into something…

November 11
It was so horrible to have to carry that note! The temptation to channel resentment for selfish ends is now overwhelming. The note clearly says I will bring the typewriter to Farmer Brown after he delivers the electric blankets to the cows. Will I really do this? Doubting myself, my character. Unsure of my true desires!

November 13
I took a day for introspection. On one hand, the cows are entitled to basic necessities for their production. On the other hand, do they really need electric blankets? And have they considered the increased utility costs? What if a blanket goes bad? It’s one thing to buy something, but the real killer is maintenance. More to the point, what about me? What will I do? Am I about to abuse my unique position for personal gain?

November 14
Today, at last, a grand decision. The deed is done. The guilt is overwhelming. Instead of delivering the typewriter to Farmer Brown, I used it to write a note. I demanded a diving board for the pond. Am I a horrible animal? I think I might be. Are all revolutionary movements doomed to bow down before the twin gods of materialism and hedonism?

November 19
The diving board was installed today. Time to embrace the new me! I’m letting go of my guilt. Letting it sink like a stone to the bottom of this beautiful and no longer boring pond. Leisure is part of decent working conditions. I further negotiated with Farmer Brown to have the pond dredged to a depth sufficient to satisfy the insurance underwriters. I also inserted some language into the contract specifying length and width of the board to ensure springiness (and longevity). A biannual inspection program (paid for by Farmer Brown) should satisfy basic maintenance and any new materials needs.

November 20
Did the diving board make me happy? Oh, who knows! I can’t torture myself with these questions anymore. But we’ve started grading for the new cabana bar, ordered a dozen Indonesian teak chaise longue chairs, and are pricing underwater LED lighting. I’m wondering if a small waterfall would be too much? I’ll dash off a note to the farmer…

Amazon's cloud-computing arm was hit with an outage that lasted almost all day Tuesday, knocking offline many web-connected devices and popular sites.

Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. The chilly weather, the hot chocolate, the presents, and (most importantly) a very important birthday everyone should be celebrating. But one of the more “hit or miss” parts of the season is the songs. Don’t get me wrong, some songs absolutely s l a p (looking at you “All I Want For Christmas”) but others just need to be re-written or put to rest forever. As you start to put on a Christmas playlist, consider taking some of these songs out of the rotation.

Christmas Shoes

I’ll be honest, I feel a little bad putting this on the list because it’s a song about a boy wanting to buy something nice for his dying mother. That being said, this is the bleakest song I believe I’ve ever heard — and I’m saying that as a a fan of Phoebe Bridgers. The entire chorus is just heartbreak after heartbreak after heartbreak. “Sir, I want to buy these shoes for my mama…Could you hurry, sir, daddy says there’s not much time, You see she’s been sick for quite a while… And I want her to look beautiful if mama meets Jesus tonight.” The song may be beautiful, but unless you want to see a group of people sobbing their eyes out, do not play this song at a Christmas party.

Mary Did You Know?

“This could have been an email.” The singer spends four minutes asking Mary if she knew who Jesus would be, and the answer is yes. She knew. The angel literally told her in Luke 1 who her son was. That’s part of the Christmas story. So why do we need a song gaslighting Mary about something she already knew? 

Baby It’s Cold Outside

A song about a woman trying to get away from a man who won’t take no for an answer? In this day and age? I don’t think so! NEXT!

Away in a Manger

Before everyone starts yelling, 99% of this song is perfectly fine. It’s a sweet and tender song about baby Jesus, which is all fine and good. However, there’s one particular line that’s always been a bit bothersome. “But little Lord Jesus, No crying he makes.” First off, this is Biblically false because as John 11:35 points out, Jesus is a weeper. Secondly, babies cry. It’s what they do, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s just how they communicate. So can someone explain why it’s seen as a good and precious thing that Jesus doesn’t cry in this song? When did this become Biblical canon that baby Jesus didn’t cry? Because as any child development specialist will tell you, it’s actually a bad thing if baby Jesus wasn’t crying. 

The 12 Days of Christmas

Hopefully no one is surprised that the most unnecessarily long Christmas song made the list. No one needs this many gifts. And personally, if I was gifted 23 birds within the span of a week, I would run for the hills. This is not a suitor, it’s a stalker.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

The story of Rudolph isn’t as happy as you may think. After being cast aside for one different feature (seriously, he was identical in every other way. They couldn’t look past a different color nose?), he is eventually “accepted” by the other reindeer and Santa himself. But was he really welcomed? Or were his differences only accepted because they could be exploited for labor?

​​Little Drummer Boy

With the exception of Dwight’s award-worthy rendition, this song gets on my last nerves. Young Mary has just given birth to the savior of the world in a dirty old barn, surrounded by animals and strangers. And here comes some kid wanting to show off his drum skills. Where was Joseph to tell little Ringo that this was not his time to shine? All I’m saying is he could have waited a few more days before he honored Jesus with the drum solo he worked so hard on.

The post Seven Christmas Songs We Have Some Beef With appeared first on RELEVANT.

"Videos and GIFs of cute animals — usually cats — have gone viral online for almost as long as the internet has been around..." writes the New York Times. "Now, it is becoming increasingly clear how widely the old-school internet trick is being used by people and organizations peddling false information online, misinformation researchers say." The posts with the animals do not directly spread false information. But they can draw a huge audience that can be redirected to a publication or site spreading false information about election fraud, unproven coronavirus cures and other baseless conspiracy theories entirely unrelated to the videos. Sometimes, following a feed of cute animals on Facebook unknowingly signs users up as subscribers to misleading posts from the same publisher. Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said this kind of "engagement bait" helped misinformation actors generate clicks on their pages, which can make them more prominent in users' feeds in the future. That prominence can drive a broader audience to content with inaccurate or misleading information, she said. "The strategy works because the platforms continue to reward engagement over everything else," Ms. Ryan said, "even when that engagement comes from" publications that also publish false or misleading content.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon is hard at work on its Lord of the Rings TV show, which is set to be the most expensive show ever made. That series will act as a prequel to the J.R.R. Tolkien books most of us think of as Lord of the Rings — you know, the ones that became Peter Jackson’s trilogy. But before Jackson got his mitts on the Middle-earth saga, there was almost a very different Lord of the Rings movie about how Frodo got by with a little help from a very different set of friends. Yes, there was a time when the Beatles were going to be front and center in a Lord of the Rings adaptation.

It was the 1960s and rock and roll artists were popping up in a lot of movies. The Beatles had made some good money off movies like Help! and A Hard Days Night, and film producer Denis O’Dell — who was contractually obligated to get them in another movie — had the idea of casting them in a story of Frodo’s quest to take the Ring to Mount Doom. The movie, in this case, would be a musical featuring original tunes from the John, Paul, George and Ringo.

The Beatles were fans of the books and reportedly keen on the idea. While it’d be the easiest job in history to just cast the four members of the band as the four main Hobbits, the Beatles themselves had different ideas. Paul and Ringo wanted to be Frodo and Sam, respectively. But John Lennon was more interested in being Gollum (can you imagine) and George Harrison had his heart set on Gandalf. The studio was more than happy to give them whatever roles they wanted.

Lennon was championing the idea and he knew just the director he wanted: filmmaking auteur Stanley Kubrick, famous for The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and many, many other classics. Kubrick himself was an avowed Tolkien fan but just didn’t think filmmaking technology had progressed far enough to accurately depict Middle-earth on screen (fair enough!). When Kubrick said no, the Beatles themselves got a little cooler on the idea.

But there was a bigger obstacle. Tolkien himself still held the rights to the books at the time and, according to Jackson, simply didn’t like the Beatles. Tolkien put his foot down and forward progress on the movie stopped altogether until years later, when Jackson talked Hollywood into letting him adapt the trilogy.

It’s almost certainly for the best of all parties concerned, given the benefit of hindsight. But it’s a shame we’ll never get to hear George Harrison’s “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” on screen.

Facebook and its sister properties Instagram and WhatsApp are suffering from ongoing, global outages. We don’t yet know why this happened, but the how is clear: Earlier this morning, something inside Facebook caused the company to revoke key digital records that tell computers and other Internet-enabled devices how to find these destinations online.

Doug Madory is director of internet analysis at Kentik, a San Francisco-based network monitoring company. Madory said at approximately 11:39 a.m. ET today (15:39 UTC), someone at Facebook caused an update to be made to the company’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) records. BGP is a mechanism by which Internet service providers of the world share information about which providers are responsible for routing Internet traffic to which specific groups of Internet addresses.

In simpler terms, sometime this morning Facebook took away the map telling the world’s computers how to find its various online properties. As a result, when one types Facebook.com into a web browser, the browser has no idea where to find Facebook.com, and so returns an error page.

In addition to stranding billions of users, the Facebook outage also has stranded its employees from communicating with one another using their internal Facebook tools. That’s because Facebook’s email and tools are all managed in house and via the same domains that are now stranded.

“Not only are Facebook’s services and apps down for the public, its internal tools and communications platforms, including Workplace, are out as well,” New York Times tech reporter Ryan Mac tweeted. “No one can do any work. Several people I’ve talked to said this is the equivalent of a ‘snow day’ at the company.”

The outages come just hours after CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a much-anticipated interview with Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower who recently leaked a number of internal Facebook investigations showing the company knew its products were causing mass harm, and that it prioritized profits over taking bolder steps to curtail abuse on its platform — including disinformation and hate speech.

We don’t know how or why the outages persist at Facebook and its other properties, but the changes had to have come from inside the company, as Facebook manages those records internally. Whether the changes were made maliciously or by accident is anyone’s guess at this point.

Madory said it could be that someone at Facebook just screwed up.

“In the past year or so, we’ve seen a lot of these big outages where they had some sort of update to their global network configuration that went awry,” Madory said. “We obviously can’t rule out someone hacking them, but they also could have done this to themselves.”

Update, 4:37 p.m. ET: Sheera Frenkel with The New York Times tweeted that Facebook employees told her they were having trouble accessing Facebook buildings because their employee badges no longer worked. That could be one reason this outage has persisted so long: Facebook engineers may be having trouble physically accessing the computer servers needed to upload new BGP records to the global Internet.

Update, 6:16 p.m. ET: A trusted source who spoke with a person on the recovery effort at Facebook was told the outage was caused by a routine BGP update gone wrong. The source explained that the errant update blocked Facebook employees — the majority of whom are working remotely — from reverting the changes. Meanwhile, those with physical access to Facebook’s buildings couldn’t access Facebook’s internal tools because those were all tied to the company’s stranded domains.

Update, 7:46 p.m. ET: Facebook says its domains are slowly coming back online for most users. In a tweet, the company thanked users for their patience, but it still hasn’t offered any explanation for the outage.

Update, 8:05 p.m. ET: This fascinating thread on Hacker News delves into some of the not-so-obvious side effects of today’s outages: Many organizations saw network disruptions and slowness thanks to billions of devices constantly asking for the current coordinates of Facebook.com, Instagram.com and WhatsApp.com. Bill Woodcock, executive director of the Packet Clearing House, said his organization saw a 40 percent increase globally in wayward DNS traffic throughout the outage.

Update, 8:32 p.m. ET: Cloudflare has published a detailed and somewhat technical writeup on the BGP changes that caused today’s outage. Still no word from Facebook on what happened.

Update, 11:32 p.m. ET: Facebook published a blog post saying the outage was the result of a faulty configuration change:

“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication,” Facebook’s Santosh Janardhan wrote. “This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.”

“We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change,” Janardhan continued. “We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

Several different domain registration companies today listed the domain Facebook.com as up for sale. This happened thanks to automated systems that look for registered domains which appear to be expired, abandoned or recently vacated. There was never any reason to believe Facebook.com would actually be sold as a result, but it’s fun to consider how many billions of dollars it could fetch on the open market.

This is a developing story and will likely be updated throughout the day.