The author of When I Hit You returns with a pithy, savagely funny tale of online shaming and the Indian manosphere

We can all agree that the internet today, especially two particular platforms owned by the world’s greatest megalomaniacs, is a hellscape. But if you think X and Facebook are purgatories of friendless trolls endlessly posting hate and bullying women, each other and minorities under the guise of free speech, wait till you experience the Indian version of that netherworld, as captured by novelist and poet Meena Kandasamy. Take the worst algorithms in the world, add a billion-and-a-half people, mix in a far-right government with advanced internet skills and bring on the “burning ghats of Indian politics” that include caste and misogyny as well as roiling ethnic and religious antagonisms, and the western version of X begins to look like a children’s playground.

This is the world that Amy Chaturvedi, a posh student activist-communist living in London, wakes up to one day when the internet is set ablaze by a deepfake sex tape. It’s her face, but it’s not her. Don’t get her wrong, Amy is sexually unapologetic and proudly experimental; she has done plenty of transgressive things, she just didn’t do that one video. But try telling that to the Indian manosphere or, in fact, Amy’s mother. “The main aggressors are a disparate bunch of Nazi-loving, Islamophobic vegetarian dicks with profile pictures that are either the Joker or V for Vendetta,” Kandasamy writes. “If these trolls are to be believed, I am a leading member of the tukde-tukde gang of academics who want to balkanise India. I am on Pakistani payroll. I am funded by George Soros.” She nails the weaselly character of the Indian internet troll, exposing all their shameful secrets – their failures with women, their desire to be followed by Prime Minister Modi (it’s a real thing, look it up), their fear of Muslims, and their rage. Kandasamy’s sharp humour provides much-needed relief from the anger of the internet and I found myself laughing many times at her wicked, tart observations.

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The Hong Kong action master’s deliriously violent 1990 epic fuses gangland thriller, war movie and tragic melodrama into a spectacular vision of greed and moral collapse

The title of this 1990 John Woo extravaganza might lead the uninitiated to expect a chillingly focused, targeted assassination. Actually, there are innumerable bullets and innumerable heads in this over-the-top gonzo spectacle. It is a crime thriller, a wartime action film set in Vietnam, but it offers something other than the usual Hollywood perspective; it is a parable of greed comparable to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and even a kind of romantic melodrama.

There is, however, one key bullet in a head, a literal bullet lodged in the skull of someone who achieves a macabre zombie-like semi-survival, the bullet being symbolic of the way violence takes root in the brain, dehumanising its victim. The final “boardroom” scene disclosing this image is toweringly mad and strange. Yet in this movie, as in so many other Woo films, we can see how the director counterintuitively uses sad music – harmonica, woodwind – over grisly, brutal action sequences, as if what he wants us to register is not the violence or the shock but just how poignantly futile and pathetic it all is.

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Cape Town schoolkids heading home and rules for maintaining a long-distance relationship feature in photos exploring the theme of unknown futures

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A new cap on bus fares in the Highlands and islands makes exploring this stunning archipelago in Scotland a breeze

The views are remarkable. From one window, gorse-gold hills roll west towards mountains patched with snow. On the other side, fields of new spring lambs slope down to a silver sea. Elsewhere, the bus crosses wide estuaries and cascading burns. There are thatched crofts, rocky bays and birch woods starred with anemones. One of the most remarkable things about this scenic 111-mile, 3½-hour trip on bus X99 is that it costs just £2.

Until March 2026, a single from Inverness to Scrabster on Scotland’s north coast was £28. Now, thanks to a new bus fare cap in Orkney, Highland and Moray, no journey in the area costs more than £2. The bus is timed to coincide with the Northlink Ferry to Stromness, Orkney’s second biggest town, and I’m heading there to explore by bus.

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Barnardo’s says survey shows online abuse and harassment becoming ‘part of background noise of growing up’

Nearly one in five girls in the UK receive persistent, unwanted images online, according to a poll by the charity Barnardo’s, which warned that online misogyny was becoming an everyday part of childhood.

Its survey of 4,000 young people found that a quarter of girls had been called degrading names online, while one in seven 13- to 15-year-olds had been asked to send a nude photo.

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Vorige week verscheen op De Correspondent een stuk waarin Jesse Frederik mijn boek De Symfonie van Onvredeaangreep voor een polemiek over de oorzaken van het succes van radicaal-rechts en de manier waarop wetenschappers daar onderzoek naar doen. Laat ik vooropstellen dat ik een groot voorstander ben van open debat en kritische journalistiek. Ik heb immers […]

Het bericht Jesse Frederik gaat te kort door de bocht: Waarom complexe maatschappelijke onvrede niet in één verklaring past verscheen eerst op StukRoodVlees.

Iran’s government has decided the nation should reconnect to the global internet. In the days after the USA and Israel attacked Iran in February, traffic from the Gulf nation to the global internet dropped to just one percent of usual volumes – with the remaining trickle of traffic thought to be the result of a policy allowing access to a small group of mostly government and military users. On Tuesday, Iran's vice-president Mohammad Reza Aref used his X account to announce “the first step toward free and regulated access to cyberspace has been taken.” Not long afterwards, NetBlocks and Cloudflare both recorded substantial traffic flowing to and from Iran for the first time in 88 days. Outage-watchers at network observability outfit Kentik believe Iran’s disconnection is the longest such incident since Libya’s six-month shutdown in 2011. Internet analyst Doug Madory rated it as far more significant, because Iran’s population is 15 times larger than Libya’s. “Along with the sheer number of people cut off from the world, what makes this shutdown unique is Iran’s use of an elaborate system to selectively allow internet access for some favored individuals and organizations, while blocking the internet for everyone else, a practice referred to as either whitelisting or a tiered internet,” he wrote in April. Outage-watching org NetBlocks thinks filtering of content remains in place, “but can be worked around,” but has also observed that Iran’s government has now restricted access to Meta’s messaging service WhatsApp. Iran’s government said it blocked connections to the outside world as a national security measure. The nation has blocked traffic in the past during conflicts and internal protests, presumably to prevent citizens sharing the true state of the nation’s affairs with the world and to make life harder for would-be cyber-attackers. Vice-president Aref said resuming connection will mean “smart services will be streamlined … and the obstacles to knowledge-based development and scientific authority will be removed,” but didn’t explain why the government decided to end outage at this time. Iran’s government has reportedly split over the issue of restoring connectivity. ®

Original Mastodon Post

by Chris Reccardi

#art #ChrisReccardi

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Aerodynamic drag is a major "barrier" in high-speed airplanes, automobiles, and bullet trains. This is because a design with less aerodynamic drag allows the aircraft to move at higher speeds with less energy. When an aircraft or car body moves at high speed, a thin layer of air called the "boundary layer" is formed on its surface. This boundary layer has two states: laminar flow, in which air flows in an orderly fashion, and turbulent flow, which involves turbulence. The longer the air stays in the laminar flow state with low friction, the smaller the air resistance becomes, but as the air speed increases, it transitions to turbulent flow. The key to reducing aerodynamic drag is how to delay this transition to turbulence.

For more than 80 years, the principle of "the surface of an object must be smooth" has been the basic premise of aeronautical engineering throughout the world in order to suppress the transition to turbulence and reduce aerodynamic drag. This premise was based on the results of a 1940 study by Ichiro Tani, a Japanese aerodynamicist who quantitatively demonstrated the relationship between "surface roughness" (an indicator of the state of the machined surface) and turbulent transition, arguing that surface roughness, which was unavoidable with the manufacturing technology of the time, prevented laminar flow from being realized. However, in 1989 Tani reinterpreted the experimental data on rough-surface pipes obtained by fluid engineer Johann Nikulase in the 1930s, bringing a new perspective that "roughness may not necessarily only promote turbulent transition and increase fluid resistance." Inheriting this idea, a research group led by Yasuaki Kohama of Tohoku University experimentally demonstrated in the 1990s that fibrous rough surfaces, which have fine fibrous irregularities on their surface, have the effect of delaying transition under certain conditions.

The same Tohoku University research team recently announced a discovery that significantly advances this trend. Aiko Yakino, associate professor at Tohoku University's Institute of Fluid Science, and her research group were the first in the world to demonstrate that aerodynamic drag can be reduced by up to 43.6 percent simply by applying distributed micro-roughness (DMR), a surface roughness so fine and irregular that it cannot be distinguished by the naked eye. This technology is fundamentally different from the "rivulet (shark skin) process," which is known as a typical aerodynamic drag reduction technology. The rivulet process mimics the fine longitudinal grooves in shark skin, and by carving grooves approximately 0.1 mm wide along the direction of airflow, it aligns the vortices that occur near the wall surface of turbulent airflow areas. DMR, on the other hand, delays the switch from laminar to turbulent flow by means of random and minute irregularities. The flow zones it affects and the mechanisms it employs are based on completely different concepts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.