The Rapture

Sam Sparro

Muse

In addition to leading the animation studio at the National Film Board of Canada, René Jodoin made several animated films that explored geometric forms and motion, including the one above, A Matter of Form from 1984.

Set to the rousing notes of Schubert’s Military March, this animation film is an ingenious example of how a single point can be the building-block for a multiplicity of shapes and configurations. Lines and forms grow out of the point, eventually covering the entire screen in splashes of colour. This is geometric wizardry at its colourful best. A film without words.

I’m not saying my affinity for such animations is because I watched so much Sesame Street as a kid, but I’m not not saying it either.

Here’s another of Jodoin’s films, Dance Squared:

You can watch more of Jodoin’s work in this YouTube playlist. (via the kid should see this)

Tags: geometry · René Jodoin · video

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE (ANP) - De Ecuadoraan Richard Carapaz heeft de achttiende etappe in de Tour de France van Voiron over een afstand van 185,2 kilometer naar Orcières-Merlette gewonnen. De 33-jarige renner van EF Education-EasyPost ging na een slotklim van 7,1 kilometer op een hoogte van 1825 meter alleen over de streep.

Een groepje van zes renners met Matteo Jorgenson, Carapaz, Paret-Peintre, Mauro Schmid, Tobias Johannessen en Raúl García reed de laatste 50 kilometer aan de leiding. Een groep achtervolgers met de Nederlander Thymen Arensman slaagde er niet meer in ze te achterhalen.

Het zestal vluchters begon samen aan de slotklim met een gemiddeld stijgingspercentage van 6,7 procent naar skioord Orcières-Merlette. Op 3,4 kilometer voor de finish ging Carapaz er alleen vandoor. De Franse klimmer Paret-Peintre deed nog een vergeefse poging hem in te halen.

Terwijl hun klasgenoten al zomervakantie hebben, zitten op OBS De Vliegenier in Apeldoorn nog dertig kinderen in de klas. Zij hadden eerder dit jaar buiten de schoolvakanties vrij. Nu halen ze die gemiste onderwijstijd in.

It's a bad day to be an Oracle admin: Big Red has just released 1,449 security patches ready to be applied. The patches were released as part of the company's quarterly security fixes, and the record number may partly reflect Oracle's internal push to harness AI for vulnerability detection, which it announced in April. Oracle also manages a huge product portfolio, and the patches span numerous products, so the total shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Instead, experts speaking to The Register unanimously agreed that any concerns over the number of patches should be reserved for the admins responsible for applying them, rather than for Oracle's code quality. "While a record 1,449 patches sounds alarming, it mostly reflects the massive scale of modern software ecosystems and the industry's shift toward aggressive, automated security scanning," said Dray Agha, senior manager of security operations at Huntress. "Frankly, the real story isn't the sheer volume of bugs, but rather the immense operational strain this puts on enterprise IT teams who must now race to separate the critical threats from the routine fixes without breaking business operations." Others, like Matei Badanoiu, lead security researcher at Pentest-Tools.com, say these bumper batches of security updates are likely to become the norm, owing mainly to AI-assisted bug hunting. Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday updates have ballooned in size in the last few months too, and not without warning. July's record 622 CVEs eclipsed June's 206, which at the time was an all-time high, and Microsoft warned just days before that the role of AI in vulnerability detection will make defenders even busier. "As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release," Microsoft Windows veep Pavan Davuluri wrote in a blog post. Davuluri noted that Microsoft offers various automated patching tools and encouraged customers to make use of them to ease the ever-increasing burden of applying an unprecedented volume of security fixes. Similarly, Oracle's Integrated Cyber Center wrote in a blog post that customers feeling overwhelmed by the scale of their patching duties should make use of support resources provided by its various teams: My Oracle Support, Technical Account Management, and Customer Success. Big Red's big bet on AI for vulnerability detection has also led to a shakeup in how it delivers patches to customers. Starting in May 2026, Oracle began supplementing its quarterly updates with monthly patch batches for the most critical bugs it finds. Named Critical Security Patch Updates (CSPUs), these will be smaller but more frequent, allowing defenders to stay on top of the most pressing threats. Oracle said: "This approach enables customers to apply critical fixes more quickly on premises, while continuing to support established quarterly patching cycles through cumulative updates." Priority patches Only ten of the 1,449 patches carried a maximum CVSS score of 10.0, all of them affecting Oracle Fusion Middleware. Of these, two were highlighted as particularly dangerous by the Dutch NCSC: CVE-2026-47056 and CVE-2026-60217. Neither vulnerability is cataloged with a Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) identifier, although both are described as easily exploitable. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit CVE-2026-47056 via HTTP to take over Oracle Data Integrator, while CVE-2026-60217 allows the same against Oracle Coherence over TCP. Urging customers to apply updates as soon as possible, NCSC-NL said: "Depending on the vulnerability, an attacker can execute malicious code, view sensitive data, or take over a system completely. Due to the severity of the vulnerabilities and the lack of authentication, the risk of exploitation is high." Badanoiu, meanwhile, told us that he was especially concerned about CVE-2026-61211 (9.9) and CVE-2026-47040 (9.1) – the two top-rated vulnerabilities affecting Oracle Database Server. "CVE-2026-47040, in Oracle Net Service, leads to an unauthenticated vulnerability through which attackers gain access to any stored data and the risk of persistently crashing the service," he explained. "And CVE-2026-61211, in the DBMS_CLOUD package, carries the highest score in the batch, where a low-privilege attacker can get remote code execution and takeover of Oracle's RDBMS as well as downstream implications for other products that use the database." ®

Swedish nonprofit alleges cost to repair replica was £4,500 but Universal – which made £196m on film’s opening weekend – has not stumped up

The Swedish owners of a Viking longship replica that features in Hollywood blockbuster The Odyssey say they feel “forgotten” after film-makers allegedly returned the vessel damaged and failed to foot the bill for repairs.

In nearly three decades at sea, the warship Glad av Gillberga – which is based on a wreck from around 1040 found in Denmark’s Roskilde fjord – has successfully sailed the North Sea, the Baltic and even voyaged to Canada.

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Billionaire in interview with the Economist admits he was too consumed by politics and shares predictions about AI

Elon Musk has admitted he became too consumed by politics during his volatile alliance with Donald Trump and his brief appointment as the president’s financial axman, running the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).

The world’s richest person, and briefly its first trillionaire after his SpaceX company floated on the New York stock exchange in June, made the confession in a wide-ranging interview with the Economist published on Thursday. He shared his positions on subjects from foreign wars to AI, and made a number of eye-opening predictions for the future.

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