They are not a new normal. But worse can nonetheless be expected.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

• First ODI of series will take place in Bready on Wednesday

• England refuse to face Afghanistan due to Taliban regime

Ireland’s decision to stage a full one-day international series for their men’s team against Afghanistan this summer could cost them lucrative future fixtures against England.

The England and Wales Cricket Board is understood to be unhappy about the series, which starts on Wednesday, taking place as England refuse to play Afghanistan outside International Cricket Council global events because of what the ECB chair, Richard Thompson, has described as the “gender apartheid” of the Taliban regime.

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Mount Vernon official is accused of driving getaway car after son allegedly opened fire outside Bronx court

A New York state police department fired its deputy commissioner on Tuesday after she allegedly acted as a getaway driver for her son in what is being investigated as an attempted murder.

The city of Mount Vernon said in an Instagram post that it had terminated Jennifer Lackard, deputy police commissioner for safety, for conduct “unrelated to her duties”.

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The company will release its second quarter earnings on Tuesday, giving investors a look at its potential profit

For the first time since SpaceX went public, the world will get a first-hand look into the trillion-dollar corporation’s financials. The Elon Musk-run business will report its second quarter earnings on Tuesday, while nervous investors look to gain more insight into the rocket ship company’s potential for profit.

SpaceX had a blockbuster initial public offering in June with the largest-ever stock market debut in history. The IPO transformed SpaceX into a $2tn company and briefly crowned Musk the world’s first trillionaire. But since then, the company’s stock has plummeted by 24%, erasing nearly $500bn in market cap.

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Investigators pin blame for Eaton fire, which killed 19 people and ruined thousands of homes, on ‘electrical arcing events’ at out-of-service tower

The deadly 2025 Eaton fire in the Los Angeles area was caused by equipment belonging to the utility company Southern California Edison, fire officials said in a report released on Tuesday.

Los Angeles county fire officials found that the cause of the fire that killed 19 people and destroyed or damaged more than 9,000 homes and businesses was a tower that was not in service, according to the report.

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David Hearn has ‘number of potential remedies’ after being prosecuted in connection with pool damage, attorney says

An attorney for the former Olympic canoeist who was charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool has said that “all options are on table” for legal recourse after prosecutors recently abandoned the case abruptly.

David Hearn “has a number of potential remedies” after being prosecuted in connection with pool damage now attributed to faulty work by a contractor, attorney Steven Levin said in a statement. Levin added that those could include “civil suits, bar referrals for the prosecutors involved, request for sanctions and reimbursement of attorneys’ fees and expenses”, and requests for investigations by various government entities, including Congress.

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I don’t know what sort of neurodiverse bucket this puts me in, but I think a lot about mowing the lawn¹ relative to how much time I actually spend mowing lawns (~6-7 hours per year). And so I was completely fascinated by The Pudding’s latest post on optimal lawn mowing paths and “why some people mow a lawn better than others”.

They built several digital lawns for people to mow and recorded all of their moves, how often they paused at certain times, and who mowed an optimal path.

Solving the lawn mowing problem is formally called Coverage Path Planning, and is related to one of the most famous path planning problems in computer science: The Traveling Salesman Problem.

Humans turn out to be pretty good mowers, especially those who take their time and have played some video games (including, one would assume, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mr. Do!, and any other game where you need to worry about dead-ends).

Sarah, one of the best mowers, spent her attention unevenly on purpose. She had a theory about why.

“The bigger spaces have more cognitive load for you to figure out what the best path is. Whereas the smaller spaces…there are fewer decisions to make.”

She planned the tight, trap-prone sections carefully and winged it on the open ones.

So it’s not about thinking more or faster, but when thinking happens. That’s what a good heuristic does: it spends your attention on the decisions that matter and nothing on the ones that don’t.

The piece is interactive so you get to try your hand at digital mowing as well.

My actual lawn is very irregularly shaped with a few dead-ends & choke points and an added wrinkle that I can’t blow grass clippings into the flower beds (so I can only go one-way the “wrong way” in those areas). So every time I mow, I’m trying to figure out the optimal path so I don’t end up backtracking too much. I probably end up saving about 45 seconds of actual time but boy is it fun from an intellectual standpoint.

1. See my post on Tidying Up from more than 20 years ago. ↩

Tags: infoviz · science · The Pudding

“poetry camera is a new way to see your world. take a photo with the camera… poetry camera thinks… and prints out a poem about the scene.”

Bobby Fingers (the greatest human alive today) has released another video about constructing a diorama of the bedroom of Johnny Depp and Amanda Heard after an alleged notorious incident.

You can try to find the buried diorama, or just buy his Toilet Wine. There are rats.

This Stupid Trend Is Taking Over YouTube [SLYT]

tldw; It's probably the result of YouTube's A.I. prompting different creators with the same subject, thumbnail style, and even timing of the uploads.

In a culture obsessed with seamlessness and instant fulfilment, inconvenience is starting to feel strangely radical again. The revolution will not be optimised: on frictionmaxxing and the creative virtues of inconvenience (It's Nice That)

Against Frictionless AI (Communications Psychology via Nature) 'Friction-maxxing' in school: Students should read primary literature, not AI summaries Can friction-maxxing change your focus? (BBC) I baulked at the idea of 'friction-maxxing'. But there's more to it than meets the eye (The Guardian) There's a high cost to the frictionless consumer experience. (Psychology Today) And possibly more controversial (CW: tolerance, spirituality) "Every time we exchange our fallible, friction-filled world for a smoother, more convenient, more predictable experience, we are chipping away at what makes us human." Noēma mag (left-centre), The Healing Power of Social Friction

This “Hendrix Fire Letterpress” is an iteration of a Jimi Hendrix portrait I made but never released outside of inclusion in my “50 Shades of Black” boxset. I’ve been a fan of Jimi Hendrix since late high school. After what I call my “punk rock orthodoxy” phase waned, I was open to looking back to older music that had some of the same attitude and expression as punk. Hendrix stood out to me as being soulful and cool, but also intense and feral. The debut Hendrix album, Are You Experienced, is a masterpiece all the way through, and though it opens with the banger “Purple Haze,” I really love the groove and vocal swagger of the song “Fire.” To me, “Fire” has a heavier funk feel, almost like James Brown with more guitar power. Most people focus on Jimi’s guitar prowess, but I think he was a great vocalist and songwriter with his guitar brilliance, just adding flair to superb songs. I made several homemade Hendrix shirts when I was in high school and college just to have one for myself. One of the first “art” prints I ever made was a tribute to John Van Hamersveld’s Pinnacle Hendrix poster from 1968. I saw Hendrix as a cultural icon to reference and honor, even as I subverted his image. This one, however, is a pure, sincere tribute!
-Shepard

PRINT DETAILS: Hendrix Fire Letterpress. 13″ H x 10″ W. Letterpress on cream cotton paper with hand-deckled edges. Signed by Shepard Fairey. Numbered edition of 450. Obey publishing chop in lower left corner. Comes with a Digital Certificate of Authenticity provided by Verisart. $65. Available on Thursday, August 6th @ 10 AM PDT at https://store.obeygiant.com. Max order: 1 per customer/household. International customers are responsible for any applicable import duties, taxes, and customs fees due upon delivery, except for UK orders under $160 USD and EU orders.

The post New “Hendrix Fire Letterpress” Available on Thursday, August 6th at 10AM PT! appeared first on Obey Giant.

Diederik uit Goedereede zat maandagavond rustig een boekje te lezen in zijn tuin, vlak achter de duinen. De rooklucht die hij rook bleek niet afkomstig van barbecueënde buren, maar door een duinbrand. "Je hebt een tuinslang, maar als het overslaat is het klaar."

Een gek gezicht voor wie nu naar de Papendrechtsebrug kijkt: de brugklep is weg. Rijkswaterstaat is de afgelopen dagen bezig geweest met het uitvijzelen van de klep, die in de nacht van maandag op dinsdag op een ponton is geplaatst. Pas maanden later komt het gevaarte terug op zijn plek.

I've seen Dave Rupert do posts that only appear in the RSS feed. He called it the RSS Club. In his words,

It’s like a newsletter delivered to your feed reader to celebrate the medium of RSS and breakaway from social media.

I like that ethos and am choosing to do the same. What posts will qualify as part of the RSS Club remains to be seen. Maybe they'll be more personal. Maybe they'll cover topics that don't need to be directly linked from home pages and index pages. Maybe I'll get bored of the idea and we never hear of this again.

And it's not like they'll be sooper-dooper secret because there will still be a web page that will be generated. You could still share and link the page, if you wanted. At least, for now. It's just that they won't be linked to from any of the index pages. Perhaps one day I'll look into creating content purely for the RSS feed that doesn't have a permalink generated for it. That'll require some tweaks to the RSS feed since it relies on the URL for things like the ID.

Consider this an invitation to subscribe to the RSS feed—if you haven't already—and perhaps some interesting content will find it's way to you.

Technical Bits

This site is built with 11ty. Every file—okay, not every file; I'm simplifying here—gets added to a collection. Files can be added to a specific collection using tags. When I first built this site, every blog post was tagged as a post. Then, I told the home page to grab the most recent posts. And the index view to grab all of the posts. And then the RSS feed should grab the ten most recent posts.

What I've done is added a new collection called rss and I changed the RSS feed to only grab items from the rss collection.

tags:
  - post
  - rss

This allows me to create content that only appears in the RSS feed or only appears on the site or appears in both. This system will be used for any new thing that I add. For example, if I add photography, I can create a photo tag and add the photos to the RSS feed or choose not to. I can add the photos to the Everything and Nothing index or I can create a separate photo feed altogether that just pulls anything tagged photo.

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Have something to say? Tell me about it.

Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage.

And it seems like this is a campaign that has targeted at least seven states. And, because this is where the US is right now, Trump doesn’t believe it’s Iran and that Minnesota…I guess…hacked itself.

“I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said. “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota. They like to say, ‘Oh, it’s Iran.’ Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota.”

No word on whether he believes the other six states have hacked themselves as well.

Slashdot thread.

Incense and Peppermints, van Strawberry Alarm Clock, omdat jaren 60 hippiemuziek af en toe ook best lekker is.

Ja Kempi heeft een strafblad ter grootte van een novelle, waarvan een aanzienlijk deel zijn ietwat onbeheerste omgang met het vrouwelijke geslacht behelst. Zo maakte hij in 2024 nog een dame zwanger die hij vervolgens dreigde te vermoorden als ze geen abortus pleegde, en toen het kindje eenmaal geboren was bleef hij vrolijk verder intimideren. Daar moet hij zeven maanden voor de bak in, maar met een vrij kansloos hoger beroep kocht hij in ieder geval net genoeg tijd om het door de rechtbank opgelegde (online-) contactverbod te schenden, waardoor hij de moeder van zijn kind nu 90 duizend pietermannen moet betalen. Dat heeft hij natuurlijk helemaal niet, en bovendien wil platenmaatschappij Top Notch niet verder met 'm en trokken naar verluidt ook andere opdrachtgevers zich terug na het eerder genoemde vonnis. Bij Kempi werd eerder een narcistische persoonlijkheidsstoornis vastgesteld, waardoor hij ongeveer evengoed in staat is tot zelfreflectie als Pieter Waterdrinker tot zelfrelativering. Dat levert komische taferelen op in de Instagram-stories van de ex-rapper, die de hele tijd allemaal gewichtige citaten deelt over dat hij is uitverkozen door god (in casu: allah), en allemaal motivational quotes die beter zouden passen bij een 16-jarige havist met liefdesverdriet dan bij een gevreesde rapmeneer van middelbare leeftijd. Ook is hij gestopt met blowen en heel erg veel gaan sporten, zodat hij binnenkort 'met mannen kan gooien als gewichten', wat op zich natuurlijk goed nieuws is - dan laat-ie de vrouwtjes in ieder geval even met rust. Tot slot lijkt-ie bovendien reclame te maken voor Retatrutide, een Ozempic-alternatief dat nog niet is toegelaten tot de Nederlandse markt en mogelijk even gevaarlijk is voor gebruikers als Kempi voor vrouwen. 

Nou, u bent weer helemaal bij.

Het berouw druipt van het scherm

Onduidelijk overigens of dit is ingegeven door geldgebrek of intrinsieke motivatie

Goed nieuws!