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StringJunky

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Posts posted by StringJunky

  1. 2 hours ago, TheVat said:

    Now another artist, a London-based artist who operates under the name The Misfortuneteller, says the idea was stolen from him.

     

    https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/mar/25/its-not-banksys-its-mine-artist-says-bristol-plaque-to-adulterer-is-a-copy

     

    Who put up the plaque commemorating the “husband, father, adulterer” – which included the payoff line “Roger, I knew” – remains unknown. But while locals speculated that Banksy may have been involved, another artist has now suggested they are the victim of a rip-off.

    The London-based creator, who operates under the name The Misfortuneteller, said he created a near-identical plaque in March 2020 after wandering around New York’s Central Park and looking at the inscriptions on benches.

    “Plaques are fine but they’re not really that truthful,” he said. “I wanted to do honest memorial plaques. Bittersweet ones.”

    He mocked-up a series of images featuring offbeat tributes to the deceased. Some of the designs were sold as real engraved plaques. An ex-girlfriend is commemorated with a real-life plaque reading: “For Barbara – Who was awful when hungry but otherwise pretty solid.”

    Others took on a life of their own after going viral, often being shared without credit or posted by meme aggregation accounts on Instagram.

    No one bought his design paying tribute to a “cherished husband, dad and adulterer”, even though the image proved popular online.

    As a result, The Misfortuneteller said he was surprised to see his original design and phrasing reappear on the Bristol bench this week, prompting him to say: “It’s not Banksy’s; it’s fucking mine.”

     Why do people get antsy about stuff. Nobody creates in a vacuum.

  2. 22 minutes ago, exchemist said:

    I have now experimented with AdBlock Plus, which is free on the App Store, for my iPad.  At first it did not do much, but a few days ago I found the app contains an option to permit what it calls non-intrusive ads, which is by default enabled on the grounds that the AdBlock people recognise websites need to make some money. My experience however is that that still permits most of the annoying, moving ads that are so distracting to the reader, e.g. on newspaper websites, to get through. I have now found that by turning that off I can suppress these and my reading experience is now vastly improved. I have the feeling it may also stop the ads coming up in the middle of YouTube videos, though it still allows the ones at the start. I'll give it a few more weeks and if no snags emerge I'll install it on the laptop as well.  

    uBlock Origin is available for most platforms. Look in settings as well for more blocks. Ive used it for years.

  3. With Russia finally admitting it is "at war" with Ukraine, will this change anything in terms of the rules of conflict? Does that free open more options for them in what they can allow militarily with their armed forces and population?

    Quote

    The Kremlin said that it is in a "state of war" in Ukraine -- a major escalation in the official language used to describe the conflict, now in its third year.

    "We are in a state of war. Yes, it started as a special military operation, but as soon as this bunch was formed there, when the collective West became a participant on Ukraine's side, for us it already became a war," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview to a pro-Kremlin newspaper published on Friday. - Kyiv Post

     

  4. 5 hours ago, iNow said:

    Sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic 

    I can understand the palpable hint of getting rid of this that many HIV+ must feel right now. I contracted HCV in the 80's, through my own fault, diagnosed in 1992. They had Interferon sufficiently nailed down for me to push it below detection in 2016. This is routine now with far kinder drugs. 20-30 years is a long subjective time to wait for a long term solution.

  5. 59 minutes ago, toucana said:

    As of May 1945, the USA had enough fissile material available to manufacture just 3 atomic bombs. One of these nicknamed ‘Little Boy’ was a ballistic gun-type device that worked by firing a slug of Uranium 235 along a barrel into another sub-critical mass of U235 to cause a chain reaction with a 15 Kiloton explosive yield. This was never tested because the engineers were certain it would work at the first time of asking - so they simply assembled and dropped it on Hiroshima  - but there was no other Uranium 235 available. The scientists had used up their entire stock of weapons grade Uranium 235 refined over a 3 year period in building this single weapon.

    https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/fatman-littleboy-losalamosnatllab.pdf

    The other two devices both relied on an HE implosion lens to compress a hollow sphere of Plutonium 239 into a critical mass with an explosive yield of around 21 Kilotons. This novel Plutonium implosion mechanism was a highly complex engineering challenge to perfect, and absolutely had to be tested by proof firing one of the devices nicknamed ‘The Gadget’ at Los Alamos to ensure it worked.

    After the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, the USA now had just 2 atomic bombs left available for use - One Uranium device, and one Plutonium device nicknamed ‘Fat Man’. American military planners believed they would need to drop at least two bombs to convince the Japanese to surrender, and they reasoned it was better to actually run out of ammunition, rather than *look* as though they were running out of ammunition. It was a gamble that worked, because after the bombing of Nagasaki on August 9th, the Japanese concluded that America had an entire production line running, and that a third weapon would shortly be dropped on Tokyo if they did not offer their unconditional surrender immediately.

    In reality the USA had no other nuclear weapons that could have been deployed against Japan at that time. It is said that they could have cobbled together another Plutonium 239 device by a cannibalising a laboratory test-rig nicknamed the ‘Demon Core’ - which is another entire story - and would have taken months.

     

    The ''demon core' still killed a few although that was through naivete of its handlers.

  6. 14 minutes ago, exchemist said:

    There have, I believe, been reports of reduced sperm count in industrialised societies and some discussion about what might be responsible. Things like endocrine disruptors get mentioned but so far as I know nobody has fingered the widespread prescribing of antibiotics. 

    Pthaalates probably, that softens plastics. Apparently, they migrate out over time.

  7. Scientists say they have successfully eliminated HIV from infected cells, using Nobel Prize-winning Crispr gene-editing technology.

    Working like scissors, but at the molecular level, it cuts DNA so "bad" bits can be removed or inactivated.

    The hope is to ultimately be able to rid the body entirely of the virus, although much more work is needed to check it would be safe and effective.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-68609297

  8. 4 hours ago, iNow said:

    And this core challenge is being amplified by deepfakes which can now be created from a single 2D image and a recording of 3-5 words alone by any of us 

    I recently rejoined FB and the manipulation of natural images, and presented as verbatim is truly pukable. Verbatim representations will increasingly become a very rare commodity.

  9. 14 hours ago, Airbrush said:

    To show off to the world what the US could do? Japan was already beaten. We also found out that the Nazis never developed anything close to an A bomb. Japan was already totally cut off from the world by US submarines and air force. No more imports so they were on the verge of starving. They were also having their cities systematically destroyed by huge B29 incendiary strikes, like the one that killed 100,000 people in Tokyo IN A DAY. All that happened by using the A bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to REVEAL to the world that such a weapon EXISTS. What they should have done, IMHO, is realize that nobody needs to know about IT, and that IT should be covered up so nobody else can create an A bomb. There should have been a HUGE, Manhattan-Project-sized, intelligence operation to do everything we can to make sure that no country can create such a bomb, except for the US. The US would TRY keep the A bomb a secret as long as possible.  That would have saved so much money.  Of course you can't keep something like that a secret forever, but at least stall it as long as possible.  Or is this a naive proposal?

    From a non-nationalist perspective, no country should have overwhelming, asymmetric military ability. That's not how one maintains an equitable global peace. In that light, it was highly fortunate the Americans couldn't keep it to themselves.

  10. 4 minutes ago, tmdarkmatter said:

    If you can cover the moon with your thumb, how is this image possible? image.png.326f3cede21d83374327b98e489e2ac7.png

    They are both far away, such that lens compression has brought them together front to back. The naked eye view will do the same. What you are seeing is the relative  sizes brought together, then the brain does the rest to make sense of it. I think that's how it interprets the scene. 

  11. 9 hours ago, iNow said:

    Alternatively, the fun has been back ended and more time is spent enjoying the outcome you desired instead of grinding along the path needed to get there. 

    I’m all for DIY, but sometimes you just want someone else to do it. More time with satisfying ice cream, less time maseraring raw broccolis and tree bark. 

    If you want to build a house, what's the advantage of moulding your bricks first, is my thought. Also people only have so many hours of free time. Better to spend it on what you want to do.

  12. 1 hour ago, iNow said:

    If artificial consciousness becomes even more indistinguishable from wet meat computer (biological) consciousness than it already is, does it really matter?

    You are a sufficiently convincing copy is the most I can determine as to your compatibility with human identifiers, looking at your behaviour from my PC. It doesn't matter because there are people 

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