Rare Encounter

Blowing explosive loads, self destructive simulations, and attacking from behind.

Executive producer: serpent

Show Notes

Premature explosions, or blowing your load in the middle of the day

Gilly Gene on Twitter

So this just happened in Ocean City, MD.

Check the video.

AUDIO: Two Adult Females Injured After Beaver Attack in Bushwood | Southern Maryland News Net | Southern Maryland News Net

Abandoned homes

'Ghost Houses' Haunt a Rapidly Aging Japan - Atlas Obscura

As a town’s older residents move to assisted living facilities or die, their homes pass down to their heirs. Younger generations, now increasingly located in Japan’s major cities, often have no interest in inheriting or maintaining the family’s ancestral home deep in the countryside, beyond paying the required property taxes. In other cases, officials are unable to locate or identify the proper heirs, leaving the fate of the property in a state of limbo.

Greenery surrounds a disused farmhouse in Ehime. (John Steele/Alamy)

Here’s how Baltimore City is using QR codes to help address the problem of vacant homes - Baltimore Sun

The once-marooned Ever Given finally sets sail from the Suez Canal

About damn time.

Anime

Higurashi: When They Cry - SOTSU

Mexican telenovela.

Daddy's visiting a whore with MY NAME?!

Bokutachi no Remake

Star Wars: Visions

Remember The Animatrix? It's back, in Star Wars form.

• Kamikaze Douga - The Duel
• Geno Studio (Twin Engine) - Lop and Ochō
• Studio Colorido (Twin Engine) - Tatooine Rhapsody
• Trigger - The Twins
• Trigger - The Elder
• Kinema Citrus - The Village Bride
• Science Saru - Akakiri
• Science Saru - T0-B1
• Production IG - The Ninth Jedi

Coming to Disney+ on [2021-09-22 Wed].

Anime Expo Lite: 20 Things We Learned from the Star Wars: Visions Panel | StarWars.com

Wave, Listen to Me!

Also read the manga!

Swingers (1996) - IMDb

Freespin

A demo for the Commodore 1541 disk drive itself. A little hardware hacking to connect it to a monitor and you only need a C64 to bootstrap!

Title screen for the bootstrap of the demo.

Freespin - YouTube

In case you don't have a C64 setup laying about, here's a video of the demo playing on real hardware.

Faster planet, shorter days

Shorter Days as Earth's Rotation Speeds Up

2020 was the fastest year over the past six decades, and 2021 is expected to be even faster, with an average day being more than 0.2 milliseconds short of the standard 84,600 seconds.

Variation of daylength throughout 2020. The length of day is shown as the difference in milliseconds (ms) between the Earth's rotation and 86,400 seconds. (timeanddate.com)

The Earth has been spinning faster lately

Coordinated Universal Time - Wikipedia

Long story short, UTC is an attempt to keep pace with sidereal time (i.e. based on position of celestial objects at a certain time of day) using SI seconds (i.e. a fixed number of caesium-133 transitions). This is why we have leap seconds.

What causes changes in Earth's rotation speed?

It's all about conservation of angular momentum.

Anything that changes Earth's mass distribution affects the speed at which Earth rotates on its axis. These include:

• Tidal effects
• Post-glacial rebound
• Tectonics and seismic effects
  • Earthquakes in short term
  • Continental drift in long term
• Mantle dynamics

Earth's rotation - Wikipedia

ΔT (timekeeping) - Wikipedia

Day length fluctuations - Wikipedia

Chocolate holograms

"Hologram" (it's the wrong term) printed onto chocolate with diffraction grating. Diffraction grating imparts iridescence on chocolate.

Chocolate Holograms Are Beautiful - YouTube

Digital evolution

The AI Wolf That Preferred Suicide Over Eating Sheep | by Lance Ng | Jul, 2021 | Medium

Archive version

AI often doesn't optimize the way you want, or even expect.

The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution: A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities