captain of my soul.

Scout and Abbey, my family’s current two rescue Dalmatians (we think Abbey is half German pointer but we’re not sure, but there’s definitely Dalmatian in her, her back half looks just like another dal we’ve had). They draw a ton of attention when we take them for walks.

They spend their days sunbathing, digging holes, Scout living up to his name, and Abbey protecting her precious 387 tennis balls.

“Clean” by Woshibai

I eagerly await our new AI masters’ world of ultraoptimized, uncannily organic, evolving foorplans. Joel Simon:

Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways, etc. The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm.

Adds Simon: “I have very mixed feelings about this project.”

“Beach” by Woshibai

The appeal of those green cityscapes in the pretty pictures isn’t just that they’re hi-tech and clean, it’s that they sprout from a society that values compassion, the environment, and human lives more than it values profit. We need to build that society first, and we need to build it from the ground up with what we have available

Nazis weren’t just the soldiers with guns at the entrances to death camps. They weren’t just the guys who ushered people into the gas chambers. They weren’t just the politicians signing the orders to invade other countries, or the generals ordering their troops to execute civilians.

Nazis were also the people who joined the party because it was the social thing to do. They were the people who looked the other way when their Jewish neighbors were hauled off. They were the actors who put their careers above the lives of others in order to take roles in propaganda films. They were the civilians who asked “But what do we do about the Jewish problem???” and expected a legitimate answer. They were the people who registered, and put their names on a list so they could have a little bit of social fortune while it was still popular to do so.