Have I missed something? Is it now normal for white, post-doc women to elbow-kick their love interest and colleague in the solar plexus? And a black male one at that? In a jaw-dropping scene of a Netflix series viewed worldwide? And the man passively folds in half, choking, +
Hats off to the colleagues at Haut et Court for pooling in an impressive amount of resources and talent to shoot the “Constellation” series for Apple+. However, the end result turned out as a pseudo sci-fi light-horror semi-drama that toys with quantum mechanics in low Earth orbit +
Even online, the French struggle with “customer service”. A retailer of running shoes, i-Run, has been sending me monthly e-mails warning that the €8.29 credit I had after buying from them will expire today, if I do not re-order immediately. They’ve just sent me a +
Fascinating how the film “Limitless” by Neil Burger starring Bradley Cooper paints a dreamy picture of a struggling artist with an external solution to everything — a pill, stolen by the artist — to be used by the artist to pursue: 1) money 2) sex 3) power… and his art? +
What would a trilingual like myself do with a ChatGPT? Torture it with correspondence tests, of course. Here’s the result: 🤪 ChatGPT: If we were to use English proficiency as a base and attribute a numerical score of 100 to it, I would rank my +
Oh, now Twitter asks me to pay 100 USD per month to read and backup my own tweets on my server. Since early July 2023, I can no longer GET my own posts, sort them into 3 distinct languages and store them in my own +
A review of Nick Lane’s “The Vital Question” is easy to write: just re-arrange a dozen of his own passages. The book itself, though, is not easy to read. Unless… you understand at least the main principles of physics, chemistry and Latin. However interesting the +
“Off the Clock” – Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done… by Laura Vanderkam. Oh, wow. Such a promising title. Again. Bless those who helped increase my reading speed! Because this book is 1% trite time management advice and 99% memory recalls of various mothers +
“Cheap Sex” is a great book by sociologist Mark Regnerus to compliment David Buss’ “Evolution of Desire”. It describes the current personal and interpersonal sexuality / gender relations state of affairs in the US. The local trends and stats which do or will impact the +
“How Emotions Are Made“ is yet another weird book with a promising title, written for someone without any knowledge of science, its methods and branches. Possibly for those of us who skipped biology classes in school and haven’t read anything about neuroscience ever since? The +
Finally got to watch “For All Mankind” season 1… well, Ronald Moore sure is consistent with his regular soap opera vibe. Or rather, alcohol+tobacco opera — the amount of drinking and smoking easily surpasses the amount of RP-1 burning and space flying. It ticks all +
“The End of the World is Just the Beginning” is a weird book by Peter Zeihan — self-described as an “optimist, green, internationalist, and democrat” — who retells us a mix-mash of history, geography, economy and chemistry lessons taught in school, then declares that the +
Disappointed by Carlo Rovelli’s “Order of Time”. Reads more like a physicist’s hobby project in creative writing (though quite a poetic one)… rather than a container of eye-opening, bleeding-edge information. Main ideas: time is quantized, entropy increases with time, time is local and relative, we +
Annoyed by Apple’s Books.app quoting, trimming and appending an “Excerpt From” when copying a small passage from an ePub? Did you know ePubs are a collection of HTML files? 🤓 Open the folder containing the books. If you use iCloud, type open ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/Documents/ in +
“The Art of Impossible” by Steven Kotler is a perfect example of a book by a journalist who does punchy write-ups of other books written by other punchy journalists who cite popular self-hack writers (like Tim Ferriss, whose advice is retold several times), who talk +
“The emergency shutdown system at Chernobyl had a fatal flaw. At 01:23:40, Akimov engages AZ-5, or SCRAM. The fully withdrawn control rods begin moving back into the reactor. These rods are made of boron, which reduces reactivity… but not the tips. The tips are made +
Apple: Would you like to install iOS updates automatically? Me: No. Apple: There’s a major 1.0 update of iOS, would you like to install it now? Me: No. Apple: Enter your passcode and we’ll install an update of iOS overnight. Me: Cancel that! I said +
Saw the premiere in Cannes… A rather weird alternative rendition of an (imagined?) fleeting romance of legendary Russian pop-rock singer Viktor Tsoi in the 1980s Saint Petersburg. Hipsterish B&W, “It Never Happened” announcements, 4th wall pokes, awkward handwriting notes on the screen… I much prefer +
La Prière / The prayer at the Berlin Film Festival is a classically, solidly, well-told story about a French heroin addict who joins a Christian Catholic community of former addicts who live isolated in the Alps mountains and use manual work and prayer as a +
A premiere of “Dovlatov” film at the Berlin Film Festival. 6 days in the 70s life of a Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov – Сергей Довлатов, an unknown to almost anyone in the USSR until it fell in 1991. And still largely unknown globally. Unfortunately, not +
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