thomaswilson-sveltekit/.netlify/server/chunks/2021-01-09-things-i-learned-22-09d66b70.js

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const metadata = {
  "title": "Things I learned this week #22",
  "author": "Thomas Wilson",
  "date": "2021-01-09T00:00:00.000Z",
  "draft": false,
  "slug": "2021-01-09-things-i-learned-22",
  "tags": ["things-i-learned"]
};
const _2021_01_09_things_i_learned_22 = (0, import_index_10ac95e2.c)(($$result, $$props, $$bindings, slots) => {
  return `<p>This week the UK Government has brought us <em>Lockdown The Third</em>, a threequel in the franchise after the straight-to-TV movie that was the November lockdown. Cases, deaths, and hospital admissions are at an all-time high in our country at the moment, with London in particular looking pretty scary. It might be the \u201Cthe last push\u201D like this (boy, I really hope it is the last push), but that doesn\u2019t help the healthcare workers being forced forward/backwards/downwards by this whole situation. So for goodness sake, just stay inside. Call out people who are making selfish choices. We\u2019re all making decisions for everyone else around us, it really is that simple. Arrange FaceTime calls, yoga sessions, happy hours, online games, book clubs, Netflix watch parties, and craft dates with people. Life isn\u2019t going to be normal for a while, but we\u2019re going to get through this together and then one day get irresponsibly drunk as we sit in or outside a pub until closing time with the people we love, and think about what life looks like now. Until then just\u2026 learn to crochet or cook or something.</p>
<ul><li><strong>This cat</strong>: Mike the Cat guarded the British Museum, who was \u201Cprobably the most famed British feline of the 20th Century\u201D. Which seems like a narrow competition, but look, I don\u2019t want to detract from Mike\u2019s notoriety. After a decade\u2019s service, he passed away in 1929, and officials at the museum placed a memorial stone near the Great Russell Street entrance of the museum. (<a href="${"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_%28cat%29"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">source</a>)</li>
<li><strong>This not-fireworks display</strong>: At Mariana Bay, Singapore, officials organised a light show performed (which feels like the wrong word) by five hundred drones. Just watch the video, it\u2019s mesmerising to watch them twinkle, form into animals, or just geometric patterns. (<a href="${"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7Ul_EmHiJM"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">YouTube video</a>)</li>
<li><strong>This over-qualified actor</strong>: Y\u2019all have seen <em>Stranger Things</em>, right? The Netflix original 80\u2019s horror show which lives in my heart forever because I watched it during my Ph.D. with my housemate and like a whole bunch of popcorn. Mate, honestly it\u2019s so good. Anyway, there\u2019s this iconic scene right at the end of the third season where the world is about to end, and some of the characters are driving their iconic 80s car away from a world-consuming monster. The Duffer brothers took nearly three minutes of screen-time during this climax for an over-the HAM radio <a href="${"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EiRjwjp30I"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">rendition</a> of the title theme from <em>The Never-Ending Story</em>. It\u2019s baffling and I\u2019m amazed it got approval. Susie, the long-distance (previously almost certainly fictitious) girlfriend is played by Gabriella Pizzolo, played the title role in Matilda on Broadway in 2013. Pizzolo gets less than a minute\u2019s screen time but she rocks it. Bonus fun fact: the composers for the show (Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein), who produced the iconic synth-heavy score and title theme music weren\u2019t even told about this musical number until they turned to set one day. (<a href="${"https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/stranger-things-season-3-finale-neverending-story-song-explained-1222689"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">source</a>)</li>
<li><strong>This other Ancient Egyptian Script</strong>: We all know that ancient Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs: the pictorial script of birds, plants, and other symbols which were ubiquitous in their crypts and monuments. However, after around 700BCE, most cultures in the Ancient Egyptian period had at least two scripts in use at any one time: hieroglyphs to record what was morally good and should endure for eternity (like holy texts and things you\u2019d write on your culture-defining monumental tombs), and <em>demotic</em> (meaning popular) which was a more cursive script used for day-to-day things. That said, we estimate only about 1-5% of the Ancient Egyptian population were literate. The script survived in use until about the second century BCE, when it was replaced by <em>Coptic</em> - notably it wasn\u2019t replaced wholesale by Latin, as one might expect when the Roman emperors decided they owned the Nile now. (<a href="${"https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/writing/hieratic.html"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">source</a>)</li></ul>
<h2>What I\u2019ve had on Rotation</h2>
<ul><li><strong>Something New</strong> <em>In Sickness &amp; in Flames</em> by The Front Bottoms (Rock/Punk, 2020). I only just discovered this rock/punk-ish duet, and I\u2019m a little bit in love. It\u2019s like they\u2019re shouting poetry, or little truths, or little anecdotes that <em>are</em> connected most of the time, but sometimes it\u2019s a very loose connection. It\u2019s energetic, it\u2019s erratic, it\u2019s honest, and it\u2019s not so hardcore or edgy that it\u2019s exclusionary or difficult to listen to. Put it on when you next go for a walk sometimes. (<a href="${"https://songwhip.com/the-front-bottoms/in-sickness-and-in-flames"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">links</a>)</li>
<li><strong>Something Old</strong> <em>A Moment of Madness</em> by Izzy Bizu (R&amp;B, 2016). I was recommended this album as something to have on in the background if I needed to get something else done, and I really liked it. It\u2019s upbeat, soul-ish R&amp;B that can stand its own as the centrepiece of music, or can hold into the background. It\u2019s gentle and doesn\u2019t demand your attention, but he clear voice and clean production doesn\u2019t wither under it. (<a href="${"https://songwhip.com/izzy-bizu/a-moment-of-madness"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">links</a>)</li></ul>
<h2>Cool Articles</h2>
<ul><li><a href="${"https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/"}" rel="${"nofollow"}">DALL\xB7E: Creating Images from Text</a> by Open-AI. Isn\u2019t this a terrifying little read. The Open-AI team show how they trained an AI to generate images from free text prompts. For example they gave it the phrase \u201CA storefront with \u2018Open AI\u2019 written on it\u201D, and the AI went ahead and made it. Trained on a corpus of labelled images, it was able to throw together these images on demand. Some of them are terrifying because they\u2019re so accurate - others are terrifying because they\u2019re 90% of the way towards making the image, and sit in the \u2018Nightmare Fuel\u2019 region of the uncanny valley.</li></ul>`;
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