A tormented mother living in Bramford Road with her two young children has been woken on an almost nightly basis by a tinny, distant rendition of ‘It’s Raining, It’s Pouring’. She said the threatening undertone of the song had left her frightened and questioning whether she was imagining things. After months of torment, she finally reported the unusual complaint to Ipswich Borough Council.

“I posed a deceptively simple question to our writers and editors, as well as some artists we admire: What are the five minutes or so — longer than a moment, shorter than a symphony — that you’d play for a friend to convince them to fall in love with classical music?

Activities that involve being with others face-to-face (social interaction, religious services, volunteer work, and even going to movies) are linked to more happiness, and those that involve being alone or on your phone (social media, internet, listening to music, being alone) are linked to less happiness.

Learn Japanese by reading manga with Japanese text that can easily be translated to English or selected/copied.

“we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die

““Without ever being shown what a noise-free image looks like, this AI can remove artifacts, noise, grain, and automatically enhance your photos.

“Person tweets some fact. Other people reply with other facts. Person complains, “Ugh, randos in my mentions.” Harsh words may be exchanged, and everyone exits the encounter thinking the other person was monumentally rude for no reason.

The dynamics at play behind “ugh, randos” are so pernicious because it isn’t a simple problem of definitions or message integrity, but different views on what communication is or is for.(...)

From Sue’s perspective, strangers have come out of the woodwork to demonstrate superiority by making useless, trivial corrections. Some of them may be saying obvious things that Sue, being well-versed in the material she’s referencing, already knows, and thus are insulting her intelligence, possibly due to their latent bias. (...)

From Charlie’s perspective, Sue has shared a piece of information. Perhaps he already knows it, perhaps he doesn’t. What is important is that Sue has given a gift to the commons, and he would like to respond with a gift of his own. Another aspect is that, as he sees it, Sue has signaled an interest in the topic, and he would like to establish rapport as a fellow person interested in the topic. In other words, he is not trying to play competitive social games, and he may not even be aware such a game is being played. When Sue responds unfavorably, he sees this as her spurning his gift as if it had no value. This is roughly as insulting to Charlie as his supposed attempt to gain status over Sue is to her. At this point, both people think the other one is the asshole. 

“Using the presented dataset, we develop a pipeline for processing low-light images, based on end-to-end training of a fully-convolutional network. The network operates directly on raw sensor data and replaces much of the traditional image processing pipeline, which tends to perform poorly on such data

A.I. Assistant Calls Local Businesses To Make Appointments

“The reality is that "pink for girls, blue for boys" has existed continuously since at least the 1820s, while "blue for girls, pink for boys" is only recorded between 1889 and 1941. 

A Collection of Anecdotes from the Evolutionary Computation and Artificial Life Research Communities

“We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO₂-equivalent (tCO₂e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO₂e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO₂e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO₂e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less). 

Click the ordinal numbers for the links to the online versions. For a list of board games that you can play against AI opponents (as opposed to other online players), look here.

Some of the biggest online board gaming sites are Boîte à Jeux, Board Game Arena and Tabletopia.

Amazon's cashier-free, Pikachu-tested convenience store is opening to the public.

I've been playing a lot of board games lately. Ars Technica has a nice overview of good, modern ones.