A Brief History of Kinetic Sculpture Racing

Found by reader smittypap, who posted the link in a comment at my previous post about art cars.

Another example of people having fun.  No war posts today.

Removing a facade from an old building

There is informed discussion scattered through the comments at the oddlysatisfying subreddit post.  Huge windows used to be assets re light and maybe heat during an earlier era of industry, but became maintenance liabilities in more modern times.

I agree with the top-rated comment at the source: it's like removing a carpet and finding a hardwood floor.

Some elevators have "Yes" and "No" buttons

I probably should travel more, because I've never seen an elevator panel like this.  The rationale is explained in a lucid and fairly concise comment thread at the whatisit subreddit.

The Roman emperor Commodus

Interesting.  You learn something every day.

An "art car" parade (Houston, 2025)

The video is almost two hours long - a thorough documentation of the parade, apparently without any commentary, best approached for casual viewing by clicking along the scrubber bar at the bottom.  Here are a couple screencaps:

I found the video after reading about the phenomenon in The New York Times:

This was not just a car. It was an art car — a vehicle transformed into a kinetic sculpture, built from imagination and, often, from what others had thrown away.

“I can’t drive past trash without pulling over,” said Mr. Polidore, 50, a longtime elementary school art teacher who writes art curricula for the district. “When I’m stuck in that hellacious Houston traffic, I’m scanning the side of the road for any parts of cars that have gotten thrown off in wrecks and I’m grabbing them.”...

The rules remain minimal. “Whether it’s been painted, welded, sculpted, dropped, chopped, beaded, smashed, crashed, lit or lifted, art cars come in all shapes, sizes and forms,” read this year’s brochure. “The only rule is that it must roll!” And across the city, in garages, driveways and schoolyards, artists have been working for months to ensure that theirs will.

But what might make Houston’s art car parade so special is the fact that many of the artists are children... Over 50 of the cars that roll on Saturday will have been made in Houston classrooms, a striking fact at a time when arts funding in schools continues to shrink...

In Houston, where driving is nearly unavoidable, the art car offers a kind of inversion, a reminder that even the most ordinary object can be remade into something strange, expressive and communal.

Or, as Ms. Soto put it: “Art cars are chaos. Good chaos.”

TL:DR - People having fun.  Something this world needs more of.

Addendum:  If this topic interests you, I encourage you to browse some of the art-car-related posts at Just A Car Guy, including this video of the Houston art car parade.

Good news for home distillers of alcohol

As reported this week in The Guardian:

A US appeals court on Friday declared a nearly 158-year-old federal ban on home distilling to be unconstitutional, calling it an unnecessary and improper means for Congress to exercise its power to tax.

The fifth US circuit court of appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of the non-profit Hobby Distillers Association and four of its 1,300 members.

They argued that people should be free to distill spirits at home, whether as a hobby or for personal consumption including, in one instance, to create an apple-pie-vodka recipe.

The ban was part of a law passed during the US’s post-civil war Reconstruction era in July 1868, in part to thwart liquor tax evasion, and subjected violators to up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine...

More information at the link.  Image cropped for size from the original, credit Diana Vyshniakova/Alamy.

Autonomous weapons are not just science fiction

Autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots") were the basis for the Terminator movies and uncounted spinoffs and copycats.  But the concept is achievable, and the potential consequences are unthinkable:

"A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone’s head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don’t have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target.

There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don’t matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don’t get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons.

They could be here in two to three years."

              — Stuart Russell, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California Berkeley

That's the intro to a frankly unsettling article.

...lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS): weapons that have the ability to independently select and engage targets... humans out of the loop — where the human releases the machine to perform a task and that’s it — no supervision, no recall, no stop function.

One of the very real problems with attempting to preemptively ban LAWS is that they kind of already exist. Many countries have defensive systems with autonomous modes that can select and attack targets without human intervention — they recognize incoming fire and act to neutralize it... Meanwhile, offensive systems already exist, too: Take Israel’s Harpy and second-generation Harop, which enter an area, hunt for enemy radar, and kamikaze into it, regardless of where they are set up. The Harpy is fully autonomous...

Among the lauded new technologies is swarms — weapons moving in large formations with one controller somewhere far away on the ground clicking computer keys. Think hundreds of small drones moving as one, like a lethal flock of birds...

I worry it will breed way more terrorist activities. You can call them insurgents, you can call them terrorists, I don’t care, when you realize that you can’t ever fight the state mano-a-mano anymore, if people are pissed off, they’ll find a way to vent that frustration, and they will probably take it out on people who are defenseless. 

Much more in the link.

Reposted to provide addenda:  The source link at Buzzfeed for this old (2017) post has undergone partial linkrot, but I'm going to repost the text as an introduction to this old (2018) video about "slaughterbots" -

It presents seven minutes of gradually increasing horror and is very similar in content to "Hated in the Nation" - my favorite episode of Black Mirror -

 

Posting both because this morning one of my cousins forwarded to me a substack presentation by "Blood in the Machine" entitled "Why the AI backlash has turned violent," which addresses recent physical assaults on various persons associated with AI and public anger against datacenters, including this comment:

"In the short time since I wrote that post, such pointed AI refusal has continued apace. Maine looks set to become the first US state to ban data center development outright. Form letters for refusing AI at work are circulating widely. Public polling of AI sentiment is in the gutter; it’s never been popular, and it’s especially unpopular now. A widely discussed NBC poll found that just 26% of Americans had positive feelings about AI; around half had negative feelings. Gen Z in particular loathes AI: For respondents aged 18-34, AI’s net favorability rating was minus 44."

I have some other offerings to present re AI, but will defer until later and just leave this post up for now.

America needs another New Deal

An excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's April 13 "Letters from an American" -

Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. “Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,” New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.

“Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,” FDR said. “Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.”

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,” FDR concluded. “Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

(boldface added), More at the link.

The world's oldest gorilla

Details from Deutsche Welle:

At 69 years old, Lady Fatou on Monday became not only the Berlin Zoo's longest-residing tenant but also maintained her title as the oldest gorilla in the world.

Born somewhere in West Africa in 1957, she arrived in Europe at the port of Marseilles in 1959 amongst the luggage of a French sailor. According to the Berlin Zoo, the sailor found himself unable to pay his bill at a tavern and gave Fatou to the landlady as payment. From there, she soon ended up in the German capital.

Fatou is a western lowland gorilla. In the wild they usually don't live past their 40s, and even in captivity 50 is considered advanced old age.

In 1974 she gave birth to Dufte, the first gorilla born at the Berlin Zoo. Although her daughter passed away in 2001, Fatou's granddaugther M'penzi still keeps her company in Berlin. She has at least three great-great-great grandchildren as of 2026.

I had no idea they could live that long.  You learn something every day.

Breaking news

Screencap this afternoon from the France 24 site.  Putin's ally Orban loses despite Trump's support:

“My Administration stands ready to use the full Economic Might of the United States to strengthen Hungary’s Economy, as we have done for our Great Allies in the past, if Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian People ever need it,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social ahead of Sunday’s vote.

“We are excited to invest in the future Prosperity that will be generated by Orbán’s continued Leadership!” said Trump, who has endorsed Orbán multiple times during the campaign.

The U.S. has always influenced foreign elections - but usually not so overtly.  Or so ineffectually.

And "Magyar" is such a wonderful patronym for a Hungarian leader.  Apparently it is a common surname as well as the ethnonym for the people.

Daddy, what is a "late night rage tweet"?

Here you go, sweetheart.  Read this and weep.  This is a spontaneous public rant by a person who is supposed to represent the dignity of the United States to the rest of the world.  This is what happens when a man becomes mentally unstable and discovers that after a lifetime of having people do whatever he wants them to do, his "base" of loyal supporters begin to desert him.

Some of the backstory triggering this rage is expressed in the I Fucking Love Australia substack: 

"The story is this: Trump’s own people are ratting him out faster than a Boa constrictor with an eating disorder. Staff leaking. Pentagon leaking. State Department leaking. Every single person in that building with access to a phone and a journalist’s number is apparently queuing up to unload everything they know about the most powerful man on earth, and what they know is not flattering.

This is not a leak. This is Niagara Falls wearing a suit.

Carville’s referencing a New York Times story that reads like a guided tour through the West Wing’s collective contempt for the man running it. These aren’t anonymous sources with a grudge. These are the people who sit in meetings with him. The people who hand him his briefing notes and watch him ignore them. The people who stand there with a straight face while he explains how he could’ve been a general if he hadn’t had that thing with his foot.

Those people. Talking. Constantly.

That is not the behaviour of people who fear their boss.

That is the behaviour of people who have already quietly packed their desk drawers and are just waiting for the right moment to walk...

And then there’s the book.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. June. Carville calls them the pizza man. Because they’re going to deliver.

Every leaked conversation. Every panicked staffer confession. Every moment where the people closest to the most powerful man on earth looked at each other across a conference table and thought Jesus Christ we are so completely fucked. All of it. Bound. Published. On shelves in June.

The structural collapse of the whole operation is what Carville is pointing at underneath all the profanity. MAGA loyalty looks airtight until it doesn’t. Then it goes like a tradie’s knees on a cold morning. Fast and all at once. He’s watching the Indiana state Senate Republican primary as an early indicator. Republican voters. In Trump’s own party. Peeling away...

Carville’s flat prediction: Trump will not be president a year from now. Too weak. Too exposed. Too hated by the people closest to him. And when Democrats get back in January they go straight for the corruption and they claw every dodgy dollar back...

But here’s what we do know.

The leaks are real. Vance sharpening his knife is real. The book is real. The polling is real. The fact that the most feared political operator in living memory is now being openly mocked by his own Pentagon is very, very real..."

(boldface added)  More at the link.

American negotiators arrive in Pakistan for peace talks

I can't imagine anyone had serious hopes that peace could be negotiated during the recent summit in Pakistan, when the U.S. positions include "complete surrender" and the Iranians insist on control of Hormuz plus compensation for damages from the bombing campaign.  American media reported hopfully that "talks were underway" while in fact both sides were using the pause to reload their weaponry.

The AI image and the text below come from an April 11 Substack entitled "I Fucking Love Australia."

The Surrender Summit: Trump Sends His Son-in-Law to Lose a War

JD Vance flew to Pakistan to negotiate with a civilisation that’s been doing geopolitics 

since before white people invented trousers.

"Vance brought his wife.

Not a deputy secretary. Not a general. Not even a halfway competent mid-level State Department lifer who at least knows what the Strait of Hormuz is on a map. He brought Usha. His wife. To a war negotiation. The most consequential diplomatic moment since the end of the Cold War and JD thought, yeah, I’ll make a long weekend of it, bring the missus, see Pakistan...

And then there’s Jared Kushner. Jared fucking Kushner. A man whose entire qualification for any of this is that he married into the right family, which, by the way, is also his business model, his foreign policy experience, and apparently now his military strategy. Jared has the energy of a guy who’s never been told no in his life because everyone around him was either paid not to or too scared to. He walked into the Middle East peace process last time and achieved absolutely nothing except making himself several hundred million dollars richer. So naturally Donald called him again...

And somewhere in a Mar-a-Lago dining room, the aluminium siding salesman with the IQ of a concussed house brick is posting about tankers on Truth Social, absolutely convinced he’s winning, because no one in his orbit is allowed to tell him otherwise, and the two blokes he sent to Pakistan to save his legacy couldn’t find the Strait of Hormuz with both hands and a geopolitical GPS..."

More at the link. 

"Relapsing into individuality"

I came across an interesting quote from one of my favorite authors:

“As life goes on it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”

The citation comes from her 1976 autobiography.  It reflects an astute perception by a woman whose literary craftsmanship focused on the deceptions of her fictional characters.  I particularly like the three words I've placed in the title of this post, and I have no doubt that I am more "myself" now than I was during the earlier phases of my social and professional life.

Via the Indian Times Entertainment.  Embedded image via Goalcast, where there are additional quotes and aphorisms.

Reinstituting U.S. military draft registration

A very interesting headline in The Hill this morning.  Details re the implementation at the link.

I came of age during the 1960s, when the Vietnam War was at its peak, and I can assure younger readers that a wartime draft was a very big deal back then.  I have read in unreliable sources (Facebook) that with the onset of the Gulf War, soldiers have been implementing misdemeanors (smoking weed on base etc) in order to be dismissed from active duty.  And it's possible that the onset of active conflict and some combat-related deaths has diminished the applications for military service.

But then I saw this in the article at the link:

"In addition, immigrants who don’t register may lose their U.S. citizenship."

Is this automatic registration being implemented as a strategic way to justify the mandatory deportation of legal immigrants?

Worldwide toilet paper consumption

I'm not particularly surprised that the U.S. leads the world in this metric, but the numbers are unexpected.  Per capita usage of 141 rolls per year would mean 2-3 rolls every week.  How many squares are people using???