This passes for entertainment with our kids these days …
Disappointing
I got really excited for this reissue last spring, but every review I’ve seen (including this one) says these watches are a letdown. $1,000 for this?!
On an unrelated-but-equally-nerdy note, I did recently find a new keyring I really like …
I, Robot Musician
Some algorithm is making sure I see ads for this everywhere I go. I’m sure the flashing light will trigger a previously undiagnosed seizure disorder.
Sassy Justice
Man this is good.
Serafinowicz, Parker & Stone.
Do You Like Catchy Songs?
I like catchy songs.
You Bastards Never Tell Me Anything!
Like that the Vapors put out a new album this summer!
These Guys Again
And about time! Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, AND Malcolm McDowell?
Truth Seekers is a supernatural comedy drama series featuring Nick Frost, Samson Kayo, Simon Pegg, and Emma D’Arcy. A group of part-time paranormal investigators team up to uncover a deadly conspiracy.
I’m in. No firm release date yet.
New Beths Means Another Goofy Video
This is from Jump Rope Gazers, coming July 10th.
New Strokes
I’m hearing good things about the next album, due April 10. I lost interest in The Strokes after First Impressions of Earth (2006?!), but I’d be hard-pressed to find a better debut album than Is This It.
Here’s a video for one of the new singles, “Bad Decisions.” If it sounds a lot like “Dancing With Myself,” it’s no accident. The band allegedly gave Billy Idol and Tony James songwriting credits to avoid litigation.
As near as I can tell, the message in the video is that The Strokes will be evolving musically, so if you want rehashed older albums (clones), too bad. Oh, and the band members’ faces are deepfaked onto actors playing the clones. Timely!
Quantum Supremacy
(artist’s drawing of Google’s quantum computer chip)
In October, Google built a quantum computer that solved an incredibly hard problem in 200 seconds — a problem the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10,000 years to solve. This is called “quantum supremacy”, and has been compared to the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
”Until recently, every computer on the planet — from a 1960s mainframe to your iPhone, and even inventions as superficially exotic as ‘neuromorphic computers’ and DNA computers — has operated on the same rules. These were rules that Charles Babbage understood in the 1830s and that Alan Turing codified in the 1930s. Through the course of the computer revolution, all that has changed at the lowest level are the numbers: speed, amount of RAM and hard disk, number of parallel processors.
But quantum computing is different. It’s the first computing paradigm since Turing that’s expected to change the fundamental scaling behavior of algorithms, making certain tasks feasible that had previously been exponentially hard. Of these, the most famous examples are simulating quantum physics and chemistry, and breaking much of the encryption that currently secures the internet.”
I’m sure this will go well.
More here.