Well no feedback on yesterday's post, from the five of you who read it :) - I guess it was okay.  Though in media, no news is not good news, even if it isn't bad news.

The pic above was auto-generated by DALL-E, "sailboat racing watercolor".  I quite like it, what a tool.  My only complaint isn't about the tool, it's about the website; the reCAPTCHA required to sign in everything is truly annoying.  I get the need for a "verify this is a human" test, but this one is awful.  You'd think OpenAI could do better - some kind of reverse Turning test :)

A further update on Win11, I've been doing a project for a company who've provided me a laptop which is running Win11.  So I have a place to learn about it.  I did this with Win 10 too, and it's the right way to do it; get familiar, learn all the config options, figure out how to do the things you want to do, and meanwhile have your old environment for doing important stuff (like blogging).  Anyway stay tuned.

(Of course, this doesn't solve the "sometimes launches IE" problem, which so far has never occurred on the guest Win11 laptop...)

Jon Gruber urged me to watch the new teaser trailer for Barbie.  Okay, I did.  And yeah, I urge you to do it too :)  Starring Margot Robbie as Barbie, who else? 

Observation: how iconic is the opening to 2001, right? 

In case you think the recent news about nuclear fusion was important, Visual Capitalist helpfully posted this Explainer about The Science of Nuclear Fusion.  Turns out that while the payoff will be amazing, this is a hard problem, as indicated by the fact that the recent news highlighted a situation when 300X the energy was required to get 1.5X the output.  (Where X was the power of the laser input to the reactor.) 

Things I love about blogging: posting about Barbie and then Nuclear Fusion.

Boing Boing: People who shaped science in 2022 and ones to watch in 2023.  Yeah, climate change, but also Covid, Ukraine, etc! 

BTW this is a beautiful picture, click to enbiggen!

Not surprising: The Strange Attack on Blind Reviewing.  Similar to the strange way blind auditions have fallen from favor.  Turns out these institutions don't want "blind", they want control while appearing virtuous.  Yeah, we get it. 

I can't do justice to the whole ongoing "Twitter Files" saga, but it's great theater.  Especially interesting has been the relative silence in the media about it; they're hoping it will just go away, apparently.   Powerline have been following too, and posted this footnote: "Our press would bring these stories to light if it could refute them, but it can't so it ignores them". 

From April 2015: The problem with affirmative action in one picture.  "The true story of an Indian American who got into medical school by pretending to be an African American.  This is from well before the now-famous lawsuit against Harvard for discriminating against Asians.  

Onward ... Happy Holidays!  This is the Friday before the last weekend before Christmas - have fun :)