For his new video series, David Friedman of Ironic Sans finds out the secret behind an unusual object that Joe Biden has placed in the Oval Office: an empty picture frame. The object turns out to be….well, I won’t spoil it, but a few other presidents have had this thing in their Oval Offices as well.

Joe Biden put an empty picture frame in the Oval Office and it’s got a lot of people asking questions. Has a photo been removed? Is something being censored and hidden from the public? I have the answer! And it takes us down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Friedman also uploaded a copy of the White House tour brochure for Biden’s White House.

Nebraska state senator Machaela Cavanaugh is 3 weeks into filibustering an anti-trans bill. "If this Legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it...painful for everyone." [apnews.com]

Cony Hawk, Pro Skater. This traffic cone is a way better skater than I'll ever be and I'm not even mad about it. [tiktok.com]

50 Years Later, We're Still Living in the Xerox Alto's World. "Using it feels so familiar and natural that it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate just how extraordinary, how different it was when it first appeared." [spectrum.ieee.org]

Almost every letter in English speech can be silent, except for possibly V. "The letter E quietly resides in the middle of the word vegetable." [dictionary.com]

It Took Me Nearly 40 Years To Stop Resenting Ke Huy Quan. "I blamed Quan, Gedde Watanabe, Pat Morita, and any number of other Asian-American actors for perpetuating these constructed stereotypes." [decider.com]

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In a piece about how the pace of improvement in the current crop of AI products is vastly outstripping the ability of society to react/respond to it, Ezra Klein uses this cracker of a phrase/concept: “the difficulty of living in exponential time”.

I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. There was the difficulty of living in exponential time, the impossible task of speeding policy and social change to match the rate of viral replication. I suspect that some of the political and social damage we still carry from the pandemic reflects that impossible acceleration. There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time.

But that is the kind of moment I believe we are in now. We do not have the luxury of moving this slowly in response, at least not if the technology is going to move this fast.

Covid, AI, and even climate change (e.g. the effects we are seeing after 250 years of escalating carbon emissions)…they are all moving too fast for society to make complete sense of them. And it’s causing problems and creating opportunities for schemers, connivers, and confidence tricksters to wreck havoc.

In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how much progress has been made in passenger safety in those 50 years. Even though the Malibu is much lighter, its crumple zone absorbs much of the impact while the Bel Air lets the newer car’s front end slam right into the driver.¹

Even though I’ve seen crash test footage before, I was shocked at how quickly the airbag deployed in the newer car…it’s fully inflated before the rest of the car and its occupants even realize that inertia is about to do some bad things.

1. And LOL to the truthers in the comments insisting that the test was flawed (there was an engine in the Bel Air, BTW) and that good ol’ American cars were built like tanks back in the day and therefore are impervious to harm.↩

What to Expect When You're Expecting to Be a Gen-X Girl. "Your parents will never, not once, wonder if you’re hydrated." [newyorker.com]

AI is being used to find formerly undetectable samples from songs by Daft Punk, Mobb Deep, etc. "Google Assistant can even detect samples less than a second long, and is usually able to detect samples that have been chopped or time-stretched." [tracklib.com]

Rosecrans Baldwin: Los Angeles Is a Fantastic Walking City. No, Really. "Probably most of Greater L.A. is awful to experience on foot. Yet there’s so much of it, radiating from multiple cores, that the amount worth walking is colossal." [nytimes.com]

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“Six seasons and a movie!” Per Community’s Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), that’s the ideal shelf life for a TV show and the real-life rallying cry of that series’ devoted fanbase, an episode-count pipe dream they willed into prophecy. (The Community movie, set for Peacock, will reportedly begin filming in summer 2023.) But,…

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