It took me years to understand that reference fully. When I saw UHF originally it bugged me that I knew it was a reference to something but I didn't know what. Finally, a decade later I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I finally put two and two together.
Due to my age when I watched UHF I had not seen many of the movies that it referenced: Conan the Barbarian, Rambo, Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Close Encounters - only over time did I come to appreciate it.
Probably not. Solid metal objects at that scale have not been a feature of human history for particularly long, they probably don't have a name that's normally used in an archaeological context.
Ha!
I once reduced a 10,000 line module in a Broadcom 802.11 driver to one page - a template to construct a message. Calls to the old code (5-6 lines) went to nothing - simply pass your structure to the message API.
But that was an eggregious driver. Previous version: ~15 modules. Rewritten by some purist: 900(!) modules. I kid you not.
Please tell me more! How come the calls to the old code went to nothing? It does not surprise me but I wonder how it happened in this specific instance.
Instead of declaring a message and creating it with a call to the (now obsolete) module specific to the structure being transmitted, one simply passed the structure to the message-send api. The conversion template to 'Message' automatically rewrote the structure argument as a message argument.
I was re-writing the driver as a simple C++ set of pure virtual objects and implementations for my hardware. So when I scavenged code to send a certain structure as a message, I simply didn't make the old calls. I remember I did (for some reason) edit all the old modules to use the new API, to prove it still worked I guess. A long afternoon of search and replace.
The (Korean?) company that owned the driver must have had a team or something. It was extremely brain-dead code for every element of an 802.11/ethernet abstraction as a separate module, done twice (once for the driver; once for the module firmware). Double structure definitions for everything.
My team wanted a walk-thru of the existing driver. I scheduled two hours, one before lunch and one after. I opened with "I've brought just the 500 most significant modules today, and we're going to walk thru a connection and message send". Proceeded to open dozens of nested module references on a very long path from triggering a connection attempt to exchanging the first message for negotiation. The hour was up.
>
"It is illegal to install structures or art without authorisation on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you're from," the department said.
Or my personal favourite "artist" Wanksy who draws (if he's still going) penises on potholes because they are then considered obscene and therefore will be fixed by the local council
Russian variant of it: if your local authorities aren't cleaning snow, just write "Навальный" on it and it'll be gone at the speed of light. (Navalny is the leader of opposition.)
That's the point. The government can compel you as they please under threat of harsh criminal punishment.
For example, did you know it's illegal to lie to an FBI agent? Think of how many things could easily be misconstrued as lies in a normal conversation. Introduce yourself to an FBI field agent as a "Jim" when your given name is actually "James"? You've just committed a crime punishable by up to a year in prison.
It has to be "knowingly and willfully", "in any matter within the jurisdiction" of the government. While this is much broader than most people might realize or expect, it probably doesn't extend to using a nickname in a conversation when the agent hasn't asked you your legal name as part of an investigation!
(But the breadth of this kind of rule is definitely a reason that people are discouraged from consenting to an interview with law enforcement without a lawyer present.)
In my small Texas town there is the list of "ordinances" at over 11 pages long, over 1,600 different violations with fines ranging from $200 all the way to almost $600. This is just a way to screw people out of their hard earned money. Some Choice Examples:
NO MUD FLAPS - $142
NO HOUSE NUMBERS AFFIXED TO FRONT OF HOME - Hearing Required in Court
LIT CHARCOAL OR WOOD IN A CITY PARK - $571
CUTTING ACROSS PARKING LOT - $271
USING BBQ GRILL/PIT AT APARTMENT COMPLEX - $500
PUBLIC INTOXICATION ‐ ALCOHOL, OR OTHER SUBSTANCE - $571
GAMING ‐ DOMINOES $275.00
GAMING ‐ CARDS $275.00
GAMING ‐ DICE $275.00
DISCHARGE SLINGSHOT IN CITY LIMITS - $225
HUNTING,FISHING AND CAMPING IN CITY PARKS:GATHERING FIREWOOD - $180
USE OF LASER POINTER - $271 (Does not state how used, as in presentation)
RIDING BICYCLE ON DOWNTOWN STREET - $100
ANIMALS: NOT STERILIZED - $130
BEGGING OR SOLICITING - $271
BEE KEEPING: VIOLATE REQUIRED DISTANCE FROM PROPERTY LINE - $321
Roosters are assholes and AFAIK they're banned in most non-agricultural zoning.
> JONESBORO, GA. No profanity in front of children under 14
A bit moralistic but I could see it happening in a smaller town where people might be more aligned on such things. And looks like the population of Jonesboro is sub-5k.
> JUPITER, FLA. No roadside billboards
I wish this was true everywhere.
> STATE OF TEXAS No walking in the streets if there is a sidewalk
Only complaint I have on this one is that it's cementing car culture worship.
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I suspect others are probably over-reactions to single adverse events.
Pretty sure if they have the technological capacity to travel from somewhere to earth and land undetected ... they don't have to care about any human laws.
I’m not convinced. Some economist wrote a thing about how if aliens observed us they would think dogs and automobiles were our rulers cause we spend all our energy taking care of them.
Invents interstellar travel. Travels 17,000 light years across the universe. Places art work as token of greeting. First contact with human civilization. Alien scientists begin deciphering message. "It reads, 'I am from the Bureau of Land Management...'"
People of Earth, your attention please,’ a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadraphonic sound with distortion levels
so low as to make a brave man weep.
‘This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,’ the voice continued. ‘As you will no doubt be aware, the
plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and
regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.’
Assuming the "monolith" is around 10ft tall with a 1.5ft square base, it would weigh 5 tonnes if it were made of solid steel. Whoever installed it would have needed serious machinery to haul it over there and stick it in the rock.
Thin sheets of metal, either welded or riveted together, would have been much easier to build and install. It could even have been filled with some other material (e.g. sand) before the top was put on.
> Thin sheets of metal, either welded or riveted together, would have been much easier to build and install. It could even have been filled with some other material (e.g. sand) before the top was put on.
Yes, it was a prism shaped object with 3 pieces of stainless steel panels riveted together, the bottom has concret and silicone:)
Aliens may not know that. Since McMaster Carr is the web site with the best UX for materials supply, and has been so for 20 years, they would have not known any better, especially given the propagation time for their TCP packets.
Good math... Aluminum comes in different alloys, this is likely 6061 (precipitation-hardened aluminium alloy, containing magnesium and silicon as its major alloying elements) - 6061 is about two bucks per pound [2]...
Using the weight calculator [1], and plugging in 23.5/23.5/141 (all in inches) I am getting about 7.7K lbs, or around $15K in material costs. Given it’s unusual shape, I’m assuming that normal is producing it. This would require additional costs for machining and processing Dash I’d probably say it would be several thousand dollars in additional costs. Overall this looks to me like a $25,000 piece of metal...
For just that weight of metal...not too expensive. To get it formed into that shape, potentially very expensive.
It looks like aluminum. Someone posted 23.5" x 23.5" x ~144" as the dimensions. This comes out to be 46 cubic feet, and would weigh about 7,700 lbs. A floor of the price would be ~40 cents/lb scrap price, or ~$3,100. Ballpark 80-120 cents/lb might be a more realistic price if it were straightforward to manufacture like that (which it's certainly not).
As an industrial engineer and former employee of one of the largest aluminum plants in the world, I can safely say I doubt it is solid rolled aluminum, and bet it would be way bigger of an extrusion that is possible. And logistically, it would be far easier to transport to a remote location via helicopter if it wasn't solid. Any machining, metal forming, etc. would require specialized large equipment, and would quickly drive the cost up, potentially an order of magnitude higher than material costs.
> And logistically, it would be far easier to transport to a remote location via helicopter if it wasn't solid.
Cue reddit researchers combing through old helicopter flight plans/paths from the relevant time frame? Though I would have thought an off road vehicle might be more likely; looks like it's only about 2-3 miles from the nearest road.
Edit: actually there appears to be a dirt road ~1k feet or less away
The road is Lockhart Basin Road, well-known among Utah off-roaders. I've been there, and also camped on one of the fingers of Hatch Point, directly above the monolith.
television ratios joke. 4:3 became 16:9 for widescreen. Further from square and closer to the "golden ratio", so make something closer with different prime squares.
In reality I was joking about fashion. The new trend in monoliths is a metallic finish and slender proportions, skipping one prime square - The original is 1²:2²:3² and the new one is 1²:3²:7² (skips primes 2 and 5). The dimensions continue, of course. In Clarke's 2010 it's kind of assumed it'd mean it'd be integers, but the new one fits better with primes.
> Any machining, metal forming, etc. would require specialized large equipmen, and would quickly drive the cost up, potentially an order of magnitude higher than material costs.
It seems unlikely that there are serious tolerances to be kept here, couldn't this just be cast messily using a sand/clay mould and then cleaned up with portable power tools?
That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whatever Aluminium you can get your hands on. Hell, you can even recycle Aluminium cans.
Large scale castings are also tricky. You can't cast a rectangular prism and get good results. As the metal freezes (solidifies), it shrinks. You'd end up with a very poor surface finish at best, and chunks missing at worst. The shrinkage needs to be made up for with some additional molten metal.
The fix is pretty simple though. You need directional solidification, meaning the freezing starts on one end and moved towards the other. If you apply a draft angle of 1 degree or so to the parallel faces, you will have enough difference in dimensions to get directional solidification working fine.
>That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whatever Aluminium you can get your hands on. Hell, you can even recycle Aluminium cans.
I'd advise against mixing alloys, but you may still be alright to get something, but it will be worthless if you try to recycle it again. Mixed scrap fetches far less than sorted scrap when you try to sell it. E.g. Some alloys might allow 1-2% copper, while others require <0.01% copper. Each pound of type 1 mixed with type 2 requires lots of pig (pure aluminum, no alloying elements) to be added to get the proportions back to something you can legally call whatever alloy you're targeting.
Aluminum cans aren't a wonderful source for things like this because they contain a thin plastic film on the inside to prevent the liquid contained from having its flavor tainted. Normal recycling processes handle this fine, but cannot handle the plastic labels added on many small brewery cans. Those should be cut off prior to recycling.
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Side note - It is incredibly energy intensive to mine bauxite, refine it through an electrolysis process into alumina, and finally alloying it into your preferred type of aluminum. It recycles incredibly well though. Recycling 1 ton of aluminum saves about 95% of the energy compared to new aluminum. This 95% savings is about 14,000 kWh. The energy intensity is part of why Iceland houses 4 smelters. With nearly 100% of electricity production coming from hydroelectric, they have incredibly cheap electricity, and it's economically viable for the likes of Alcoa, Rio Tinto, and Century Aluminum to haul bauxite ore from around the world to a tiny country with almost no manufacturing base, process it, then haul it around the world to its final destination.
Just a note about aluminum recycling. Humans tend to trash things instead of recycling. Out here in the desert where people dump things I have noticed old steel cans rusted to nothing mixed with aluminum cans which seem to not degrade over time.
Arguably if you are worried about the environment and account for human laziness steel cans are better for the environment IMO
I've read around 75% of the aluminum ever produced is still in use today. If you machine a new surface on aluminum, it will form an aluminum oxide layer in a matter of hours. I believe (but am not certain) this effectively prevents it from degrading the way steel does over time.
Aluminum can recycling rates tend to be higher in states that offer deposit programs. Back when they were getting introduced in the 80's, $0.05/container had a lot more buying power than it does today. It's enough of an annoyance now, they'd be best off eliminating it or increasing it to ~$0.15 or so. Or since this is HackerNews, maybe we could use block chain technology to verify each can is properly recycled and reimburse with bitcoin.
A classmate of mine in college made all of his sculptures out of plywood and Bondo, reasoning that they were likely to last much longer than anything made out of metal due to having no scrap value.
Iceland's electricity production mix seems to be typically about 70% Hydro and 30% Geothermal (which does not change the overall point - just interesting).
Ah, good catch! I was rusty on my numbers from a year and a half ago when I wrote a paper on this for school. Back in the 80's they were nearly 100% hydro.
As I noted in another response, you can't cast a rectangular prism and expect a good result. You'd need to add some angle to the edges to ensure it solidifies correctly, but doing so takes away from the monolith feel.
That's also a lot of polishing for the finish you would get from sand casting.
I would bet it is just metal sheets cut to size and then riveted or screwed together on site, then filled with rocks for stability. Metal sheets could be carried there, hole dug out and then assembled by 1 person basically.
Probably they hit it with a rock and decided it didn't sound hollow. They may also have noted an absence of seams. Seams could be hidden with welding and grinding, but that would suggest it wasn't assembled on site.
"Probably". I wouldn't trust journalists on this sort of thing. It would be completely insane to make this solid. It's almost certainly welded sheets with ground welds, assembled off-site.
While that's true, there are clearly screws or rivets in the video's of it. It's extremely unlikely to be solid metal, though it may be filled with rock/sand/something.
It looks like it might be sheet metal screwed to a wooden frame, judging from what look like screws near the edges. Why would aliens bring a solid block of aluminum all the way across the 8th dimension?
Given that the excitement will have died down by the time its precise structure is revealed, I'd say a simpler design served its purpose quite well.
Mr Hutchings speculated that the monolith may have been installed by "some new wave artist", or a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 film directed by Stanley Kubrick.
I understand not wanting to set a precedent, but I wish more organizations adopted a mindset that the original can stay, but no others are allowed. That leaves space for a little bit of whimsy.
This is a federally protected land, there are no special rules for art unless it was before when such laws were made.
FWIW, I find this piece of trash to be a showoff moment for some wannabe 'artist'. Mimicking a movie prop to me sounds like a low-effort, untalented mindset.
Just thinking the same thing. There's no rule the you must clamp down the the first instance of a violation.
Leave it be, and leave the rule in place. If there's an epidemic of monoliths being planted on federal land, then you uproot them all and say "this is why we can't have nice things."
Until or unless that happens, just leave it alone.
The purpose of the law is to improve the quality of life. Nothing wrong with changing the law to further that goal. Just give the monolith a permit to make it legit.
You didn't know that this thing existed like 2 hours ago and now you want to change the laws in our national parks to allow art installations across our parks? Why even have national parks and try to preserve wilderness?
Maybe we can set up a Starbucks next to it and some bathrooms too. It's the famous monolith! Come one come all!
> The purpose of the law is to improve the quality of life.
I don't see how litter in my national parks is improving my quality of life.
> You didn't know that this thing existed like 2 hours ago and now you want to change the laws in our national parks to allow art installations across our parks? Why even have national parks and try to preserve wilderness?
On the other hand, you didn't know it existed until 2 hours ago and now you want it removed.
Simply put, I think it is cool and would like to to stick around. For what it is worth, here are a few points to consider.
There already is art Throughout the wilderness and I think it is great. Sometimes the art is as simple as a statue or plaque commemorating a historic location, other times it is DIY art like this.
The point of national parks isn’t to preserve wilderness for the sake of preservation. The point is recreation. This is why they are full of artificial modifications like roads, trails, and sometimes attractions with shops and bathrooms.
Also, as far as I can tell, this isn’t in a national park, but on federal BLM land Used for hunting and off-roading.
Well you can certainly have your own perspective, I just disagree 100% with it and will use whatever means I have to make sure that the tiny bits of nature we have left are preserved to the extent possible. Some aluminum "art" in the middle of nowhere is a perversion and should be garbage collected. That's my view, which I will use dollars and my vote toward.
We might just have agree to disagree. I have literally seen tens of thousands of pounds of garbage dumped on public land.
The idea that some out of the way and moderately interesting art is a priority is laughable.
> I have literally seen tens of thousands of pounds of garbage dumped on public land.
Yes, and they shouldn't be.
> The idea that some out of the way and moderately interesting art is a priority is laughable.
I don't think it's that interesting, but besides that I don't follow your rationale. Because some people litter against the rules, we shouldn't clean up this thing someone put on federal lands? Even so, wouldn't large pieces of litter take priority over smaller ones simply due to human nature?
I really feel like you're stretching here. Frankly, it's interesting to watch people defend some thing they just found out about and have no attachment to.
> The point of national parks isn’t to preserve wilderness for the sake of preservation. The point is recreation.
The national parks service philosophy is very preservationist. They advise people to follow guidelines that are literally called “leave no trace”. Their mission statement uses the word preserve in the first sentence. Hell, part of the reason why Big Bend national park never became an international park (among many others) was because the parks service disagreed with the laxer, conservationist approach that Mexican authorities favored.
>The point is recreation. This is why they are full of artificial modifications like roads, trails, and sometimes attractions with shops and bathrooms.
Those modifications are done carefully to have as little impact on the environment and a lot of types of recreation are completed banned in national parks, hunting being the obvious one. The use of vehicles (including bicycles) is completely banned in federally designated wilderness.
What steps did whoever installed this take to make sure that this thing isn’t going to leech metals into an ephemeral watering hole used by wildlife?
I agree that the NapS is ver preservationist, compared to the blm, where the monolith is located. For what it is worth 66/75 of national parks permit hunting.
There is a rule for the first instance of the violation. The law applies to all instances of the violation, first, last and everything in between.
The thing is the reason why a lot of people are ok with this art thing is because it's not just the first instance of it, but because it's currently quite interesting and tasteful. These are vague qualitative aspects that are hard to define with law and will change over time.
Better to have a simple law everyone can understand and agree on then to find some perfect law that fits with our complicated, blurry and inconsistent definition of morality. The more complicated a set of laws are the more likely people will be able to find loop holes to exploit.
>The department has not disclosed the exact location of the monolith, fearing explorers may try to seek it out and "become stranded". The big horn sheep wildlife officials were counting are native to many parts of southern Utah, where the terrain is rugged.
The point still stands, it shouldn't be allowed. It's a natural area for animals and it is a dangerous location. Those well trained/equipped who would normally explore areas like this would be fine -- but this could encourage people with less experience to venture into these areas unprepared for what they will face.
That terrain in Utah is no joke and many people have gone missing in those areas.
It’s not a natural location for animals. It is federally managed land for camping, hunting, and 4 wheeling.
Inexperienced people die venturing into nature all the time. The solution is to warn and educate people, not discourage them from enjoying the outdoors.
Its a big place, and only a few busy Rangers. I imagine folks can just drive in unnoticed. And die of exhaustion or dehydration once they've had a breakdown, lost their way, run out of gas or whatever. Where in that process do we have an opportunity for education? Other than the Darwin sort.
This is true of any wilderness. We should put a warning poster at the obvious trailheads and let the rest of the idiots die.
A more aggressive strategy might involve teaching children in schools not to walk out into the desert without water, or into the ocean if you can’t swim
What counts as an original in this context? Would another unauthorized art piece of a different type in the same protected land be an original? Would a metal monolith in a different park count as an original for that park? Would a unauthorized art piece of a different type in a different park be an original? What if one of these originals was 100' high?
If you allow the original but remove a 2nd and it is goverment land, are you opening yourself up to legal issues regarding the 1st amendment.
Happened in Dublin, Ireland a couple of years back - a joke plaque was installed a bridge, the council removed it and after public outcry they reinstalled it.
Change the law, and/or file an injunction to stop it's removal if that is your wish.
But I firmly believe that The Rule of Law matters in our country.
Specific to this case, it's not an organization, it's a federal law. And whimsy might bring cheer to you and I, but it does not really belong in federal law.
You're assuming that it's art. Maybe it's a critical piece of the machinery inside the earth, the one small probe that needs to be exposed to the atmosphere. I wouldn't want to break it and send the whole planet hurtling into the sun.
I expect the monolith to disappear and periodically reappear at different places, e.g., inside a shopping mall, in SF harbor wild seal rocks, on the White House lawn during Biden's inaugural,etc.
But seriously, they should examine the monolith's RF characteristics, monitor/test the field strength around the thing to determine its size and whether it is wired into something.
...but we should definitely allow the operations which recently "leased" drilling rights to previously-untouched bits of that area to move forward, since they're so much less damaging than a piece of metal stuck in the ground.
It felt incomplete because it's not a real game, it's a pageant — like little kids dressing up as shepherds and wise men and telling the story of Christmas.
You feel it's cool and big, because you're looking at the story of going from the origins of life to the galaxy, but the gameplay doesn't actually support that ambition. Most of what you accomplish has very little impact; it's just a series of hoops you need to jump through, so that you can say that you did them.
I get that, but I'd prefer games that tell a story rather than cause angst whilst they siphon your wallet. Played LoL quite a lot and haven't learnt a thing from it :(
Best games don't tell stories - they generate them. There's no need to make games more like movies or graphic novels because we already have movies and graphic novels.
There is room for many types, and when it comes to more traditional storytelling, games can create more direct emotional connections by making you the character, rather then the protagonist just being someone you watch.
But most games nowadays actively avoid that! They make you control Geralt or Solid Snake or Master Chief or whatever. You know, someone cooler than you could ever possibly be. They introduce third person cutscenes if the game isn't already 3rd person by default. You can't choose what to say or are very limited in what or how you say it. You pursue someone else's goals.
Half Life 1 is one of the few games that got it right, but does it have imitators? A silent protagonist is something to be ashamed of nowadays.
Silent protagonist games still exist. 'Prey' comes to mind (though an AI character speaks to you using your character's voice, and you can also hear your character speak on a few recordings you can find.
But in the tradition of HL, your character never utters anything while you are in their perspective, and there are no third person cutscenes.
Spoilers: the entity you are playing as is not actually the character it's presented as, so technically you never actually hear your character's voice.)
The new Doom games also have silent protagonists, but unfortunately have some third person cutscenes and are extreme examples of 'cooler than you'.
I can't disagree more. Stuff like minecraft(which I assume you mean) just have no lessons to teach. They are great games. But they can't grow beyond that. They can't be masterpieces precisely because they don't tell a story.
I'm shamelessly pasting a wikipedia quote because it puts it better and more succinctly than I could.
"Non-games are a class of software on the border between video games and toys. The original term "non-game game" was coined by late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who describes it as "a form of entertainment that really doesn't have a winner, or even a real conclusion".[1] Will Wright had previously used the term "software toy" for the same purpose.[2] The main difference between non-games and traditional video games is the lack of structured goals, objectives, and challenges.[3] This allows the player a greater degree of self-expression through freeform play, since they can set up their own goals to achieve."
Will Wright is the designer of Sim City, and he deliberately called his creation this way. I think the above wikipedia distinction is spot on. I don't think the term "non-game" is ideal, but I can't think of any better one that's short. Sandbox, entertainment software, etc. "Sandbox" doesn't capture graphic novels. I think Will Wright also compared Sim City to a ball. You can play a game with a ball, you can invent some rules, but it's not a game by itself.
Speaking of Minecraft, you can make a game within it, or out of it. But it's not a fully fledged, "batteries included" game. Minecraft is very similar to Lego, and if you remove one dimension - even a painting set.
The term "non-game" is somewhat useful for me because I specifically look for games for my active entertainment. I'm annoyed when I have to wade through several quasi-games on a review site to find one proper game. I don't necessarily think games in classical sense are inherently better or more challenging. But if the word "game" ceases to have any meaning on computers, someone will have to come up with a game2 term, which would be silly.
I wouldn't go so far as to call Minecraft educational, but it certainly can teach things. It's probably taught the utility of logic gates to at least a few kids. The comparison to Lego seems apt. Most will probably just build houses or spaceships, but some with the aptitude will start building differentials or digital calculators.
That's just, like, your opinion, man. There's clearly a market for, say, JRPGs, and that market is comprised of people who fully disagree with you. Ultimately what you're saying is "there's no need to make games I don't like".
Personally, for what it's worth, I love games where you neither generate nor are told stories, but rather where you uncover them. Outer Wilds is the best recent example I know of-- the entire game is essentially a detective mystery/archaeology expedition where you have to piece the story of the game together. Similar DNA lives in games like Dark Souls and Myst, where the game lore is predetermined but not necessarily shoved in your face.
Ultimately what I'm saying is that computer games are wasting an opportunity to be good what they do best: interaction and simulation. No one condemns basketball, soccer or chess for having poor story. They are however good at generating stories people tell to each other later. Computer games do that even better.
Unfortunately not - there's too many of them, so they don't work as social objects in most contexts anymore.
I could tell endless stories about the crazy flights I've done in Kerbal Space Program - like that time when I miscalculated Δv in my moon lander and had to plot an emergency intercept on a suborbital trajectory, to let the crew EVA over to the command module before the lander crashed into the moon's surface...
... but nobody cares. I have no one to tell them to. Everyone has their own set of games they play, and the intersection of these sets contains very few games, if any at all.
At some point story generators are barely games and more like tools or toys. Dwarf fortress doesn't have a ton of replay value as a fortress manager. Maybe five or six attempts to make a stable fortress but i could spend hours just tweaking the world gen parameters and looking through the legends mode.
The screen play was actually written first by both Kubrick and Clarke, the novel was released after the movie came out. I think it’s fair to give them both credit.
A reddit user [1] found its location [2] and another figured out it was installed sometime during 2015-2016 based on when the satellite imagery changed.
> I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak.
You have to love the internet sometimes. Someone who works construction (as he stated) can develop a fun investigatory hobby just via the internet. The he can sign his work with a silly name like bear__f##ker (which I'm guessing is a reference to the movie super troopers).
On the other hand, it was people like this that once fingered the wrong person for the Boston Marathon bombing. It's all well and good as long as we remember not to put too much stock in it when it really matters.
Once an entire government worth of people led the US into war that cost millions of lives over fake reports of nukes.
It would be interesting to compare the damage caused by open, crowd-sourced investigative efforts against the damage caused of closed "authoritative" investigative efforts.
Ha, if only they had the guts to be so specific! They just hid behind the blanket statement of "WMD"s and deflected any questions of specifics. Could have been nerve gas, could have been a biological agent. Everyone played their role (media and government) in deflecting attention away from the core issue that we were being bullshitted.
I think it’s amusing that the takeaway from this episode is “the intelligence agencies screwed up” and not “the intelligence agencies found no evidence, and then were directly pressured by their political masters to construct evidence to justify a desired military outcome.”
Australia and East Timor negotiated a treaty to divide up oil and gas in the sea between the two countries. Australia bugged the East Timorese government offices to get an unfair advantage in the negotiations.
The East Timorese government found about this, and then sued Australia in the Permanent Court of Arbitration to have the treaty invalidated.
An Australian intelligence agent (''Witness K''), who knew about the bugging, contacted East Timor's lawyer – Australian Bernard Collaery – offering to testify for East Timor.
The Australian government responded by cancelling Witness K's passport to stop him from testifying, raiding the offices of East Timor's lawyer, and now both of them are on trial – in secret.
The word on the street that the extremity of the "in secret" part is the Director of Public Prosecutions, Christian Porter, protecting old party mate, Alexander Downer, to keep his name out of the mud for as long as possible, as it's likely he was the top of the chain of authorization for the bugging, being that he was the Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time and was outspoken against East Timor for accusing Australia of spying.
The problem is that in protecting one person's reputation they're ruining the reputation of an entire country.
It's exactly the job of the Australian intelligence agencies to protect for the countries interests and gain advantages where they can.
This case is even more reasonable as it's a country spying on a country so both parties have the opportunity do so.
The NSA has directly spied on corporations (Airbus) and passed the information to their own corporations (Boeing) in the past which seems less acceptable to me.
There's obviously something fairly deeply wrong with it, or wrong with it being known by the Australian public, given the government's efforts at suppressing it.
Who is to say they didn't bring them up the chain, and the chain just ignored them?
Try to bring issues to the public and they'll charge you with "espionage"/"mishandling classified information"/etc. Even if the charges don't succeed, you'll lose your career and the court case will ruin you.
Not just a court case though, an investigation or a "psych eval" are enough to ruin someone. Take a look at Russ Tice.
Also, read Ronan Farrow's piece from the New Yorker last week. They targeted a straight-laced DOJ lawyer with >20 years of experience. These organizations are out of control and pose a very serious threat to our freedom.
>Who is to say they didn't bring them up the chain, and the chain just ignored them?
And that is why those senior public servants with power in security agencies hate wikileaks and are willing to trash the constitutional protections for journalists to get Assange and also want to destroy Snowden so very badly.
It wasn’t even a real intelligent agency that drummed up support for war. It was a temporary agency created by Rumsfelds and Cheney with the Orwellian name of “Office of Special Plans.” They deliberately lied and misused raw intelligence signals to force us to war.
So season 2 of TV Series 24 aired between October 29, 2002 May 20, 2003. Its main theme was US govt using fabricated evidence to attack middle eastern countries. The Office of Special Plans (OSP) existed from September 2002 to June 2003.
There's some CIA disinfo right there. Rumsfeld and the neocon claque certainly ginned it up. The spooks though, said it would be a "slam dunk" that there would be WMD in Iraq. Here's Tenet grousing he was quoted:
> It would be interesting to compare the damage caused by open, crowd-sourced investigative efforts against the damage caused of closed "authoritative" investigative efforts.
I hate that word “interesting” when used for things that are downright fucking despicable.
Human history is rife with witch hunts. Perpetrated by communities against people living on the fringe of society or anyone they just didn’t like. Someone to blame for nothing in particular when they can’t find any other outlet for frustration. I guarantee you wouldn’t find it “interesting” if you were the target of oPeN cRoWdSoUrCeD iNvEsTiGaTiVe EfFoRtS.
I bet a comparative study can be done. Some places have a history of vigilantes and lynch mobs and a banning of that practice for the authoritative form.
I wouldn't actually be surprised if people actively debated this and did some analytical legwork when they were prevalent as some twisted justification for the practice
It's clearly possible to be against jumping to conclusions with crowd sourced material and also being false claims by the government (especially given that in the case of the Iraq invasion we don't how much fraud or bad faith really went into it).
Which is to say that measuring damage done by the Iraq invasion versus damage cause people falsely finger individuals for crimes is an exercise in fallacious analogy. The US isn't planning to crowd source their next invasion research question.
If I read this correctly Obeidi hid that parts from Saddam, not for him, from the article above:
“Had the secret cache been discovered by Saddam’s security elements, Obeidi and his family might have been eliminated.”
And those were the leftovers from dismantling the stuff which was used before 1991, as far as I understand: definitely not a smoking gun, more the old rusty non-functional parts which Saddam didn’t know existed.
I think the only cost is not the body count. One must look to the displaced populations, affects of the drop of GDP, etc. And how one thing led to another and in the end gave rise to (or at least provided the dirt to grow for) IS, etc.
It wasn’t over fake reports of nukes. The weapons reports were how it was justified for a while, it is quite doubtful that the war calculus relied on this for decision makers in any way more than as a coin to sell the war to the people.
As an analyst, something in me twitches involuntarily at your response. By people like this you mean redditors doing internet sleuthing?
But redditors doing internet sleuthing could be anyone; from detectives, to judges, to professional analysts, to trolls, to pr firms, to fraudsters and framers.
The evidence they use can be anything from high quality to low/ fraudulent.
And then we have the fact that the alternative official systems also have incentives/disincentives and also get things wrong: imagine writing about police or courts "they once fingered the wrong person for crime X, so don't put too much stock in it when it really matters".
if the Wikipedia article is anything to go by, the Boston bombing case was a bunch of internet people reacting on a rumour of similarity to descriptors/ images released by the authorities.
whereas in this case, a smart fellow follows a systematic and logical system to come to a reasonable conclusion.
I'd rather tell people to learn to judge evidence and the analytical thought that goes into making the conclusions.
Of course, we mustn't entirely discount the possibility that all this is just some PR stunt and this guy is in on it :p But either way, I'd say the better message is to learn to be skeptical, think analytically, and judge things on the quality of the evidence and the thought process used to come to the conclusion.
But redditors doing internet sleuthing could be anyone; from detectives, to judges, to professional analysts, to trolls, to pr firms, to fraudsters and framers.
Am I out of line to thinking that at least some of the types of people listed in your hypothetical group of sleuths have some sense of professional ethics to not recklessly speculate on a public web community in terms of a manhunt as was the case in Boston?
They probably do. Unfortunately, the mechanics of Reddit favor any random dope posting something that is exciting and sounds good over smart and careful people taking their time to make sure they get it right.
And of course, "Hey guys I've got it, this is totally it!!!" goes up much faster than "I found something that might be interesting, let's check it out, but I'm not sure yet, so don't anybody go off half-cocked".
Answering in a short, simple, probabilistic sense: they probably wouldn't comment.
Answering as a more seasoned, cynical person professional sense: that's way too simplified. Processes and standards for police, judges, officials etc, differ all over the world, as do professional ethics and culture. In practice there are various incentives and norms and "professional wiggle room for professional ethics". The police often release images of suspected persons or specific evidence precisely because they want the public to connect the dots and report their suspicions, knowing full well it results in false positive reports (and often withholding additional evidence for release). A doctor might not be allowed to euthanase, but they can prescribe high amounts of pain killers. A prosecuter might not go post on reddit, but they might act through a sock puppet or leak through the media. A defence may do the same. Corporations hire consultants and PR firms to give the illusion of justification and action at a distance. A judge would probably not comment on reddit (if not just because of the professions technical illiteracy), but the conditions of their appointment, their staff, political alignments, social circles, tenure, and professional ethics etc are far from uniform and sterile. All of the above are liable to cognitive, emotional and systematic failings and biases in addition, as well as the failings of their education and background: on a personal anecdote, I find judges and lawyers notoriously bad at reasoning that requires math or probability. In my experience also, those in power frequently strategically leak, work through proxies and associations to avoid the image of going against professional standards and save reputation.
additionally, in adhering to professional ethics, we don't necessarily approach the truth (which is presumably our goal), as following systematic cultures and professional ethics can lead to bias: as I pointed out, these official systems frequently come to the wrong conclusions as well, and going against the norms of professional standards can be used to silence critics, shun whistle blowers, and protect the general institution.
All this comes back to my original point: don't just believe something because it's posted in reddit. But don't discount it as being inherently inferior either.
Be skeptical, but be a skeptic of reddit and officeholders. Think critically. Learn to think and the process of thinking: it's not just natural, it needs to be learned and practiced. Learn the biases and common mistakes. Observe the evidence and the process used to come to the conclusion, and then make a judgement.
It's not very reasonable to assume that all amateurs lack professional ethics solely on the basis of the Boston manhunt incident (especially considering the different ethics associated with hunting for people and locating an artifact in the desert). It's worse to take that inference and impugn any particular amateur as the OP did when he likened the redditor who located the monolith with the redditors who misidentified the Boston Bomber.
>> It's all well and good as long as we remember not to put too much stock in it when it really matters.
> But redditors doing internet sleuthing could be anyone; from detectives, to judges, to professional analysts, to trolls, to pr firms, to fraudsters and framers.
I think you and GP agree. Reddit sleuthing is all good and fun but it should not be trusted at face value (or at all, really) when there are real people and real consequences on the line.
> I'd rather tell people to learn to judge evidence and the analytical thought that goes into making the conclusions.
Implied in this position is that you have to be skeptical of reddit sleuthing until you have a reason not to be. The problem is that people are _not_ skeptical of reddit sleuthing because there is a "We did it reddit!" attitude that the platform is super capable and should be believed by default. You and GP are both warning against that.
I don't have a citation, just inferences based on years of observation.
I also didn't lay OpSec is mostly useless. I'm not convinced that's true, though it may be.
OpSec alone is useful but brittle. If it's all you've got, you'll probably eventually have a bad day. Looking at entities considered "masterminds", what I often find is ... some intelligence, yes, but a lot of shielding from, or disregard of, risk.
Impunity is actual or believed freedom from consequence.
There are a few categories:
- The proficient: extremely good at their game. Effective, so long as it works. Covert.
- The well-protected -- friends in high places. State actors and their contractors, generally. Often under diplomatic covered. "Too big to jail" and politically-conneccted (Brock 'Stanford Rapist" Turner https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-jail/...) The Mossad team assassinating Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Ma...) (though most of the team were effectively burnt). May include some non-state actors: warlords, terrorists, narcotics gangs, though most of these fall below. Covert, but can retreat quickly to safety, or are at low risk if caught.
- The brazen. Operations with overwhelming force, whether shown or used. Military campaigns, many criminal organisations, warlords, militias. Overt.
- The uncaring: those who have no care whether they live or die. Most suicide attacks, 9/11 bombers, the original "hashīshīn", etc. 2008 Mumbai attacks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks Overt or covert.
- The ignorant: Simply unaware of the risks. Child soldiers, the Boxers (China), "wrong way 'round" Pan Am flight 18602 landing at Surabaya, Dutch East Indies, unknown to the pilot, in a heavily-mined harbour. https://medium.com/lapsed-historian/the-long-way-round-part-...
- The expendable. Assets who need only be used once, whether burnt (retired) or killed afterwards. This includes a segment of the consulting or management workforce, who have a certain ablative funtion. Martin "Pharma Bro" Shkreli.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
The relatively recently disclosed Crypto AG case, where the Swiss manufacturer of a widely-used manufacturer of communications encoding equipment was shown to be a CIA-owned front is a case in point. Signals intelligence relied not so much on exceptional decryption capabilities, but on the widespread use of a backdoored technology. The strong focus of US intelligence policy on similarly backdooring networking hardware (Cisco), telecoms switches (Greece), computing hardware, operating systems, and softwaare, speaks to the probable usefulness of this method.
It's not OpSec but influence and immunity that enables this.
Update: Parent's question, if brief, was entirely fair. Which is why I answered it.
I listen to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast and I feel the same way when the go through a propaganda video of a rocket launch and get so much more information about its capabilities and testing location than the government ever meant to reveal.
What I figured from the Internet is technical proficiency in random fields isn’t rare, but a stable, provable, predictable proficiency, on top of passable level of social acceptability, coexisting in a single consistent humanframe, is what is rare.
> but a stable, provable, predictable proficiency, on top of passable level of social acceptability, coexisting in a single consistent humanframe, is what is rare.
Seems like every 'weird job' or skill gets you an American reality TV contract these days. Either that or some Youtube followers.
Which is remarkably unclear. Did someone just toss a Trump hat into the air after pulling down the flag? Was the stream stopped before morning returned, and so the only shots are in the dark?
Is it an important set of questions? No. But still a better ending than the "oh yeah they stole the flag, now here's a shot of the flag flying during the day again".
That is a much better ending, thank you! Not entirely sure why it wasn't included in the article's video. (Also really not sure what the idea behind using a shirt as a flag was)
And of course there's a couple of Internet Historian videos: https://youtu.be/_p4h3jwJob0 (warning - very /pol/, exactly as should be expected)
The phrase "weaponized autism" used to be a thing on 4chan when I cruised that back in the day.
It honestly opened my eyes to a severely under-tapped resource in the job market. Individuals with autism tend to be able to focus on tasks more, and tend to see things in a way that lets them analyze systems and logical steps phenomenally well. In the social-sciences fields, they tend to be overlooked, because of either the stigma or actual lack of interpersonal abilities, depending on the specific individual.
It is because of 4chan that when I am hiring for technical positions (now, this is higher ed, so I'm talking about the interpretation of federal legislation or state mandates, or systems and process evaluations, not programming) I target individuals on the spectrum.
As someone on the spectrum I really loved the phrase "weaponized autism". I've been telling people most my adult life that high functioning autism is kind of like having a weird super power, but that was the first time I ever saw so many people understand the unique abilities that some people on the spectrum have.
I love the phrase "weaponized autism" as well, speaking as someone on the spectrum. A previous manager of mine once told me I am great with coming up with unique solutions to problems.
Like you said too, some of these people lack good interpersonal abilities. I know a friend who is also on the spectrum and is one of the smartest people I know, and excellent when it comes to math. However his lack of interpersonal and social skills has made it difficult for him to find meaningful employment.
As someone with ADHD, I'm kind of a kissing cousin to autism (they share some genetic indicators [https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/risk-genes-autism-overlap-...] and some but not all symptoms; I certainly don't claim to understand the unique struggles of being a person with autism of course) and can relate to the benefits of different types of intelligence. I can be smart as a whip when it comes to finding solutions to technical problems, and if you find me the right project I can (unintentionally) hyperfocus and tear through it. But man, I am not your person for organizational skills or planning skills.
I wish there were a way to be more open about this. On the one hand, you have things like ADA really dictating from a legal perspective how companies can discuss these sort of things; on the other hand, you have very real stigmas that people have against neurodiverse people. (For instance, I have not and will never tell my boss I have ADHD; I have heard far too many stories of people being lulled into thinking it was safe to do so and then finding their professional relationship irrevocably changed.) It's a shame because I think it could be a net positive for all if done in a healthy way.
I've started to just own my ADHD as a way to destigmatize it. I'm your go-to for breadth-first search, latest tools and frameworks, creative solutions, and wielding everything from soldering irons to cloud deployments. But you might need to ride my ass a bit to stay on task.
It also has pushed me to a very CI/CD-centric and statically typed workflow (in a python-heavy AI/CV department), because I need to be able to reason about stuff I wrote on a bad brain-fog day. My philosophy is if it's easy for undermedicated me to reason about it, it's easier still for my coworkers.
Just a heads up that that phrase has been heavily adopted by the QAnon conspiracy community, and using it without context might give the wrong impression.
You'd be even more frustrated by Children of the Sky. Not only is it limited in scope (to Tines' World), but it leaves a bunch of plot threads unresolved, presumably for a sequel. :/
The internet sleuthing might just be smoke and mirrors. It's possible this guy already knew where the monolith because he knew the installer or is the installer. Either way, he's comes out looking good.
Yep. I sometimes do this with ads for the housing market here in the 30k inhabitants town. Track down a house where the ad shows some exterior but doesnt tell the exact address, only the town or district. It helps a lot having done some OSM Mapping in the past and it is actually fun.
Is this relevant? It is "well known" that log2(world population) is about equal to 33, so theoretically if you numbered every human alive consecutively you would only need 33 bits to store the number. But this is a long shot from estimating the amount of data required to pick someone out of a crowd. For example, perhaps you are just given a bunch of low-resolution pictures of people's foreheads: do you only need "33 bits"? What does that mean?
Likewise, identifying a random location on earth from a photo is certainly doable, but I would say it has less to do with the logarithm of the surface area of the earth and much more to do with expertise in geography, geology, etc.
I find it interesting. I make no claims for relevance.
Knowing the 33 bits trivium, I was curious what the equivalent was for individual spatial locations. The maths are easy and GNU units near.
You're right that trying to ascertain the number of bits contributed by any one item of data is difficult. I broke that down in part in a reply to the Reddit comment (after posting here): knowing the feature was in Utah (280k km^2) and having the flight track probably narrowed the region to about a 10km square (100 km^2) region ... which still contained 10,000 10m^2 areas. The geographic clues were enough to find the specific one. It's easier to work backwards and determine how much information was deduced by given data, based on search space eliminated.
Keep in mind that "expertise in geography, geology, etc." is specifically the capability of extracting geospatial information from available data. This could have included, say, sun height and angle based on date and time (exif image data frequently encodes this, if not geolocation itself), cues from aircraft noise in live video (mentioned in another geolocation example within the thread), correlated with flight data.
That claim seems to be accurate --- Al Qaeda forces were found in the Tora Bora cave complex in the region.
The practical upshot is that if you know where something is and don't want others to know the location, virtually any information leakage can be critical.
For your crowd example, much depends on the number of suspects you already have. The question is usually one of mapping between two sets --- which of the blurry foreheads matches which another set of interest. Determining intersections is key to ost investigations.
And more generally, almost any process of discovery can be modled as searching through a space. The more irrelevant targets are excluded, the smaller the remaining space remains. Insight is exclusion. The search itself might not be binary in the classic sense, but it is one of ever narrowing scope.
As someone who is house-hunting at the moment, this is exactly what I do all evening for houses without an explicit address in the online exposé. Most of the time, the combination of solar panels and the positions of rooftop windows and the chimney is a collision free hash value.
This reminds me of #SmashTheStone from a few years back when the 4chan community came together track down and prevent 9gag from burying a meme-carved rock.
Video from the internet historian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzFykQv6Q08
Information wants to be free, in the sense of leaking out via unexpected sidechannels. But this strongly reminds me of "Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies" which uses a fairly similar example.
"I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak."
With the risk of sounding like downplaying it, I think the crucial part here is the potential range of the helicopter, which is fairly limited with the information given (start location, time etc.), and the fact they can walk in from somewhere flat enough to land the helicopter.
The geological part is nice but not necessary (you just need to be able to tell the colors of rocks).
I see some dotted lines nearby on the Google map. Hiking trails? Jeep trails? I’m wondering how much that thing weighs and how they got it there. Maybe drive it there with a large off-road pickup truck and then got a bunch of guys to carry it down the wash behind it?
It's pretty near Moab, UT - which is an adult kid's playground. The area is abundant with trails. Much of that land is regularly explored with various 4x4s for sport, even (and especially) off the trails. And Moab would also be a place enriched for people with the skill and desire to make a giant metal slab and find a place to stash it.
The 'monolith' is just a bit SE of the "Dead Horse Point" (SW of Moab), just on the east side of the river on this map [1].
I see a small dirt road immediately to the north. Given that dirt road intersects with hwy 211 I assume it was driven there in a large ATV. Most likely a 4wd truck and a large ATV went out there with the sculpture in the truck, and then the ATV and a few people with shovels drove it down to the gully to the site to install it.
At least some of it was filmed by Lake Powell, closer to the southwest corner of Utah. It was really weird to see a bunch of troops coming ashore where I was hanging out on the beach a year earlier, against a very recognizable backdrop. Definitely broke the suspension of disbelief.
They had a scene that was "outside Gainesville, FL". That's where I went to university and from the highway it's basically flat forests. The scene instead looked semi-arid with mountains in the background...
Ah, looks like my exact story is documented exactly on IMDB!
Try living in Los Angeles. Every other movie has some local detail pretending to be somewhere else.
And if you're ever going up the highway east of the Sierra Nevada, be sure to stop in at Lone Pine's film history museum. The Alabama Hills just west of town have been stand-ins for every western state, as well as Mars, Afghanistan, the entire Middle East ...
It's disconcerting to be watching a movie and seeing known landmarks pop up on alien planets, or see Mt. Whitney in the background of a shot in the "Himalaya."
I feel you. As New Zealander watching lord of the rings with local soap opera actors appearing randomly really break whatever immersion you tried to build up...
Sometimes, this happens to me just because the same actor pops up in two films. I can never quite get over Lord Elrond being Mr. Smith from the Matrix, for example. Perhaps because the acting in the two roles seems so similar to me. I don’t watch movies very much. People who do, must have this happening to them all the time.
'Hollywood' in general is like this. All the film studios have real life people working in them and who have lives outside of their work. One of the reasons that Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, Malibu, etc. are what they have become is that they are a commutable distance to the studio lots. The same is then true of shooting locations in southern CA. The ability to go back home on the weekends/evenings (in the least) is very attractive as a shooting locale.
The location is only 15 miles from Moab as the crow flies.
My bet is someone living in Moab wanted to do a desert art project and chose this location that was reasonably close, but still fairly remote.
People do all kinds of stuff out in the desert around Moab.
Just about 10-20 miles northwest of this monolith there's a small slacklining festival called GGBY held in a similarly remote location. Look up Fruit Bowl Highline Area on google maps and check out youtube to see some of the wild stuff people do!
Unless the artist practiced very good OpSec or was so disciplined that he never checked for satellite imagery of his monument, someone with the right credentials -- like the government with a subpeona or a Google insider -- could identify the artist based on his IP address.
Murderers have been identified and convicted by looking up a unique map coordinate on Google Maps, even going back as far Yahoo Maps.
You can be convicted for looking at a map where the only thing was tracked is your ip? This is all kinds of insane. No wonder the US incarcerates so many innocent people.
> The federal complaint says ... the newspaper received a letter that said ''nice sob story,'' with a computer-generated map showing an intersection in West Alton in St. Charles County, along with a handwritten X.
> ... searchers found human skeletal remains within 50 yards of the location shown by the map's X, about 300 yards from where the decomposed bodies of Ms. Wilson and another victim, Verona Thompson, had been found.
> A search by Illinois State Police of Internet mapping companies led to an exact match between features on a map sent to the Post-Dispatch and one found on Expedia.com.
> On June 3, the Microsoft Corporation, which tracks access to that Web site, showed the F.B.I. that only someone with the Internet Provider address 65.227.106.78 visited the Expedia.com site and searched the West Alton area within days of the map's mailing to the Post-Dispatch. The user name of that IP address was ''MSN/maurytravis.''
Unlikely. But it can be a clue that leads to the right person, which can then lead to more direct evidence that could form the basis of a conviction on the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof.
It's just basic detective work, updated for new technology.
I thought the US government decided it would be easier to pay tech giants to keep data longer than collecting it itself and storing it. That way they can just ask for it when they need it.
That's how they found the boyfriend of Olivia Newton-John, who had faked his own death. He was the most frequent visitor to the website set up to help find him(that's literally true - the website was a trap they had hoped he would visit)
I'm not quite sure about the satellite imagery comparisons. The angle of the sunlight is obviously different looking at the shadows of the surrounding geology.
So looking at the instragram post it looks like steel plates just screwed together. The screw holes are visible too so definitely a hollow shell. Makes it a lot less cool to me :(
I friggin love guerilla art. It always weirds me out how much effort is put into making the world un-artistic. Amazing murals being painted over, shrines being removed from nature, amazing homes made by off-skew people being demolished to put in bland main-stream housing.
Removing fancy litter from what is supposed to be a natural preserve isn’t in the same category as housing. I agree that human occupied areas need art, but encouraging wilderness to be even more littered with human scars is the last thing we need.
It is a fine line between tastefulness and crap. Even here there is a 50/50 between folks who like it and folks who think it's just screwing up the landscape. And this is a fairly tasteful piece.
If there were a blanket "Leave it alone, it's art" policy, I can see junk popping up everywhere.
I recall that. At the time I knew someone who claimed to be in contact with the perpetrators, and I had heard that the city made an arrangement for a permanent installation of that piece.
I think I can infer from the wiki page that this either fell through, or my friend was making stuff up, because it appears to be at a metalworking shop.
Wow this is getting a lot of PR. I've seen this article on the on so many news sites now. It's funny, but front page news? Seems of all the random things that go on, this was picked as special for some reason. Just interesting how some things you wouldn't expect rise to the top.
I mean, it’s pretty cool. There’s that fact. But my guess it’s probably being drive to top due to the parallels to 2001. I’d imagine there’s a large Kubrick fanbase on HN, if not just a 2001 fanbase.
The book and the film where written and developed cooperatively so both really ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ However, they are both based on clark's 1951 short story The Sentinel[0].
Great, this is what was missing from 2020 :-)
What's next... asteroid, aliens, mega solar flare, singularity.
SPOILER: This metallic monolith (most probably guerilla art) has been out there in the desert since 2015-2016.
The only person/people who will know who and when put it there are some NSA emps who are most likely rewinding satellite feed from one of their spy sats right now...
Probably something that is so scarce in earth that the monolith alone couldn't have been made by anyone other than a government, a billionare or aliens. Solid gold maybe?
On a more serious note, Rhodium fits the bill: super expensive, hard, durable, silvery and corrosion resistant.
Using the 7,700 lbs estimate elsewhere here, and a price of Rhodium I randomly found on the internet of $16,100 per troy oz, the material of this structure, if made from Rhodium, would cost about $1,749,005. Which is actually not bad, for a very rich person. I guess they'd have to build an even larger one. Or make it hollow and fill it with printer ink.
I think you calculated that wrong. I get $1.8B at that price.[0] Though that 7700 lb estimate assumed the sculpture was made of aluminum; rhodium is about 4.5X as dense, so it'd be closer to $8.1B.
Ah, thanks for the correction. I just quickly googled values and multiplied them but thinking about it, I probably multiplied by "lb/troy oz" instead of "lb/troy oz" or something like that. I'm an idiot :)
Your figure does sound a bit more realistic. Still, printer ink...
It reminds me of Stonehenge. I understand that some people may consider this could set a bad precedent but if its not harming the ecosystem in any way why shouldnt it be allowed to stay up? To me this would be like erasing the paintings we made 5000 years ago.
I seriously hope this piece of artwork, as it is clearly intended to be, is preserved. Utah already has a tradition in land art with Robert Smithson's, Spiral Jetty [1].
Look it’s not aliens but there is nothing clearly making this art. It’s far more likely a memorial for someone or something. It’s hidden. It’s expensive. And quite frankly, would be a shitty rip off if it was art.
Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist, and of course we don't know anything for certain, but is it even remotely possible that this could be a prototype of the Xbox Series X?
Not even close. Wrong color (2001 monolith was black, not stainless steel). Wrong shape (2001 monolith had a rectangular cross-section, this one has a square cross section (plus or minus).
First impression to me was that it is some sort of modern kinetic projectile[0] from aircraft weapons' testing. I've read US army used something of that shape in recent conflicts, but probably of smaller size.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 333 ms ] thread"This means something..."
It took me years to understand that reference fully. When I saw UHF originally it bugged me that I knew it was a reference to something but I didn't know what. Finally, a decade later I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I finally put two and two together.
I've only seen one part of UHF - Michael Richards' scene w/"The FIREHOSE!!"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098546/
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f9/f7/bd/f9f7bd6cd80f1db36a07...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele
http://legacy.earlham.edu/~vanbma/index/121299heizer-art.htm
http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/city
So, "Monorabd"?
Monosider?
But that was an eggregious driver. Previous version: ~15 modules. Rewritten by some purist: 900(!) modules. I kid you not.
Who did the 900 modules rewrite?
I was re-writing the driver as a simple C++ set of pure virtual objects and implementations for my hardware. So when I scavenged code to send a certain structure as a message, I simply didn't make the old calls. I remember I did (for some reason) edit all the old modules to use the new API, to prove it still worked I guess. A long afternoon of search and replace.
The (Korean?) company that owned the driver must have had a team or something. It was extremely brain-dead code for every element of an 802.11/ethernet abstraction as a separate module, done twice (once for the driver; once for the module firmware). Double structure definitions for everything.
My team wanted a walk-thru of the existing driver. I scheduled two hours, one before lunch and one after. I opened with "I've brought just the 500 most significant modules today, and we're going to walk thru a connection and message send". Proceeded to open dozens of nested module references on a very long path from triggering a connection attempt to exchanging the first message for negotiation. The hour was up.
Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.
I wonder if that's because two different teams worked on the two different abstractions.
> Nobody came to the 2nd hour after lunch.
I guess that the pain of that first hour convinced them that your rewrite was trustworthy.
I have a lisp - but I am very monotonous.
It has to be "knowingly and willfully", "in any matter within the jurisdiction" of the government. While this is much broader than most people might realize or expect, it probably doesn't extend to using a nickname in a conversation when the agent hasn't asked you your legal name as part of an investigation!
(But the breadth of this kind of rule is definitely a reason that people are discouraged from consenting to an interview with law enforcement without a lawyer present.)
Sure enough, it is. Found the link[1]
[1] http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,139525,...
> HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. No roosters
Roosters are assholes and AFAIK they're banned in most non-agricultural zoning.
> JONESBORO, GA. No profanity in front of children under 14
A bit moralistic but I could see it happening in a smaller town where people might be more aligned on such things. And looks like the population of Jonesboro is sub-5k.
> JUPITER, FLA. No roadside billboards
I wish this was true everywhere.
> STATE OF TEXAS No walking in the streets if there is a sidewalk
Only complaint I have on this one is that it's cementing car culture worship.
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I suspect others are probably over-reactions to single adverse events.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_juris_non_excusat
‘This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,’ the voice continued. ‘As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.’
Assuming the "monolith" is around 10ft tall with a 1.5ft square base, it would weigh 5 tonnes if it were made of solid steel. Whoever installed it would have needed serious machinery to haul it over there and stick it in the rock.
Thin sheets of metal, either welded or riveted together, would have been much easier to build and install. It could even have been filled with some other material (e.g. sand) before the top was put on.
Yes, it was a prism shaped object with 3 pieces of stainless steel panels riveted together, the bottom has concret and silicone:)
https://www.instagram.com/p/CH_212pAKpr/
The monolith is about 141" long, and has sides of about 23.5", so 16 of those bars would neatly fill it.
So if it is solid aluminium, that's about $23,500 in material.
[0]: https://www.onlinemetals.com/en/buy/aluminum/6-aluminum-squa...
Using the weight calculator [1], and plugging in 23.5/23.5/141 (all in inches) I am getting about 7.7K lbs, or around $15K in material costs. Given it’s unusual shape, I’m assuming that normal is producing it. This would require additional costs for machining and processing Dash I’d probably say it would be several thousand dollars in additional costs. Overall this looks to me like a $25,000 piece of metal...
[1] https://www.bostoncenterless.com/tools/metal-weight-calculat...
[2] https://fastmetals.com/collections/aluminum-extruded-square-...
It looks like aluminum. Someone posted 23.5" x 23.5" x ~144" as the dimensions. This comes out to be 46 cubic feet, and would weigh about 7,700 lbs. A floor of the price would be ~40 cents/lb scrap price, or ~$3,100. Ballpark 80-120 cents/lb might be a more realistic price if it were straightforward to manufacture like that (which it's certainly not).
As an industrial engineer and former employee of one of the largest aluminum plants in the world, I can safely say I doubt it is solid rolled aluminum, and bet it would be way bigger of an extrusion that is possible. And logistically, it would be far easier to transport to a remote location via helicopter if it wasn't solid. Any machining, metal forming, etc. would require specialized large equipment, and would quickly drive the cost up, potentially an order of magnitude higher than material costs.
Cue reddit researchers combing through old helicopter flight plans/paths from the relevant time frame? Though I would have thought an off road vehicle might be more likely; looks like it's only about 2-3 miles from the nearest road.
Edit: actually there appears to be a dirt road ~1k feet or less away
I took this one on the point overlooking the monolith: https://www.instagram.com/p/BUFR5GZF2fX/?igshid=11nr2ljs2dh6...
I took this photo not too far from the monolith:
https://flic.kr/p/8MWSQp
The monolith in 2001 had dimensions in ratios of 1:4:9 [and continuing into other dimensions...].
Why the heck would you go to all the work of putting a monolith of the wrong shape out there?
1:22:33 becomes 1:33:77
It seems unlikely that there are serious tolerances to be kept here, couldn't this just be cast messily using a sand/clay mould and then cleaned up with portable power tools?
That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whatever Aluminium you can get your hands on. Hell, you can even recycle Aluminium cans.
The fix is pretty simple though. You need directional solidification, meaning the freezing starts on one end and moved towards the other. If you apply a draft angle of 1 degree or so to the parallel faces, you will have enough difference in dimensions to get directional solidification working fine.
>That way you don't need any special equipment and you can use whatever Aluminium you can get your hands on. Hell, you can even recycle Aluminium cans.
I'd advise against mixing alloys, but you may still be alright to get something, but it will be worthless if you try to recycle it again. Mixed scrap fetches far less than sorted scrap when you try to sell it. E.g. Some alloys might allow 1-2% copper, while others require <0.01% copper. Each pound of type 1 mixed with type 2 requires lots of pig (pure aluminum, no alloying elements) to be added to get the proportions back to something you can legally call whatever alloy you're targeting.
Aluminum cans aren't a wonderful source for things like this because they contain a thin plastic film on the inside to prevent the liquid contained from having its flavor tainted. Normal recycling processes handle this fine, but cannot handle the plastic labels added on many small brewery cans. Those should be cut off prior to recycling.
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Side note - It is incredibly energy intensive to mine bauxite, refine it through an electrolysis process into alumina, and finally alloying it into your preferred type of aluminum. It recycles incredibly well though. Recycling 1 ton of aluminum saves about 95% of the energy compared to new aluminum. This 95% savings is about 14,000 kWh. The energy intensity is part of why Iceland houses 4 smelters. With nearly 100% of electricity production coming from hydroelectric, they have incredibly cheap electricity, and it's economically viable for the likes of Alcoa, Rio Tinto, and Century Aluminum to haul bauxite ore from around the world to a tiny country with almost no manufacturing base, process it, then haul it around the world to its final destination.
Arguably if you are worried about the environment and account for human laziness steel cans are better for the environment IMO
Aluminum can recycling rates tend to be higher in states that offer deposit programs. Back when they were getting introduced in the 80's, $0.05/container had a lot more buying power than it does today. It's enough of an annoyance now, they'd be best off eliminating it or increasing it to ~$0.15 or so. Or since this is HackerNews, maybe we could use block chain technology to verify each can is properly recycled and reimburse with bitcoin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Icelan...
When I visited in 2018, we came across a 5 kW turbine installed in 1927 near a famous waterfall. It's no longer online, but was neat to see.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/pLuSyKnStd4smgCCA
That's also a lot of polishing for the finish you would get from sand casting.
There appear to be screw holes (or rivets), so I'm going to guess that it's three aluminium sheets screwed onto an interior scaffold.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CH_iU8JgeIr/
https://youtu.be/LUFyGGU0cxo?t=37
Given that the excitement will have died down by the time its precise structure is revealed, I'd say a simpler design served its purpose quite well.
Mr Hutchings speculated that the monolith may have been installed by "some new wave artist", or a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1968 film directed by Stanley Kubrick.
I understand not wanting to set a precedent, but I wish more organizations adopted a mindset that the original can stay, but no others are allowed. That leaves space for a little bit of whimsy.
FWIW, I find this piece of trash to be a showoff moment for some wannabe 'artist'. Mimicking a movie prop to me sounds like a low-effort, untalented mindset.
Leave it be, and leave the rule in place. If there's an epidemic of monoliths being planted on federal land, then you uproot them all and say "this is why we can't have nice things."
Until or unless that happens, just leave it alone.
The purpose of the law is to improve the quality of life. Nothing wrong with changing the law to further that goal. Just give the monolith a permit to make it legit.
Maybe we can set up a Starbucks next to it and some bathrooms too. It's the famous monolith! Come one come all!
> The purpose of the law is to improve the quality of life.
I don't see how litter in my national parks is improving my quality of life.
On the other hand, you didn't know it existed until 2 hours ago and now you want it removed.
There already is art Throughout the wilderness and I think it is great. Sometimes the art is as simple as a statue or plaque commemorating a historic location, other times it is DIY art like this.
The point of national parks isn’t to preserve wilderness for the sake of preservation. The point is recreation. This is why they are full of artificial modifications like roads, trails, and sometimes attractions with shops and bathrooms.
Also, as far as I can tell, this isn’t in a national park, but on federal BLM land Used for hunting and off-roading.
Yes, and they shouldn't be.
> The idea that some out of the way and moderately interesting art is a priority is laughable.
I don't think it's that interesting, but besides that I don't follow your rationale. Because some people litter against the rules, we shouldn't clean up this thing someone put on federal lands? Even so, wouldn't large pieces of litter take priority over smaller ones simply due to human nature?
I really feel like you're stretching here. Frankly, it's interesting to watch people defend some thing they just found out about and have no attachment to.
The national parks service philosophy is very preservationist. They advise people to follow guidelines that are literally called “leave no trace”. Their mission statement uses the word preserve in the first sentence. Hell, part of the reason why Big Bend national park never became an international park (among many others) was because the parks service disagreed with the laxer, conservationist approach that Mexican authorities favored.
>The point is recreation. This is why they are full of artificial modifications like roads, trails, and sometimes attractions with shops and bathrooms.
Those modifications are done carefully to have as little impact on the environment and a lot of types of recreation are completed banned in national parks, hunting being the obvious one. The use of vehicles (including bicycles) is completely banned in federally designated wilderness.
What steps did whoever installed this take to make sure that this thing isn’t going to leech metals into an ephemeral watering hole used by wildlife?
https://www.doi.gov/blog/hunting-and-fishing-national-parks-...
The thing is the reason why a lot of people are ok with this art thing is because it's not just the first instance of it, but because it's currently quite interesting and tasteful. These are vague qualitative aspects that are hard to define with law and will change over time.
Better to have a simple law everyone can understand and agree on then to find some perfect law that fits with our complicated, blurry and inconsistent definition of morality. The more complicated a set of laws are the more likely people will be able to find loop holes to exploit.
>The department has not disclosed the exact location of the monolith, fearing explorers may try to seek it out and "become stranded". The big horn sheep wildlife officials were counting are native to many parts of southern Utah, where the terrain is rugged.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/38°20'35.2%22N+109°39'58.5...
That terrain in Utah is no joke and many people have gone missing in those areas.
Inexperienced people die venturing into nature all the time. The solution is to warn and educate people, not discourage them from enjoying the outdoors.
A more aggressive strategy might involve teaching children in schools not to walk out into the desert without water, or into the ocean if you can’t swim
If you allow the original but remove a 2nd and it is goverment land, are you opening yourself up to legal issues regarding the 1st amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Pat_Noise
Change the law, and/or file an injunction to stop it's removal if that is your wish.
But I firmly believe that The Rule of Law matters in our country.
Specific to this case, it's not an organization, it's a federal law. And whimsy might bring cheer to you and I, but it does not really belong in federal law.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-17398342
This isn't that great, it's not worthy of any sort of exception here.
People are really suffering from "it's new and shiny" syndrome.
But seriously, they should examine the monolith's RF characteristics, monitor/test the field strength around the thing to determine its size and whether it is wired into something.
You feel it's cool and big, because you're looking at the story of going from the origins of life to the galaxy, but the gameplay doesn't actually support that ambition. Most of what you accomplish has very little impact; it's just a series of hoops you need to jump through, so that you can say that you did them.
Half Life 1 is one of the few games that got it right, but does it have imitators? A silent protagonist is something to be ashamed of nowadays.
The new Doom games also have silent protagonists, but unfortunately have some third person cutscenes and are extreme examples of 'cooler than you'.
"Non-games are a class of software on the border between video games and toys. The original term "non-game game" was coined by late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who describes it as "a form of entertainment that really doesn't have a winner, or even a real conclusion".[1] Will Wright had previously used the term "software toy" for the same purpose.[2] The main difference between non-games and traditional video games is the lack of structured goals, objectives, and challenges.[3] This allows the player a greater degree of self-expression through freeform play, since they can set up their own goals to achieve."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-game
Will Wright is the designer of Sim City, and he deliberately called his creation this way. I think the above wikipedia distinction is spot on. I don't think the term "non-game" is ideal, but I can't think of any better one that's short. Sandbox, entertainment software, etc. "Sandbox" doesn't capture graphic novels. I think Will Wright also compared Sim City to a ball. You can play a game with a ball, you can invent some rules, but it's not a game by itself.
Speaking of Minecraft, you can make a game within it, or out of it. But it's not a fully fledged, "batteries included" game. Minecraft is very similar to Lego, and if you remove one dimension - even a painting set.
The term "non-game" is somewhat useful for me because I specifically look for games for my active entertainment. I'm annoyed when I have to wade through several quasi-games on a review site to find one proper game. I don't necessarily think games in classical sense are inherently better or more challenging. But if the word "game" ceases to have any meaning on computers, someone will have to come up with a game2 term, which would be silly.
Personally, for what it's worth, I love games where you neither generate nor are told stories, but rather where you uncover them. Outer Wilds is the best recent example I know of-- the entire game is essentially a detective mystery/archaeology expedition where you have to piece the story of the game together. Similar DNA lives in games like Dark Souls and Myst, where the game lore is predetermined but not necessarily shoved in your face.
I could tell endless stories about the crazy flights I've done in Kerbal Space Program - like that time when I miscalculated Δv in my moon lander and had to plot an emergency intercept on a suborbital trajectory, to let the crew EVA over to the command module before the lander crashed into the moon's surface...
... but nobody cares. I have no one to tell them to. Everyone has their own set of games they play, and the intersection of these sets contains very few games, if any at all.
There is a similar game mechanism in Will Wright's 1990 title SimEarth.
And not summon an alien or demon or whatever during the one of the worst years in our lifetimes."
This was the best part of the article.
“It’s obviously Bigfoot, the human/ape hybrid the greys use when on Earth.”, says a source near to the monolith.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/k01dc3/mysterious_m...
[2] https://goo.gl/maps/2xdrTqcnguX3ky8AA
> I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak.
https://old.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/jzw628/help_me_f...
It would be interesting to compare the damage caused by open, crowd-sourced investigative efforts against the damage caused of closed "authoritative" investigative efforts.
That would never happen today.
Australia and East Timor negotiated a treaty to divide up oil and gas in the sea between the two countries. Australia bugged the East Timorese government offices to get an unfair advantage in the negotiations.
The East Timorese government found about this, and then sued Australia in the Permanent Court of Arbitration to have the treaty invalidated.
An Australian intelligence agent (''Witness K''), who knew about the bugging, contacted East Timor's lawyer – Australian Bernard Collaery – offering to testify for East Timor.
The Australian government responded by cancelling Witness K's passport to stop him from testifying, raiding the offices of East Timor's lawyer, and now both of them are on trial – in secret.
The problem is that in protecting one person's reputation they're ruining the reputation of an entire country.
Shameful Australia.
Minor factual correction though: Christian Porter is the Attorney-General, not the DPP
It's exactly the job of the Australian intelligence agencies to protect for the countries interests and gain advantages where they can.
This case is even more reasonable as it's a country spying on a country so both parties have the opportunity do so.
The NSA has directly spied on corporations (Airbus) and passed the information to their own corporations (Boeing) in the past which seems less acceptable to me.
Australia needs these island states to stay friendly for national security reasons.
It shouldn't be taking advantage of their small and relatively unsophisticated governments to make a quick buck.
Try to bring issues to the public and they'll charge you with "espionage"/"mishandling classified information"/etc. Even if the charges don't succeed, you'll lose your career and the court case will ruin you.
Also, read Ronan Farrow's piece from the New Yorker last week. They targeted a straight-laced DOJ lawyer with >20 years of experience. These organizations are out of control and pose a very serious threat to our freedom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-a-cia-cove...
And that is why those senior public servants with power in security agencies hate wikileaks and are willing to trash the constitutional protections for journalists to get Assange and also want to destroy Snowden so very badly.
And the public had literally millions of people on the streets shouting about it.
And we still went to war anyway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-slamdunk-idUSN264...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=House_of_Special_...
The politically appointed heads of the intelligence agencies used this information to lie to the American public.
Assad bombed his own people
The Russians hacked the election (a very broad statement, like “let’s believe in evolution”)
North Korea hacked SONY
All at very convenient times for our moves abroad and totally nonsensical from the point of view of motivation of the ones doing it (like Assad)
It’s like they don’t even try anymore. They just say “17 intelligence agencies all concur” with each other.
I hate that word “interesting” when used for things that are downright fucking despicable.
Human history is rife with witch hunts. Perpetrated by communities against people living on the fringe of society or anyone they just didn’t like. Someone to blame for nothing in particular when they can’t find any other outlet for frustration. I guarantee you wouldn’t find it “interesting” if you were the target of oPeN cRoWdSoUrCeD iNvEsTiGaTiVe EfFoRtS.
I wouldn't actually be surprised if people actively debated this and did some analytical legwork when they were prevalent as some twisted justification for the practice
Which is to say that measuring damage done by the Iraq invasion versus damage cause people falsely finger individuals for crimes is an exercise in fallacious analogy. The US isn't planning to crowd source their next invasion research question.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
I mean I quite like this summation by Christopher Hitchens about the Iraq war: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VABqrEiuP0I
“Had the secret cache been discovered by Saddam’s security elements, Obeidi and his family might have been eliminated.”
And those were the leftovers from dismantling the stuff which was used before 1991, as far as I understand: definitely not a smoking gun, more the old rusty non-functional parts which Saddam didn’t know existed.
Not to show support for the invasion of Iraq, but it was a far cry from "millions of lives". https://www.iraqbodycount.org
But redditors doing internet sleuthing could be anyone; from detectives, to judges, to professional analysts, to trolls, to pr firms, to fraudsters and framers.
The evidence they use can be anything from high quality to low/ fraudulent.
And then we have the fact that the alternative official systems also have incentives/disincentives and also get things wrong: imagine writing about police or courts "they once fingered the wrong person for crime X, so don't put too much stock in it when it really matters".
if the Wikipedia article is anything to go by, the Boston bombing case was a bunch of internet people reacting on a rumour of similarity to descriptors/ images released by the authorities.
whereas in this case, a smart fellow follows a systematic and logical system to come to a reasonable conclusion.
I'd rather tell people to learn to judge evidence and the analytical thought that goes into making the conclusions.
Of course, we mustn't entirely discount the possibility that all this is just some PR stunt and this guy is in on it :p But either way, I'd say the better message is to learn to be skeptical, think analytically, and judge things on the quality of the evidence and the thought process used to come to the conclusion.
/soapbox
Am I out of line to thinking that at least some of the types of people listed in your hypothetical group of sleuths have some sense of professional ethics to not recklessly speculate on a public web community in terms of a manhunt as was the case in Boston?
And of course, "Hey guys I've got it, this is totally it!!!" goes up much faster than "I found something that might be interesting, let's check it out, but I'm not sure yet, so don't anybody go off half-cocked".
Answering as a more seasoned, cynical person professional sense: that's way too simplified. Processes and standards for police, judges, officials etc, differ all over the world, as do professional ethics and culture. In practice there are various incentives and norms and "professional wiggle room for professional ethics". The police often release images of suspected persons or specific evidence precisely because they want the public to connect the dots and report their suspicions, knowing full well it results in false positive reports (and often withholding additional evidence for release). A doctor might not be allowed to euthanase, but they can prescribe high amounts of pain killers. A prosecuter might not go post on reddit, but they might act through a sock puppet or leak through the media. A defence may do the same. Corporations hire consultants and PR firms to give the illusion of justification and action at a distance. A judge would probably not comment on reddit (if not just because of the professions technical illiteracy), but the conditions of their appointment, their staff, political alignments, social circles, tenure, and professional ethics etc are far from uniform and sterile. All of the above are liable to cognitive, emotional and systematic failings and biases in addition, as well as the failings of their education and background: on a personal anecdote, I find judges and lawyers notoriously bad at reasoning that requires math or probability. In my experience also, those in power frequently strategically leak, work through proxies and associations to avoid the image of going against professional standards and save reputation.
additionally, in adhering to professional ethics, we don't necessarily approach the truth (which is presumably our goal), as following systematic cultures and professional ethics can lead to bias: as I pointed out, these official systems frequently come to the wrong conclusions as well, and going against the norms of professional standards can be used to silence critics, shun whistle blowers, and protect the general institution.
All this comes back to my original point: don't just believe something because it's posted in reddit. But don't discount it as being inherently inferior either.
Be skeptical, but be a skeptic of reddit and officeholders. Think critically. Learn to think and the process of thinking: it's not just natural, it needs to be learned and practiced. Learn the biases and common mistakes. Observe the evidence and the process used to come to the conclusion, and then make a judgement.
> But redditors doing internet sleuthing could be anyone; from detectives, to judges, to professional analysts, to trolls, to pr firms, to fraudsters and framers.
I think you and GP agree. Reddit sleuthing is all good and fun but it should not be trusted at face value (or at all, really) when there are real people and real consequences on the line.
> I'd rather tell people to learn to judge evidence and the analytical thought that goes into making the conclusions.
Implied in this position is that you have to be skeptical of reddit sleuthing until you have a reason not to be. The problem is that people are _not_ skeptical of reddit sleuthing because there is a "We did it reddit!" attitude that the platform is super capable and should be believed by default. You and GP are both warning against that.
And it's people like you who try to judge them equivalent in public view, when they clearly aren't.
What you want is impunity.
I also didn't lay OpSec is mostly useless. I'm not convinced that's true, though it may be.
OpSec alone is useful but brittle. If it's all you've got, you'll probably eventually have a bad day. Looking at entities considered "masterminds", what I often find is ... some intelligence, yes, but a lot of shielding from, or disregard of, risk.
Impunity is actual or believed freedom from consequence.
There are a few categories:
- The proficient: extremely good at their game. Effective, so long as it works. Covert.
- The well-protected -- friends in high places. State actors and their contractors, generally. Often under diplomatic covered. "Too big to jail" and politically-conneccted (Brock 'Stanford Rapist" Turner https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-jail/...) The Mossad team assassinating Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Ma...) (though most of the team were effectively burnt). May include some non-state actors: warlords, terrorists, narcotics gangs, though most of these fall below. Covert, but can retreat quickly to safety, or are at low risk if caught.
- The brazen. Operations with overwhelming force, whether shown or used. Military campaigns, many criminal organisations, warlords, militias. Overt.
- The uncaring: those who have no care whether they live or die. Most suicide attacks, 9/11 bombers, the original "hashīshīn", etc. 2008 Mumbai attacks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks Overt or covert.
- The ignorant: Simply unaware of the risks. Child soldiers, the Boxers (China), "wrong way 'round" Pan Am flight 18602 landing at Surabaya, Dutch East Indies, unknown to the pilot, in a heavily-mined harbour. https://medium.com/lapsed-historian/the-long-way-round-part-...
- The expendable. Assets who need only be used once, whether burnt (retired) or killed afterwards. This includes a segment of the consulting or management workforce, who have a certain ablative funtion. Martin "Pharma Bro" Shkreli. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
The relatively recently disclosed Crypto AG case, where the Swiss manufacturer of a widely-used manufacturer of communications encoding equipment was shown to be a CIA-owned front is a case in point. Signals intelligence relied not so much on exceptional decryption capabilities, but on the widespread use of a backdoored technology. The strong focus of US intelligence policy on similarly backdooring networking hardware (Cisco), telecoms switches (Greece), computing hardware, operating systems, and softwaare, speaks to the probable usefulness of this method. It's not OpSec but influence and immunity that enables this.
Update: Parent's question, if brief, was entirely fair. Which is why I answered it.
Seems like every 'weird job' or skill gets you an American reality TV contract these days. Either that or some Youtube followers.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/d7eddj/4chan-does-first-good...
Is it an important set of questions? No. But still a better ending than the "oh yeah they stole the flag, now here's a shot of the flag flying during the day again".
Edit: The footage is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4rbA3ouyPw
And of course there's a couple of Internet Historian videos: https://youtu.be/_p4h3jwJob0 (warning - very /pol/, exactly as should be expected)
https://youtu.be/_p4h3jwJob0
It honestly opened my eyes to a severely under-tapped resource in the job market. Individuals with autism tend to be able to focus on tasks more, and tend to see things in a way that lets them analyze systems and logical steps phenomenally well. In the social-sciences fields, they tend to be overlooked, because of either the stigma or actual lack of interpersonal abilities, depending on the specific individual.
It is because of 4chan that when I am hiring for technical positions (now, this is higher ed, so I'm talking about the interpretation of federal legislation or state mandates, or systems and process evaluations, not programming) I target individuals on the spectrum.
What a weird thing to see written out.
Even if you pick an objective metric, it was decided upon subjectively and with bias.
I can appreciate wanting society to be more egalitarian, but perhaps you’re in search of another word.
https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/daring-to-think-differen...
Like you said too, some of these people lack good interpersonal abilities. I know a friend who is also on the spectrum and is one of the smartest people I know, and excellent when it comes to math. However his lack of interpersonal and social skills has made it difficult for him to find meaningful employment.
I wish there were a way to be more open about this. On the one hand, you have things like ADA really dictating from a legal perspective how companies can discuss these sort of things; on the other hand, you have very real stigmas that people have against neurodiverse people. (For instance, I have not and will never tell my boss I have ADHD; I have heard far too many stories of people being lulled into thinking it was safe to do so and then finding their professional relationship irrevocably changed.) It's a shame because I think it could be a net positive for all if done in a healthy way.
It also has pushed me to a very CI/CD-centric and statically typed workflow (in a python-heavy AI/CV department), because I need to be able to reason about stuff I wrote on a bad brain-fog day. My philosophy is if it's easy for undermedicated me to reason about it, it's easier still for my coworkers.
https://youtu.be/YnAUy4BM0w8
Too different and my expectations for the scale he set up are too big...
Not sure which is more likely.
Merely raising the possibility that he could have gotten his information another way.
People who put up things like this often want them to get found.
Some people are just insane at that game.
Enhance.
There it is.
It's relatively well known that 33 distinct bits is enough to uniquely identify any individual person now alive on Earth.[1]
Geospatially, assuming 10m resolution, 44 bits is enough to identify any unique location on Earth's land surface (46 bits buys you the oceans).
Searching for a ~1m^2 monolith visually within a 10m^2 square is reasonable.
GNU units:
49 bits buys 1m accuracy, 63 1cm, 69 1mm. Land or sea.For comparison, cellphone positioning accuracy is typically 8--600m:
- 3G iPhone w/ A-GPS ~ 8 meters
- 3G iPhone w/ wifi ~ 74 meters
- 3G iPhone w/ Cellular positioning ~ 600 meters
https://communityhealthmaps.nlm.nih.gov/2014/07/07/how-accur...
https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/
________________________________
Notes:
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20160304012305/33bits.org/about/
https://s2geometry.io/resources/s2cell_statistics.html
https://s2geometry.io/devguide/s2cell_hierarchy
Relevant xkcds:
Coordinate Precision https://xkcd.com/2170/
Map of the Internet: https://xkcd.com/195/
xkcd'Splained:
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2170:_Coordinate_...
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/195:_Map_of_the_I...
Likewise, identifying a random location on earth from a photo is certainly doable, but I would say it has less to do with the logarithm of the surface area of the earth and much more to do with expertise in geography, geology, etc.
Knowing the 33 bits trivium, I was curious what the equivalent was for individual spatial locations. The maths are easy and GNU units near.
You're right that trying to ascertain the number of bits contributed by any one item of data is difficult. I broke that down in part in a reply to the Reddit comment (after posting here): knowing the feature was in Utah (280k km^2) and having the flight track probably narrowed the region to about a 10km square (100 km^2) region ... which still contained 10,000 10m^2 areas. The geographic clues were enough to find the specific one. It's easier to work backwards and determine how much information was deduced by given data, based on search space eliminated.
Keep in mind that "expertise in geography, geology, etc." is specifically the capability of extracting geospatial information from available data. This could have included, say, sun height and angle based on date and time (exif image data frequently encodes this, if not geolocation itself), cues from aircraft noise in live video (mentioned in another geolocation example within the thread), correlated with flight data.
In 2001, the likely approximate location of Osama bin Laden was claimed by a geologist who was familiar with rock formations shown in a video. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1608272.stm
That claim seems to be accurate --- Al Qaeda forces were found in the Tora Bora cave complex in the region.
The practical upshot is that if you know where something is and don't want others to know the location, virtually any information leakage can be critical.
For your crowd example, much depends on the number of suspects you already have. The question is usually one of mapping between two sets --- which of the blurry foreheads matches which another set of interest. Determining intersections is key to ost investigations.
And more generally, almost any process of discovery can be modled as searching through a space. The more irrelevant targets are excluded, the smaller the remaining space remains. Insight is exclusion. The search itself might not be binary in the classic sense, but it is one of ever narrowing scope.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wyyfFfaRar2jEdeQK/entangled-...
"I looked at rock type (Sandstone), color (red and white - no black streaks like found on higher cliffs in Utah), shape (more rounded indicating a more exposed area and erosion), the texture of the canyon floor (flat rock vs sloped indicating higher up in a watershed with infrequent water), and the larger cliff/mesa in the upper background of one of the photos. I took all that and lined it up with the flight time and flight path of the helicopter - earlier in the morning taking off from Monticello, UT and flying almost directly north before going off radar (usually indicating it dropped below radar scan altitude. From there, I know I am looking for a south/east facing canyon with rounded red/white rock, most likely close to the base of a larger cliff/mesa, most likely closer to the top of a watershed, and with a suitable flat area for an AS350 helicopter to land. Took about 30 minutes of random checks around the Green River/Colorado River junction before finding similar terrain. From there it took another 15 minutes to find the exact canyon. Yes... I'm a freak."
u/Bear__Fucker
https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/jzw628/help_me_f...
I'm still gobsmacked about the specific geological knowledge and application here turning into a very precise and relatively small search area.
The geological part is nice but not necessary (you just need to be able to tell the colors of rocks).
The 'monolith' is just a bit SE of the "Dead Horse Point" (SW of Moab), just on the east side of the river on this map [1].
[1] https://www.discovermoab.com/4-wheeling/
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770521/
They had a scene that was "outside Gainesville, FL". That's where I went to university and from the highway it's basically flat forests. The scene instead looked semi-arid with mountains in the background...
Ah, looks like my exact story is documented exactly on IMDB!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0770521/goofs?item=gf0809526
The show only lasted 6 episodes, so...
https://vimeo.com/138807572
[Also, my original comment should have said "southeast" not "southwest", d'oh]
My bet is someone living in Moab wanted to do a desert art project and chose this location that was reasonably close, but still fairly remote.
People do all kinds of stuff out in the desert around Moab.
Just about 10-20 miles northwest of this monolith there's a small slacklining festival called GGBY held in a similarly remote location. Look up Fruit Bowl Highline Area on google maps and check out youtube to see some of the wild stuff people do!
Unless the artist practiced very good OpSec or was so disciplined that he never checked for satellite imagery of his monument, someone with the right credentials -- like the government with a subpeona or a Google insider -- could identify the artist based on his IP address.
Murderers have been identified and convicted by looking up a unique map coordinate on Google Maps, even going back as far Yahoo Maps.
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/11/us/internet-used-to-find-...
> The federal complaint says ... the newspaper received a letter that said ''nice sob story,'' with a computer-generated map showing an intersection in West Alton in St. Charles County, along with a handwritten X.
> ... searchers found human skeletal remains within 50 yards of the location shown by the map's X, about 300 yards from where the decomposed bodies of Ms. Wilson and another victim, Verona Thompson, had been found.
> A search by Illinois State Police of Internet mapping companies led to an exact match between features on a map sent to the Post-Dispatch and one found on Expedia.com.
> On June 3, the Microsoft Corporation, which tracks access to that Web site, showed the F.B.I. that only someone with the Internet Provider address 65.227.106.78 visited the Expedia.com site and searched the West Alton area within days of the map's mailing to the Post-Dispatch. The user name of that IP address was ''MSN/maurytravis.''
It's just basic detective work, updated for new technology.
Their privacy policy states that IP addresses are anonymized after 9 months and cookies after 18 months[1].
[1]: https://policies.google.com/technologies/retention?hl=en-US
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_McDermott
That's...a surprisingly small amount to fake your own death over.
"Discover food deliveries nearby"
Fairly sure that's going to be a tough challenge at that location!
At least this one lives on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_Ends_Park
If there were a blanket "Leave it alone, it's art" policy, I can see junk popping up everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Monolith
I think I can infer from the wiki page that this either fell through, or my friend was making stuff up, because it appears to be at a metalworking shop.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(short_story)
> The book was credited to Clarke alone.
TIL :)
pentagon confirmed aliens and nobody cared, 2020 is weird.
On a more serious note, Rhodium fits the bill: super expensive, hard, durable, silvery and corrosion resistant.
Using the 7,700 lbs estimate elsewhere here, and a price of Rhodium I randomly found on the internet of $16,100 per troy oz, the material of this structure, if made from Rhodium, would cost about $1,749,005. Which is actually not bad, for a very rich person. I guess they'd have to build an even larger one. Or make it hollow and fill it with printer ink.
[0]: 7700 lb * 14.5833 troy oz/lb * 16100 $/troy oz = 1,807,891,701
Your figure does sound a bit more realistic. Still, printer ink...
"Kamacite is an alloy of iron and nickel, which is found on Earth only in meteorites."[0]
As a bonus, it's shiny grey, which means it could even be what this monolith is made of.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamacite
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Jetty
hmm. we've been shamed out of questioning things due to that one label.
> but is it even remotely possible that this could be a prototype of the Xbox Series X
reminds me of Simpsons episode where they found angel bones but it was used as advertising for the grand opening of a new shopping mall
Also, you can see the construction methods.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_Dog_(bomb)