When it comes to Olympic medals, India underperforms compared to its GDP. Then again, it’s pretty handy at cricket. CC-licensed photo by Ashwin John on Flickr.
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It’s Friday, so there’s another post due at the Social Warming Substack at about 0845 UK time.
A selection of 9 links for you. Feeling googly. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes • eieio games
Nolen:
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One Million Checkboxes was a website with a million checkboxes on it. You probably coulda guessed that.
But the bit – the trick – was that all of those checkboxes were global. Checking or unchecking a box changed it for everyone in the world, instantly.
I thought the site wouldn’t get much traction but I was very, very wrong. Over 500,000 people visited the site in the 3 days after launch; folks checked 650,000,000 boxes in the two weeks that I kept the site online.
It made the New York Times and The Washington Post; it’s on Know Your Meme and Wikipedia. I just spoke about it at XOXO Fest and the site won a Tiny Award. The whole thing was a wild ride.
I’ve written at length about the technical details behind the site – you can read about them here. And if you prefer to listen to the story I’m about to tell rather than read it, you can watch it on YouTube (it’s based on my talk from XOXO). This is my first video; I’m trying to figure out if it’s something I’d like to pursue.
But let’s get into the story. To tell you this story, I need to give you some context.
I like to make games that help people interact on the internet. Some people are assholes when they interact on the internet. So when I make games like this I try to add constraints to make the average interaction a little more pleasant.
I’ve been around long enough to know what people will draw if you put an unrestricted canvas on the public internet, so for OMCB [One Million Checkboxes] I wanted to constrain drawing.
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You won’t be able to guess where this is going, but you will be astounded and delighted, and then you’ll think about The Three Body Problem and alien communication and other surprises.
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LG Display unveils stretchable displays at Seoul Fashion Week • LG Display
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LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that it is this week presenting its Stretchable displays, which can be freely stretched, folded, and twisted, at one of the world’s most exciting fashion events.
The groundbreaking displays are part of clothing and bag concepts being unveiled at 2025 S/S Seoul Fashion Week at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP).
Their appearance at Seoul Fashion Week marks another milestone after LG Display in 2022 unveiled the industry’s first Stretchable prototype that could extend from 12 to 14 inches while maintaining a high resolution of 100ppi, at the level of a regular monitor, and a full color spectrum.
Allowing designs and colors to shift from one moment to the next, the company’s Stretchable displays feature on the front of garments, sleeves, and clutch bags crafted by leading Korean designers Youn-Hee Park and Chung-Chung Lee. Models are demonstrating these concepts during runway shows on September 5 and 7.
“We have been able to design future fashion concepts with new materials that have never existed before,” said Park, the head of GREEDILOUS. “Stretchable displays will bring a new paradigm to the fashion world.”
Lee, the head of LIE, added, “Stretchable displays will have a great impact on the fashion industry by enabling the implementation of designs that previously could only be imagined.”
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Could be a big moment? Could be nothing? Foldable displays seemed like a big thing, but phones don’t feel like quite the right place (despite everything). Stretchable and twistable seem much more interesting.
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When reality came undone • Nautilus
Philip Ball:
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n 1926, tensions were running high at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. The institute was established 10 years earlier by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had shaped it into a hothouse for young collaborators to thrash out a new theory of atoms. In 1925, one of Bohr’s protégés, the brilliant and ambitious German physicist Werner Heisenberg, had produced such a theory. But now everyone was arguing with each other about what it implied for the nature of physical reality itself.
To the Copenhagen group, it appeared reality had come undone.
Bohr had electrified the scientific world in 1913 with his bold theory of how atoms are constituted. Drawing on an idea proposed in 1900 by the German physicist Max Planck, he said that the electrons that orbit the dense central nucleus are constrained to specific orbits, able to jump between them only by emitting or absorbing light in discrete packets of energy called quanta.
The theory won Bohr a Nobel Prize in 1922, but it was an ungainly, ad hoc mix of traditional physics and Planck’s new “quantum” hypothesis. Bohr craved an explanation that got to the root of why atoms seemed to behave in this peculiar way. It couldn’t be constructed from the traditional classical mechanics that had prevailed since Isaac Newton laid out its basic rules in the 17th century but demanded a new mechanics of quanta.
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Long but absorbing read about a topic that still puzzles us today.
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When the bitcoin scammers came for me • The Atlantic
Annie Lowrey:
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Earlier this year, an astonishing moneymaking opportunity appeared on my phone. I had somehow been added to a cacophonous group chat populated by scores of high-net-worth investors. For weeks, I watched as they shared photographs of steak dinners and second homes, while also proffering their buy-sell positions, their gains and losses. Keita, a guy with a northern-Florida number, complained about having to hire laborers to clean up his garden. Anthony of New York posted while reading his kids a bedtime story. Jefferson Ogwa talked about smart trades.
The smartest trades of all came from a guy named Mike Wilson, who, along with his assistant at Morgan Stanley, put order recommendations into the chat. When he did, folks would flood the group with screenshots of their Wilson-directed wins and occasionally post their Wilson-advised losses. Wilson’s assistant would aid people in making their trades, encouraging them to hold steady through the inevitable market fluctuations. “Start-up capital is relatively low for those interested in participating,” she wrote. “Stay tuned.”
I stayed tuned. Having not made any trades—as a reporter, I do not actively invest in anything—I nevertheless chimed in: “Can’t wait for the markets to open Monday.” At that point, I got added to other trading groups and my phone started to ping with texts on iMessage and WhatsApp. “This is Marie, do you have time to talk today?” “Are you interested?” From there, escalation, gentle, slow. Would I like to chat? What were my investment goals? How was my week going? Looking forward to anything?
I was enmeshed in a textbook pig-butchering scam—the hallmark of which, its horrifying name aside, is a certain relaxed charm. No rush. No blunt ask for cash. Just a lot of engaging and unthreatening messages leading, inexorably, to an attempt to get me to start trading bitcoin on a dedicated platform or to send it to an anonymous address.
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Lowrey twigged it pretty much immediately – it would be like being among aliens who’d learnt English from a book – but what’s different here is that the scammers don’t hurry.
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Real-estate shopping for the apocalypse • The New Yorker
Patricia Marx decided to see if there are any affordable bunkers for if, you know, the reds decide to push the button down (in the words of Donald Fagen’s New Frontier):
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I considered breaking the bank ($4.9 million) for a compound in Battle Creek, Michigan: more than two hundred and ninety acres encompassing several dwellings, the largest being a fourteen-thousand-square-foot affair that looks like a soap opera’s idea of a mansion, with indoor pool and “high-end” appliances (if there’s a Miele waffle-maker, I need that house!)—and, below, a spacious bunker with its own shooting range and grow room. (Phew! Who can survive without daily fresh fenugreek?) Unfortunately, the owner of that particular McBunker wouldn’t allow me to tour the place, because I couldn’t show proof of funding. This is a standard requirement when shopping for bunkers; so few “comps” exist that banks cannot assess their value, and thus won’t give mortgages.
After weeks of scrolling, I found a handful of dream hideaways on the market whose sellers were willing to let me take a tour. There were two bunkers in Montana, one of which sleeps at least ninety; a prepper bunker in Missouri that features an inconspicuous entrance and a conspicuous arsenal of guns (not included in sale, but makes you think twice before criticizing the kitchen-countertop choice); a defunct missile-silo site in North Dakota; and a twenty-thousand-square-foot cave in Arkansas used by its previous owner to raise earthworms. (Favorite bit of real-estate marketing copy: “The worm room speaks for itself.”)
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Music producer allegedly used AI songs to swindle Spotify • Variety
Gene Maddaus:
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A music producer was arrested Wednesday and charged with multiple felonies for allegedly scamming more than $10m in royalties using hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs.
Michael Smith, 52, of Cornelius, N.C., is alleged to have created thousands of bot accounts on platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music. According to the indictment, he used the accounts to automatically stream AI music he had placed on the platforms, generating as many as 661,440 streams per day.
Smith allegedly orchestrated the scheme to get around the platforms’ fraud detection systems. Prosecutors allege that he initially engaged in fraudulent streaming of music that he owned. But the streaming platforms could detect likely fraud if a particular piece of music was streamed a billion times.
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Quite possibly related to this 2020 piece by Andres Guadamuz, who found his Spotify account hacked (still haven’t figured out 2FA, people?) and being used to play bizarrely bland music.
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How Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi • Navy Times
Diana Correll:
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Today’s Navy sailors are likely familiar with the jarring loss of internet connectivity that can come with a ship’s deployment.
For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.
But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.
As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.
So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.
The enjoyment of those wireless creature comforts by enlisted leaders aboard the ship carried serious repercussions for the security of the ship and its crew.
“The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship and the Navy cannot be understated,” the investigation notes.
Led by the senior enlisted leader of the ship’s gold crew, then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, the effort roped in the entire chiefs mess by the time it was uncovered a few months later.
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That’s ex-Command Senior Chief Marrero to you, following the court-martial. Can’t figure out if the bust to E-7 is one or three rank demotions. (Thanks G for the link.)
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Why is India so bad at sport? • FT
Tej Parikh:
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whether it is the Paralympics or Olympics, India underwhelms on the global sports stage, relative to its demographic heft. It has won just 41 medals at the Olympics since 1900. On the balance of probability alone — accounting for 1 in 6 people in the world — the nation’s recent performance is embarrassing. It amassed just six medals at the Olympics this year.
Of course, athletic prowess depends on far more than people power. For instance, America sent over five times the number of athletes India did to this year’s Olympics, despite having just a quarter of its population. Indeed, Rory Green, chief China economist at TS Lombard, finds that GDP explained about 90% of the variation in medal counts at the Paris games. But, India is also the world’s fifth-largest economy. If it has the people and the money, why is it so bad at sport?
Success at the Olympics tends to scale with GDP partly because it acts as a proxy for sport expenditure. “Capital-intensive sports — including gymnastics, sailing, swimming, rowing and diving — accounted for 28% of available medals this year,” notes Green. America, China and Britain excel in many of these. “Economic development also means more leisure time and the creation of a sporting culture.”
India’s economic emergence has, however, not translated into stronger investment in sport, or more recreation. Expenditure on physical recreation has not been a priority for successive governments. As a result, wannabe athletes have faced significant hurdles in the form of poor funding and a lack of access to facilities, coaching and equipment.
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There’s a graph with a log scale which seems to suggest that the UK, France, China and US are outliers in the medal count.
But of course, there aren’t Olympic medals for cricket, and that is colossal in India: the IPL (India Premier League) is worth over a billion US dollars in media revenue alone.
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Solar module installations could hit 592 GW in 2024 • PV Magazine International
Patrick Jowett:
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The global solar industry is on track to install 592 GW of modules this year, up 33% from 2023, according to a new report from BloombergNEF. It said in its its “3Q 2024 Global PV Market Outlook” that “low prices for modules are stimulating demand in new markets this year, but hurting manufacturers, who are competing intensely to maintain market share.”
Quarter-on-quarter analysis shows a 1% increase across the world’s largest 28 markets. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and India lead the largest developments, while Japan and South Africa experience notable decreases.The most established solar markets continue to build steadily.
The report forecasts steady year-on-year increases in solar module installations, reaching 996 GW by 2035. BloombergNEF has also reduced its 2024 estimate for polysilicon production to 1.96 million metric tons – enough to produce 900 GW of modules.
Jenny Chase, BloombergNEF’s lead solar analyst, told pv magazine that the main reason for the polysilicon output reduction from 2.2 million tons of estimated annual output in the second quarter of 2024, is “that manufacturers are scheduling maintenance or using other ways to temporarily reduce production, due to the low prices and oversupply.” The report states that polysilicon prices are currently $4.9/kg, below production costs for nearly all manufacturers.
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Polysilicon now as cheap as plywood. But generates more energy if you put it on a roof. And look at that growth rate!
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 