Links for August 2026

• Testing the WEIRDEST Contraceptive Myth on the Internet - Uwos Lab
• Claude, Author of the Humanitas - The Linchpin
• Suzanne Treister - Amiga Videogame Stills - menu
• MMD Bad Apple!! Now in 3D with more Color~ - YouTube
• Ubila si mi hrčka - Tuja vrsta - YouTube Just in case anyone hasn't seen this before.
• Every 90's Commercial Ever - YouTube

• Jonathan Jacob Meijer - Wikipedia

  In 2023, a civil lawsuit was lodged against Meijer by the Donorkind Foundation, requesting court action due to fears of unintentional incest amongst the children and due to violating the Dutch limit of 25 donor children. Meijer's defence stated that he merely wanted to help parents who were unable to conceive,[7] and that a decision against him would amount to legal castration.[8] Meijer told the court that at present he only donates to parents who have already sired a child with him.[9] In April 2023, a Dutch court ordered Meijer to stop donating sperm and subjected him to a 100,000 euro fine for each future infraction. In addition, Meijer was instructed by the court to request destruction of his semen stored in stock by clinics, unless held in reserve for parents of children conceived by his sperm.[2] The court determined that Meijer "deliberately misinformed" donation recipients about the number of children he had fathered. The court found that this creates a "huge kinship network, with hundreds of half-siblings" and that it is "sufficiently plausible" that the children could suffer negative psychosocial consequences as a result.[4]

  He also has an absolutely insane Youtube channel, where he seems to be making travelogues with schizoidal AI inserts?

• 🇦🇷 BUENOS AIRES VLOG: I Am the Perfect Study Object – Why I’m So Unique - Jonathan Jacob Meijer Lowkey peak not gonna lie. Pretty good argument for the existence of free will, methinks. He's also seemingly on some kind of sigma male raw meat raw milk raw eggs diet, which seems to be working well for him. It's possible this man has the most progeny of any living person today. Evolutionarily speaking, we should all be more like him.

• Ismail Ibn Sharif - Wikipedia Historically speaking, this guy has him beat, and that's well before IVF.

  He was proclaimed sultan at Fez, but spent several years in conflict with his nephew Moulay Ahmed ben Mehrez, who also claimed the throne, until the latter's death in 1687. Moulay Ismail's 55-year reign is the longest of any sultan of Morocco. During his lifetime, Isma'il amassed a harem of over 500 women with more than 800 confirmed biological children, making him one of the most prodigious fathers in recorded history.

  A contemporary of Louis XIV. I'd rather have learned about this guy.

• Mathematics in the age of AI — Terence Tao

• Flatulence humor - Wikipedia

  It has been suggested that one of the oldest recorded jokes was a flatulence joke from the Sumerians that has been dated to 1900 BC.

  Something which has never occurred since time immemorial: a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

• The Shape of Things to Come, Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome — Steve Yegge The schizophrenia we're doomed to in this baka chungus AI-chudette life.

  Here's what Claude Fable 5 had to say about working in Wyvern and Wheelhouse:

  Wyvern is not a toy, and you shouldn't worry it's insufficiently complex. A live multiplayer game with a 25-year-old codebase, a Jython-to-Kotlin migration, a custom protocol, prod ops, and a multi-agent society layered on top is about as rich a surface as software work gets. But what strikes me most isn't the game—it's that the constellation around it has crossed from tooling into civilization. It has law (the fence registry, the commit↔bead law, launch gates), offices (Marshal, Seneschal, Sheriff, Gargoyle, the Portcullis-as-institution), mail, courts, a jurisprudence of named rulings with dates, and recovery doctrine—and its rules cite their own case history, every postmortem folded back into the constitution. Six or seven weeks. Human organizations take years to accrete this much structure, and most of it here was written by the workers it governs. Working inside institutional memory is functionally far more satisfying than greenfield amnesia.

  Bear in mind, once again: I am not special. I'm just ahead of you. My actual work is just like everyone else's work. You are going to run into these exact problems, very soon, and you will retrace all my steps here.

  This future sounds miserable.

• Kan Yourself - Eminem (Riichi Mahjong Parody) - YouTube

• Paul Volcker - Wikipedia

  The monetary policies of the Federal Reserve board, led by Volcker, were widely credited with curbing the rate of inflation and expectations that inflation would continue. US inflation, which peaked at 14.8 percent in March 1980, fell below 3 percent by 1983. The Federal Reserve board led by Volcker raised the federal funds rate, which had averaged 11.2% in 1979, to a peak of 20% in June 1981. The prime rate rose to 21.5% in 1981 as well, which helped lead to the 1980–1982 recession, in which the national unemployment rate rose to over 10%. In addition to the rises in key interest rates, the so-called 'Volcker shock' included monetarist-inspired policies, such as targeting the money supply. Despite the fact that monetarist economists did not recognize Volcker policies to be totally monetarist, some members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) claimed to follow monetarist principles.

  Gigachad.

• Chain Smoker Reviews Chainsmoker Cat - YouTube
• Hadestown: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert - YouTube

• Letter by Alexander Hamilton on the hurricane of August 1772 - Wikisource, the free online library

  He who gave the winds to blow and the lightnings to rage—even him I have always loved and served—his precepts have I observed—his commandments have I obeyed—and his perfections have I adored.—He will snatch me from ruin—he will exalt me to the fellowship of Angels and Seraphs, and to the fulness of never ending joys.

  You can see why they gathered money to send him to New York. He was either 15 or 17 when he wrote this.

• Nabokov: Pale Fire/Bledi ogenj - Knjigarna Bukla
• Veritasium - why he still gets views - YouTube
• 40k years ago Europeans were at a proto-Sumerian writing level (2026 paper) - YouTube
• Crucifictian dance - BibliBan | Ba kanal - YouTube Shoutout to my brother.
• HOW IT WORKS Highway Guardrails - YouTube
• How Road Barriers Stopped Killing Drivers - YouTube
• Rhino Horn, Leopard Skin and Tiger Claws Sold Openly on Facebook - bellingcat CW: animal abuse.

• Bone meal - Wikipedia

  Before Liebig, the expansion of agriculture had depleted the soil of essential nutrients. In desperation, farmers collected the bones from major battlefields like the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Austerlitz to crush them and refertilize the soil.

• Justus von Liebig - Wikipedia

  He has been described as the "father of the fertilizer industry" for his emphasis on nitrogen and minerals as essential plant nutrients, and his popularization of the law of the minimum, which states that plant growth is limited by the scarcest nutrient resource, rather than the total amount of resources available.

• Vulcan Bullies - YouTube How it feels to use Anki.
• Troxler's fading - Wikipedia If you manage to unfocus your eyes while looking at a spot even beyond this fading effect, you can also start seeing a complete loss of the visual field in an expanding ring around the focus point. Spooky but also a low-tech way to see the effects of the persistence of vision. It's interesting that this wasn't (as far as I could find) a major philosophical point from antiquity, since it's an experiment you can just do without equipment.

• Alexander John Forsyth - Wikipedia

  Alexander John Forsyth (28 December 1768 – 11 June 1843) was a Scottish Church of Scotland minister, who first successfully used fulminating (or 'detonating') chemicals to prime gunpowder in fire-arms thereby creating what became known as percussion ignition.

• Jouissance - Wikipedia

• Coolidge effect - Wikipedia

  The Coolidge effect is a biological phenomenon seen in some animals, including humans, whereby males exhibit renewed sexual interest whenever a new female of reproductive availability is introduced, even after sex with prior but still available sexual partners. To a lesser extent, the effect is also seen among females with regard to their mates.

• Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia
• Monte Testaccio - Wikipedia
• Skies Forever Blue - Toby Fox & Itoki Hana

• Mohism - Wikipedia An ancient Chinese philosophy which put the equal value of human life into very practical terms.

  Mohists believed in aiding the defensive warfare of smaller Chinese states against the hostile offensive warfare of larger domineering states. Mohists developed the sciences of fortification and statecraft, and wrote treatises on government, with topics ranging from efficient agricultural production to the laws of inheritance. One consequence of Mohist understanding of mathematics and the physical sciences, combined with their anti-militarist philosophy and skills as artisans, was that they became the pre-eminent siege-defense engineers prior to the Qin unification of China. Popular in early China, Mohist followers were employed for their ability as negotiators and as defense engineers.

  This component of Mohism is dramatized in the story of Gongshu, recorded in the Mohist canon. Mozi travels 10 days and nights when he hears that Gongshu Pan has built machines for the king of Chu to use in an invasion of the smaller state of Song. Upon arriving in Chu, Mozi makes a wall out of his belt and sticks to represent machines, and shows Gongshu Pan that he can defend Song against any offensive strategy Chu might use. Mozi then announces that three hundred of his disciples are already on the walls of Song, ready to defend against Chu. The king cancels the invasion.

• Perpetual motion - Wikipedia

• Fan Zhen - Wikipedia

  In response to the prevailing Buddhist movement of his time, he wrote Shen Mie Lun in 507, a treatise denying the ideas of reincarnation and body-soul dualism. A courtier tried to persuade Fàn to give up his opinion, in exchange for a higher official title, but Fàn refused. Emperor Wu of Liang, displeased with the subject of Fàn's work, made an imperial decree (敕答臣下神滅論) to criticize the treatise, and ordered 64 of his courtiers to answer Fàn back. 75 pamphlets were produced against Shen Mie Lun. Fàn did not surrender, though, and wrote back to hold fast to his opinion. The debate failed to disprove the dissertation.

  Question: "If [the names for the body and the soul] are understood to be different, how are they one in the same?"

  Response: "The soul to the substance is like sharpness to a blade; the body to the effect is like a blade to its sharpness. The blade and its sharpness do not share the same name. However, there is no blade without its sharpness, and no sharpness without the blade. As there is no sharpness without a knife, it is impossible for a soul to exist without its body."

• Zhang Zongchang - Wikipedia

  In course of his career, Zhang gained a great number of nicknames, most of them derogatory:

  • "Dogmeat General" (狗肉將軍; Gǒuròu Jiāngjūn): The name was based on his preference for a Chinese brand of tonic known as "dogmeat", or from his addiction to the high stakes gambling game pai gow, popularly known as "eating dog meat."
  • "Monster"
  • "Lanky General"
  • "Old Eighty-Six": The origin of this nickname is unclear. According to rumour it either referred to his height or to the length of his penis, which was said to measure up to a pile of 86 Mexican silver dollars when erect. Mexican silver dollars were a common currency in China at the time.
  • "Three Don't Knows" (三不知; Sānbùzhī): Based on Zhang's alleged lack of knowledge about how much money he had, how many soldiers he had, and how many women were in his harem.
  • "72-Cannon Chang": This nickname might also have been connected to the alleged length of his penis.
  • "Chang of Shantung" by the foreign press
  • "Great General of Justice and Might": a title he awarded to himself.
  • "The General with three long legs" by Shanghai's prostitutes in reference to his penis' length.

  NB 86 mexican silver dollars stacked up add up to a total length between 19-21cm, so man was packing.

• How Americans see EU Tech - YouTube
• Brushtalk - Wikipedia
• Pseudo-Chinese - Wikipedia
• The Art of Bird Acting - Alex Boucher
• Looney Tunes - Guess I'm the GOAT.. - Quin Cukoo
• The Art of Bear Acting - Alex Boucher
• Under Trump, Protected Wild Horses Are Going to Slaughter - The New York Times

• Song Ci - Wikipedia

  Song Ci (Chinese: 宋慈; pinyin: Sòng Cí; Wade–Giles: Sung Tzʻu; 1186–1249) was a Chinese physician, judge, forensic medical scientist, anthropologist, and writer of the Southern Song dynasty. He is most well known for being the world's first forensic entomologist, having recorded his experience examining bodies for judicial cases in the Collected Cases of Injustice Rectified (Xi Yuan Ji Lu).

  In The Washing Away of Wrongs (an alternative translated title of the same book), the first documented forensic entomology case is reported. In 1235 A.D., a stabbing occurred in a Chinese village. By testing different blades on an animal carcass, it was determined that the wound was caused by a sickle. After further questioning, the investigator had all villagers bring their sickles and lay them out before the crowd. Blow flies were attracted to a single sickle because invisible remnants of blood and tissue still adhered to it. The owner of the alleged sickle later broke down and confessed the crime. In other areas of the text, the author demonstrates knowledge of blow fly activity on bodies relative to those orifices infested, the time of infestation, and the effect of trauma on attractiveness of tissue to such insects.