Edouard Chazal

A 300mph Projectile on Wheels

The new Jesko by Koenigsegg, named after the company founder’s father, is claimed to be the world’s first road-legal 300 mph car. That top speed translates to more than 480 kilometers per hour. To put it in more relatable terms, this car can travel fast enough to cover the length of a football field — doesn’t matter which version of football you prefer — in less than a second. When you think of it in those terms, you’ll probably also realize just how theoretical performance like that is: there aren’t many straight lines in the world long enough to let a person hit such ludicrous speeds.

→ The Verge

Why CAPTCHA Have Gotten So Difficult

Because CAPTCHA is such an elegant tool for training AI, any given test could only ever be temporary, something its inventors acknowledged at the outset. With all those researchers, scammers, and ordinary humans solving billions of puzzles just at the threshold of what AI can do, at some point the machines were going to pass us by. In 2014, Google pitted one of its machine learning algorithms against humans in solving the most distorted text CAPTCHAs: the computer got the test right 99.8 percent of the time, while the humans got a mere 33 percent.

→ The Verge

In a Home Surrounded by Homicide

Cynthia Glover has arranged her bed so that it faces the front door. On many nights she lies there until the pop of gunfire is replaced by the hiss of air brakes from the first school bus of the morning. Then the 56-year-old can doze off, her pit bull and her husband by one side, a loaded 9mm handgun by the other. It is chrome and holds 17 rounds.

• • •

Glover used to watch the movies with her four children, sitting on the couch as she held them, rocking back and forth. Then they grew up, and three of them were shot and killed in separate incidents. So was one grandson. Now, she worries her last child will be next.

→ The Washington Post

Trump Fails His Rendezvous in France

To Trump’s decision to stay away because of rain from a solemn occasion to honor these dead, none of us living today can offer an adequate response. So perhaps it is best to let one of the more famous of those early volunteers, Alan Seeger, deliver a rebuke from beyond the grave.

“I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows ’twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear …
But I’ve a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.”

→ The Atlantic

As Brazil’s Far Right Leader Threatens the Amazon, One Tribe Pushes Back

Cleber da Silva Costa, the miner who brought the bounty, said he knew what he and his fellow miners were doing was illegal and harmful to the environment. Yet he argued that his crime was merely a symptom of more egregious wrong.

“If you didn’t have so many corrupt people in Congress, you might be able to consider preserving the environment,” he said.

Mr. da Silva, 47, a miner with three children, said the camp was doing more to preserve than destroy indigenous communities.

“The little they have today is from miners,” he said. “The government doesn’t help. All the money gets stolen. We may be in the wrong. But out here, it’s the law of survival.”

→ The New York Times