How the U.S. military lost a $250 million war game in minutes – The Washington Post

As a U.S. Navy carrier battle group entered the Persian Gulf, it came under surprise attack by adversaries launching missiles from commercial ships and radio-silent aircraft that quickly overwhelmed its missile defense systems. Nineteen U.S. ships, including the aircraft carrier, were destroyed and sunk within 10 minutes.

To plan his attack, Van Riper wrote that he “employed a command and control methodology specifically designed to thwart” American technological advantages, including the ability to intercept electronic and phone communications. He relied on couriers to relay sensitive messages and communicated to aircraft with lanterns to avoid radio chatter.

After his surprise attack simulated the destruction of the carrier group, the atmosphere at Norfolk command, where Van Riper led his team, was “shock,” he told The Post in an interview. “It was just quiet. It never happened in an exercise before. … I don’t think [Joint Forces Command] knew what to do.”

On Crafting Painterly Shaders – Maxime Heckel’s Blog

This article is the culmination of months of work, trial and error, and research to craft the perfect painterly shader for your next WebGL project. In it, we will deep dive into the characteristics of the Kuwahara filter that make it so great at transforming our work into paintings, as well as look into several techniques highlighted in the many papers I read to improve the original implementation and have it return a sharper, and more anisotropic output. Finally, we’ll go through a bit of color correction and the use of textures to achieve a satisfying and accurate painting effect.

Sources

Getting Lost in UFO 50 | dansinker.com

I’m doing a disservice in calling UFO 50 a game. Because it’s actually fifty games and, I think, a larger meta game or story that I still have yet to even scratch the surface of. The premise, told in bitmapped stills in the opening menu, is this: A group of game developers discovered a long-forgotten 1980s game console, the LX, in an abandoned storage locker. They work to port the system to a PC, and then emulate 50 of the best games produced for the LX console by UFO Soft from 1982-1989. Those 50 games are packaged together in UFO 50 and, in addition to the basic rules and gameplay information, each one comes with a small backstory of its development and the date it was published.

That “Little Secret” Between Trump and Johnson? Here’s What It Could Mean. | The Nation

During the Nazi-throwback rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, after Donald Trump and his MAGA cohorts finished insulting pretty much every non-white person who might even think of voting for him, Trump revealed that he doesn’t actually need votes to be installed as president again. Referencing a “secret plan” he has with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Trump said this: “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a little secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over.”

When pressed, Speaker Johnson released a statement effectively confirming the existence of the plot: “By definition, a secret is not to be shared—and I don’t intend to share this one.”

The 1600s Were a Watershed for Swear Words | History Today

Swear words are a constant, but their ability to cause offence is in flux. In the 1600s, today’s obscenities were mundane.

Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’ Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings for Clues About Produce That Has Disappeared From the Kitchen Table | Smithsonian

Renaissance paintings, medieval archives, cloistered orchards—how one Italian scientist is uncovering secrets that could help combat a growing agricultural crisis

Type Revival for Film & TV | Alphabettes

Type revival involves recreating period lettering and typography as digital typefaces. Although it requires an up-front time investment, it later makes the graphics process as quick as typing, selecting the font, and making any adjustments. And when replicates need to be made of that graphic (always needed for props for multiple takes and occasionally needed for sets to be rebuilt), it is far faster and more accurate to reprint a digital file than to hand-create copies. Also, particularly for sign painting, every region and every period has a distinct visual identity, and so converting specific source material into a font for its original use maintains historical and local faithfulness.

Brazil Farmers Destroy Ancient Amazon Archaeological Sites

Ancient geoglyphs and archaeological sites are being plowed over by Brazil farmers growing soy, corn and sugar crops in the Amazon Basin.

Tactile Controls: Why Buttons Are Making a Comeback – IEEE Spectrum

In nieuws dat iedereen letterlijk al tien jaar weet dat het er stond aan te komen: In an interview with Rachel Plotnick, delve into the past and present of tactile controls. As touchscreens dominate, we examine the current trend shifting back to physical buttons, and why users crave the familiar feel of buttons, knobs, and switches in their devices and interfaces.

Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2023

Building out the database of ancient DNA is undeniably valuable. But even more fascinating are the discoveries that allow us to look at biology, social dynamics, and evolution in new ways.

Discoveries like that don’t always get big headlines. This year I read many new studies that deserve a lot more attention than they got when they were published. These include studies of patterns of natural selection in past humans, how humans affected other ancient species, and how different populations interacted with each other. New techniques have opened up avenues of understanding kinship from ancient populations and the links between people and artifacts.