Boeing panel that blew off during flight

A refrigerator-sized panel popped off a Boeing 737 MAX 9 during the ascent of an Alaska Airlines flight. Reuters illustrates what that panel is for, other airlines with the same configuration, and where they travel.

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Oppenheimer movie timeline

By Reddit user Pitazboras, a movie timeline for Oppenheimer with running time on the x-axis and chronological time on the y-axis. I haven’t seen the movie, so I cannot speak to the accuracy. But it seems confusing.

All Christopher Nolan movies probably deserve a timeline graphic. See also: a flowchart for Inception dream levels.

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Breaking down the holiday movie formula

NYT’s The Upshot looked at 424 holiday movies released by the Hallmark and Lifetime networks since 2017. Like most forms of entertainment, the movies look identical from a zoomed out view. There’s a protagonist female who feels lost, finds her way and love in the process.

Get in closer and you see the nuances. Sometimes a couple has to save a candy shop instead of a bakery.

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Tracking operations in an online scam labor camp

Neo Lu was scammed into a labor camp. In an effort to escape and expose the operation, he began to send information to The New York Times from within.

Mr. Lu said he pleaded to be freed, but his captors refused. They put him to work as an accountant, and over months he tracked millions of dollars in illicit income and managed their day-to-day expenses.

While he was still inside the camp, Mr. Lu contacted The New York Times. He sent hundreds of pages of financial records and photos and videos of the site, hoping to expose the operation at some point.

I was probably slack jawed most of the time while reading this. The graphics and photos about the inner workings and how the scam works, dubbed “pig butchering,” move the story forward.

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Scale of all the things, compared to you

Kurzgesagt illustrates the scale of the tiniest of things and the biggest of things by zooming in and out, but unlike videos before, they focus on human scale by comparing everything against it at each step.

You’ve probably seen the Powers of Ten, which demonstrates the scale of things by zooming farther and farther away from the universe and then back in to the microscopic level.

However, once people fall out of view, you lose a sense of magnitude. It’s just this is really big and that is really small. With focus on the individual, the Kurzgesagt rendition keeps the scale close as if you’re standing right next to it instead of traveling to an unreachable place.

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Inflation high, cost of living no good

Usually inflation is more of a slow thing that you don’t notice so much until you think back to the time when a burger was only a dollar. Prices increased much faster over the past few years though. For Bloomberg, Reade Pickert and Jennah Haque zoom in on the everyday items that are noticeably more expensive. Basically everything.

I just wrapped up travel in a high cost of living area. The sticker shock on a simple grocery bill was brutal.

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Failed community notes to stop misinformation on Twitter

Twitter has a Community Notes feature that attempts to flag posts that contain misinformation. This might work well in theory, and the notes are often informative, but it works slowly and is often not enough to stop the spread of misinformation in a viral tweet. Bloomberg shows the spread through the lens of a single tweet.

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Toddlers and stochastic parrots

For The New Yorker, Angie Wang draws parallels between toddler learning behavior and training large language models, but more importantly, where they diverge.

They are the least useful, the least creative, and the least likely to pass a bar exam. They fall far below the median human standard
that machines are meant to achieve.

They are so much less than a machine, and yet it’s clear to any of us that they’re so much more than a machine.

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Parallel lines of old

This doesn’t have labeled axes, so I assume it only shows a zoomed in portion of the earlier years. The slope of the top line starts to level out at older ages, because my lines are about to cross.

See also: Closeness lines over time.

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Carrier pigeon vs. internet upload speeds

In some rural areas, upload speeds are crawlingly slow, which can make it difficult to send things on the internet. In some cases, a carrier pigeon might even be faster. For The Washington Post, Janice Kai Chen did the math so you know which one to use:

Racing pigeons clock an average of 40 miles per hour and typically race up to 400 miles, roughly from D.C. to Boston, according to the American Racing Pigeon Union. With the boost of a tailwind, pigeons have been recorded going as fast as 110 mph and as far as 1,000 miles.

At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.

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