Top: in Donkey Kong Country, the Master Necky boss is a bird whose main body is never seen. Instead, merely its head and neck appear from offscreen, being able to instantly switch what side of the screen it appears from.
Bottom: an official Japanese guide for the game contains a humorous illustration where Donkey Kong theorizes that the only way this is possible is if Master Necky actually has two heads, and each is simply hiding behind its own side of the screen.
“To grasp what coverage of Trump’s mental unfitness might look like, try comparing what little there is of it to coverage of President Biden’s age before his exit from the race. In a useful intervention, the Times’ Jamelle Bouie notes that in the latter case, the media adopted the premise that Biden’s age mattered precisely because it went to Biden’s core mental capacity “to do the job as president,” thus meriting extensive journalistic attention. But if so, then why don’t things like Trump’s obvious cognitive impairment, his frequent inability to speak and think coherently, his resolute refusal to acquire minimal baseline knowledge on many consequential issues, his tendency to invent things on the fly that are wildly disconnected from reality, his intense narcissism, his deliberate lying and bigotry and misogyny—to name just a few traits—also go to his core mental and characterological capacity to do the job as president?”
The first simulated image of a black hole was calculated with an IBM 7040 computer using 1960 punch cards and hand-plotted by French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet in 1978.
the romance of hand-plotting. this guy looked at the numbers and drew each of those dots manually, and the image emerged. we can only imagine how he felt
