Blogbook

This joyful video of two twin teen YouTuber brothers listening to Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” has gone viral. Via Vulture:

You know those viral videos where a baby tries ice cream or bacon for the first time? You see their sweet baby faces cycle through curiosity, incredulity, discovery, and joy, all at something we don’t think twice about. Now imagine being a Gen-Z teen in 2020, basically still just a wee bébé, who has never heard Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” Not even the drum fill. It’s a real first-time-ice-cream-baby mood. Gary, Indiana–based teen twin YouTubers Tim and Fred Williams posted an eight-minute video on July 27 of the two of them, AirPods in, experiencing and reacting to Collins’s 1981 hit for the first time. Their reaction is priceless.

Open Like Never Before is a new Coca-Cola ad with George the Poet, marking the cultural significance of the coronavirus pandemic.

Algorithmic ad targeting and segregation. Via YouTube:

In 2019, Facebook settled a lawsuit with civil rights groups following the revelation that advertisers using their platform could use the targeting options to exclude many specific demographics from seeing their ads. It’s now more difficult for an unscrupulous advertiser to use Facebook’s platform to discriminate.

However, even when you remove human bias from the system, Facebook’s ad delivery algorithms can result in biased outcomes. According to research from Northeastern University, Facebook sometimes displays ads to highly skewed audiences based on the content of the ad.

By purchasing ads and inputting neutral targeting options, the researchers found that the algorithmically determined audience for job ads for cleaners, secretaries, nurses, and preschool teachers was mostly women. The job ads for fast food workers, supermarket cashiers, and taxi drivers skewed toward Black users. The studies show that by targeting “relevant” users, these systems can reinforce existing disparities in our interests and our opportunities.

Black is King is a visual album / film by Beyoncé, and has dropped on Disney+ of all places. Looking forward to checking it out!

Umbrella Academy Season 2 is out: where the dysfunctional superhero family travels to the 1960s, near the Kennedy assassination. So far, the writing looks better than the first season.

You Can’t Stop Us is the latest Nike ad, a beautiful work of editing with a diverse cast of Nike’s sponsored athletes and others.

Necrobarista is a new visual novel game currently out on Steam about the afterlife and Melbourne’s cafe culture, by a Melbourne-based team.

With the Mars Perseverance Rover, NASA looks set to explore the red planet again. It’s just passed its flight readiness check and will launch this week. Via Space.com:

Mission team members have some wiggle room if technical issues or bad weather scuttle the Thursday attempt. Mars 2020 can still make its way to the Red Planet as long as it launches by Aug. 15, NASA officials have said. After that, the mission would have to wait 26 months, until Mars and Earth are properly aligned again for interplanetary journeys.

Whenever it lifts off, Perseverance will touch down inside Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero hosted a lake and a river delta in the ancient past, and Perseverance will characterize the area in detail and search for possible signs of ancient Mars life. The six-wheeled robot will also collect and cache several dozen samples that will be returned to Earth, possibly as early as 2031, by a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign.

Mars 2020 will also test out several new exploration technologies. For example, one of Perseverance’s 10 instruments, called MOXIE (short for “Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment”), will generate oxygen from the thin, carbon dioxide-dominated Martian atmosphere. Such gear, if scaled up, could aid future human exploration of the Red Planet, NASA officials have said.

Street Food: Latin America is out on Netflix! Each gorgeously filmed episode follows a main story and some side stories of a great cast of characters.

Chaindrite Thai Roach Spray Ad: Thai ads are known to be quite out there and entertaining, but this one really takes the cake. My Gods.