On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Music composed in the signature 140 character limit. That is what has been done by a researcher from the UK. The album is called sc140 and contains 22 pieces by artists from around the world, each piece created with just 140 characters of code. As reported by PCworld " "It all started a few months ago," said Stowell, who is studying for his PhD in Queen Mary's Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), in a statement. "I was writing in a programming language - called SuperCollider - that tells a computer what sounds to make and posted a tweet containing the instructions to create a sound like waves crashing on the shore. The next thing I knew people were tweeting back with sounds and music of their own. Some of the tweets made such great music that I couldn't just let them vanish into the ether. So I brought all the best ones together in an online album." Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" would looks like this in a Tweet: {b="GGHJJHGECCEG".ascii.s...