» 2014 » October Epicene Cyborg

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October 31, 2014

Study: Broadband Still Slower, More Expensive In U.S. Than In Europe, Asia.

Outcome Of The 2012 US Presidential Election If Only White Men Could Vote.

Protecting a limited subset of free speech scrupulously, and only against government intrusion, ignores the much greater effect on expression of social and economic control.

FCC proposing misleading, fake Common Carrier classification for ISPs to shut you up. My headline is accurate.

An 180 million year old fern fossil unearthed in Sweden is so exquisitely preserved that it is possible to see its cells dividing.

Child poverty in the U.S. is among the worst in the developed world.

Jammed by big ISPs.

The Last of the Monsters with Iron Teeth.

How Facebook Could End Up Controlling Everything You Watch and Read Online.

Horror films flirt with boredom not because they aim to be dull, but because audiences are increasingly knowledgeable about how the genre functions, which means many of the classic techniques of horror no longer work.

October 30, 2014

Research cannot be planned and managed like, say, teaching duties or a Walmart store. If you could manage it, then it would not be research.

People trust NSA more than Google, survey says.

Homeopathy for Ebola.

Recent college graduates are pushing lower-income African Americans out of cities.

Sneaky Jays Look and Listen to Steal From Others.

Pakistani illustrator writes to Ben Affleck on radical Islam: ‘Your heart’s in the right place but…’.

Surprise! Controversial Patriot Act power now overwhelmingly used in drug investigations.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been reading some ‘complicated’ (but not really), obscure or arcane book (i.e. Jean Paul Sartre) and have been asked by the resident college grad in my office (accompanied by furrowed brow): “Are you reading that for a class?” The idea that one actually reads something “difficult” for oneself, for pleasure, is utterly foreign to them.

Bricklin’s teachers at Harvard thought he was wasting his time: why would a manager want to do a spreadsheet on one of those “toy” computers?

October 29, 2014

Food is now politics and ethics as much as it is sustenance.

Why is talking while female such an offense?

A new sign that opting out of Medicaid expansion will cost states money.

Verizon is launching a tech news site that bans stories on U.S. spying and net neutrality.

What Americans Believe.

Famous Internet Firsts: Then & Now.

Woman walks around New York for a day, is catcalled more than 100 times. And gets it all on camera.

October 28, 2014

Fast-food workers in Denmark are doing even better than the wage comparison would indicate.

Instead of Unsolicited Advice….

The more you read in the history of macroeconomics and monetary theory, the more you find that current debates are reprises of arguments from 50, 100 or 200 years ago.

Mickey Mouse and blackface.

The mind is powerful.

Seven Reasons Poor People Rent to Own Furniture.

Most religious people I run into are “useful idiots.” They are politically conservative because they think that is what God wants, but they are really just doing the work of the power elite.

Facebook has totally reinvented human identity: Why it’s even worse than you think.

October 27, 2014

A memorial erected in Vancouver sparked….

Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The Spider Assassin.

Climate records are breaking so often now, we’ve stopped paying attention.

The Loneliest Plant In The World.

Secrets of the Creative Brain.

Obama Is a Republican.

October 26, 2014

Who stops to help. Yep.

If the victim, at the sight of the economic predator, goes into doggie submission, we must stop discussing the phenomenon in terms of conflict and consider whether what we are observing might be some strange instance of symbiosis.

List of statutory minimum employment leave by country. United States: 0.

Our society runs on a digital myth, which says that the technology-based economy is different, special and somehow not subject to the principles of mathematics and human nature that govern the rest of our lives.

Après les exoplanètes, voici le temps des exocomètes.

Modern computer engineering is kazoo-only, and keyboards are only the most banal example of this fact.

The Problem With Positive Thinking.

Conservatives are becoming more conservative because of propaganda, whereas liberals are becoming more liberal while staying very much checked into reality.

California Highway Patrol officers have allegedly been obtaining nude photos of female suspects from their cell phones and sharing them among other officers.

How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself: A Timely Vintage Field Guide to Self-Reliant Play and Joyful Solitude.

Lance Mannion: Just do the right thing. Gloomy thoughts after spending too much time on Twitter.

October 25, 2014

What Apple gets and what no one else in the industry does is that using your mobile device for payments will only work if it’s far easier and better than using a credit card.

Progressive writers could make their lives so much easier if they just became radicals.

Banks Again Avoid Having Any Skin in the Game.

Why Most of Your Body Is Younger Than You Are.

Iran hangs woman for killing her alleged rapist.

What’s The Biggest Animal Gathering Ever?

Nothing is more dangerous than taking things at face value.

Verizon Wireless injects identifiers that link its users to Web requests.

October 24, 2014

So yes, we are destroying the planet because about ten thousand people all over the world want to hang onto their current profits, which are almost all dependent upon externalities.

New Microscope Collects Dynamic Images of the Molecules that Animate Life.

Think the government must convict you of a crime before it can punish you for it? Think again.

Climate Change And Rising Violence Are Linked.

The end of pregnancy and the inevitable rise of the artificial womb.

The 10 Most Expensive Flops In Television History. Supertrain? Good god.

October 23, 2014

Fremont Tech Company Paid Workers $1.21 An Hour: U.S. Dept. of Labor.

No Love for Lovelace: A Closer Read of Walter Isaacson’s Innovators.

Ferns send signals to decide what sex to be.

The “ruined lives” of Oscar Pistorius and Ched Evans: why do men matter more than women?

Nearly half of Florida’s beachfront is designated under state law as “critically eroding.” But that designation doesn’t limit further development; instead, it triggers taxpayer subsidies that support the status quo.

U.S. Solar Is 59 Percent Cheaper Than We Thought It Would Be Back In 2010.

Avast Antivirus Was Spying On You with Adware (Until This Week).

An A to Z of Noah Webster’s Finest Forgotten Words.

Montreal teacher, 73, loses job over film nudity more than 40 years ago.

Wait, that is a moon.

How Piracy Benefits Companies, Even If They Don’t Admit it.

The man with the golden blood.

October 22, 2014

At the very least, one could say that the smartphone creates an environment that encourages participation at a distance: participation as performance.

Sci-fi Suburbia.

The idea that Photoshop was the beginning of widespread photo retouching should make anyone familiar with the history of photography giggle.

Gamergate Goons Can Scream All They Want, But They Can’t Stop Progress.

How an African slave helped Boston fight smallpox.

October 21, 2014

Capitalism’s Suffocating Music.

Speakers at liberal arts conference begrudgingly make case for their utility.

32 Cities Want to Challenge Big Telecom, Build Their Own Gigabit Networks.

The Real Amazon Warriors.

Not so long ago, writes Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the U. of Iowa, Americans expected technological and social progress to lead to reduced working hours.

Astrobiology: Bolts from the blue.

The Greatest Representations of Comets in the History of Art.

Yes, Amazon is abusing its power. But the publishers are also abusing the public and their writers.

“Basic” Is Just Another Word For Class Anxiety. Buzzfeed has gotten a lot better in the past year.

Why do you hate men so much?

October 20, 2014

It’s All Beautiful and Nothing Lasts.

All The Items Of Clothing Women Have Been Told Not To Wear In 2014.

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