March 31, 2016

Sound check: the quietest place in the U.S.



How DRM would kill the next Netflix (and how the W3C could save it).



This Stretch Of Route 66 Plays ‘America The Beautiful’ If You Go The Speed Limit.



The Milky Way’s hot spot.



Your season of birth is stamped on your DNA and can affect your risk of allergies. Allergedly.



Ice Cube, before he became a comic prop in family vacation movies, understood a fundamental truth about race and law enforcement 30 years ago that still has not sunk in with a lot of Americans.



Why we should guard against military notions of immunity.



Netflix: Geography, Age, and Gender are “Garbage” for Predicting Taste.



Ancient fossil was ‘nearly a spider.’



Simmering for Decades, Anger About Trade Boils Over in ’16 Election.



No, It isn’t Free Stuff: Supporting Bernie Sanders is About Understanding Harsh Realities.



Mass surveillance silences minority opinions, according to study.



Liberal critics like Paul Krugman argue that Sanders’s economic platform is unrealistic. They are dead wrong. I am not a Bernie supporter, but his econ plan is pretty conventional and solid.



Scientists have identified a new universal facial expression called the ‘Not Face.’ My expression 95% of the time.



When the Feminist Establishment Candidate is Further Right than Trump.



Bodypaint Wizard Transforms Herself Into Superman.



So Far: Unfriendly AI Edition. Unfriendly AI is a real threat, but not as much as global climate change.



Rare example of lost language found on stone hidden 2500 years ago.



College Admissions Shocker!



World watches Britain’s ‘living wage’ experiment.



“What We Have is Capture of the Regulators’ Minds, A Much More Sophisticated Form of Capture Than Putting Money in Their Pockets.”



The EU as Qwerty keyboard.



Utopia is creepy.



The People Moving Back Into Big American Cities Are Mostly Rich White People. Major US cities are ridiculously expensive; I could have a mansion in the country (30 miles out of town, too long to commute), or shack in the city for same price.



Je Suis Sick of This.



We Asked People at the Library What They’re Doing There.



A select group of New York households reported “negative income” and paid no city income taxes, even though they took in $1.8 billion in capital gains, dividends, interest and wages: 54,348 households reported income below zero.



March 30, 2016

Microsoft accidentally revives Nazi AI chatbot Tay, then kills it again. Poor Tay.



Scientists Find a Way to Predict U.S. Heat Waves Weeks in Advance.



Stop trying to make Bernie disappear: While the establishment pretends nothing has changed, Sanders continues to win big. No chance for the nom, never did, but media does not like him one bit.



These “modern” designs are about hiding as much as possible till as late as possible – so that you need to have several successive context switches to gain wider access to less used (in the opinions of the UI author) programs and features. They’re all downgrades from the previous designs that were well studied and sampled with real users before enforcing them on the masses.



Republicans offer tax cuts and deregulation, as if everyone in America were going to become an entrepreneur. Democrats offer free college tuition and paid maternity leave, as if these things were a great benefit to people who don’t have the ability, preparation or inclination to sit through four years of college, and as a result, can’t find a decent job from which to take their leave.



There Are More Officers Than Counselors In The Largest Public School Districts. So now it’s just the prison to prison pipeline.



Non-Shared Environment Doesn’t Just Mean Schools And Peers.



What would it be like to stop treating women as a voting niche, and gave men that treatment instead? Shockingly, women are just as varied and just as much individuals as men.



Women in Jail Are Being Denied Tampons, Pads, and Basic Human Dignity.



Long goodbye of the European Left.



Supergirl is a better Superman story than Batman v Superman. And Melissa Benoist is the perfect Supergirl, too.



The Mixed-Up Brothers of Bogotá.



The extreme pressure and temperature deep within Uranus may break up the methane molecules, with the carbon atoms condensing into crystals of diamond that rain down through the mantle like hailstones. Diamond rain: rock band of the 80s or real phenomenon in this solar system? Why not both!



Enjambment.



Agricultural fastest growing robotic sector.



March 29, 2016

Freakishly mild Arctic winter leads to lowest winter sea ice cover on record.



Fiction v nonfiction – English literature’s made-up divide.



Story of a self-reliant Gen-Xer’s first time home purchase. Damn, glad I do not live in California — great climate, everything else terrible.



Washington’s Olympic Peninsula loses 2 dams and gains a wild river – plus a new beach.



Experience: I was swallowed by a hippo. That story had me hippo-notized.



Why Learning To Code Won’t Save Your Job. This was always terrible, stupid advice.



The Price Of Glee In China.



Holdouts of the Social Media Age.



Why We Need Kate Millett’s ‘Sexual Politics.’



A Conversation with Jonathan Haidt.



The State Assault on Planned Parenthood.



What thirty years of technology looks like: the early high-school years. But nothing has changed! Everything is exactly the same as it was in 1292!



How Much Support Does Hillary Actually Lose Because She’s A Woman?



March 28, 2016

TPP deal a win for corporations, a blow to climate and workers.



U.S. Marshals Service Sending SWAT Teams Out to Arrest People for Unpaid Student Loans.



Factories are getting more efficient — and more automated. A 2015 Boston Consulting Group report found that 10% of manufacturing functions are fully automated today. BCG predicts that it’ll be 25% by 2025.



Spring break in Miami is the worst time to be a hotel maid.



Tay Exposes the Fairy Tales We Tell Ourselves About Racists.



Foreign wars fanned by European and American interventionists in the name of democracy and humanitarianism now threaten those same values in Europe as never before since the end of World War II.



We’re About to Start Seeing More Early Deaths From Diabetes. But HAES! *foot falls off* HAES! *leg falls off* HAe-*dies of sepsis*



There is no more ducking the point: It’s not terror only when it happens to us. Our “shock and awe” is terror, too.



Another Way to See How Family Poverty Works.



CRT Simulation.



March 27, 2016

City birds are smarter than country birds: Life in the city changes cognition, behavior and physiology of birds to their advantage.



The average American factory worker today is responsible for more than $180,000 of annual output, triple the $60,000 in 1972. As of 2011.



Scientists Slowly Reintroducing Small Group Of Normal, Well-Adjusted Humans Into Society.



Why prairies matter and lawns don’t.



Energy forecasters consistently underestimate wind and solar. A critic explains why that’s a problem. Yep. 10-15 years ago, conventional scientific “wisdom” was that wind/solar would never work anywhere.



Why Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton.



In the fight for climate action, data isn’t always your friend.



People who expect big things from evidence-based approaches ought to be really quite worried right now.



“I think we’re polar opposites,” Stein said. “Hillary talks the talk, but in my view she is as big a corporatist, as big a war monger, as big an imperialist as any of the Republican presidential candidates. Her rhetoric is less offensive.” There you go.



For decades now the EU has had an absolutely suicidal policy on immigration or, should I maybe say, no real policy at all, unless you consider “let them all in” a policy. Yes, US has millions of immigrants — difference is, their values/cultures not much different.



If you are not paranoid, you are not paying attention.



German food minister stands up for pork on public menus.



March 26, 2016

Remember, It Was A ‘Lawful Access’ Tool That Enabled iCloud Hacker To Download Celebrity Nudes.



The Story Behind GM’s Celebrated ‘Damsels of Design.’ GM was more progressive (for a bit) in 1958 than many tech companies today. Jesus.



Voter Suppression Works Well.



Critical thinking suppressed in brains of people who believe in the supernatural.



On Trade, Angry Voters Have a Point.



Defensive Clinton Campaign Releases New ‘Who Are You To Judge Me?’ Ad.



A Social Theory of Surveillance.



IBM’s Corporate “Transformation.”



The Choice Is Not Between TPP or No Trade. False dichotomies are very powerful. Even the smartest people are often snookered by them.



Mocked and forgotten: who will speak for the American white working class?



Make elites compete: Why the 1% earn so much and what to do about it. Parts of Myth 1 are highly misleading bordering on dishonest. Exercise left for the reader. Actually this whole thing is pretty much crap.



March 25, 2016

Trump Gives Displaced IT Workers Attention, and He’s Not Alone. US IT industry being hollowed out from the bottom up, just like manufacturing was.



How Metals Helped Drive the Origin of Life on Earth.



We had all better hope these scientists are wrong about the planet’s future.



Rusty-spotted cat.



the sublime narcissism of getting offended on other people’s behalf.



Our aerosol emissions are blocking a third of the climate warming. When your fuck-ups are preventing other fuck-ups from fucking everything up, you have done fucked up.



How Maritime Insurance Built Ancient Rome.



Sexual Harassment Cases Tarnish Berkeley’s Image as a Center of Social Activism. Prob as much sexual harassment on left as right.



They Made Him a Moron.



You pay for failed mortgage innovations with your taxes and your home.



Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome. Conventional wisdom is that science/tech has stagnated. CW is, as usual, completely wrong.



The Enduring Mystery Of ‘Jawn’, Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun.