» 2016 » April Epicene Cyborg

Dan Loeb of Third Point Foresees a Hedge Fund “Killing Field.” Original hedge funds were countercyclical investments intended to — you guessed it — hedge against risk/losses. No more.

Who Will Debunk The Debunkers? As in etymology, many debunkings of urban legends are themselves urban legends.

Is software a neutral agent? Guess I’m different than most people; don’t want a goddamn thing auto-recommended to me, ever.

What the Talk About “Peak Apple” Says About Us.

Headline that makes no sense to people under 40.

But this Don Quixote Fallacy is not dead.

Apple’s iTunes is 13 years old—and it’s still awful.

Windows 10 will no longer let you Google search from Cortana. So your malware won’t let you use the other spyware? Cool I guess.

Future Screens are Mostly Blue.

Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics? Ready or not, it’s gonna get that anyway.

How a giant space umbrella could stop global warming. Well, here we go.

The Victorians who flew as high as jumbo jets.

The Curious Case of The Dropping Life Expectancy At Birth For Non-Hispanic White Women. A Lesson in Interpretations.

The Reader Is the Protagonist. Exiting a Horror Story.

Behold the Magic of this Lonely Ghost Town in the Namib Desert.

Charitable Plutocracy: Bill Gates, Washington State, and the Nuisance of Democracy.

Why is it illegal to walk freely in most of the US?

A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows.

Where Did the Government Jobs Go? Long a ticket to the middle class, especially for African-Americans, they have become increasingly difficult to find. Bathtub-drowning is moving along apace.

Gutless Democrats Fear Fights: Why Triangulating Neoliberal Clintonites Back Big Business Over People.

Nearby massive star explosion 30 million years ago equaled detonation of 100 million suns.

Introducing Our Series on Central Appalachia.

China Is Building a Robot Army of Model Workers.

Reality for Garment Workers.

Bodyhackers are all around you, they’re called women.

Fantasy Math Is Helping Companies Spin Losses Into Profits.

Cimmerian.

The CIA Waterboarded the Wrong Man 83 Times in 1 Month.

From Retail Palace to Zombie Mall: How Efficiency Killed the Department Store.

A handful of companies employ humans pretending to be robots pretending to be humans.

the sheer irony of the fact that mary shelley wrote frankenstein when she was still a teenager. a teenage girl.

Superman v. capitalism.

Supreme Court strengthens free-speech rights of public employees.

Globalization and the communications revolution have reinforced, rather than negated, geopolitics.

Drug Prices Keep Rising Despite Intense Criticism. Capitalism algorithm optimizes prices for largest profit. Nothing else. Need new algorithm.

Titan’s great lakes appear to be filled with clear, colorless methane.

One Gene, Many Proteins.

Scientists Have Been Using a Flawed Method to Diagnose Pain.

The driverless truck is coming, and it’s going to automate millions of jobs. And in current economic climate, increase poverty greatly (when it should not).

As someone who has seen this play out a dozen times now, let me give you a little spoiler: Slack is not going to replace email. I remember reading about “inevitable” email replacements as early as the late 1980s in tech magazines.

Rethinking Humanity’s Roots.

How Kalman Filters Work, Part 1.

The laudable desire for knowledge and training is converted into propaganda for a corrupt higher education system that lures people onto courses (often of questionable use to the individual) and off the employment register, while perpetuating the assets-to-debt swapping regime.

Mile-long “Band of Holes” in Peru may be remains of Inca tax system.

Do We Own Money, or Does Money Own Us? Markets, Numbers, and Prices.

Statement of Retraction. Replication of Obesity and Associated Signaling Pathways Through Transfer of Microbiota From Obese-Prone Rats. Diabetes 2014;63:1624–1636. DOI: 10.2337/db13-1526.

Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Fears Theorists, Lacking Data, May Succumb to “Wishful Thinking.”

King under the mountain: Building Colorado’s Cold War command center.

The truth is, people are evaluating women for their looks, and they’re evaluating men for their looks. Women are as shallow as men when it comes to appearance, and they should focus on their own accomplishments.

Documents Raise Questions About Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prosecutions.

The harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse.

Language change as waves, contagions and hierarchies.

It’s an example of how underinvestment and political dysfunction have left America with infrastructure that’s failing and often downright dangerous.

The Rise of the Non-Book Book. Strange when an industry does the exact opposite of what would make them prosper. Music industry did same.

So what leads some phrases to become more successful than others? Why do some survive the test of time while others die out?

A Day In the Life of ABT Principal Dancer Isabella Boylston. Yes, FA nuts, you can stay slim and eat a lot — but you have to exercise a whole fucking lot like Isabella. In the Army, I ate ~4,000 calories a day, had a six pack. But I exercised hard up to four hours a day. Sometimes more.

The “obesity paradox”, wherein high BMI individuals are shown to live longer, falls apart when correcting for muscle mass.

Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system.

The ancient copper mines dug by children.

Huge coral reef discovered at Amazon river mouth.

Why Hillary holds so little allure for many Millennials. Clinton is status quo, which will destroy anyone younger than 40.

So if you really want to know why there is such deep economic discontent in America today, even when many indicators say the country is heading in the right direction, ask a member of that 47 percent.

Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson’s Great Showdown About the Nature of Time.

Debunking the Jevons Paradox.

The cereal box is lying to you — and so is every other label: Why you can’t trust that “nutrition” information. Those comforting calorie numbers? They’re not reviewed by the FDA, wildly inconsistent and maybe off by 20 percent.

1,400 Square Feet of Candy-Colored Resin Layered Onto the Floor of a German Museum.

Gigantic Dinosaurs Had to Grow Freakishly Fast.

Further evidence of just how much education is about socialization, rather than the explicit mastery of scholarly information. As Tyler Cowen accurately put it.

The whole notion of ideology-free explanation of complex subjects is of course itself ideology-laden.

We haven’t just normalized the weird, we’ve turned into something basic. We now exist in a time where the most culturally unadventurous people on your timeline are expressing themselves with short videos of goats screaming; where your mom is trading faces with your dad and sending it to your aunty; where you can communicate embarrassment with a pictograph of a monkey covering his eyes and nobody will bat an eyelid.

On EU average, it took between five and six years to integrate more than 50% of humanitarian migrants into the workplace and as much as 15 years to reach a 70% employment rate converging towards the outcomes for labour migrants.

Gender stereotyping may start as young as 3 months—study of babies’ cries shows. Humans are a defective species and need to be replaced.

Enough with the Hillary cult: Her admirers ignore reality, dream of worshipping a queen. Clinton is better than Trump — just as a frosted turd is better than an unfrosted one.

The average size of Web pages is now the average size of a Doom install.

How Americans pretend to love ‘ethnic food.’ Somewhat true, but I’d pay $$ to get some of the amazingly delicious food I could get in China not available here.

Born for it. How the image of software developers came about.

The Firefly Time-Lapse.

Majority of Americans can’t fathom supporting Trump or Clinton (or Cruz) Majority of Americans are wiser than I thought, then.

Ostrich hit by car after activists ‘free’ it from circus.

More Than Half of All Americans Breathe Polluted Air.

Why we almost always underestimate the size of oil spills.

US War on Terror Leaves 1.3 Million Dead in 3 Countries.

What is the typical life experience for an American on the verge of turning 30?

Every semi-competent male hero has a more talented female sidekick. Why isn’t she the hero instead?

The Neighborhood Veto and the ‘Missing Middle.’

The Internet Really Has Changed Everything. Here’s the Proof.

Slamming, A Classic ’90s Phone Scam, Is Still Alive And Well.