June 30, 2016

How is Brexit different than Texit, Quexit, or Scotxit?



Absurdities of American higher education, financial edition.



7 Out of 10 Americans Agree That Economy is Rigged Against Them. And they are right.



Rare Dinosaur-Era Bird Wings Found Trapped in Amber.



Who got rich off the student debt crisis: Step by step, Congress has enacted one law after another to make student debt the worst kind of debt for Americans – and the best kind for banks and debt collectors.



South Florida lifeguard fired after saving man. Capitalism in one simple lesson.



Study Debunks Gender Performance Gap in Online Video Games. On balance, women will probably be very slightly better in an ideal environment. Shorter nerves (due to shorter limbs) == faster reaction times.



Don’t blame Brits for the Brexit: The EU strayed from its roots in post-war unity to become a neoliberal technocracy.



Scott Naismith.



No peace after progress.



How Amazon Triggered a Robot Arms Race. Could just as easily read “How Amazon’s anti-competitive actions stalled automation by half a decade.”



June 29, 2016

I was twenty-three at the time, still paying off the cost of the mental-health-care debt I took on at nineteen, a cost I believed I would shoulder well into my thirties, a figure that felt more like a student loan than an appropriate cost for medical care.



Why Women (Sometimes) Don’t Help Other Women. It’s not because they’re inherently harsher leaders than men, but because they often respond to sexism by trying to distance themselves from other women.



To Compete Better, States Are Trying to Curb Noncompete Pacts.



Whether women are being encouraged to rid our homes of useless belongings, or urged to shop for new ones, the result is the same: Society continues to associate women with the home and the material, men with the outside and experiences.



NASA’s Juno Spacecraft Will Soon Be in Jupiter’s Grip.



BREXIT is an opportunity to drive home to the rabble the folly of failing to fall in line with the policies of the serious people featured in the NYT.



Yes, Disney princess culture is influencing your daughters—and your sons.



The rise and fall of great world cities: 5,700 years of urbanisation.



Secretive Alphabet division aims to fix public transit in US by shifting control to Google. So it will get worse.



Brexit Dreams And Nightmares. Echidne also noticed how white people can apparently now be racist against other white people. That’s a new one.



Hillary Clinton Hints at Giant, Trump-Like Giveaway to Corporate America. Nothing else was really possible or expected.



After robots take our jobs, who will pay for social security? Framing problems 101.



Expect New Wars in the Middle East if Hillary Clinton Is Elected President. With Hillary, war with Iran possible.



History of the Infographic.



One can screech “racism” until one is blue in the face but cultural incompatibility is real and overcoming it is hard.



Xbox Fitness users will soon lose access to workout videos they bought. DRM world: don’t own anything, no recourse, no other options.



Researchers have encountered a denial-of-service botnet that’s made up of more than 25,000 Internet-connected closed circuit TV devices.



June 28, 2016

The “Cobra Effect” that is disabling paste on password fields.



The world’s losers are revolting, and Brexit is only the beginning. Yep. The world 2020-2050 will look more like 1914-1945 than 1950-2000.



The life of American workers in 1915.



We Can Prove Why Extra Mass on Bike Wheels Is Your Worst Enemy. This is well-known in the car world; people pay $$$$$$$ for even slightly-lighter wheels/tires.



Non-beneficial treatments in hospital at the end of life: a systematic review on extent of the problem.



There are now more Americans working for online-only outlets than newspapers.



Researchers steal data from a PC by controlling the noise from the fans. This is useless in any practical sense, but fun.



Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Abortion Restrictions.



This Time, It Is Not Different: The Persistent Concerns of Financial Macroeconomics.



The effect of markets on discrimination is more nuanced than you think.



How landlords get kickbacks to lock tenants into big Internet providers.



June 27, 2016

The problem with reinforced concrete.



When Good Waves Go Rogue.



Thoughts on the sociology of Brexit.



Agenda-Setting. False dichotomies are the absolute most effective propaganda technique I know of. I use it all the time at work to get my way.



US Customs wants to collect social media account names at the border.



Unlike most people accused of dishonesty, Clinton and Trump are true liars.



When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, private equity firms have increasingly taken over public services like emergency care and firefighting, often with dire effects.



Aerial Shots That Demonstrate The Stark Divide Between Rich and Poor.



Mass shootings affect even the youngest children.



World going to hell? Here are the Solar System’s five most livable places. None are very livable; Venus only plausible terraforming candidate.



Hell Is Other Britons. This is literature.



Scottish leader may try to block ‘Brexit’ as turmoil spreads.



Open water camouflage via ‘leaky’ light guides in the midwater squid Galiteuthis.



Casanova.



The correct diagnosis is that in the US, populism is rooted in the failure of globalization to deliver palpable benefits to its working class.



Researchers offer new theory on how climate affects violence: Climate impacts life strategies, time orientation, self-control.



The Return of Lesser Evilism. Lesser evil is still evil, ya’ll.



‘If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out.’



Vote on values.



Hircine.



Social construction of illness.



Why I hate the S word.



The more strongly you privilege loyalty, obedience and purity — as opposed to values such as care and fairness — the more likely you are to blame the victim.



June 26, 2016

History of the Urban Dashboard.



New work from Carnegie’s Peter Driscoll suggests Earth’s ancient magnetic field was significantly different than the present day field, originating from several poles rather than the familiar two.



Americans Confused By System Of Government In Which Leader Would Resign After Making Terrible Decision.



Why I renounced my US citizenship.



Among Young Britons, Fear and Despair Over Vote to Leave E.U.



Pink snow: pretty, but a troubling sign of a melting Arctic.



Giant Blobs of Rock, Deep Inside the Earth, Hold Important Clues About Our Planet.



Farmers Insurance will pay a high price for discriminating against its female attorneys.



Arco, a new solver that, given a dynamical system specification in the form of a set of differential equations, generates physically realizable configurations for programmable analog devices that are algebraically equivalent to the specified system.



Boston Dynamics Shows Off its New SpotMini Robot.



Immigration and Brexit: How a rising tide of European immigrants fueled the Leave vote.



A Stark Nuclear Warning.



Brexit polling: What went wrong?



It seems that even sympathetic voices have bought into the free stuff straw man commonly touted in right-wing circles; an argument that is equivalent to the conservative “poor people are lazy” talking point.



Brexit is just the beginning. The EU blew it. EU disintegration chances at 70% I’d say.



The more guns a person owns, the more likely they are to report experiencing serious, uncontrollable outbursts of anger and aggression.



Russian soldiers started executing people inside my apartment block (1994, Chechnya), so I pretended I was their supply boy for the army….



“I served in the military and the M16A2/M4 was the weapon I used for 20 years. It is first and foremost designed as an assault weapon platform, no matter what the spin. A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt, if he does he sucks, and should go play video games.”



There were 32 gunfights and shootouts in the Wild West from 1840 to 1918. There have been 173 mass shootings in America this year.



Demystifying NeoFisherism.



This notion of education is especially important given that racialized violence, violence against women and the ongoing assaults on public goods cannot be solved on an individual basis.



Caltech glassblower’s retirement has scientists sighing.



June 25, 2016

Judge Says FBI Can Hack Computers Without A Warrant Because Computer Users Get Hacked All The Time.



Did a gravitational wave detector find dark matter?



Berning Illusions: Why Sanders Can’t Concede to the Clinton Democrats.



88 people were shot during the House Democrats’ gun control sit-in.



The True Cost. Why the Private Prison Industry is About so Much More Than Prisons.



Fix for 3-billion-year-old genetic error could dramatically improve genetic sequencing.



This was the day the British people defied their jailers.



DNA: A Metaphor? All words, language, even math just models; all reveal glimpses only.



Do the Experts Know Anything?



How Baby Boomers Crushed Millennials With Brexit. No matter what you think about Brexit, older voters should get less say in matters that have very long-term consequences.



How to Permanently Disable The Touch Keyboard In Windows 8 and 10. Annoyance, you have become. Strike you down I will.



Brexit’s message: It feels good to tell them all to bugger off.



Your Personality Isn’t As Set In Stone As You Think.



Raw and Cooked.



June 24, 2016

The Rule of 72.



Beyond meritocracy.