September 20, 2016

Trees know when deer are eating them — and how to fight back.



Occupy Wall Street, five years on: fire in the dustbin of history. This legitimately scared the ruling class, and such a thing will not be allowed to happen again.



It’s no surprise that Apple’s tremendously successful line of products — iPads, iPhones, and iPods — incorporate twelve key innovations. All twelve…were developed by publicly funded research and development projects.



China facing full-blown banking crisis, world’s top financial watchdog warns.



Director Alice Lowe About Her New Pregnancy Slasher Film.



Women in Hollywood Disappear at Age 40.



On a day on which police managed to take into custody alive a suspected terrorist who fired off dozens of rounds at officers, hitting two, we have another video of a unarmed black man with his hands in the air being killed by police.



Anonymous Hacker Explains His Attack On Boston Children’s Hospital. Medical establishment in the US is effectively wholly evil.



Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its typed transcript.



September 19, 2016

iTunes will never work well.



In India, A Rich Food Culture Vanishes From The Train Tracks.



Simone Segouin.



The Difference Between Rationality and Intelligence.



Big Business Is Killing Innovation in the U.S.



The Hijab Is Not a Feminist Statement. Get Over It.



US religion is worth $1.2T/year, more than America’s 10 biggest tech companies, combined.



As we’ve already seen, pointing out that Facebook still occasionally relies on people to make editorial judgments is not going to inspire Facebook to hire more editors; it’s going to inspire Facebook to redouble its efforts to automate those judgments, even if the price in the immediate term is more foul-ups.



Technological Progress Anxiety: Thinking About “Peak Horse” and the Possibility of “Peak Human.”



The fact that the peasants are killing themselves in droves flies in the face of the Panglossian “You’ve never had it so good!!!” op-ed pieces regularly issuing from the mainstream media bullhorn.



What Did the United States Look Like in the 1950s? At least the urban, relatively-rich part looked like this.



Can e-bikes revolutionise long-distance commuting? In places where you won’t immediately be killed while riding them, perhaps.



September 18, 2016

The long, sad history of accusing women who seek power and influence of ugliness and ill health.



This is the big national debt problem Congress won’t talk about. Lawmakers ignore economic consequences of consumer and student debt.



Xiaomi phones are pre-backdoored; your apps can be silently overwritten.



Ignore what the corporate lobbyists and naysayers say — the U.S. Postal Service does a great job AND makes money.



From the caves to here.



Observing that “copyright is not a divine right”, the Delhi high court on Friday allowed Delhi University to issue photocopies of major textbooks published by leading publishers.



When unscrupulous journalists lie by using numbers deceptively.



Here’s how broken today’s web will feel in Chrome’s secure-by-default future. “Secure.”



However: Everything you need to know about a commonly abused word.



Stark Reviews: Alice’s Wild West Show (1924).



Even without retractions, ‘top’ journals publish the least reliable science.



Which Federal Programs Best Reduce Poverty?



Coconut crabs of Vamizi.



It seems a terrible statement about my home country that my children will encounter homelessness and mental illness much more vividly in the wealthiest nation in the world than they did in Thailand, where we previously lived.



The downside of upward mobility.



Historical headlines.



Lightning’s Strange Physics Still Stump Scientists.



How Seattle Killed Micro-Housing.



Future of Workforce Automation.



September 17, 2016

A nose by any other name: Biology may affect the way we invent words.



Hillary Clinton’s Backers Thought She Couldn’t Lose. Now, ‘I Can’t Go There.’ Clinton always a terrible candidate; very lucky she’s running against an even worse one (Romney would’ve trounced her).



Can U.S. Cities Compensate for Curbing Sprawl by Growing Denser?



Elites just can’t seem to believe that the world which is so perfect for them sucks for a lot of other people.



Brexit fallout: markets v economists. Macros wrong again? Shocker!



There may be an evolutionary reason suburbia feels so miserable.



How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language. I only murder hobos in French, for instance.



Well-preserved mammoth skull unearthed on Channel Islands puzzles scientists.



Why Modern Movies Are So Stupid.



September 16, 2016

What are we allowed to say?



Those leaked Colin Powell emails are a huge blow to Clinton (not Trump).



Ford shifting all U.S. small-car production to Mexico. NAFTA still benefiting America after all these years, just as the macros promised us.



The internet as an engine of liberation is an innocent fraud.



The weirdest town names in all 50 US states.



US renewables: Dropping in price, growing in significance. “Wisdom” a decade ago was that no renewable would ever be cheaper than coal.



A giant problem. The rise of the corporate colossus threatens both competition and the legitimacy of business.



The simplest way to stop stuff is to just forbid it. Foreigners don’t have any “right” to buy property in other countries. It’s a privilege. A country for its own citizens. Fancy that.



September 15, 2016

The night we almost lost Arkansas — a 1980 nuclear Armageddon that almost was.



Income gains in 2015 don’t reverse long-run trend toward greater inequality.



Unintended consequences of creating the world’s first semisynthetic organism.



A look at the new Wall Street scheme to make money with your home. In the history of terrible ideas, this is right below naked shorts.



Hillary Became Unelectable Long Ago.



Using Machine Learning to verify Machine Learning?



The first fuckwit.



Are bonds and equities a bubble? Wrong question….



Sprawling suburbs, not tall towers, lead to affordable housing, study finds. One reason is that tall towers are very, very, very expensive to build; 2-3x as much $$ per sq ft as low-rise.



The Trouble with Macroeconomics.



September 14, 2016

West Virginia cop fired for not killing a man with an unloaded gun.



Houdini’s Straightjacket and Maroeconomics.



What would the Earth be like if it was the shape of a donut? Parts would be frosty.



Android Users Need To Delete Google Maps and Google Play If They Don’t Want Their Locations Tracked.



A coalition of feminist groups want to block sentencing bill inspired by Stanford rape case.



BrickX – Fractional Home Ownership – Brick by Brick – Literally.



Overfunctioners vs. underfunctioners.



September 13, 2016

How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat.



Chemistry says Moon is proto-Earth’s mantle, relocated.



Clinton was wrong to divide Trump voters between the bigoted and economically anxious because many are both, and the two things are interrelated.



The largest wealth transfer in history has already begun.



Wells Fargo Executive Linked To Scam Gets $124.6 Million Payday. Little people get punished, elites get paid. See Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump for other examples.



New paper: “Logical induction.”



September 12, 2016

The Real Heroes Are Dead.



Time crystals might exist after all.



Youth Shall No Longer Inherit the Earth, Thanks to Skewed Global Demography.



Donald Trump has bravely proposed ‘banning’ the Muslims that Hillary Clinton has spent two decades murdering, slandering the Hispanic immigrants that Hillary Clinton has spent two decades dispossessing and cutting taxes on the rich that Hillary Clinton has spent two decades making richer.



The Sixth Stage of Grief is Retro-Computing.



Against Charity.



End of the NHS?



September 11, 2016

Reframing the Minimum-Wage Debate.



Will the system fail Bresha Meadows, a teen who killed her reportedly abusive father? Yes, it will.



Everything in medicine is like this.



Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal).



Taming the steamroller: how to communicate compassionately with non-native English speakers. Have to apply these techniques all the time in my current job.



Ants are destroying your plants by nurturing perfect aphid colonies.



The unbitten Apple.



Fall Foliage Map 2016 & Nationwide Peak Leaf Forecast.



New One-of-a-Kind Landscape Rugs by Alexandra Kehayoglou.



Economics briefs: Six big ideas.



September 10, 2016

“An Apology for Idlers” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Bobby S. knew what’s up.



Once dismissed as fake, Maya calendar is Americas’ oldest manuscript say Brown University scientists.



The Fierce, Forgotten Library Wars of the Ancient World.