» 2017 » November Epicene Cyborg

Toppling the Grammar Patriarchy. More than 300 teachers in France said they would no longer teach the rule that “the masculine prevails over the feminine” when it came to plural nouns.

Sorry, poor people: The FCC is coming after your broadband plans.

The Brutal Fight to Mine Your Data and Sell It to Your Boss.

Absent-mindedness as dominance behaviour.

TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports.

How a Wild Rocket Misfire Created Cape Canaveral. “Wild Rocket Misfire” is my new Scots Gaelic acoustic speed metal band name.

When Everyone Has Health Care.

Nannies and Maids Face Abuse and Threats Behind Closed Doors, but New Bills May Offer Protection.

The best laptop ever made. Agreed, though we have the 13-inch version. It is a perfect machine.

Cells are very fast and crowded places.

Astronomers find an Earth-size world just 11 light years away. Where’s my interstellar U-Haul.

Why the Movies Are So Obsessed With Capes. Capes were also used as impromptu shields/distractions/weapons concealment in Western martial arts, so they have had some practical purpose.

Fox News Struggling To Attract Younger 60-75 Demographic.

Law and Political Economy: Toward a Manifesto.

Blood is thicker than water.

Texas National Guard Latest Agency To Be Discovered Operating Flying Cell Tower Spoofers.

The Ivory Tower Can’t Keep Ignoring Tech.

‘Wonder Woman’—Armor vs. Underwear & Why It Matters. Also, the cavalry techniques the Amazons used on the beach were textbook. Someone knew what they were doing.

A Century of Women Fighting Back.

The Beautiful Intelligence of Bacteria and Other Microbes.

Why Beauty Is Not Universal. I suspect this is mostly wrong, or not basic enough.

As house prices rise, this is how much more you need to save for a down payment.

Kaiser Health News, with assistance from researchers at the Mayo Clinic, analyzed available billing data from Medicare and private insurance billing nationwide, and found that spending on urine screens and related genetic tests quadrupled from 2011 to 2014 to an estimated $8.5 billion a year — more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Little divides the Russian town of Ivangorod and its Estonian twin, Narva, but a fairly narrow river. That, and a vast cultural chasm.

How to Make Cars Cooperate.

Bill Clinton: A Reckoning. Feminists saved the 42nd president of the United States in the 1990s. They were on the wrong side of history; is it finally time to make things right?

This argument has its roots in a mindset that has become popular in much of the left, that the ultimate political goal is equal well-being for all, that well-being is essentially having a positive emotional state (or not being in a state of stress/despair/fear/etc.), and that actions should therefore be judged by the emotional response they engender, especially among marginalized groups.

Underwear of Uncertain Origin. On the strange afterlife of the goods we return to the store.

Annie Soudain. Wow, these are great. They are like Dégas, van Gogh, and Tolkien admixed.

Big Money Is Buying Up Puerto Rico’s Risky Real Estate.

One in five American households have ‘zero or negative’ wealth.

The Model Book of Calligraphy (1561–1596).

Why Some Scars From the Recession May Never Vanish.

A brief history of the “walking simulator,” gaming’s most detested genre.

IBM Raises the Bar with a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer.

Big box stores are costing our cities far more than we ever imagined.

Roy Moore’s alleged pursuit of a young girl is the symptom of a larger problem in evangelical circles. Preach.

Increasingly, the working class sees higher education as not worth the cost — despite the fact that a growing share of jobs require a postsecondary degree.

Highway 1 was buried under a massive landslide. Months later, engineers battle Mother Nature to fix it.

Supernova Looks Like a New Kind of Star Death.

Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behaviour.

Bullying is not just a relation between bully and victim. It’s really a three-way relation, between bully, victim and everyone who refuses to do anything about the aggression.

Mate choice and sexual selection: What have we learned since Darwin?

almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983. Yep. I can now type significantly faster than Office 2016 on Windows can display characters to the screen. Computers are getting more terrible as they are idiot-optimized (optimized by and for idiots) by the day.

Women in the Service Sector Are at the Forefront of Resisting Sexual Harassment. Strength in numbers is more powerful than naming and shaming. Note that hugely increased immigration is likely to also greatly increase sexual harassment incidences.

Teen Girl Posed For 8 Years As Married Man To Write About Baseball And Harass Women.

America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning.

To the extent that Trump appealed to “whiteness,” that hurt him in much of the country. The thing that helped him was an appeal to nationalism. Nailed it.

How Matter Lost Its Mojo.

What’s wrong with big data? The view that more information produces better decisions is at odds with the world around us.

French institute suspects nuclear accident in Russia or Kazakhstan in September.

Following Equifax Breach, CEO Doesn’t Know If Data Is Encrypted.

When will the Earth try to kill us again?

How Corporations and the Wealthy Avoid Taxes (and How to Stop Them).

I was on the self-driving bus that crashed in Vegas. Here’s what really happened. Like most stories about anything, misreported.

Chattel slavery undermines incentives to develop labour-saving devices because human labour power never loses its comparative advantage.

The First Hard Case: ‘Zeran v. AOL’ and What It Can Teach Us About Today’s Hard Cases.

People keep saying (to me, people have said it to me many times) that literary criticism is not a valuable discipline because it can’t predict anything. I fail to see the huge value of predictions. Hell yes. The misapplied quant turn has destroyed many good and necessary things.

Endowments Boom as Colleges Bury Earnings Overseas. Many universities are now hedge funds with some school or other attached.

Check out the genes on this huge ‘shroom.

Logitech Will Be Intentionally Bricking Hardware Sold in 2015.

Every payroll period, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle also provide an electronic feed of their employees’ hourly work and wage information to Equifax. So do Wal-Mart, Twitter, AT&T, Harvard Law School, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Revised Data Shows Community Colleges Have Been Underappreciated. Community colleges are pretty amazing.

Don’t Nudge Me: The Limits of Behavioral Economics in Medicine.

The Left Had a Great Election Night. Will Democrats Take Advantage? No.

How Scientific Language Differs From Ordinary Language.

Irukandji.

The Mythical Whiteness of Trump Country.

The Texas Shooting Is Inspiring More Wannabe ‘Good Guys with Guns.’ Oh great.

The Inequality Beneath the Sexual-Harassment Headlines. The problem is worse in low-profile, low-accountability, and low-wage industries. As I’ve said elsewhere, for affluent women things will get slightly better, for working class, no change or worse, and meanwhile low-status undesirable men will be punished and humiliated.

What’s life like for thousands of incarcerated women? Imagine if Hollywood’s worst predators had a key to your home. So Harvey Weinstein will be looking for work at a women’s prison?

How to Create an Intellectual?

The iPhone X Is A User Experience Nightmare.

Warm Water Has Existed on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus for Potentially Billions of Years.

Antifa Activists As The Truest Defenders Of Free Speech.

Here’s How Far the World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals.

In the year since Trump was elected president, his opponents have offered little but excuses for losing the election a year ago: It was the electoral college. It was the Russians. It was the racists. It was the alt-right. It was social media. It was anti-feminist backlash. It was Hillary, it was Bernie, it was Obama, it was Comey.

San Francisco is actually one of the worst-paying places in the US for software engineers. I’m in IT (but not software engineering) and I’d need to make approximately 3x what I do now to have my same standard of living in San Fran.

Nominee for a top Pentagon job says it’s “insane” to allow civilians to buy assault rifles.

To understand America’s new impulse to make being poor a crime, one has to follow the trail of tax cuts that began in the Reagan era, which created revenue gaps all over the country.

Not your imagination: mass shootings now happen more frequently in the U.S.

Kids, Would You Please Start Fighting?

Drapetomania.

Sexism Starts in Childhood. It can also be stopped there. But only if parents push a stronger message than our culture does.

It’s no accident that sexual harassers rise up the ranks. For too long, we’ve lauded men’s domination and aggressiveness as a sign of leadership rather than possible red flags.

Ageing satellites put crucial sea-ice climate record at risk.

How HQ2 Ended Seattle’s Love Affair With Amazon.

I poured my blood, sweat and life savings into my restaurant. Dumbest thing I’ve ever done. A restaurant is a terrible business: low margin, high capex, high cost of labor, huge competition and terrible customers. Hardly a worse business idea.

The Misunderstood History of the Balkans’ Surreal War Memorials.

If HTTPS is so necessary, then selling it on its own merits should work fine, without destroying the history of the web.

America is facing an epistemic crisis. What if Mueller proves his case and it doesn’t matter? Come on, Vox, this is and has always been the most likely outcome.

You might not know it, but inside your Intel system, you have an operating system running in addition to your main OS, MINIX. And it’s raising eyebrows and concerns.

Most scientists now reject the idea that the first Americans came by land.

The end of the cloud is coming. Mostly agreed.

Does anyone remember websites? I miss the internet as it was, before corporations and dunces invaded.

The Great College Loan Swindle. How universities, banks and the government turned student debt into America’s next financial black hole.

Study First to Identify Cells Driving Gecko’s Ability to Regrow Its Tail.

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