» 2018 » July Epicene Cyborg

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July 31, 2018

How Tom Tryniski digitized nearly 50 million pages of newspapers in his living room.

It is generally a bad idea for a society to consistently go against the consensus of opinion of its own scientists for pure ideology, irrational fear, or because of industry favoritism. In the case of the anti-GMO movement, all three are involved.

For Sale: Survey Data on Millions of High School Students. A look at some of the major minor miners.

The new housing play: Helping priced-out renters become long-distance landlords. Oh god no.

Coal Mining Has Destroyed 1.5 Million Acres of Appalachian Forest.

Lead is useful; lead is poison.

The EU Backs Off its War on Cash. Here’s Why.

Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.

July 30, 2018

Living in a beat-up Jeep after mounting hardship, a homeless veteran and his wife cling to hope, waiting for a place to call home. It is despicable that we allow any homelessness, but this is particularly horrendous. Greatest country on earth, folks!

How Did the Climate Apocalypse Become Old News?

Here’s proof that open office layouts don’t work, and how to fix them.

The Productivity Gain: Where Is It Coming From And Where Is It Going To?

Has Zuckerberg, like Frankenstein, lost control of the monster he created?

How many of us today would rather be outraged than informed? ‘Bout damn near everyone.

In other words, whatever my preferred pronouns might have been in some imaginary Rawlsian original position, I do not feel I have a reasonable expectation of others that they use them in my non-imaginary present position.

Our mass delusion of American prosperity and national well-being is killing U.S.

Fewer Americans are making more than their parents did—especially if they grew up in the middle class.

American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths.

Gaming’s toxic men, explained.

The Language of the Past.

July 29, 2018

“Bipartisan” or “consensus” are not synonyms for “good” when it comes to public policy. It simply means that everyone agrees on an outcome (inevitably the status quo) and says nothing about the outcome itself.

Trigger warnings increase peoples’ perceived emotional vulnerability to trauma.

Inconsistent theories of value and neoliberal economics.

Google just proved its $5 billion fine was too small.

Venezuela could eventually have 1 million percent inflation.

The average corporate tax rate globally has fallen by more than half over the past three decades, from 49 percent in 1985 to 24 percent in 2018.

How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies.

Have we reached Peak Storage? No. I need a spare planet to store my interstellar invasion fleet.

July 28, 2018

Cultural Changes in Neural Structure and Function.

Destroying North America’s Natural Wonders to Own the Libs.

Facebook’s active user growth went into reverse for the first time, and the worst is yet to come. Good.

Motherhood in the Age of Fear. Women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational parenting decisions.

He may have been credulous and intellectually shallow. He may have produced a scissors-and-paste job cribbed from other ancient sources. But those other sources are lost, which makes what Diogenes Laertius left behind, to quote the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “truly priceless.”

Google and Facebook’s Security Guards Battle to Earn a Living Wage.

Iran’s Wolf Wall, Second-longest in the World, is Still Shrouded in Mystery.

The 50 greatest special effects movies of all time.

Does deciding among morally relevant options feel like making a choice? How morality constrains people’s sense of choice.

The Big Adjustments in “Real” GDP.

Precinct Data Shows Rich, White Neighborhoods Flipping Democratic in 2016. Will It Last?

Police Held Ving Rhames At Gunpoint In His Own Home After A Neighbor Told 911 ‘A Large Black Man’ Had Broken In. Oh no! A large black man! What ever will we do!

Why do so many moms die and suffer in the US? Stupid negligence.

July 27, 2018

Chrome Extensions, Android and iOS Apps Caught Collecting Browsing Data.

Beijing’s Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces. Zimbabwe is signing up for China’s surveillance state, but its citizens will pay the price. Western liberals say little about this because a “minority” colonizing and oppressing another minority does not compute for them.

Amazon’s Face Recognition Misidentifies 28 Members of Congress as Suspected Criminals. It seems to me that nothing went wrong here.

Let’s be blunt: Third Way and all the other groups that exist to glorify centrism are conservative groups.

Browsers hide or obscure URLs, so it’s difficult to identify the source of what you’re reading (and its reliability). If your own personal, highly-private information hasn’t been hacked, you’re in the minority. Fuck Mozilla and Firefox for going along with this — it’s a deliberate harm-the-user strategy.

The collection and storage of people’s biometric data fundamentally changes the relationship between citizen and state. Once “presumed innocent,” we are now, in the sinister words of former UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd, “unconvicted persons.”.

Worms frozen in permafrost for up to 42,000 years come back to life. No, worms, it’s been 42,000 years. Please stay dead.

Calgary malls use facial recognition to track shoppers’ age, gender without consent. Welcome to the (terrible) future.

July 26, 2018

Elspeth Beard, shortly after becoming the first Englishwoman to circumnavigate the world by motorcycle.

When Wall Street Showed Up, Fortunes Sank in This Small American Town.

Fox Is Horrified at the Idea of Americans Leading Dignified Lives.

Against Democracy: political philosopher Jason Brennan on the case for epistocracy.

To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget.

1 Hen, 76 Ducklings: What’s the Deal With This Picture? That’s one anatid who didn’t duck out on her responsibilities.

Inside Ozy Fest, the progressive alternate reality where the brands outshine the ideas. That sounds like hell. Pure hell.

Why cosmology without philosophy is like a ship without a hull. If you think that philosophy is not useful, this means you are allowing someone else’s philosophy to dominate what and how you think without even being aware of it.

Rearranging the Planet to Save It.

Scientists Believe They’ve Found a Liquid Body of Water on Mars. Any fish?

Native Americans managed the prairie for better bison hunts. Hunter-gatherer societies may have a bigger ecological impact than we thought.

Leaders of democratic nations actually have stronger incentives to start and exacerbate conflicts with other countries than their autocratic counterparts, suggests a new study published by the American Journal of Political Science.

These are the websites your clean-install Windows PC connects to by itself. Fuck that noise. And assclown low-IQ morons tried to tell me Windows 10 was not exfiltrating data when I could see it with my own eyes.

The state of ‘New Keynesian’ economics.

Chronic Lyme is as nebulous as gender, an identity as much as a biological category.

You could find yourself in cozy exile there, social theorists said, if you’d tried too hard to picture technoscientific global capitalism and your brain broke. I’d barely begun to try, and mine already had.

July 25, 2018

Camping only a holiday if your house is worse than a tent.

Thinner and Lighter Laptops Have Screwed Us All.

Habermas and pimps: the world of the day and the world of the night.

An Inflated Steel Archway.

Loneliness is the common ground of terror.

The software to create the black hole in the movie ‘Interstellar’ is a full implementation of Einstein’s equations in 40,000 lines of C++, and rendered thousands of 23-megapixel IMAX frames on a 32,000-core render farm at about 20 core-hours per frame. (Note that it was changed up a little for the film as the real phenomenon as it would appear was thought to be too visually confusing for audiences. In that, I believe they were correct.)

Genetic differences in human life are a scientific fact, like climate change.

Only Three Humans Have Died in Space: The Story of Soyuz 11.

The web’s transition from nomadism to feudalism.

Delicate-Looking Garments Made Entirely Out Of Wood.

What the Mystery of the Tick-Borne Meat Allergy Could Reveal.

July 24, 2018

The Welfare Boogeyman. The Trump administration wants to rebrand social programs that millions of Americans rely on as “welfare.” Will we fall for it?

Please Stop “Fixing” Font Smoothing. Fuck Apple for fucking me over to the tune of $10,000+.

Google is not an American company.

Backlash Against “War on Cash” Reaches Washington & China.

Homophobia in the Service of Anti-Trumpism is Still Homophobic (Even When it’s the New York Times).

Forget the Folk: Moral Responsibility Preservation Motives and Other Conditions for Compatibilism.

Karl Polanyi and the formation of this generation’s new Left.

July 23, 2018

The Circa-1870 Disjunction Between Production and Distribution.

Why is real wage growth anemic? It’s not because of a skills shortage.

Driving one of the world’s largest vehicles. When Nasa’s giant SLS rocket carries out its first mission, it will be brought to the launchpad by one of the largest vehicles ever built. And driving it requires massive concentration.

Desperate Facebook poisons the well, spamming disenchanted users with torrents of notifications, including through 2FA.

More and more health care bills are over $1 million—and expensive drugs are playing a major role.

p-Hacking and False Discovery in A/B Testing. This is one of Mozilla’s one main issues in “testing” Firefox changes. They do data analysis there like I do figure skating.

Opossums seem to have a knack for ticks. According to numbers calculated from a study published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a single opossum can consume between 5,500 and 6,000 ticks per week.

July 22, 2018

Giant sea bass are mysterious to scientists. Understanding them could help the species survive.

Home Depot fires black staffer for retort to racist customer.

Country music has a rich history of making tunes for the working American, but that tradition is in danger of being completely replaced by a cynical, consumerist wasteland.

The Russia Scandal Might Help Trump Get Reelected. If his opponents focus too much on theories of collusion and “kompromat,” they’ll risk glossing over the real failings of his presidency.

Women, Stop Volunteering for Office Housework!

Facial recognition, welcome to U.S. high schools. Just asking questions: Why don’t we try gun control first to stop school shootings? That dystopia so many people told me couldn’t happen…it’s happening.

How to Fight the Actual Source of Ocean Garbage (Which Isn’t Straws).

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