The Secretive Business of Facial-Recognition Software in Retail Stores.
October 24, 2018
How Marketing Created Superfoods. There is no such thing as a superfood. It has zero basis in science.
Selma Blair’s MS diagnosis took 15 years. That’s common. Here’s why. Particularly common in women to be misdiagnosed.
October 23, 2018
Hurricane Michael leaves a seaside Florida town in an existential crisis. Rebuilding anything here is pure folly.
California’s Underwater Forests Are Being Eaten by the ‘Cockroaches of the Ocean.’ Another climate change consequence.
Another Report Shows That FOSTA Increased (Not Decreased) Sex Trafficking; Where Is The Outrage? People care far, far more about symbolic moves (and mood affiliation/performative virtue) rather than effective ones.
Using representational similarity analysis, we found that gender and age information emerged significantly earlier than identity information, followed by a late signature of familiarity. This is one of the reasons I am extremely skeptical of the modern notions of extreme gender fluidity and changeability. (Some, yes, but not the extreme version that you’re punished if you don’t 100% subscribe to today.)
October 22, 2018
Mars could have enough molecular oxygen to support life, and scientists figured out where to find it. Better headline would be to support “aerobic life” as non-aerobic life might already exist on Mars
Vivaldi 2.0 review: The modern Web browser does not have to be so bland. Vivaldi says about half of all the 2.0 features come from user feedback and suggestions. Imagine that. (Obligatory: Fuck Mozilla and fuck the Firefox developers!)
Microsoft’s problem isn’t how often it updates Windows—it’s how it develops it. Windows 10 seems like alpha release software, intended only for an internal demo — and has seemed that way since its initial release, with no real improvement.
October 21, 2018
October 17, 2018
There May Soon Be Three Internets. America’s Won’t Necessarily Be the Best. Humans have the unique capacity to fuck anything up.
‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss. Killing everything is not going to be a long-term successful strategy for us, no matter what the anti-science right or the clueless left believes.
The Google Pixel 3 Is A Very Good Phone. But Maybe Phones Have Gone Too Far. They have. In some ways, worse than opioids.
October 16, 2018
A roadmap to agriculture that’s sustainable and climate-neutral. No one will say it, but the only real option is fewer people. Many fewer. We’ll get that — the hard way or the easy way. Probably the hard way.
Housing Market Is Raising Serious Red Flags. Decline was inevitable, even though it “could never happen again.”
October 15, 2018
Men Have Been Telling Women to Shut Up for at Least 3,000 Years. Well, we got it half right.
As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty. This is Pynchon from 1984. The world is now at least 100x more complex. Cognitive inequality is a real concern in such a world.
Insulin sensitivity was cut in half after 10 days of no exercise. (Frequent exercise helps prevent or even reverse diabetes.)
October 14, 2018
Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture. Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either. PC culture, even for the things it gets right, is extremely stifling and restrictive and absolutely no fun even for the people it’s “protecting.”
We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too Late. We also need about 6 billion fewer people. Neither one is likely.
Tech suffers from lack of humanities, says Mozilla head. Whoa, someone from Mozilla said something intelligent? Huh. But she is 100% right.
Marvel Fires Star Wars Author For Bad Reasons. Told you the censorship train would crash into the left much harder than the right. Why? Because the left is a threat to corporate profits, and the right is not.
Elon Musk Wants Tesla Gigafactory Employees to Live on Site in Mobile Homes. When will he issue company scrip and start playing “Sixteen Tons” over the loudspeakers?
October 13, 2018
The Case for Climate Pessimism. My best guess is we’ll do nothing for the next 20 years, things will get quite bad, then we’ll try geoengineering out of desperation and 5-6 billion people will die as a result of all of it.
Cancer is so expensive to treat that 42% of patients deplete their entire life’s assets to afford treatment within the first 2 years, according to a new study. In the US. In the rest of the world, not so much.