November 22, 2018

Internal strategy documents obtained by The Intercept and Documented reveal the strategy that private health care interests plan to use to influence Democratic Party messaging and stymie the momentum toward achieving universal health care coverage.



Brain-Destroying Prions Also Spread Through Victims’ Eyes.



An Economic Explanation For Why DRM Cannot Open Up New Business Model Opportunities.



You snooze, you lose: Insurers make the old adage literally true. Insurers spy on sleep apnea suffers via connected CPAP machines.



The Predatory Lending Machine Crushing Small Businesses Across America.



Cognitive Training Does Not Enhance General Cognition.



Massive Data Leaks Keep Happening Because Big Companies Can Afford to Lose Your Data.



Climate Change Slows Oil Company Plan To Drill In The Arctic. Ha. But a sad, angry ha.



California fire: What started as a tiny brush fire became the state’s deadliest wildfire. Here’s how.



Nearsighted Neoliberalism Helped Mobilize Today’s Far Right.



The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life.



Break up Facebook (and while we’re at it, Google, Apple and Amazon). I would be fine with just destroying Facebook altogether.



If the Homo prospectus theory is correct, those limited time-traveling skills explain an important piece of the technological gap that separates humans from all other species on the planet.



That Escalated Quickly: Putting the Fun in Funiculars.



November 21, 2018

Nancy Pelosi, hoping to retake the reins as House Speaker, has pledged to revive so-called “Pay-Go” rules, requiring that any new federal spending be offset with tax hikes or budget cuts. No one who supports this should be Speaker; it’s a way of blocking Medicare for All and any climate change commitments without seeming to have done so. It’s also profoundly economically ignorant.



How Powerful Companies Might Hold Back Growth. There’s evidence that low wages are undermining production.



Why everyone can — and should — learn quantum mechanics. It’s not rocket science — it’s a fundamental part of how our world works, and not as complex as you might fear. QM is easy compared to many things considered “hard” if you are willing to abandon your macro intuition.



Overstating the Role of Environmental Factors in Success: A Cautionary Note. So if environmental factors don’t matter that much, and genetic factors don’t matter much…what matters?



The same is also observable for males that are more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and less agreeable; indicating that for men, a greater number of personality factors matter in explaining the variation in sexual activity.



Countering the geography of discontent: Strategies for left-behind places.



Review: ‘Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché’ sheds light on the first female film director. Fucking hell, why didn’t someone tell me it was a woman who first came up with the idea of narrative films and who basically invented modern cinema?



Meta-surface corrects for chromatic aberrations across all kinds of lenses.



Everything Online Is Getting Bigger Except Your ISP’s Data Cap.



An Italian Cosmologist Who Wanders in Dante’s Dark Wood. A cosmologist and data scientist with a literary bent, Valeria Pettorino thinks multiple angles and diverse points of view are needed to unriddle the nature of dark matter and dark energy.



US has the Most Expensive Mobile Data Plans in the World.



November 20, 2018

Yes, (Over)Population IS a Problem.



Big Oil Doesn’t Like EV Subsidies, Just Its Own Giant Subsidy.



High-tech farmers are using LED lights in ways that seem to border on science fiction.



New Sexual Morality.



The Secret of Amazon’s Success. It isn’t just size. Unlike many big American companies, Amazon is not squandering its profits on stock buybacks. Amazon does loads of R&D and business development. This is accurate, whatever you think of Amazon.



Why Standing Desks Are Overrated.



Most Money Advice Is Worthless When You’re Poor. Savings tips are classist garbage and belong in the trash.



Manta isn’t arguing that women are coerced into sex they didn’t want (at the time). She is arguing that women of a certain age stop engaging in sex for pleasure and start trading sex for the hope of obtaining financial security.



November 19, 2018

People who live in a rough neighborhood and are confronted with a demand for money are forced to make calculations that people in safer, more affluent areas rarely think about.



Libération de Paris : pourquoi il n’y a (presque) pas de Noirs sur les photos.



Estimating the chances of something that hasn’t happened yet.



Surveillance Kills Freedom By Killing Experimentation.



Prosecuting WikiLeaks for publishing activities poses a profound threat to press freedom.



Somebody Had to Set a Bad Example. Hell, that is some good writing.



Long-term exposure to road traffic noise may increase the risk of obesity.



Intel Linux 4.20 Performance Decimated by Spectre and Meltdown Mitigations.



A Rose is a Rose is a Rose: Mathematical Model Explains How Different Brains Agree on Smells.



All this would be trivial enough, if it weren’t blindingly evident that the assumed superiority of “educated people” is a visible cause of today’s catastrophes.



Another social psychology classic bites the dust – meta-analysis finds little evidence for the Macbeth effect.



November 18, 2018

Amazon is being given land in Queens that was supposed to go for affordable housing. Now 1,500 homes are off the table.



Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive.’



Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins the rigged conservative shame game — by refusing to play.



Even if some people are outside the binary, they are a miniscule fraction of the population, nothing like the frequently cited 1–2 percent figure.



Longer Than the Song of a Whip-poor-will.



In 1993, I did not picture people having their online experience being “fed” to them by large corporations using mysterious algorithms. Instead, I envisioned individuals in control, creating and exploring on their own. Most people want to be fed. Even force fed. Sartre’s “freedom” is not appealing to many.



Estates of Mind. Technological and societal stagnation is a political choice, just like most other problems that bedevil us.



America’s big box stores sucked up corporate welfare and killed Main Street — now they’re ducking property tax.



November 17, 2018

American Household Debt is Nearly a Trillion Dollars Higher than it was Before the 2008 Recession. That’s going to leave a mark.



Nationalize Amazon. Is this a realistic demand? Perhaps not yet, but that’s the point.



A 1970s Essay Predicted Silicon Valley’s High-Minded Tyranny.



Amazon HQ2 Will Cost Taxpayers at Least $4.6 Billion, More Than Twice What the Company Claimed, New Study Shows.



The seven deadly paradoxes of cryptocurrency.



International trade data: why doesn’t it add up?



Not Even Hiding It Any More: EU Council Explicitly Pushing For Mandatory Upload Filters.



Everything on Amazon Is Amazon!



UN poverty envoy calls UK poverty a “political choice” that inflicted “great misery.” Any poverty in a rich country is a political choice.



Bolsonaro’s deforestation of the Amazon has already begun.



November 16, 2018

Microsoft systematically collects data on a large scale about the individual use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. Covertly, without informing people. Microsoft does not offer any choice with regard to the amount of data, or possibility to switch off the collection, or ability to see what data are collected, because the data stream is encoded.



The hunt for human nature. We still live in the long shadow of Man-the-Hunter: a midcentury theory of human origins soaked in strife and violence.



Humans are having huge influence on evolution of species, study says. I would be very surprised were this not the case.



Your Children’s Yellowstone Will Be Radically Different. In Yellowstone National Park, warming has brought rapid changes.



For arid, Mars-like Peruvian desert, rain brings death.



Great Misinterpretations.



The Man Who Wrote The Mediocre Novel.



Amazon and Google Are Taking Over Cities. The Smartest Startups Are Going Virtual. Opting out of geography offers startups the best of both worlds–a deeper and cheaper talent pool. The agglomeration effect is overstated, mainly by post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking.



Please, Hillary, don’t do it. Can we donate money so she doesn’t run? I’m in for that.



November 15, 2018

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us.



Dutch Culture Taught Me to Be Brutally Honest: The Dutch Directness. Germans are also this way. I worked for a German company for a while.



A Space of Their Own, a New Online Database, Will Feature Works by 600+ Overlooked Female Artists from the 15th-19th Centuries.



Tantalizing But Preliminary Evidence of a ‘Brain Microbiome.’ I wrote an sf story a long time ago about human intelligence being the result of parasitism, and the philosophical implications thereof.



Altruistic indulgence: people voluntarily consume high-calorie foods to make other people feel comfortable and pleasant. I do not do this.



Period-tracking apps are not for women. The golden age of menstrual surveillance is great for men, marketers, and medical companies.



Mortality rates among non-Hispanic whites without college degrees have increased substantially over the last twenty years.



NRA Publishes Tips For Staying Safe While Committing A Mass Shooting.



Amazon Is Creating Cities for the Rich and Democrats Are Bending the Knee.



What Amazon HQ2 tells us about America’s great divide.



Women stockpile birth control as Trump administration finalizes religious exemptions.



Student Debt Does Not Pay for Itself.



November 14, 2018

Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers. Billions are being spent to protect children from school shootings. Does any of it work? I never thought I’d live in a time where mass slaughter of children would just be…normal.



Obesity and Cancer: ‘Fat-clogged’ Immune Cells Fail to Fight Tumors.



MIT Researchers Make Spintronics Breakthrough.



Resistance for Oligarchy.



Why we need difficult books.



An infinite, procedurally generated city, assembled out of blocks using the Wave Function Collapse algorithm.



Gaia spots a ‘ghost’ galaxy next door.



Something Happened to U.S. Drug Costs in the 1990s. This conceals more than it reveals; totally ignores the question of why the US diverged so much. Propaganda by omission.



Neuroexistentialism.



Study: Welfare Work Requirements Don’t Combat Poverty.



November 13, 2018

What ancient DNA says about us.



Surviving Jonestown.



Submarine to visit deepest parts of the ocean in Five Deeps Expedition.



Making light twist into a bowtie may reveal dark matter.



Americans Demand Their Voices Be Heard And Also Some Kind Of Dessert You Get After Breakfast.



Canada is richer than the US, according to a new wealth ranking — in fact, the US doesn’t even make the top 10.



The needle and the damage done: Another election night ruined by garbage “data journalism.” Not over the twitchy “election needle” from 2016? This year, Nate Silver’s “real-time forecast” was even worse.