» 2020 » January Epicene Cyborg

YouTube has a big climate change misinformation problem it can’t solve. Doesn’t really want to solve.

California, Mired in a Housing Crisis, Rejects an Effort to Ease It.

F-35’s Gun That Can’t Shoot Straight Adds to Its Roster of Flaws.

Now you went from writing bad code to building bad infrastructure that you deploy the bad code on top of. Tada, microservices!

Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue. I barely do? It’s rare, anyway.

How good liars get away with telling lies.

9 things Americans need to learn from the rest of the world’s health care systems.

Racists Are Having an Idiotic Field Day Over Coronavirus.

Travel providers now use software to re-price their offerings, sometimes dozens of times a day, putting travelers at a big disadvantage.

Tracking Reality’s “Fuckedness Quotient”: An Interview with William Gibson.

US Colleges Are Trying To Install Location Tracking Apps On Students’ Phones.

The Killer Neural Wiring That Links Eyes and Wings in 2 Predators.

Assume that every website you visit tattles to Facebook.

All learning is ultimately play.

Keeping Aging Muscles Fit Is Tied to Better Heart Health Later. For men at least, entering middle age with plenty of muscle may lower the later risk of developing heart disease by more than 80 percent.

Scientists learn how plants manipulate their soil environment to assure a cheap, steady supply of nutrients.

Lab-Grown Heart Muscles Have Been Transplanted Into a Human For the First Time.

Good Life. Gods, humans, happiness — The video of ‘Despacito’ is a Campbellian masterpiece.

These Images Show the Sun’s Surface in Greater Detail Than Ever Before.

The Skewed and the Screwed: When Mating Meets Politics.

Study finds there is “no safe level” of pm2.5 air pollution.

How Much Does a Mile of Road Actually Cost?

How a vegan diet could make you dumber.

Pundits who once decried Joe Biden’s attacks on Social Security are now insisting he never made them, while self-declared “fact-checkers” with an ax to grind are treated like an infallible Ministry of Truth. The anti-Sanders attack machine has taken an Orwellian turn.

Joe Biden’s Checkered Ethical History Is Fair Game for Criticism.

Red Sea huge source of air pollution, greenhouse gases: study.

Ajit Pai promised that killing net neutrality would spur network investment, but instead Comcast cut spending by 10.5%.

Relationship between animal protein intake and muscle mass index in healthy women.

The Clues That Neanderthals Didn’t Know How To Make Fire.

One day, a scientist in Craig Ferris’s lab was scanning the brains of very old rats when he found that one could see, hear, smell, and feel just like the other rats, but it was walking around with basically no brain—and likely had been since birth.

The Origin of the Factory.

How Earth climate models help picture life on unimaginable worlds.

Entropy in the Universe.

The fractured politics, the anti-establishment fervor, the nihilism – follow from the willful blindness of the people at the top to the fact that the rules at ground level have shifted forever.

Movie Notes: Gone with the Wind.

History of the Great Black Swamp.

Cheetahs on the Edge. Amazing how much time they spend full-tilt with no paws on the ground. They are nearly flying.

The Enemies of Writing. A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.

Another #MeToo Fail.

Our crappy healthcare system is to blame for Goop.

Ring doorbell app packed with third-party trackers.

GPT-2 and the Nature of Intelligence.

In Defense of Dumb Cities.

The world is getting noisier, and it’s affecting our health. How much will people pay for silence? A fucking lot, that’s how much.

Why being extremely online makes you cynical. A new psychology study on how being disrespected leads to increasing cynicism has repercussions for online behavior.

Regulators, lawmakers and companies seem disturbingly content to force average Americans to endure an ever-growing variety of headaches to carry out daily life. Those costs are making the basics of an advanced society harder to maintain.

The Central Social Institution in Prague was home to the world’s largest vertical file cabinet.

The lessons from historic preservation councils blocking solar panels. American politics is a thicket of local civic and political groups that may resist change.

As sea levels rise, little of the United States will be unaffected. If you’re not near the coast, get ready for lots of new neighbors.

The debunked “Russian influence” nonsense is infantilizing liberals. The Russian money spent to influence the election was negligible. Its persistence as an explanation is bad for Dems.

The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.

Banks have returned to the pre-2008 world of automatic credit-limit increases for credit cards used by already indebted people.

Gravity: We might have been getting it wrong this whole time.

The dark side of expertise.

Werner Herzog: ‘Piracy Has Been The Most Successful Form of Distribution Worldwide.’

You Are Now Remotely Controlled. Surveillance capitalists control the science and the scientists, the secrets and the truth.

How much longer will we trust Google’s search results? Stopped trusting them in 2012.

Novel phylogeny of angiosperms inferred from whole-genome microsynteny analysis.

Models of Femininity.

Local Radio Follows Local Newspapers Down The Drain Of Corporate Chain Ownership.

How TV crime shows erase racism and normalize police misconduct.

Legalized Bribery by Elites Is Here to Stay. Now What? Conservatives have won a generational lock on the highest courts, entrenching Citizens United. But the courts aren’t the only way to bring change.

Recessive deleterious variation has a limited impact on signals of adaptive introgression in human populations.

The answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not anti-scraping laws.

Most political unrest has one big root cause: soaring inequality.

Prof Claudia de Rham’s ‘massive gravity’ theory could explain why universe expansion is accelerating.

The Use of Magnifying Lenses in the Classical World.

Scythian golden pectoral from Tovsta Mohyla; 4th C BC.

How Does a Nation Adapt to Its Own Murder? Australia is going up in flames, and its government calls for resilience while planning for more coal mines.

Matt Parker on the Time Someone Tried to Buy a Jet Plane Using Pepsi Points.

Scientists Finally Pin Down Why Stress Turns Our Hair Gray.

TripAdvisor Cuts Hundreds of Jobs After Google Competition Bites. Be nice if we did any anti-monopoly enforcement anymore.

Image Desmearing with ImageJ.

CenturyLink, Frontier took FCC cash, failed to deploy all required broadband. Which ISPs have been doing for 20 years at least.

The biggest tax theft in the history of Europe. From 2006 to 2011, these two and hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.

The Darkness Where the Future Should Be. What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience. We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.

Google backtracks on design that made search ads look like normal results.

Forever Wars Don’t End. They Just Go Corporate.

Cancel Earthworms. The “crazy worms” remaking forests aren’t your friendly neighborhood garden worms. Then again, those aren’t so great either.

If we were to stand on the shores of the ancient Tethys Ocean a hundred million years ago, and look out towards a vast archipelago, could we really call our surroundings ‘Europe’?

Spreadsheet Anthropologist Apple researcher Bonnie Nardi observes digital villagers at work. From 1996, still relevant.

Union Pacific Cut 17% of its Workers, Will Cut 8% in 2020. Revenue Fell 9.5%, Income 10%. Bought Back $5.8 Bn in Shares. Stock Hits New High. Entire economy is a scam now.

In serving big company interests, copyright is in crisis.

The Attempted Corporate Takeover of .Org.

How housing became the world’s biggest asset class. It is only a recent phenomenon.

Why Actually Principled People Are Difficult (Glenn Greenwald Edition).

If the conversation about sexism and Clinton’s campaign feels stuck in a rut, it’s in part because the former candidate herself won’t think outside it.

How Not to Write a Book Review. The fallout over “American Dirt” reveals the publishing industry’s biases and blind spots. Another failing ideology in full view.

Biden’s Advocacy for Social Security Cuts Has Had Real Consequences. The proposal for ‘chained CPI,’ a cut to future benefits, during the Obama administration led to its widespread use in other areas of the government. These plutes love starving old people.

Considerations on Rent Control.

Global Elites Have Found A Way To Do the Absolute Minimum For The Climate.

The dangerous shortcomings of forensic science.

Ten years of social media have left us all worse off.

Mainstream media: U.S. has the permanent right to use violence anytime, anywhere.

Please, stop putting weird products like crocheted tampons in your vagina.

A Myth That Won’t Die About a Gulf War Weapon, and Why It Matters.

Bernie Sanders’s Foreign Policy Is Too Evidence-Based for the Beltway’s Taste.

Every Google result now looks like an ad.

Microsoft is Testing Ads in WordPad in Windows 10. Joke OS.

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