» 2020 » October Epicene Cyborg

The most effective forms of censorship today involve meddling with trust and attention, not muzzling speech itself. As a result, they don’t look much like the old forms of censorship at all.

Jeremy Corbyn’s Suspension Is About Crushing the Left.

Pointing and calling.

Public attitudes in the context of COVID-19 and Brexit.

As experts call for nationwide mask mandate, anti-maskers stab guard 27 times.

How many habitable planets are out there? And when can I move?

Aerosol transmission of Covid-19: A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air. This is really good and accurately assesses infection risks in various scenarios. Real journalism.

Without reviews – even the scathing ones – we’d be left with a paltry, loveless cultural landscape. To apply the concept of “if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” to cultural criticism is to accept that art is created solely to fulfil the ego of the artist.

How Auto Insurers Subsidize Car Carnage.

Study: Republicans and Democrats hate the other side more than they love their own side.

Oscar bait’s great sin is not artistic pretension; it’s a lack of curiosity.

Shopkeeper Installs Glass Panels So That Ceiling Cats Can Watch Customers.

Paul Krugman Connects Ayn Rand to the Right Wing Not Wearing Masks: Here’s the Devastating Part of the Story He’s Missing.

As Climate Disasters Pile Up, a Radical Proposal Gains Traction. The idea of modifying Earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet, once seen as too risky to seriously consider, is attracting new money and attention. Probably inevitable we will do this.

In a first, researchers extract secret key used to encrypt Intel CPU code. Hackers can now reverse engineer updates or write their own custom firmware.

How Does Traceroute Work.

US grid-battery costs dropped 70% over 3 years.

‘Zoom towns’ are exploding in the West. And many cities aren’t ready for the onslaught.

Why is this election so painful? Because voting isn’t real political power.

Landlords Challenge U.S. Eviction Ban and Continue to Oust Renters.

Jingle Mail Haunts Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities as Property Values Get Slashed Below Loan Amounts.

Study finds over 80 percent of COVID-19 patients have vitamin D deficiency.

Coronavirus may dull the body’s pain receptors, helping the unsuspecting spread it, study says.

Noodiversity, Technodiversity: elements of a new economic foundation based on a new foundation for theoretical computer science.

John Gray: ‘What can we learn from cats? Don’t live in an imagined future.’

The Big 3 Lifts Suck For Size Gains. Yes, they do. And aren’t enough by themselves for getting strong without injury.

They are successfully taking away our general-purpose computers and replacing them with little more than Internet appliances. Has been the goal for many, many years.

Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet.

US, Global Corporate Giants Not Amused Mexico Finally Forces Them to Pay the Taxes They Owe.

New sub-Saturn-mass exoplanet discovered.

SOFIA discovers water on sunlit surface of moon.

How dams have reshaped our planet.

The need to touch. The language of touch binds our minds and bodies to the broader social world. What happens when touch becomes taboo? I don’t know, but the liberals want us to find out!

The Nordic concept of friluftsliv.

What Was BeOS, and Why Did People Love It? I miss BeOS every day.

Coronavirus pandemic is causing ‘unacceptable’ shortages in US drug supplies, report says. Capitalism is so efficient. Obviously.

The Rich in New York Confront an Unfamiliar Word: No.

Covid Puts a Spotlight on the Food Industry’s Role in Obesity.

Firefox is the embarrassment of open source, and it’s the only thing standing between Google and an all-encompassing monopoly over the web.

2.5 Gigapixel Image of the Orion Constellation Took Five Years To Complete.

The threat of long economic Covid looms. Governments need to focus on the cost of inaction, not the cost of supporting economies.

Trump issues sweeping order stripping job protections from tens of thousands of federal employees.

Jellies Transfer a Significant Amount of Carbon to the Deep Ocean.

This dominant way of teaching men leads to the epic amounts of abuse and assault that women face, and it actually doesn’t really work for most men.

Pandemic could force 30-35% of U.S. shopping malls to close permanently, warns Morgan Stanley. Accelerating something already going to occur.

The engines of SARS-CoV-2 spread.

Housing Market Goes Nuts, Everyone Sees it, But it Can’t Last.

A typical teenager’s stroll: Carrying a baby and dodging mammoths.

Once an ideal is alive, it may not give back our ideal response.

Plato, newspapers, and the end of the world.

Russia’s Laptev Sea Should Have Started to Freeze by Now. Normally, the ‘birthplace of ice’ freezes by late October. For the first time in recorded history, it hasn’t. That could have knock-on effects across the Arctic.

Mystery of unusual neutron star system revealed after 20 years, thanks to thousands of volunteers. Since they solved it, they should do the neutron dance.

Microsoft just force restarted my Windows PC again to install more unwanted apps.

Out of Work in America.

The road hogs are pigging out. Dave Barry from 1999.

President Trump is benefiting from single-payer, single-provider health care. We all should.

The pobblebonk frog makes the best noises.

Toxic Internet Culture From East To West. What the digital worlds of Japan’s imageboards and America’s alt-right reveal about real-life precarity.

The Corporatization of Nursing Homes. A tragic history of how we’ve treated elderly citizens, for profit.

The Importance of End-to-End Thinking in System Design.

“A huge reason that our politics is not so extremely polarised and so far out there is because we no longer have Murdoch-owned press in New Zealand, and it’s never taken a foothold.”

The People Who Prioritize a Friendship Over Romance.

How an Ill-Fated Fishing Voyage Helped Us Understand Covid-19.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused nearly 300,000 more deaths than expected in a typical year.

New Orleans to furlough city employees, 4,000 will go unpaid over 6 days. And the next phase of the pandemic depression begins.

As cases rise again, second thoughts on another lockdown. Lockdowns were good as temporary measures. Now we’ve failed and it’s too late.

On top of skyrocketing medical costs, many Americans face staggering surprise bills for “air ambulances.” What’s no surprise is that the private equity industry is deeply implicated in this nightmare — and spending heavily to make sure no one puts a stop to it.

Systemic Risk in the Broad Economy. Interfirm Networks and Shocks in the U.S. Economy.

The Internet, smart phones, and social media (ISS) have set human communication back about 20,000 years. That is, we now rely more on gossip than we have since we lived in small tribes.

Minivan buyers tend to be more self-confident and more “other-oriented”: more involved with family, friends and their communities.

Satellites Put the World’s Biggest Methane Emitters on the Map. Now the companies and countries responsible for a powerful greenhouse gas won’t be able to hide from view.

Down-to-Earth View of the “Recovery” in Near-Real Time, Eight Months into the Pandemic.

Driver of the largest mass extinction in the history of the Earth identified.

Confronting the Parasite Economy. Why low-wage work is bad for business—and all of us.

Facebook and Twitter Cross a Line Far More Dangerous Than What They Censor.

Constructing Our Enemy: Synthetic Lifeforms in Film 1911-1979.

Supreme Court Justices Are Politicians, Too. And just like Republican politicians, the conservative justices are dedicated to preserving the right’s minority rule.

And if there is one thing we can definitively state, it’s that this virus is much, much less likely to spread outdoors than in.

After 2 Hurricanes, Lake Charles Fears Its Cries for Help Have Gone Unheard.

How Criminal Charges Against a Wall Street Icon Went from Front Page News to a Yawn at the New York Times.

‘Scarred for life’: Sage experts warn of impact of Covid policies on the young. The liberal idea of “stay inside forever” was always a moronic one.

Le gouvernement a donné son feu vert à un nouveau malus automobile lié à la masse pour les véhicules pesant plus de 1.800 kg. Une mesure destinée à lutter contre l’achat de modèles plus lourds et polluants et qui est critiquée par les constructeurs automobiles. Should be done in the US too.

Why small businesses in supply chains matter too.

Coronavirus Tanked the Economy. Then Credit Scores Went Up. The average credit score hit a record in July after millions of Americans had lost their jobs, scrambling lenders’ underwriting models.

As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place. A nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites publishes coverage that is ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms.

The preexisting conditions of the coronavirus pandemic. An enormous new data set peers into the health of the world’s population before 2020.

All that is to say that starting at 1 is not an unreasonable position at all; to a typical human thinking about the zeroth element of an array doesn’t make any more sense than trying to catch the zeroth bus that comes by, but we’ve clearly ended up here somehow. So what’s the story there?

Covid-19: The global crisis — in data.

There’s a Word for Why We Wear Masks, and Liberals Should Say It. It’s high time Democrats played some philosophical offense on the concept of “freedom.” Liberals play offense? LOL.

After sidelining scientists, Europe plays catchup with new coronavirus wave.

Seven Laws of Sane Personal Computing.

Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press.

Zeptoseconds: New world record in short time measurement. In other words, they made Zepto Marks.

What has happened in the wholesale commodification of American culture is the gangsterization of American life. And people saw in Trump a gangster who wins. Nailed it.

Britons alarmed by unpleasant border infrastructure they demanded.

Why I’m Glad I Left America. Life in France is better, especially now.

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