Epicene Cyborg

Speer’s story reminds us in a timely way that it’s not only the knowingly depraved who gather around a tyrant. Equally dangerous are those, like Speer, who provide the system with their intellect while in denial about the consequences.

Fossilized Tooth Captures a Pterosaur’s Failed Squid Meal.

Supersized trucks and SUVs seem here to stay, unlike the auto show. There was little technological innovation on display, mostly intimidating bulk. Wasting our resources on garbage.

The worst case is happening.

I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead. In pop culture, women are often objectified and disposed of. But even when we’re not being victimized, the alternative leaves much to be desired. This is by Brit Marling, so everyone should read it.

Why males pack a powerful punch.

Joe Biden’s Role in the Student Debt Crisis Dates to the 1970s.

How ‘Big Law’ Makes Big Money.

Four-Dimensional Geometry.

The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

How I Exploited a Command Injection in my Smart TV.

Study: Percentage of Companies Using Non-GAAP Metrics Rose from 59 to 96 Percent in 20 Years. In other words, nearly all fraudulent numbers.

The Rake.

New Software Glitch Found In Boeing 737 Max.

Christina Koch Lands on Earth, and Crosses a Threshold for Women in Space.

Analysing the first hypothesis reported in each paper, we found 96% positive results in standard reports, but only 44% positive results in Registered Reports.

Rising prevalence of BMI ≥40 kg/m²: A high‐demand epidemic needing better documentation.

Democrats Embrace the Grift. The decidedly Trumpian nonprofit behind the Iowa app debacle.

In Iowa, the Democratic Party’s Real Conspiracy Was Grift. “Incompetence” is often used to give conspiracies plausible deniability.

Pete Buttigieg’s success is making a Bernie Sanders nomination more likely.

Here’s a working paperclip computer from the 1967 book, “How to Build a Working Digital Computer.”

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy. The Iowa caucus disaster is a function of a broken economic structure that rewards con artistry over competence.

Anonymized Data Is Meaningless in the Face of Data Breaches.

No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in the Air. Do recent explanations solve the mysteries of aerodynamic lift?

Someone used neural networks to upscale a famous 1896 video to 4k quality.

On September 9, the U.S. 9th circuit court of Appeals ruled that web scraping public sites does not violate the CFAA (Computer Fraud and Abuse Act).

How knitters got knotted in a purity spiral.

The Missing Semester of Your CS Education.

How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class. Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities.

Massage Parlor Panic. A potent combination of puritanism, racism, and political opportunism is putting Asian masseuses and the people who support them in needless danger.

How Does Ibuprofen Actually Work? What happens inside your body after you pop an Advil.

Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Fiasco: Jeff Bezos Was Jealous of Elon Musk.

Historicizing the Self-Evident: An Interview with Lorraine Daston.

These results demonstrate that attractiveness activates approach-avoidance tendencies, even in the absence of any task demand.

Our findings suggest that approach biases towards food items are quite robust and do not rapidly change with dietary practice.

Check out the first-ever electric car designed by Porsche, the 1898 P1.

Graphene amplifier unlocks hidden frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum.

This 7,000-year-old well is the oldest wooden structure ever discovered, archaeologists say. It looks, uh, well-preserved I wood say.

Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be?

Taxing the Superrich. For the sake of justice and democracy, we need a progressive wealth tax.

Lost world revealed by human, Neanderthal relics washed up on North Sea beaches.

What Is ‘Fridging’, And How Can You Avoid It?

The true way out of embarrassment isn’t to attempt to expunge it entirely from our routines, it is to orchestrate deliberate occasions when it can have an honoured place in our social lives.

Revisiting the Psychology of Denial Concerning Low-Carbon Behaviors: From Moral Disengagement to Generating Social Change.

NASA Sets 2022 Launch For Air Quality Sensor That Will Provide Hourly Updates Across North America.

Japan Races to Build New Coal-Burning Power Plants, Despite the Climate Risks.

Good thread about the malaise of the modern world.

Why liberal white women pay a lot of money to learn over dinner how they’re racist. Please someone make it stop.

The Gap Between the Haves and Have-Nots of Tech Widens. Despite regulatory scrutiny and pressure from lawmakers, the industry’s wealthiest are continuing to grow at remarkable speeds for big companies. Gobbling up all — need antitrust now.

Heisenberg limit gets a meaningful update.

While Gopnik’s liberal commitment to openness may enjoin him to give the criticisms of liberalism a fair hearing, what never seems to occur to him is what Trilling felt viscerally: that the criticisms of liberalism could be true.

Among poorest 20 percent of Americans, one-third of income goes to health care: study.

The Rise of the Video Surveillance Industrial Complex.

A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64.

Raising a person in a culture full of types. We probably shouldn’t be telling children that who they are determines what they do.

Heterosexuality and its discontents. Why straight women seem to malign heterosexuality with such frequency.

Cantillation.

Human Needs.

Educated Fools.

Artificial Wombs Aren’t a Sci-Fi Horror Story.

Damn, I miss those days. There were no big walled gardens, no Twitter or Facebook. If you had anything to say to anyone, you had to put together your own website. It was amazing. Then the droolers invaded.

Bizarre neutrinos detected in Antarctica could open the door to new physics discoveries. Most neutrinos are created inside stars. Why are these coming from inside Earth?.

Space-time Is Swirling Around a Dead Star, Proving Einstein Right Again.

A Russian Satellite Appears To Be Shadowing an American Spy Satellite.

Bernie Sanders’s Surge Owes a Lot to Voters of Color.

Boomers Are Hanging Onto CEO Positions Like Grim Death.

How Walter Murch Brought More Immersive Sound to Film.

Lots of myths and half-truths circulate about Nordic countries like Finland. But make no mistake: socialists and militant workers built the Finnish welfare state — not an enlightened or pro-business elite.

The Rent Crisis Won’t Go Away Without More Housing. Hot cities need to get serious about allowing more construction.

How Private Equity Buried Payless. Finance-driven capitalism was supposed to make the economy more dynamic. A failed shoe chain shows why it hasn’t happened. Is more dynamic for the rich — all money dynamically flows to them.

How Capitalism Underdeveloped Rural America.

YouTube reversed my bogus copyright strike after I threatened to write this.

I had to get a background check for my job, and it turns out the report is a 300+ page pdf of every single tweet I’ve ever liked with the work “fuck” in it. Enjoy your dystopian bs! *waves*

‘You’re A Piece Of Shit And I Hope Everyone Like You Dies,’ Says Biden To Democratic Voter In Stirring Call For Party Unity.

No sex, please, we’re colleagues – the new rules of office romance. Another area where feminism and severe prudishness has gone off the rails.

Virtually All Major US Drinking Water Sources Likely Contaminated With PFAS.

“In Aggregate,” Consumers Are Doing Pretty Good, But America’s Vast Income Disparity Skew the Data.

Where Does Prosperity (Really) Come From?

The Problem With Fact Checkers.

A deep dive into the Apollo Guidance Computer, and the hack that saved Apollo 14. How on Earth do you patch the software on a computer orbiting the Moon? Very carefully.

How Capitalism Broke Young Adulthood. Boomers have socialism. Why not Millennials?

More Students Are Homeless Than Ever Before. Richest country in the world, right here.

Regaining Consensus on the Reliability of Memory.

Women with fair phenotypes seem to confer a survival advantage in a low UV milieu.

The disaster of utopian engineering. Neoliberalism, as a class project, is a brilliant success.

Human-caused biodiversity decline started millions of years ago.

The Brexit Blog: A day to mourn.

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.

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