Interesting Articles, Books and Viewpoints

Ridley Scott is a genius, but the westerno-centric based Prometheus leaves me thinking 'why would it be the Christ figure the Engineers send - that is such a western concept and a narrow world-view. Sorry Ridley, you are the man, but not in Prometheus and Covenant':: Prometheus contains such a huge amount of mythic resonance that it effectively obscures a ...

It’s well known by now that the super-wealthy are planning for the apocalypse. Whether they’re buying luxury bunkers or island nations, it’s clear that billionaires are preparing for the end of days with lavish and secure spaces where they hope to ride out whatever catastrophe might strike humanity next. Beginning Naomi Alderman’s new book, “The Future,” ...

In the dynamic world of science, women have played pivotal roles in reshaping the landscape of discovery and innovation. From breaking through glass ceilings to paving the way for future generations, female scientists have left an indelible mark on various fields. Their contributions, often overshadowed in the past, are now gaining the recognition they rightfully deserve.

These trailblazers are not ...

This book is beautifully written and it has stuck in my head long after finishing it. :: Ah, the Fuckwit world! So modern, so dead. Gone too soon, and all that’s left is blue. Which is just fine by Tetley Abednego, thank you very much. See, the world she lives in, the one left behind after the Fuckwits fucked off and ...

In memory of Mitch. Hey, das Moocher! Man, were you a big, fat, wonderful part of the best times of my life—from high school through our first Durban rage, all the Cape Town jols, varsity, and the mega Africa trips that changed our lives. We took an oath at Lake Bangweulu to leave the city for good, and we stayed true ...

Algorithms have become ubiquitous. They optimize our commutes, process payments, and coordinate the flow of internet traffic. It seems that for every problem that can be articulated in precise mathematical terms, there’s an algorithm that can solve it, at least in principle. But that’s not the case—some seemingly simple problems can never be solved algorithmically. The pioneering computer scientist Alan ...

This is a novel of grief: but bear with me, as it's so much more than that. Isaac is 29 years old. When we first meet him, he emerges from a black-out to find himself teetering on the edge of a bridge in the rainy night, his car dinging with its lights on, doors open, a sense of outrage ...

Man what a game, those last 10 minutes almost killed me! Handre Pollard kicked England out of the Rugby World Cup in a thrilling and bruising encounter at the Stade de France as a penalty in the dying minutes saw the Springboks move on to a second successive final. With remarkable symmetry, they overcame northern hemisphere opposition by a single point ...

5 stars for this brilliant, hard-core book :: Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private ...

A 3,700-year-old clay tablet has revealed that the ancient Babylonians understood the Pythagorean theorem more than 1,000 years before the birth of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who is widely associated with the idea. The tablet, known as Si.427, was used by ancient land surveyors to draw accurate boundaries and is engraved with cuneiform markings which form a mathematical table instructing ...

In the spirit of Booksmart and Plan B we now have final-year-of-school femme suspend-reality fight club and I'm loving it. Go girls, and believe me, I ain't going to be messing with you! :: There’s a lot one can say about Bottoms, the new film from Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman, but the best thing about it is that it is completely and utterly alive. From the ...

What a truly fabulous book this is. Thanks to Pan McMillan for this review :: 1987, New York City. There's only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that's her uncle, the renowned painter, Finn Weiss; he is her godfather, confident, and best friend. So when he dies far too young of a mysterious illness, June's world ...

EARLIER THIS MONTH, Sundar Pichai was struggling to write a letter to Alphabet’s 180,000 employees. The 51-year-old CEO wanted to laud Google on its 25th birthday, which could have been easy enough. Alphabet’s stock market value was around $1.7 trillion. Its vast cloud-computing operation had turned its first profit. Its self-driving cars were ferrying people around San Francisco. And ...

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, machine learning has become a driving force behind innovation, enabling businesses to harness the full potential of their data. Google, a pioneer in the field of AI and machine learning, has taken a giant leap forward with its Vertex AI platform, revolutionizing how organizations approach machine learning projects. This innovative platform promises to democratize ...

In the rush of modern life, we tend to lose touch with the peace that is available in each moment. World-renowned Zen master, spiritual leader, and author Thich Nhat Hanh shows us how to make positive use of the very situations that usually pressure and antagonize us. For him a ringing telephone can be a signal to call us back to ...

Thanks to Mark Horrell for this review:: Way back when I published my journal The Chomolungma Diaries in 2012, there were very few books (if any) about climbing Everest that had been written from the perspective of a commercial client. Yes, there was Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about the disastrous Adventure Consultants and Mountain Madness expeditions of 1996, probably the best-selling mountaineering book ever written. ...

Yes I know Banyana Banya is out (thanks Netherlands!), but now my support is fully behind the Matildas, they're kicking ass! Thanks to the Guardian for this overview of a killer match:: Gone were the ghosts of France 2019. The nightmare in Nice of four years ago – when the Matildas departed the last World Cup ...

Hey Rodriguez, you were there through it all for me and my friends and my siblings. Through primary school!, through high school, the goddamn army, Wits in the late 80's & early 90's with its astonishing smell of teargas and the end of tyranny. I heard you as the sun came up on Signal Hill and when it went down ...

Sadly, RSA got knocked out by the Netherlands, but :: It is no secret that the Women’s World Cup 2023 has been taking the world by storm! In this blog, we will take a look at the profound impact of the FIFA Women's World Cup 2023, transcending the realm of football to become a catalyst for empowering women ...

At age eleven, Malala Yousafzai was already advocating for the rights of women and girls. As an outspoken proponent for girls’ right to education, Yousafzai was often in danger because of her beliefs. However, even after being shot by the Taliban, she continued her activism and founded the Malala Fund with her father. By age seventeen, Yousafzai became the youngest ...

Fleabag is brilliant and Phoebe Waller-Bridge is some kind of remarkable genius and savant. Watch her in Crashing first. That show really needs a season 2 but sadly, that looks unlikely. Season 1 of Fleabag is heartbreaking and hilarious and humbling. Season 2 is some of the best TV ever made and I venture to say that the last episode ...

Submersible disasters are extraordinarily uncommon—and vessels are constructed to final. Girguis cites the Alvin: Commissioned in 1964, the deep-ocean analysis submersible was the primary crewed vessel to discover the Titanic wreckage, in 1986. It’s nonetheless in operation, having made greater than 5,000 dives. “I feel safer in a research submersible than I do on the highway,” says Girguis, who estimates he has ...

In the fast-paced world of data analysis, staying ahead of the curve is essential. With the ever-growing volume and complexity of data, traditional methods of analysis are often insufficient. However, a groundbreaking Python library called PandasAI is changing the game by seamlessly integrating Generative AI capabilities with the widely popular data analysis tool, pandas. In this blog post, we will ...

Black Mirror has recently returned to help make your 2023 more paranoid, with a sixth season recently dropping on Netflix. It's a show that began in 2011, and started to receive worldwide attention around 2016 (the first time it had a season produced by Netflix), so most surely know what the deal is with the premise by now. It's an ...

Doug Rushkoff, a prolific writer and media theorist, was one of the original believers in tech’s limitless potential. In the nineties, as a cyberpunk representative of Gen X, he championed the internet as the surest way forward to a renegade, antigovernment future. As Silicon Valley gave over to Big Tech, he stayed on the fringes, resolutely pushing his humanist values ...

All The Wild Things People Are Doing With Photoshop’s New Generative Fill Tool :: Since Adobe Photoshop launched its new artificial intelligence (AI) Generative Fill tool last week, the “photoverse” has been awash with its awesome power. PetaPixel has rounded up some of the most remarkable examples so far. And let's not leave out Midjourney, DALL-E. etc. 

10 out of 10 for this show. It is briliant. Terrifying and brilliant. :: If there was any debate about “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s place among the upper echelon of television storytellers, Armstrong snuffed it out by declaring the show’s fourth season would be its last. In interviews with Armstrong after he announced his intention to go ...

Yellowjackets is great! Thanks to the Guardian for this review:: After the 2021 press tour for the slasher movie Halloween Kills, a video of Jamie Lee Curtis went viral, highlighting just how many times she uttered the word “trauma”. She was speaking about one of the most common problems with “elevated horror” – genuine ...

Thanks to Sigal Samuel for this article:: For a few years now, I’ve been writing articles on neurotechnology with downright Orwellian headlines. Headlines that warn “Facebook is building tech to read your mind” and “Brain-reading tech is coming.” Well, the technology is no longer just “coming.” It’s here. With the help of AI, scientists from the University ...

South African sailor Kirsten Neuschäfer has just become the first woman to win the Golden Globe Race, a solo, round-the-world yacht race, and also won hearts by rescuing a fellow competitor whose boat had sunk. Les Sables d’Olonne, France (28 April 2023) – Kirsten Neuschäfer, a South African sailor from Gqeberha, has just made history by becoming the first woman to win ...

I went to Antarctica with SANAP for the period Dec 1998 to Feb 1999. The trip was 100 days, and I was on the ice with my mate, pretty much just the 2 of us and our skidoos and supplies, for 59 days. It's in my (unpublished) book, what follows is fiction, but a lot of the experience and emotions ...

The next stage in NASA’s audacious journey to bring back people to the surface of the Moon is called Artemis II, and the space agency has just revealed the names of the four scientists who will serve on its team. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and record-breaking Christina Koch, along with Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, have been named as ...

 I am ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI. I use artificial intelligence to understand natural language and generate responses to questions and prompts. I have been trained on a large corpus of text data, which allows me to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of topics. My goal is to assist users by answering their questions, providing ...

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced the release of GPT-4, its latest, biggest language model, only a few months after the splashy release of ChatGPT. GPT-4 was already in action — Microsoft has been using it to power Bing’s new assistant function. The people behind OpenAI have written that they think the best way to handle powerful AI systems is to develop and release ...

IN THE VILLAGE of Melness, a frayed twist of bungalows and old stone buildings on Scotland’s desolate northern shore, April is a month of new beginnings, when the dark and strung-out Highland winter finally unfurls into a tentative spring, and pregnant ewes balloon like airships in the wind-swept hills. As the 2015 lambing season neared its start, the villagers began the ...

Go NASA! It's Armageddon (the movie) time! In September of last year, after years of careful planning and development, NASA crashed a spacecraft smack into a rock drifting through the Solar System, just minding its own business. It wasn't for the sheer hatred of space rocks, or the joy of collisions; the motive behind this exercise was to test our ...

This show is a hoot. And no, it doesn't go well. In "Welcome to Wrexham," Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds learn to run the third oldest professional football club in the world. In 2020, Rob and Ryan teamed up to purchase the fifth tier Red Dragons in the hope of turning Wrexham AFC into an underdog story the whole world ...

In late 2021, 20-year-old Rueben Tauk asked his father for £50,000 ($67,000 at the time) to invest in YouTuber Logan Paul’s crypto project, CryptoZoo. Paul, one of the most famous influencers in the world, described CryptoZoo as a game in which you could hatch and breed hybrid NFT animals that would gain in value over time. Speaking in August 2021 ...

This is a fine book! No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving—every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the ...

What great book, and so well-written I've read it twice. The story is fascinating too - to think they got back to Cooper's Creek on the exact same day the rescue departed, thus dooming them, it's unbelievable! Thanks to Goodreads for the review :: They departed Melbourne's Royal Park in the summer of 1860, a misfit party of eighteen amateur ...

I love this show too. It's sense of place is spot on, the soundtrack is perfect and the characters are all classic. Erin's dad for instance, just gets more hilarous the more you get to know him. It's genuine, and I love it! Thanks to Rachel Aroesti & The Guardian for this review :: All good ...

I love this series, it's quiet and understated, thoughful, funny, quirky and basically brilliant. It's like comfort food. Thanks to Mackenzie Crook for creating it and the Guardian for this review :: It used to be customary for sitcoms to change their location when they returned, after the end of the regular series, with a film spin-off or ...

It's been a hell of a year! 2022 was no stranger to big news stories. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, midterm elections, and the list goes on. But visually, it’s those spaces in between that yield the interesting images. Captured moments that may not be headline worthy, but they create the fabric of the communities ...

A fine book, and a must read! Joanne Joseph’s Children of Sugarcane tells the story of Shanti Manickam’s journey from India in the 19th century to Port Natal in a bid to escape a forced marriage. Shanti plans to work on a sugarcane farm so that she can send money home to support her parents. The book began as a personal project when Joseph ...

Morocco made history Saturday as the first African team to reach a World Cup semifinal, defeating Portugal 1-0 to continue its sparkling run in Qatar. Youssef En-Nesyri scored the game’s only goal, rising highest to head the ball into the net just minutes before halftime, while Morocco’s defense once again kept a clean ...

The Boids algorithm is amazing! What is it? This is a simple demonstration of the boids algorithm that's featured in this Smarter Every Day video: How Flocking Birds Make Amazing Murmurations (Boids Algorithm) - Check the video out to learn how this simulation models flocking behavior in birds and other animals. How does it work? Each of the boids (bird-oid objects) ...

I used to think Elon Musk was a visionary. Now I think he's a megalomaniac freak with a God complex. Thanks to Hot Hardware News for this summary of his latest debacles on Twitter:: Musk's Twitter saga continues to evolve, as the company undergoes an extremely raucous 48 hours. The billionaire has been making some questionable changes in what he ...

A harrowing and outstanding read :: Adrift in a frigid sea, no land in sight—just debris from the ship's wreckage and floating corpses all around—nineteen-year-old Doaa Al Zamel floats with a small inflatable water ring around her waist and clutches two children, barely toddlers, to her body. The children had been thrust into Doaa's arms by their drowning relatives, all ...

An excellent book, Douglas Mawson is one of the greatest, up there with Shackleton. On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. ...

Norwegian mountaineer Kristin Harila is hoping to become the climber who ascends the world’s 14 highest peaks in record time, and she’s on track to accomplish it. This week, she summited Manaslu, which leaves only Shishapangma and Cho Oyu. In October 2019, Nirmal ‘Nims’ Purja posted “Mission achieved!” on social media from the summit of Shishapangma with his teammates Mingma ...

Bands that changed my life part 6 (in no particular order): King Crimson. If Durban gave us a taste of freedom, then my years at Wits were like having a 4lt Beer Stein of it poured over my head. Between being tear-gassed and getting an education, there was so much exposure to music over the next four years: new people with ...

I rate this film. It's about how our narcissism and selfishness have grave effects on the people around us. It's only when we stop thinking of ourselves that we can heal and become better people. We put on masks, it's only when we let them drop that we can forge real relationships. Thanks to The Guardian for this review :: ...

Look, it was awesome! But I didn't give it the respect it deserved by getting fit enough, so I deservedly suffered. I also had a weird fainting overheat spell on the way down which set the tone for dizziness and extremely slow snail paces over the next 6 days. I had only done 16km of a 66km hike after 3 ...

Bands that changed my life part 5 (in no particular order): Yes. Sometimes an album exists entirely encapsulated within a piece of space-time; you can’t listen to the music without remembering the time and place. This album is forever fixed in Durban at the end of 1986 for me. We’d just been repressed in high-school for 5 years, down-trodden by military ...

Bands that changed my life part 3 (in no particular order): Led Zeppelin. I’m not sure how it happened, but I didn’t really know Zep at all until much later on compared to other groups I still love. It just never blipped on the radar, and if I heard the name mentioned, I (weirdly) thought that they were a metal ...

What a fine film this is, with an absolutely brilliant ending! Thanks to Mark Kermode and The Guardian for this review. :: Tragedy, comedy and Kierkegaard collide like the highs and lows of an alcohol binge in Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, which won the Bafta for best film not in the English language, and Oscar for best ...

This is a hard-hitting, hectic book but it demands to be read. Thanks to the Guardian and Lamorna Ash for this review :: In all Claire Keegan’s stories, there is a family. The protagonist changes – the father, the mother, a son or daughter. But this figure never stands very far out in front. Instead, the narrative gains its ...

No, not the Rush song, the book by Percival Everett. It's short, sharp, shocked. It's funny and dreadful, and it demands to be read. It also demands to be made into a film, preferably by Jordan Peele. Thanks to Sandeep Sandhu for his review :: The first thing to say about Percival Everett’s latest effort, The Trees: A Novel, is ...

Bands that changed my life part 2 (in no particular order): Rush. If AC/DC exposed me to rock for the first time, then this album showed me how broad the scope of rock actually is and how a ‘thinking’ kick-ass rock band does exist. I had been to the drive-in (!) with my sister and her boyfriend and I don’t ...

The first images from the JWST are the bomb! Thanks to Space.com for this article :: The James Webb Space Telescope team has released the first science-quality images from the new telescope. In them are the oldest galaxies ever seen by human eyes, evidence of water on a planet 1,000 light-years away and incredible details showing the ...

What an astonishing story! The Shipwreck of the Batavia combines in just the one tale the birth of the world's first corporation, the brutality of colonisation, the battle of good vs evil, the derring-do of sea-faring adventure, mutiny, ship-wreck, love, lust, blood-lust, petty fascist dictatorship, criminality, a reign of terror, murders most foul, sexual slavery, natural nobility, survival, retribution, rescue, ...

We all know that numbers go on forever, that you could spend your life counting and never reach the end of the line, so there can’t be such a thing as a ‘biggest number’. Or can there? To find out, David Darling and Agnijo Banerjee embark on an epic quest, revealing the answers to questions like: are there more grains of ...

The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those dye molecules are going to slowly spread throughout the water. Physicists quantify this tendency to spread by counting the number of possible ways the dye molecules can be arranged. There’s one possible state where the molecules are crowded into ...

Thanks to Roger McNamee for this article:: As the person who helped Mark Zuckerberg recruit Sheryl Sandberg to Facebook, I take no joy in the news that Sandberg is leaving her post as chief operating officer. I first encountered Sheryl Sandberg when she was chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Larry Summers during the Clinton administration. Sandberg reached ...

Books by war correspondents highlight the difference between journalism and literature. No matter how terrible the atrocities or gruelling the reporter's experience, 300 pages of blood, thunder and self-promotion can be tedious. Not so Aidan Hartley's Zanzibar Chest. The former Reuters correspondent has written the most startling memoir of Africa for a generation. It is a complicated book. A ...

This is as profound as it gets. I am... well, let's be nice and say sceptical. And even this sceptic believes Eckart Tolle has direct connection to the truth. Relinquishing ego, engaging the watcher, and living in the now without judgement is the way. Now I just need to do it :) :: There comes a book, once in a ...

Astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. The image was produced by a ...

This one of the best travel books I have ever read. Of course, it's so much more than a travel book. It's about life, written by someone nearing the end of it. :: There’s a movement afoot (led in part by Mark Walker, see the interview below) to elevate Moritz Thomsen to the status of a Very Important Writer, someone ...

This could go badly, it worries me! :: Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa on 28 June 1971. His parents are South African engineer Errrol Musk and Canadian-South African model and dietician Maye Musk. Errol and Maye divorced in 1979 and Elon and his brother Kimbal decided to live with their father. However, Elon had a troubled relationship with ...

Click here for the interactive map! Some 240 million years ago, the patch of land that would one day become the National Mall was part of an enormous supercontinent known as Pangea. Encompassing nearly all of Earth’s extant land mass, Pangea bore little resemblance to our contemporary planet. Thanks to a recently released interactive map, however, interested ...

It’s no secret that remakes and series based on true stories dominate modern television: No beloved ‘90s show or shocking news story from recent years is safe from the greedy grasp of television executives. And while these shows can turn out to be great works in their own right, they lack novelty. Apple TV +’ new series “Severance,” which completed ...

EARLY ONE FALL morning in 2017, in a middle-class suburb on the outskirts of Atlanta, Chris Janczewski stood alone inside the doorway of a home he had not been invited to enter. Moments earlier, armed Homeland Security Investigations agents in ballistic vests had taken up positions around the tidy two-story brick house, banged on the front door, and when a member ...

This is an excellent book, don't believe the bad reviews - hogwash! This review is honest :: Let me preface this review by stating that I admire Carrot Quinn tremendously. I have been a reader of her blog since 2014, and have cheered her along every step of the Continental Divide Trail this year. She’s a fantastic blogger — but ...

John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing, about a group of scientists battling a shape-shifting alien, is a classic of sci-fi horror. Humor writer Tom Gerencer is one of the film’s many fans. “This movie is woven through my life in so many ways,” Gerencer says in Episode 506 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I ...

Happy Pi Day! This image is a visualization of the first 1,000 digits of Pi, shown as links between successive digits. The 10 different segments around the circle each represent a digit 0 through 9. For each pair of adjacent digits in Pi, the curves in the center of the circle connect a pair of segments associated with these digits. ...

Documenting a project well is one of the most important aspects of the development lifecycle of any project as at the end of the day this will be shared and communicated with all the stakeholders, for example, clients, project managers, other developers etc whosoever associated with the project. Now descriptive and easy to understand images and diagrams are one ...

Here we go again:: Russian forces now in control of territory to the north-west of Kyiv continued their assault on the capital on Saturday, with reports of a rocket fired at an apartment block and street fighting around the edge of the city. The president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in a video message that Ukrainian forces were in control of the ...

This is not so much a buddy-cop movie as it is being thrust into the front seat of an LA patrol car in South Central with "throat-grabbing immediacy". It's raw and appalling and tense and funny, it's harrowing and and moving. I haven't rooted for american law enforcement in a movie in about 35 years, but I did in this one. Jake ...

Early this week, the public got statements from two middle-aged men with shaved heads. One is Daniel Ek, a Swedish billionaire who heads Spotify, the audio streaming company. The other is Joe Rogan, a comedian and wrestling commentator turned podcaster, whose show lives exclusively on Spotify. In an episode that went live on December 31, Rogan’s guest spun conspiracy theories ...

This makes me feel ill where I didn't know I could feel ill. Thanks to WIRED for the article. THIS WEEK, SPOTIFY removed the musical catalog of Neil Young from its platform. On Monday, the legendary rocker published a letter decrying the Swedish streamer for spreading false information about Covid-19 vaccines. In it, he cited the Spotify-exclusive podcast The Joe Rogan Experience in particular: ...

I need to see this! If you were able to create an immortal version of yourself, would you? Until this decade, that question was the stuff of science fiction, but now experts in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics suggest it will indeed be possible. This cinematic documentary explores the latest technological advancements in AI, robotics ...

The James Webb Telescope will scan the cosmos for light streaming from stars and galaxies formed 13.7 billion years ago. The James Webb Space Telescope has completed a tricky two-week-long deployment phase, unfolding its huge, gold-plated, flower-shaped mirror panel as it readies to study every phase of cosmic history. Engineering teams at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, cheered ...

When Paul and I were starting Microsoft, we had a vision that personal computers would one day play a significant role in people’s lives. But I don’t think either of us ever foresaw a future where they would be your only connection to the world. Like many people, there were entire days this year when the only human interaction I ...

It was a lurching, stammering year that began in hope, flirted with whiplash, and shuddered to a halt. In 2021, miraculously effective vaccines showed up, a new President promised unity, and a jury convicted the man who killed George Floyd. It was also the year that supporters of the losing candidate took over the U.S. Capitol, Asian-Americans were given new ...

OneZoom is a one-stop site for exploring all life on Earth, its evolutionary history, and how much of it is threatened with extinction. The OneZoom explorer – available at onezoom.org – maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species known to science. The interactive tree of life allows users to zoom in ...

Thanks to Ismael Araujo for pointing us to this cool library! :: A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about Bamboolib that became quite popular. The blog was very well received, achieving tens of thousands of views in the first week. And after that, I had planned to write about other Data Science-related subjects and was going to ...

Nims Purja has achieved what I would have definitely called the impossible, and this movie is a must watch. It perforce has to rush through the feat, so read Nims' book, Beyond Possible too :: With the success of films like "Free Solo" and the popularity of the "Reel Rock Film Festival," and the recent release of "The ...

TO HEAR TECH CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg or Satya Nadella talk about it, the metaverse is the future of the internet. Or it's a video game. Or maybe it's a deeply uncomfortable, worse version of Zoom? It's hard to say. To a certain extent, talking about what “the metaverse” means is a bit like having a discussion ...

ON SEPTEMBER 26, 2018, a row of tech executives filed into a marble- and wood-paneled hearing room and sat down behind a row of tabletop microphones and tiny water bottles. They had all been called to testify before the US Senate Commerce Committee on a dry subject—the safekeeping and privacy of customer data—that had recently been making large numbers of people ...

Frances Haugen is a legend! Thanks to Protocol and Issie Lapowsky for this story :: Facebook knows a thing or two about optimizing content for outrage. As it turns out, so does Frances Haugen. Or at least, the heavyweight team of media and political operatives helping manage the rollout of her massive trove of internal documents seems to ...

Exciting stuff from Harry Cliff, particle physicist, University of Cambridge :: The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sparked worldwide excitement in March as particle physicists reported tantalizing evidence for new physics – potentially a new force of nature. Now, our new result, yet to be peer reviewed, from CERN's gargantuan particle collider seems to be adding further support to the idea. Our current best ...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended the widespread use of a malaria vaccine among children in Africa and other areas of high malaria transmission – a breakthrough in the long fight against the deadly disease. Malaria is a parasite-caused disease that's been around for thousands of years and is transmitted primarily via mosquito bites. It ...

I need to read this: Thiel embodies all the dangers we face from the far right, the ultra-monied, cut-throat libertarianism and the internet's voyage from utopian vision to roiling mass of hyper deplorables and breeding ground for a sharp departure from critical thinking. At least I think Thiel embodies those things, I haven't read it yet! :: A sharp and ...

Thanks to Christopher on GoodReads for this review :: From exposing security issues during the early days of the Internet to quashing modern-day political misinformation, one group of hackers has been through it all: Cult of the Dead Cow. By latching onto their own branch of “hacktivism”, this group has morphed from an eclectic group of enthusiasts to a movement ...

THE NOTION OF dimension at first seems intuitive. Glancing out the window we might see a crow sitting atop a cramped flagpole experiencing zero dimensions, a robin on a telephone wire constrained to one, a pigeon on the ground free to move in two and an eagle in the air enjoying three. But as we’ll see, finding an explicit definition for ...

Fascinating, I couldn't put it down! Thanks to the Guardian for this review:: It is perhaps a little hard to remember now, but in 2010, there seemed to be a new global superpower. A superpower that acted in unorthodox ways, which was unaccountable and yet of the people, and that was above all nameless, faceless and, as it styled itself, 

Horror movies frequently feature a “final girl,” a female character who survives to the end of the movie when most—or all—of the other characters do not. Stephen Graham Jones, author of My Heart Is a Chainsaw, is a big fan of the final girl trope. “The final girl is to the slasher as the silver bullet is to the ...

This book is good stuff and I can't wait for the next in the series! J.S. Dewes is a Columbia College grad who writes using her initials because there is still a gender bias when it comes to reading science fiction. Boo! Dewes is helping break that bias. Yay! Thanks to Allison Epstein for this review:: A band of scrappy criminal ...

Wow, this is scathing! Doctorow was co-editor for Boing Boing, and writes for Wired, so I'm inclined to believe he knows what he's talking about. Also, he has meticulously linked articles that support everything he is saying. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for this article :: Uber is a bezzle (“the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money ...

Thanks, Scott Aaronson & Quanta Magazine for this article:: Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically ...

Here is a map of mathematics as it stands today, mathematics as it is practiced by mathematicians. From simple starting points — Numbers, Shapes, Change — the map branches out into interwoven tendrils of thought. Follow it, and you’ll understand how prime numbers connect to geometry, how symmetries give a handle on questions of infinity. And although ...

Not a bad list, I'll go with it, but I'd add Palm Springs & Boss Level because they are a helluva lot of fun! Thanks to Wired for this list :: TIME—RAVAGER OF YOUTH; spoiler of milk; humanity’s oldest and deadliest foe. Yet in films we can conquer time easily: running it forwards and backward, skipping into the future or past with ...

Today is Mandela Day - thank you Madiba, for everything. Sincerely, South Africa. The Long Walk to Freedom is an absolute must read:: "Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama. Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose ...

THE SKY OVER the Spaceport American in Las Cruces, New Mexico, was afire with lightning last night. The storm was sufficiently fierce to postpone Virgin Galactic’s planned rollout of its twin airships, mothership Eve and a space vehicle called VSS Unity, from their hangar. The delay meant that lift-off for today’s planned flight, which would send a crew on Unity ...

Rick & Morty is the greatest 'toon on television. It's the greatest 'toon ever devised! A friend kept telling me to watch it, now I rev him by saying: "Dude, why didn't you tell me to watch it." It's profound, ludicrous, deranged, inappropriate, highly intelligent and the single correct word to describe it is magnificent. It's so good, that I'll ...

First published in April 1959, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes remains fundamentally profound and will never become irrelevant. It's not tied to a time at all, and its themes are what it means to be human, why we are alive, the nature and worth of intelligence and how we handle and treat those not like us. You know, the small stuff? ...

Spoilers ahead! David Lynch is a master craftsman and this is his most accessible work, I think (at least of his work that I've seen). The story actually does make sense, even the nightmare behind the diner sequence (contact me, I'll explain :) - there are clues as to the true nature of the story everywhere in this opus). And ...

Nothing fires the imagination like an anonymous hero with a secret identity. It’s been an enduring trope since the Scarlet Pimpernel rescued his first aristocrat from Madame la Guillotine. From Batman to the street artist Banksy, each hero has his own reason for donning the mask of anonymity. This phenomenon has come to the world of finance in the person ...

I love the trend towards femino-centric coming-of-age movies. Booksmart was just brilliant, now we have another fine addition to the genre in Plan B. It's girl power from the jump, and it's mostly hilarious. Brilliant actresses take the lead, but there's a deadly serious under-current of how our society treats young women, autonomy over the body, access to contraception and reproductive ...

Thanks to OneZero & Thomas Smith for this article:: I have a photographic memory, and I’m a time-space synesthete. That means I can visualize, in photorealistic detail, basically any place I’ve ever been. I can also imagine nonexistent places and fly around them in my brain like I’m in a video game. It’s a cool thing to ...

LAST WEEK, WHEN Elon Musk tweeted that he had spoken with the team of Doge developers about how to make the coin more efficient, the impact was predictable: It sent the price of Dogecoin to the moon. It was just the latest in a series of Musk declarations that has sent the viral coin on a roller coaster over the past few ...

What an astonishing and beautiful book this is. Surfing as a metaphor for life. Surfing as life! It's so well written it simply stops you in your tracks sometimes. :: Surfing appears to get you nowhere. You paddle out, you sprint for a wave, you ride it shorewards … and repeat. The sessions last hours; the rides, seconds. ...

TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES LIKE to portray artificial intelligence as a precise and powerful tool for good. Kate Crawford says that mythology is flawed. In her book Atlas of AI, she visits a lithium mine, an Amazon warehouse, and a 19th-century phrenological skull archive to illustrate the natural resources, human sweat, and bad science underpinning some versions of the technology. Crawford, ...

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully completed its second Mars flight on April 22 – the 18th sol, or Martian day, of its experimental flight test window. Lasting 51.9 seconds, the flight added several new challenges to the first, which took place on April 19, including a higher maximum altitude, longer duration, and sideways movement. “So far, the engineering telemetry we have ...

When starting a new supervised Machine Learning project, one of the first steps is to analyze the data, understand what we are trying to accomplish, and which machine learning algorithms could help us achieve our goals. While the scikit-learn library makes our lives easier by making possible to run models with a few lines of code, it can also be time-consuming ...

This is a pretty awesome tool from MS Research! :: Data visualisation is an area where experimentation is rewarded. It is important to be able to rapidly prototype ideas when creating charts. It is easy to think up impressive ways of building a graph to show a trend in a data set only to find out that, once created, ...

IT STARTED WITH CryptoKitties. In December 2017, the dopey-looking cartoon cats, created by Canadian company Dapper Labs, debuted as tradable collectibles, like Pokémon cards for the bitcoin era. Each image was associated with a unique string of digits—a cryptocurrency “non-fungible token,” or NFT—that could be traded on the Ethereum blockchain platform as a title deed granting the holder ownership ...

TWO YEARS AGO, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) made headlines with its announcement of the first direct image of a black hole. Science magazine named the image its Breakthrough of the Year. Now the EHT collaboration is back with another groundbreaking result: a new image of the same black hole, this time showing how it looks in polarized ...

Let me very clear about my opinion here: Twitter was created by 3 good guys, and Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey does not play well with others. I just wish the others had seen that. Thanks to WIRED for this overview of a fascinating book:: THEY SAY HISTORY is written by the victors. And that's usually true—unless the losers have powerful allies ...

I just finished American Kingpin. Fascinating - read it immediately! Thanks to Medium for this article :: THE POSTMAN ONLY rang once. Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini doughnuts. Fingers frosted synthetic white, he was startled to hear someone at the door. It was 11 am, and ...

Dispatches is like mainlining Vietnam, I've read dozens of books on Vietnam by now, and this one is the one that stays with me the most. Despite every other kind of progress, humanity still lives and dies in conditions of either war or peace, a truth reflected in our literature. There is still a place for a great ...

Jason Lewis was 26, broke and cleaning windows when he and a college friend decided to embark on an adventure around the world using only human power, one of the last great firsts to conquer. No-one had ever circumnavigated the earth under their own steam - no motors, no sails. But Jason and his friend Stevie Smith had little experience. ...

The Expanse

Space Opera! I love this show, it's absolutely splendid! WHEN the Syfy channel pulled the plug on The Expanse three seasons in, that looked to be it for the sprawling TV show. But then Amazon picked it up for a fourth season, the show went on and a fifth season could come out at any time. What we have now is a ...

Read More | Feb. 7, 2021

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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Solvatore ambulando, it is solved by walking; said Bruce Chatwin. And that's what Cheryl Strayed did, she fixed her life by walking through it. It's a beautiful book (and movie for that matter), and it's a must-read. From the Guardian: In this hugely entertaining book, Cheryl Strayed takes the redemptive nature of travel – a theme as old as literature itself ...

Read More | Jan. 31, 2021

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Buried in the Sky

What an excellent book. I've been reading so much about climbers on Everest, K2, Annapurna, but how often do you read about the people who make it all happen and are hardly ever mentioned? Without the Sherpas none of it would be possible :: When Edmund Hillary first conquered Mt. Everest, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was at his side. Indeed, for as ...

Read More | Jan. 24, 2021

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Culture Warlords

Talia Lavin is every skinhead’s worst nightmare: a loud and unapologetic Jewish woman, acerbic, smart, and profoundly antiracist, with the investigative chops to expose the tactics and ideologies of online hatemongers. Culture Warlords is the story of how Lavin, a frequent target of extremist trolls (including those at Fox News), dove into a byzantine online culture of hate and learned the intricacies ...

Read More | Jan. 17, 2021

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Platforms Must Pay for Their Role in the Insurrection

"Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it." I particularly detest the argument "Is the telecom provider responsible for the content of people's conversations"? The bleddy telecom provider doesn't start your call with "Hi press 1 to connect with a group call ...

Read More | Jan. 10, 2021

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Tim Minchin’s Ode to Reason

Australian performer and comedian Tim Minchin, known for his eyeliner and for his staunch defence of reason and healthy scepticism, wrote a song called Storm that went down a… well, storm. It’s become as well-known as Minchin’s Pope Song (if you haven’t heard that one, you should), and has now been released in book format using magnificent illustrations by DC Turner to ...

Read More | Jan. 3, 2021

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The Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2020

For many of us, 2020 has been a very dangerous year. Alongside the usual headline grabbers like wars, violent crime, and terrorism, we also faced more insidious, creeping threats: a pandemic that has claimed more than 300,000 American lives, and the lives of 1.5 million people worldwide, thanks in part to waves of viral lies dismissing Covid-19's deathly serious effects. Hackers who ...

Read More | Dec. 30, 2020

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David Ballam Fine Art Photography

David Ballam is a genius and I love his work:: David Ballam was born and schooled in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first attended university in Cape Town but later moved to Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape. He was introduced to the camera by Obie Oberholzer and in 2004 gained his Fine Art Degree with Honours in photography. David returned to ...

Read More | Dec. 20, 2020

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Themba Khumalo Art Studio

Themba Khumalo is a Soweto raised and now Johannesburg based visual artist, born in 1987. In his 10-year professional career he’s had over 20 group show appearances, featured in just over 10 art fairs, and has had 5 solo shows – both locally and internationally. His current art subject Emhlabeni reflects the social, political, and spiritual landscape in current South Africa and ...

Read More | Dec. 13, 2020

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Humans on Mars by 2024

Humankind’s quest to set up base on Mars has received a boost as scientists have now claimed to have discovered a way that can help extract oxygen and fuel from the salty water found on the red planet. The water which is salty due to the Martian soil can't be used for drinking purposes. Even electrolysis, the usual method of ...

Read More | Dec. 6, 2020

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Girl Decoded

I'm really enjoying this, a life of science seen through the lens of someone brought up traditionally in Egypt and Kuwait. In a captivating memoir, an Egyptian American visionary and scientist provides an intimate view of her personal transformation as she follows her calling—to humanize our technology and how we connect with one another. Rana el Kaliouby is a rarity in ...

Read More | Nov. 22, 2020

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The Queen's Gambit

Great show, and Anna Taylor-Joy is a revelation! :: In 1884, the American star chess player Paul Morphy was found dead in his bathtub, at the age of forty-seven. “The pride and the sorrow of chess is gone forever,” the Austrian chess master Wilhelm Steinitz wrote in an elegy, the following year. Morphy had begun winning citywide tournaments in his ...

Read More | Nov. 15, 2020

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"America is ready. And so are Joe and I."

Congratulations to Joe Biden and to the USA's first Black and Indian-American woman Vice President, Kamala Harris. Here's her speech:: Good evening. Congressman John Lewis, before his passing, wrote: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” And what he meant was that America’s democracy is not guaranteed. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it, to ...

Read More | Nov. 8, 2020

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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

No, it's not well written. But yes, it is terrifying - a group of young analysts were given a toy (unlimited facebook user data), and were allowed to play with it. No surprise that we have ended up we we are now :: For the first time, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower tells the inside story of the data mining and ...

Read More | Nov. 1, 2020

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Permanent Record

Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment ...

Read More | Oct. 25, 2020

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The Moment of Lift

Another must read. I really wish my daughter inhabited a world where at least 50% of politicians, business leaders and decision makers were women. What a significantly better world it would be. Barack Obama: "When you lift up women, you lift up everybody - families, communities, entire countries... In her book, Melinda tells the stories of the inspiring people she's met ...

Read More | Oct. 18, 2020

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Pioneering CRISPR Genome Editing Technique Wins 2020 Nobel Chemistry Prize

Yay! French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their development of the CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technique, an approach that has often been lauded in the news as a future panacea, capable of curing any ailment. The two scientists win the 10-million kronor (about $1.12 million) prize, which they will share ...

Read More | Oct. 11, 2020

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Quantum Entanglement Realised Between Distant Large Objects

A team of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have succeeded in entangling two very different quantum objects. The result has several potential applications in ultra-precise sensing and quantum communication and is now published in Nature Physics. Entanglement is the basis for quantum communication and quantum sensing. It can be understood as a quantum link between two objects ...

Read More | Oct. 4, 2020

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Raised by Wolves

This show is good stuff, watch it! :: NO ONE IN HBO Max’s new science fiction drama Raised by Wolves is who they used to be. Humans have flung themselves from a decaying, technologically advanced society to a deserted planet where they grow tubers and scrabble at fungus. Religious order and hierarchy have been replaced by chaos as hardship and whispering voices unspool ...

Read More | Sept. 27, 2020

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Google Maps For Your Entire Life

Google Street View emerged from a seemingly insane vision: Put cameras on cars, and drive them around the entire world to capture every street on the planet. Over time, that data became more and more valuable. The footage from those cars automatically updates Google Maps with new business signs and changes street names. Data from the car’s ...

Read More | Sept. 20, 2020

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Facebook’s Deadly Impact

On the morning of August 25, a self-proclaimed militia group on Facebook called Kenosha Guard put out a public call for people to “take up arms” and defend the city of Kenosha, Wisconsin, from “evil thugs” — that is, people protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, two days earlier. Responses rolled in throughout the ...

Read More | Sept. 13, 2020

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How Social Media Is Hacking Our Brains

Thanks to Medium & OneZero for this article:: On my recent birthday, only four of my 711 Facebook “friends” wrote on my wall. It was tempting to assume that people scrolling their news feeds saw it was my birthday and thought “Nah, not interested.” My rational brain, however, knew it wasn’t my friends who lacked basic decency, but the algorithms that ...

Read More | Sept. 6, 2020

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Why Django Is The Best Web Framework

Django was created by two programmers working for the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas. The newspaper needed a web application to publish news online. Eventually, the creators of Django realized that their solution had evolved into a real framework and made it publicly available. Once Django formed a community, its development took off, and the number of websites using Django grew ...

Read More | Aug. 30, 2020

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In All Its Wonderful and Horrific Glory

220,000 Reddit users got involved in an experiment: “There is an empty canvas. You may place a tile upon it, but you must wait to place another. Individually, you can create something. Together you can create something more.” Each user could only change 1 pixel, every 5 minutes. if you wanted to achieve anything at scale, good or ...

Read More | Aug. 23, 2020

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OpenAI’s GPT-3

“Playing with GPT-3 feels like seeing the future,” Arram Sabeti, a San Francisco–based developer and artist, tweeted last week. That pretty much sums up the response on social media in the last few days to OpenAI’s latest language-generating AI. OpenAI first described GPT-3 in a research paper published in May. But last week it began drip-feeding the software to ...

Read More | Aug. 23, 2020

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Did a Person Write This Headline?

THE TECH INDUSTRY pays programmers handsomely to tap the right keys in the right order, but earlier this month entrepreneur Sharif Shameem tested an alternative way to write code. First he wrote a short description of a simple app to add items to a to-do list and check them off once completed. Then he submitted it to an artificial intelligence system called ...

Read More | Aug. 16, 2020

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Underland

Thanks to The Guardian for this review of an excellent must-read:: Last Christmas, perhaps wishing to get rid of an unwanted appendage to the family, my mother-in-law bought me a potholing experience in, or rather under, Snowdonia. I was led down an abandoned mine shaft which opened out on to a narrow ledge overlooking an apparently bottomless chasm. I experienced ...

Read More | Aug. 9, 2020

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Go, Perseverance!

ON THURSDAY MORNING, NASA launched its new Mars rover, Perseverance, on a six-month journey to the Red Planet. The car-sized rover was boosted into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket that departed from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It’s the third and final Mars mission to depart Earth this summer; earlier in July, China and the United ...

Read More | Aug. 2, 2020

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First Direct Image of Two Exoplanets Orbiting a Sunlike Star

How would our solar system look from the vicinity of another star? Using technologies similar to ours, alien astronomers would have a tough time photographing our small, rocky Earth. They might more easily manage to capture images of our solar system’s biggest planets, the large gaseous worlds Jupiter and Saturn. Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far orbiting distant stars, ...

Read More | July 27, 2020

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Arithmetising Metamathematics

IN 1931, THE Austrian logician Kurt Gödel pulled off arguably one of the most stunning intellectual achievements in history. Mathematicians of the era sought a solid foundation for mathematics: a set of basic mathematical facts, or axioms, that was both consistent—never leading to contradictions—and complete, serving as the building blocks of all mathematical truths. But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published ...

Read More | July 20, 2020

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The Maths of Herd Immunity

WHILE MUCH ABOUT the Covid-19 pandemic remains uncertain, we know how it will likely end: when the spread of the virus starts to slow (and eventually ceases altogether) because enough people have developed immunity to it. At that point, whether it’s brought on by a vaccine or by people catching the disease, the population has developed herd immunity. "Once the ...

Read More | July 12, 2020

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Measuring Happiness

It’s what most people say they want. So how do we know how happy people are? You can’t improve or understand what you can’t measure. In a blow to happiness, we’re very good at measuring economic indices and this means we tend to focus on them. With our flagship instrument at hedonometer.org we’ve created an instrument that measures the happiness ...

Read More | July 6, 2020

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Facebook to Label All Rule-Breaking Posts

If Mark Zee opened a bar, he would welcome patrons like the imperial wizard of the KKK, Pol Pot and hell, Hitler himself without batting an eyelid, on the grounds that some light discourse on genocide is cool and helps the human race to prosper. Take away some of his advertising dollars however, and lookie, he implements some changes. The ...

Read More | June 28, 2020

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Facebook Groups Are Destroying America

In case my opinion on this hasn't been clear enough: Zuckerberg has gone from pioneer to plain and simple pillager of all our critical thinking. He stands for nothing, and thus he lets users fall for anything. I've just watched the series Devs, and it's remarkable: it may be more style than substance but hell, what style! Beautifully made, great ...

Read More | June 22, 2020

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An Army of Volunteers Is Taking On Vaccine Disinformation Online

The biggest problem we are facing: disinformation. It threatens our civilisation, and no I'm not joking. I actually believe it. Let's fight back:: AS RESEARCHERS, PHARMA companies, and governments around the world are racing to make a vaccine against the pandemic coronavirus in record time, there’s a growing concern that many Americans won’t want it when it arrives. In a series of ...

Read More | June 17, 2020

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Mark Zuckerberg Believes Only in Mark Zuckerberg

The Zuck has gone from pioneer to democracy pirate. He stands for nothing, and thus he lets us fall for anything. He is the 21st century's greatest failure, and he really pisses me off. Thanks to WIRED for this article :: WHAT DOES MARK Zuckerberg believe? What does he really care about? How could a man who 

Read More | June 5, 2020

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SpaceX Launched Two Astronauts, Changing Spaceflight Forever

It’s Saturday morning and in just four hours astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley are expected to become the first humans to ride a Dragon. The veterans of NASA’s space shuttle program are scheduled to catch a lift to the International Space Station inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which will be boosted to orbit by the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. ...

Read More | June 1, 2020

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The Hacker Who Saved the Internet

AT AROUND 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6'4", 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and ...

Read More | May 12, 2020

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A Doctor’s Journey Into the Pandemic

THERE IS NO hope of outrunning the suffering that has settled into the hospital and the world around it, so Andrew Ibrahim laces up his blue waterproof sneakers and walks. In the time it has taken the daffodils to poke through the loamy soil and dapple Ann Arbor with pale yellow blossoms—about as long as it has taken Covid-19 to ...

Read More | May 4, 2020

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One Earth. Let Technology Save It.

NOT LONG AGO, in more innocent times, I was driving with my three sons back from trying to ski on a mountain that doesn't really have snow anymore, and we were talking about climate change. This was before the pandemic, and before our conversations shifted to discussions of what viruses are and why soap, miraculously, can kill them. The kids ...

Read More | April 23, 2020

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NASA Wants to Photograph the Surface of an Exoplanet

IT WASN’T THAT long ago that the only known planets in our galaxy were those orbiting our own sun. But over the past few decades, astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets and concluded that they outnumber the stars in our galaxy. Many of these alien worlds have fantastic properties, such as planet-wide oceans of lava or clouds that rain iron. ...

Read More | April 16, 2020

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Wired Makes Corona News Free

The job of a journalist is to keep the public informed. At its best, our profession helps to shine lights where light isn’t being shined and help people make the billions of little decisions that flap the butterfly wings that govern our world. That always matters, but it’s hard to think of a moment in my lifetime where it has ...

Read More | April 6, 2020

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A Bright Shiny COVID Model

An excellent model developed by Alison Hill:: The graph shows the expected numbers of individuals over time who are infected, recovered, susceptible, or dead over time. Infected individuals first pass through an exposed/incubation phase where they are asymptomatic and not infectious, and then move into a symptomatic and infections stage classified by the clinical status of infection (mild, severe, or ...

Read More | March 30, 2020

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Earth Looks Peaceful From Up Here

With South Africa (like many other countries) on lock-down from this Thursday, for 21 days and the world in turmoil some peaceful contemplation is in order. After Voyager 1 completed its mission and was on its way out of the solar system, it turned to look back on Valentine’s Day 1990. The scientist Carl Sagan who worked on the Voyager team, ...

Read More | March 24, 2020

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14.7 Billion Years in 19m26s

Well hell, that's brilliant! If you have 19m26s on your hands and want to watch 14.7 billion years of remarkably accurate (so far as we currently know) history, aimed at GenZees with a 19m26s attention span (and me), created by someone astonishingly creative and talented, in one longcontinuousexposition (that reads 'exposition', not 'sex position', getyourmindoutofthegutter and read it again), kind ...

Read More | March 19, 2020

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Everything Is Cancelled

As of this week, many parts of life on Earth look very different. The stock market is collapsing again and even beloved celebrities aren’t safe from global pandemics. Harvey Weinstein is going to prison for 23 years. Billie Eilish addressed body shaming during a concert. Meanwhile, Sarah Palin performed "Baby Got Back" on The Masked Singer, and scientists have decided ...

Read More | March 17, 2020

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Covid-19 in Real Time

Coronaviruses (CoV) are a large family of viruses that cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV). A novel coronavirus (nCoV) is a new strain that has not been previously identified in humans. Coronaviruses are zoonotic, meaning they are transmitted between animals and people. Detailed investigations found ...

Read More | March 13, 2020

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Exponential Growth and Epidemics

Check out this amazing explanation of exponential growth applied to the corona virus. 3Blue1Brown is a mathematics YouTube channel created by Grant Sanderson. The channel focuses on higher education mathematics with a distinct visual perspective. Some of the topics covered include linear algebra, calculus, neural networks, the Riemann hypothesis, Fourier ...

Read More | March 10, 2020

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Python Is More Popular Than Ever

I love Python, so I'm pleased with this - it's now ranked #2 in the world! Thanks to Wired for this article :: Python is one of the world’s most popular programming languages. In fact, it’s more so than ever. Python climbed from third place to tie for second in the latest ranking of ...

Read More | March 4, 2020

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Ideas Beyond Lunacy

The physicist Freeman Dyson, who has died aged 96, became famous within science for mathematical solutions so advanced that they could only be applied to complex problems of atomic theory and popular with the public for ideas so far-fetched they seemed beyond lunacy. As a young postgraduate student, Dyson devised – while taking a Greyhound bus ride in America – ...

Read More | March 2, 2020

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RIP: Katherine Johnson

Women in Science, they've always been there, and they've contributed so much. Can we start recognizing them please? RIP Katherine Johnson:: It was not the most arresting of titles: in 1959 the African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson, who has died aged 101, completed a paper entitled Determination of Azimuth Angle at ...

Read More | Feb. 25, 2020

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Years and Years

I loved this show. It feels like authentic and pretty terrifying near future. Which is what we're basically living at the moment! Here's how WIRED and the good people at Geek's Guide to the Galaxy see it:: The recent HBO series Years and Years, created by former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies, was excellent, but flew under the radar for many sci-fi ...

Read More | Feb. 24, 2020

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195-Billion Pixel Shanghai

Why am I posting a link to the world's third largest photo? Because the photo exists, and because it's cool! It was taken by Jingkun Technology, who are a “world-class innovative enterprise that focuses on creative photography and cloud data processing.” It was taken from the Oriental Pearl Tower back in 2015. As per the company’s website, ...

Read More | Feb. 20, 2020

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New Female Space Record

Nasa astronaut Christina Koch has completed the longest-ever single spaceflight by a woman. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Koch parachuted down to the grasslands of Kazakhstan at around 09:12 GMT. She spent 328 days on the International Space Station (ISS), surpassing the previous record held by fellow American Peggy Whitson. Her stay is just 12 days short of ...

Read More | Feb. 17, 2020

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The Internet Is a Toxic Hellscape

At the risk of being boring, I have a theme at the moment: how disinformation, AI-drive social media and toxicity on the 'Net is altering our view of the fabric of reality itself. Case in point, facebook and social media are now a sufficient force to win an entire country in an election. See how here. Now read this ...

Read More | Feb. 10, 2020

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The Secret History of Facial Recognition

WIRED's Longreads always have something worthwhile in them. Take this one for instance, the early origins of facial recognition. Unlike other world-changing technologies whose apocalyptic capabilities became apparent only after years in the wild—see: social media, YouTube, quadcopter drones—the potential abuses of facial-recognition technology were apparent almost from its birth at Panoramic. Many of the biases that we may write ...

Read More | Feb. 2, 2020

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30 Photos From Mars

30 seconds to Mars? 30 Photos from Mars! Oh Curiosity, you are such a plucky little rover! NASA’s Curiosity has been on Mars for more than 7 years and here are its 30 best photos. As for NASA, you are just the bomb! Keep doing what you do, and thanks to Bored panda for this article:: For us, mere mortals, ...

Read More | Jan. 30, 2020

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Being Mortal

This is the best book I've read about getting old and dying. Which sounds depressing, and I suppose you could see it like that. But it's also stark cold reality, so why pretend it's not going to happen to every single one of us? Dr Atul Gawande takes us on a brilliant and deeply thoughtful journey through the last stages of ...

Read More | Jan. 27, 2020

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Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes: the closest thing our fractured, post-gatekeeper culture has to an arbiter of good taste. This is a really interesting article about a site I use all the time:: Tim Ryan is an excitable 42-year-old film savant with a mop of reddish hair. In his early twenties, he worked as a news­paper reporter in Rhode Island and spent his downtime ...

Read More | Jan. 22, 2020

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Farewell to a King

Farewell and rest in peace, Neil Peart, virtuoso drummer and one of rock's greatest lyricists. If AC/DC exposed me to rock for the first time, then Rush showed me how broad the scope of rock actually is and how a ‘thinking’ kick-ass rock band does exist. I had been to the drive-in (!) with my sister and her boyfriend ...

Read More | Jan. 12, 2020

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The World in 2030

Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn't stop people from trying—especially people named Elon Musk. As he well knows, being bold is pretty much the only way thought castles can become concrete (or wood, brick, or metal). In this list, WIRED has gathered a handful of far-reaching goals as a framework for what to expect in the decade ahead. Space colonies. ...

Read More | Jan. 5, 2020

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The Decade, Explained

It's been a hell of a decade for our species' intelligence: we've allowed an eradicated disease to return, let an algorithm convince us the earth is flat, and (essentially the same 2 points already mentioned), let fake news have the same look and feel as real news. We let democracy die. We let hard science prove the climate ...

Read More | Dec. 30, 2019

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7 Big Science Stories That Shaped 2019

Thanks to WIRED for being awesome, they're the best subscription I ever took. They've had some stunning reads in 2019, here are some of them: The practice of science is about progress: Crafting knowledge out of hunches and experiments, finding life-saving remedies, informing sound policies. It doesn't always go as planned. Scientists would have struggled to predict, for example, that 

Read More | Dec. 23, 2019

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The Largest Scientific Structure Ever

This dish antenna rises seven stories above an ancient seabed in the Karoo, a remote semidesert in South Africa. Later this year it will start scanning the universe for radio waves emanating from charged particles billions of light-years away, probing some of science's deepest questions: Was Einstein right about gravity? What are the origins of magnetism? Are we humans alone?

...

Read More | Dec. 18, 2019

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Silicon Valley’s Psychedelic Wonder Drug

“This could save lives, cure depression, help alcoholism, get people off opioids—why wouldn’t I want to be invested?” Shark Tank host Kevin O’Leary is sitting across from me in a restaurant talking about a recent investment. He was part of a $6 million round in MindMed, a company that’s taking psychedelic drugs and turning them into medicine. Its first drug has ...

Read More | Dec. 11, 2019

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The Top 20 Scientific Discoveries of the Decade

The last decade has seemed pretty dark: sociologically, politically, environmentally. Thanks to the gods for Science. Yeah Science! It never stops moving forward. And thanks to NG for this article, they never stop moving forward either. AS THE 2010S come to an end, we can look back on an era rife with discovery. In the past 10 years, scientists around ...

Read More | Dec. 6, 2019

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Winners of the World Data Visualization Prize

Thanks, IiB! Information really is beautiful! The results are in. After combing through hundreds of impressive, insightful and creative entries, we’ve decided on the winners of the World Data Visualization Prize 2019. Conducted in partnership with the World Government Summit, the prize focuses on how governments are improving citizens’ lives. We asked entrants to use the power ...

Read More | Dec. 3, 2019

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Say Hello to My Little (Robot) Friend

The weekly farmer’s market in El Segundo, a cozy beach town in the shadow of Los Angeles International Airport, has everything you’d expect to see at such an event ($6 organic waffles, $8 jars of beet sauerkraut, athleisure-clad parents pushing strollers) and some things you don’t. That includes — on one recent afternoon — a fleet of personal robot ...

Read More | Nov. 25, 2019

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Dark Money

"I just want my fair share--which is all of it." - Charles Koch, quoted in Jane Mayer's Dark Money. No it's not conspiracy theory, it's powerful, meticulously reported history that shows how a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views bankrolled a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Super villains, anyone? It's a must read, if ...

Read More | Nov. 19, 2019

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Hexaflexagons

Vi Hart is going to graduate from Yale, Stanford and Harvard all at the same time! This video is just really cool, thanks Vi! Historical Note: This video is based on a true story. Arthur H. Stone really did invent the hexaflexagon after playing with the paper strips he'd cut off his too-wide British paper, and really did start ...

Read More | Nov. 10, 2019

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The Quantum Cloud

Microsoft got where it is by ensuring that Windows ran on many different types of hardware. Monday, the company said its cloud computing platform will soon offer access to the most exotic hardware of all: quantum computers. Microsoft is one of several tech giants investing in quantum computing, which by crunching data using ...

Read More | Nov. 5, 2019

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Worldwide Audiovisual Entertainment vs Cinema

This is a fabulous article from Martin Scorsese:: When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme ...

Read More | Nov. 5, 2019

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What Makes You You?

Thanks to Wait But Why for this really thought provoking article:: When you say the word “me,” you probably feel pretty clear about what that means. It’s one of the things you’re cleareston in the whole world—something you’ve understood since you were a year old. You might be working on the question, “Who amI?” but what you’re figuring out is the who am part ...

Read More | Oct. 28, 2019

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One Giant Leap for Womankind

NASA Astronauts Make History with 1st All-Woman Spacewalk. One giant leap for womankind! Two NASA astronauts made space history today (Oct. 18) as they completed the first-ever spacewalk by an all-woman team. The historic extravehicular activity (EVA) began at 7:38 EDT (1138 GMT), which was ahead of schedule as the spacewalk was ...

Read More | Oct. 21, 2019

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The Age of Incoherence

I think Mr Zuckerberg is starting to lose it. I can even start (just start?!) to imagine a Bond where a thinly-veiled Zuck is the villain. Thanks to Wired for this article:: Mark Zuckerberg gave an address about free speech at Georgetown University on Thursday. The self-analysis was skin deep; his historical parallels were, in fact, perpendicular; he mischaracterized his ...

Read More | Oct. 21, 2019

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Tabletop Whale

Tabletop Whale is an original science illustration blog, and it's a thing of great beauty. I love the idea of the marriage of art, science and tech generally, and Eleanor Lutz just does that so well. I mean look at this Planet Earth Control Deck. Oh, and if that's not enough for you, here's another great blog for getting ...

Read More | Oct. 16, 2019

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First Came the Floyd, Then Came the Void

What a great article! Without Syd Barrett, would we ever have had Pink Floyd? Would their singular sound have been the same? Impossible question to answer for one of my all time favourite bands. but I do agree with the first line of this remarkable and brilliant article from NME. And I also agree that Syd was cracked and flawed, ...

Read More | Oct. 15, 2019

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Enceladus Contains The Building Blocks of Life

Scientists just found the most basic ingredients for life bursting from an ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus. A new analysis of NASA data reveals the presence of organic compounds in the plumes of liquid water that shoot into space from the ocean below Enceladus's icy crust. These compounds, which carry nitrogen and oxygen, play a key role in producing amino ...

Read More | Oct. 7, 2019

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The Rise of Quantum Supremacy

This is a big deal, and thanks to John Preskill for this article :: In 2012, I proposed the term “quantum supremacy” to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful. With that new term, I wanted to emphasize that this is a privileged time in the history ...

Read More | Oct. 7, 2019

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Winners of the 2019 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition

These are a must see! Entrants in this year’s contest were invited to submit images that showcase Earth’s biodiversity and show some of the mounting threats to the natural world. These images originally appeared on bioGraphic, an online magazine about science and sustainability and the official media sponsor for the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition. The ...

Read More | Oct. 2, 2019

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Water Detected in Atmosphere of Exoplanet For the First Time

In the atmosphere of an exoplanet just 111 light-years away, astronomers have just made a highly exciting discovery: they've detected water. As much as 50 percent of the atmosphere of K2-18b could be water vapour. But unlike other giant exoplanets on which atmospheric water has been detected, K2-18b is a super-Earth. It could be rocky, like Earth, Mars and Venus.

...

Read More | Sept. 16, 2019

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Mathematicians Solve '42' Problem With Planetary Supercomputer

I had to include this article, even if only for the title. My daughter's friend (aged 12) just bought the 'trilogy in 5 parts' - and I was so gratified to know kids are still reading it. O, my apologies, I got sidetracked - this article is definitely cool too! :: Mathematicians have finally figured out the three cubed numbers ...

Read More | Sept. 10, 2019

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The Dark History of 8chan

I'm hideously fascinated by 8chan, the alt-right and what is essentially the rise of the new fascism. I'm not sure we would be in the position we are now without social media and the unlimited free speech provided by roiling swamps like 8chan. We live in a world where extreme and often thoroughly vile viewpoints used to be kept ...

Read More | Sept. 6, 2019

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Three Years of Misery Inside Google

ON A BRIGHT Monday in January 2017, at 2:30 in the afternoon, about a thousand Google employees—horrified, alarmed, and a little giddy—began pouring out of the company's offices in Mountain View, California. They packed themselves into a cheerful courtyard outside the main campus café, a parklike area dotted with picnic tables and a shade structure that resembles a giant game of ...

Read More | Aug. 26, 2019

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NASA's Searchable Image Library

This is cool! NASA's new image library consolidates imagery spread across 60 collections into one searchable location. Users can embed content in their own sites and choose from multiple resolutions( including the original size) to downloads. Furthermore, they can see the metadata associated with images, including EXIF/camera data, on many images. In another life I would have loved to work ...

Read More | Aug. 21, 2019

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Fly To Mars By 2024

SpaceX aims to launch its first cargo mission to Mars in 2022 and send people toward the Red Planet just two years after that. Those are just two of the highlights of the company's current Mars-colonization plan, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk unveiled early Friday morning EDT (Sept. 29) at the 68th International Astronautical ...

Read More | Aug. 12, 2019

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It Came from Something Awful

Fredrick Brennan would open 4chan when he awoke, and close it long after dusk, moments before closing his eyes. During his teenage years, he spent countless hours on the website - an online bulletin board where anyone can anonymously upload images or post comments. As one of millions of faceless users, he typed his thoughts about technology, video games and ...

Read More | Aug. 5, 2019

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Homo Deus

Sapiens explained how humankind came to rule the planet. Homo Deus examines our future. It blends science, history, philosophy, and every discipline in between, offering a vision of tomorrow that at first seems incomprehensible but soon looks undeniable: humanity will soon lose not only its dominance, but its very meaning. And we shouldn’t wait around for the resistance, either – ...

Read More | Aug. 2, 2019

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The Best Jaws Since Jaws

I rate this movie, it's fantastic! Watch it immediately on the highest quality you can muster. And man, am I glad that Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me, thanks to them for this review:: On July 28th, 1999, in the midst of quite possibly the best movie year ever, a wildly entertaining summer popcorn movie about genetically modified sharks ...

Read More | July 29, 2019

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The Breakfast Club for Millenials

Yes, it's standard high school party-before-graduation stuff but it disrupts almost every one of those usual types and tropes along the way. It also has superbly strong female protagonists, is hilarious, and doesn't condescend to anyone, not the 'school slut' nor the 'beer-swilling jock'. Highly recommended. Thanks to MTV and Crystal Bell for this write-up:: Katie Silberman likes to describe herself ...

Read More | July 21, 2019

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Facebook's Wild Years

This story is excerpted from Valley of Genius, by Adam Fisher. Everyone who has seen The Social Network knows the story of Facebook’s founding. It was at Harvard in the spring semester of 2004. What people tend to forget, however, is that Facebook was only based in Cambridge for a few short months. Back then it was called TheFacebook.com, ...

Read More | July 19, 2019

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The End to (a lot of) Human Suffering

If he treated his workers better and didn't go nuts occasionally, Elon Musk would be the greatest visionary alive right now. That's my take! Huge thanks to Wired for this insane article (it's a must read):: ELON MUSK DOESN’T think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually. ...

Read More | July 19, 2019

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The Best Sequel Ever Made

Perhaps the best single word to describe James Cameron's Aliens is relentless. Tautly paced and expertly directed, this roller coaster ride of a motion picture offers a little bit of everything, all wrapped up in a tidy science fiction/action package. From the point when the opening half-hour of exposition ends and the real movie begins, Cameron barely gives viewers a chance to ...

Read More | July 1, 2019

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The Hidden Women In Chaos Theory

Thanks to Wired and Joshua Sokol for this article :: A LITTLE OVER half a century ago, chaos started spilling out of a famous experiment. It came not from a petri dish, a beaker or an astronomical observatory, but from the vacuum tubes and diodes of a Royal McBee LGP-30. This “desk” computer—it was the size of a ...

Read More | May 28, 2019

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Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea

"The stern sank below the waves, and the graceful arc of her bow aimed into the dark heavens, as she struggled, almost desperate to keep her proud head above water, and then as the hoarse screams of five hundred men rose, she began a slow watery spin, the water turning faster and faster and faster and faster, until the swirling ...

Read More | May 21, 2019

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It's Utterly Brilliant. It's Perfect.

Not much to say here, except that this is the single most immersive and tactile world ever created for the cinema. It's brilliant, and although I grew up with the original (voice-over, happy ending) I recently saw The Final Cut. It's the only version over which Ridley Scott had complete artistic control, and it's utterly brilliant. It's perfect. It is unquestionably ...

Read More | May 13, 2019

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The Biggest Corporate Fraud Since Enron

I found this book fascinating, appalling, brilliantly researched and well-written; it is well worth reading. Thanks to Goodreads for the write-up:: The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from ...

Read More | May 13, 2019

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Applied Imagination and Steve Jobs

Thanks to Goodreads for this write-up:: From the author of the bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive, New York Times bestselling biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and ...

Read More | May 8, 2019

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11 Fantastic Science Books to Binge Read

Thanks to the Wired Staff for this article :: 2018 BROUGHT NO shortage of great science-themed books. Spurred by rapid advances in biotech, the writer Carl Zimmer spun a personal tale around the emerging science of heredity. Investigative reporter John Carreyrou exposed the rotten business at the heart of Theranos, the blood-testing startup built on air. Our past also ...

Read More | April 24, 2019

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The Eye of Sauron

Thanks to WIRED and Sophia Chen for this article:: IN THE CENTURY since Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in his theory of gravity, astrophysicists have turned up overwhelming evidence for the things. They’ve observed the push and pull of black holes on the orbits of nearby stars and planets. They’ve heard the vibrations, or gravitational waves, resonating ...

Read More | April 16, 2019

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The Tipping Point

Thanks to Goodreads for this blurb. The book is amazing, don't hesitate, read it! THE TIPPING POINT IS that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause ...

Read More | April 9, 2019

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Crispr Editing Could One Day Remove Human Pain

Thanks to Wired and Megan Molteni for this article :: FOR JO CAMERON, it takes the sight of blood or the smell of her own flesh burning for her to know that something is very wrong. As the 71-year-old Scottish woman recounted to The New York Times earlier this week, she has lived a life virtually free of pain, fear, ...

Read More | April 1, 2019

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10 of Bill Gates’s Favourite Books about Tech

Thanks to MIT Tech Review for this article from Bill Gates, he makes a good reading list and yes, Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a strange choice (brilliant book, but tech?), but check out his reasoning, and suddenly it makes more sense:: WHENEVER I WANT TO UNDERSTAND something better, I pick up a book. Reading is my favorite way ...

Read More | March 28, 2019

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DeepMind and Google

Thanks to 1843 and Hal Hodson for this article:: One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a ...

Read More | March 28, 2019

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Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling

Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers,” he said. “They are beautiful shapes.” The video is available on YouTube. Vonnegut was representing in ...

Read More | March 10, 2019

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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

This book was first published in 1979, but it's still a piece of genius. Thanks to Goodreads for this write-up. Douglas Hofstadter's book is concerned directly with the nature of “maps” or links between formal systems. However, according to Hofstadter, the formal system that underlies all mental activity transcends the system that supports it. If life can grow out ...

Read More | March 10, 2019

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Ten Women in Science and Tech Who Should Be Household Names

Thanks to Wired and Emily Dreyfuss for this article. IT’S INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S Day on 8 March, a time to celebrate the achievements of women around the world and throughout history. But the day is also about recognizing the hardships women face and the continued urgency of the fight for gender equality. That is true of WIRED’s world too—the ...

Read More | March 10, 2019

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Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow

The limits of Artificial Intelligence. Thanks to Wired and Jason Pontin for this article. SUNDAR PICHAI, THE chief executive of Google, has said that AI “is more profound than … electricity or fire.” Andrew Ng, who founded Google Brain and now invests in AI startups, wrote that “If a typical person can do a mental task with less than ...

Read More | Feb. 22, 2019

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Mirrorworld

Thanks to Kevin Kelly for this article in WIRED :: EVERY DECEMBER, ADAM Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage ...

Read More | Feb. 13, 2019

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15 Years of Facebook in 15 Critical Moments

Thanks to Issie Lapowsky and WIRED for this article. ON FEBRUARY 4, 2004, back when "Hey Ya!" was still topping the charts and global dominion was but a glimmer in a young Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, the 19-year-old Harvard sophomore and his roommates unleashed their creation, TheFacebook.com, on humanity. Or at least, they unleashed it on the elite sliver of humanity that ...

Read More | Feb. 5, 2019

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Big Tech and Big Brother

Black Mirror S3E1? No, Los Angeles, yesterday. Thanks to WIRED for this article: A FRIEND OF mine, who runs a large television production company in the car-mad city of Los Angeles, recently noticed that his intern, an aspiring filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China, was walking to work. When he offered to arrange a swifter mode of transportation, ...

Read More | Jan. 24, 2019

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A Fake Meat Future

A future with fake meat is one I can embrace wholeheartedly. This WIRED article is great food for thought. I particularly like the idea that "...fortunately, the science here is firing on all pistons", because I've always believed that humans are clever little monkeys and if we throw enough science (i.e. money) at a problem, we can pull astonishing ...

Read More | Jan. 22, 2019

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Scientists can reverse DNA aging in mice

Researchers have found a way to protect a mouse’s DNA from the damage that comes with aging, and they’re ready to test it in people. Dr. David Sinclair, from Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues reveal their new findings in the latest issue of Science. They focused on an intriguing compound with anti-aging properties called NAD+, short for nicotinamide ...

Read More | Jan. 21, 2019

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The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information? 
Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily ...

Read More | Jan. 21, 2019

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The Speed of Light : Animations

 A series of new animations by a NASA scientist show just how zippy – and also how torturously slow – the speed of light can be. Light speed is the fastest that any material object can travel through space. That is, of course, barring the existence of theoretical shortcuts in the fabric of space called wormholes (and the ability to go ...

Read More | Jan. 18, 2019

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Top 10 Science Stories of 2018

Scientists discovered a blazar spewing neutrinos directly at the Earth, solving a long-standing mystery. President Trump discussed implementing an independent military space force, but decided to pursue other options. Elon Musk sent a Tesla to space. A scientist gave MDMA to octopuses. This year taught us more about distant planets and our own world, about ...

Read More | Jan. 17, 2019

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AI-Produced Artwork Sells for $433K

Allyssia Alleyne, CNN writes that "Edmond de Belamy" has made history as the first work of art produced by artificial intelligence to be sold at auction. The slightly blurry canvas print, which has been likened to works by the Old Masters, sold Thursday for $432,500 - dramatically exceeding its original estimate of $7,000-$10,000- at a Christie's auction in New ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Autonomous Cars: Deep Learning and Computer Vision in Python

Frank Kane's Udemy courses are fantastic, and I highly recommend them. His latest is called Autonomous Cars: Deep Learning and Computer Vision in Python, and I have no doubt that it will be as excellent as his others. Below is the Frank's write-up for the course on Udemy. Check it out, and then click the link below to access the ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number

Numbers are fascinating, and truly gargantuan numbers are even more fascinating. Thanks to Wait but Why for this description of a "google". Read it, and then click here to learn about Graham's number. The name googol (redefined by Larry Page and Sergey Brin) came about when American mathematician Edward Kasner got cute one day in 1938 ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Here's a really brilliant and thought-provoking article by Jean Twenge (PhD), who's very well qualified to discuss these issues, with 25 years of research into generational differences under her belt. The article is also based on hard data and real science, and if that isn't enough, she's also coined a cool term for the smart-phone generation (born between 1995 and ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Launch of My PythonAnywhere Site

I love PythonAnywhere! And Django too. Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Built by experienced developers, it takes care of much of the hassle of Web development, so you can focus on writing your app without needing to reinvent the wheel. It’s free and open source. There is much ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari

This was so good, I'm reading it again, and it's blowing my mind for the second time. It's as if Dr Harari isn't even human, he's so adept at examining our species from the broadest view, with the widest possible perspective. He's like an alien anthro-pologist, and that is a huge, huge compliment. Also, I'm pretty sure he's about as ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Space and Time - Quantum Error-Correcting?

I've just subscribed to digital Wired, and I'm loving it. I receive an email every day with the latest news in science and tech, and there never fails to be an article of interest. Highly recommended stuff. Thanks to Wired for the article on space-time that follows: IN 1994, A mathematician at AT&T Research named Peter Shor brought instant ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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The 12 Most Controversial Facts In Mathematics

Thanks to Business Insider for this article. Mathematics has little surprises that are designed to test and push your mental limits. The following 12 simple maths problems prove outstandingly controversial among students of maths, but are nonetheless facts. They're paradoxes and idiosyncrasies of probability. And they're guaranteed to start an argument or two. If you're looking for a mathematical way ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene

The universe is so astonishing, there is no need to invent anything more astonishing. Whether you believe that or not, if you ever consider reading a book on the layers of mind-boggling reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world, start here. "From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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The Scale of the Universe

This is incredibly cool, but you'll need Flash to run it. Believe me, it's worth it! What does the universe look like on small scales? On large scales? Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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The Zen of Python

The Zen of Python is a collection of software principles stated by Tim Peters in around 1999 that influence the design of the Python Programming Language. The precepts are also included as an easter egg in the Python interpreter, and can be displayed by entering import this. All programmes should occasionally reflect on these principles. And probably meditate ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Welcome to Mars

Thanks to APOD for this post: Welcome to Mars, NASA Insight. Yesterday NASA's robotic spacecraft InSight made a dramatic landing on Mars after a six-month trek across the inner Solar System. Needing to brake from 20,000 km per hour to zero in about seven minutes, Insight decelerated by as much as 8 g's and heated up to 1500 degrees Celsius as it deployed a heat shield, ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2018

Thanks to Madison Dapcevich for the article which I saw in IFLScience. Packed with dramatic images captured around the world, this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards tells the stories of some of Earth's most elusive, endangered, and otherwise picture-perfect animals. Topping the National History Museum, London's annual photo contest as the Grand Title Winner was "The Golden Couple," captured by Dutch ...

Read More | Jan. 16, 2019

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