"If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled" - Aldous Huxley Interview by Mike Wallace on May 18, 1958, from the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin "This is Aldous Huxley, a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth. Mr. Huxley…
Let me show you how to fight back against the massive influx of Twitter porn spam bots that are following, liking and tweeting you 24/7! This method will attack them where it hurts the most, their wallets. ▼ PLEASE READ ▼ You can also use these same exact tactics to report any porn bots found on any…
In the summer of 2014, Mardi McNeil was an undergraduate student at the Queensland University of Technology. She was spending the summer helping a team of scientists with a big research project: mapping the ocean floor around the Great Barrier Reef. An aerial view of the Great Barrier Reef. A recent…
The gravitational forces responsible for high tides may also play a role in triggering major earthquakes, a study suggests. A Japanese research team found that large earthquakes are more likely to occur at times of a full or new Moon. Tides arise from the effects of the gravitational interaction of…
Mike Rothenberg’s VC firm was young, splashy, cutting-edge and loaded with investor cash. Now it’s all come crashing down. By Lauren Smiley and Jessi Hempel On the last Monday in August, Mike Rothenberg — millennial venture capitalist, virtual reality check-writer, unhappy title-holder of “The…
Its citizens pay some of the highest taxes in the world, so an administration that promises to slash them should be on to the political equivalent of a slam dunk. Not in Denmark, where such a proposal has been met with strong opposition and a drop in support for Prime Minister Lars Loekke…
Artist's impression of the Gaia spacecraft, with the Milky Way in the background. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab; background image: ESO, S. BRUNIER Celestial cartography is in for a dramatic upgrade. The Gaia spacecraft , which was launched in late 2013 by the European Space Agency, is on a mission to…
Edward Snowden has set out the case for Barack Obama granting him a pardon before the US president leaves office in January, arguing that the disclosure of the scale of surveillance by US and British intelligence agencies was not only morally right but had left citizens better off. The US…
Adblock Plus is launching a new service that... uh, puts more ads on your screen. Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller, subtler, and…
President Obama meets with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Summit in Vientiane, Laos, on Thursday. (Getty Images) Apple is facing accusations that it copied Chinese innovations in the iPhone 7. Indeed, China’s smartphone manufacturers released…
The industry warnings are urgent and often dire: The housing market could stall. Marriages are being postponed. Workers won’t have the savings to retire. The nation’s food supply will be disrupted. They point to one threat: soaring student debt. A tripling of student debt over the past decade to…
Police forces across the United States are stockpiling massive databases with personal information from millions of Americans who crossed paths with officers but were not charged with a crime. A person can end up in one of these databases by doing nothing more than sitting on a public park bench or…
WASHINGTON/JERUSALEM (Reuters) - The United States and Israel have reached final agreement on a record new package of at least $38 billion in U.S. military aid and the 10-year pact is expected to be signed this week, sources close to the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. The deal will represent the…
Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé , 1876. Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was working as a teacher in the provinces. It was, apparently, stressful, and Mallarmé came to feel that…
Shrinking harvest. Photographer: Shawn Baldwin/Bloomberg Photographer: Shawn Baldwin/Bloomberg The scandal that has devastated the business and reputation of Welspun India Ltd., India’s largest maker of home goods like sheets and towels, may also end up wrecking the prestige of Egyptian cotton. On…
I've stayed in my share of accommodations with questionable internet setups andwifi failure modes—mainly B&Bs and AirBnBs equipped with consumer-levelaccess points that don't really work. Of those, I thought I'd share two, alongwith a workaround for one of them, though admittedly a pretty janky…
Auto manufacturers today are scratching their heads, trying to figure out why the millennial generation has little-to-no interest in owning a car. What car makers are failing to see is that this generation’s interests and priorities have been redefined in the last two decades, pushing cars to the…
Last week, a major censorship controversy erupted when Facebook began deleting all posts containing the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese “Napalm Girl” on the ground that it violated the company’s ban on “child nudity.” Facebook even deleted a post from the prime minister of Norway, who posted the…
V P R V ALPARAISO P OETRY R EVIEW ContemporaryPoetry and Poetics ~W ALT M C D ONALD ~ A DVICE IW ISH I 'D B EEN T OLD O verthe years, I've heard good advice from others; I wish they had told mesooner. Probably they did, but I didn't listen. What I'm aboutto say is what I constantly urge myself to…
The 17 th century philosopher Blaise Pascal is perhaps best known for Pascal’s Wager which, in the first formal use of decision theory, argued that believing in God is the most pragmatic decision. But it seems the French thinker also had a knack for psychology. As Brain Pickings points out, Pascal…
Pharmaceutical executives who recently made a major donation to an anti-marijuana legalization campaign claimed they were doing so out of concern for the safety of children — but their investor filings reveal that pot poses a direct threat to their plans to cash in on a synthetic cannabis product…
Physics Light particles normally do not “feel” each other because there is no interaction acting between them. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in manipulating photons inside a semiconductor material in such a way as to make them repel each other nevertheless. Two light beams crossing each…
D ontcha just hate it when this happens? As content curator for one of the world's largest social media platforms, you delete a picture you consider obscene. Then some Norwegian woman writes an angry post. So you delete her post, too . I mean, who does she think she is? The Prime Minister of Norway?…
Credit iStock The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show. The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University…
‘Kids knew about all these strategies,’ said Susan Popkin, lead author of the recent Urban Institute report. ‘It was just very matter-of-fact and very common, in the richest country in the world.’Photograph: Sami Suni/Getty Images Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot…
A Plea for Cyberpunk This post is supported by my backers on Patreon! Please consider supporting independent political writing by becoming a patron or making a one time donation. So, that Apple conference happened the other day. They took out the headphone jack, like tech journalists rumored for…
Sayuru Kunihashi had paid the bill for a night on a tatami straw mat, eaten a breakfast of fish and rice and absorbed the directions for the day ahead. Her watch said 7.20am and she was dressed to depart. A sedge hat for the strong sun, a wooden staff for the rough terrain and a white funeral robe.…
Home | 2014-09-29 | (c)2014 James Hudson Follow @JamesSHudson RSS Feed This post doesn't have anything to do with running a business (except perhaps which startup ideas to avoid), but it's something lots of people seem interested in discussing. With the recent buzz about Ello ( and signs of its…
Unholstered When Texas Police Pull the Trigger How often do Texas police shoot at people? No one knows. As cities and neighborhoods across the nation suffer anguish — and in some cases violence — over controversial police shootings, in Texas there is little factual underpinning for discussions of…
About 10 years ago, Kahlil Baker had a good idea. He would pay farmers with spare land to plant trees. The trees would soak up carbon dioxide and, in return, he could claim “carbon credits” based on the greenhouse gas reductions. Initially, though, he struggled. The smallholder farmers he spoke to…
(Steven Senne/AP) The money was supposed to go toward feeding the most vulnerable children in Arkansas: Kids in low-income areas who relied on after-school programs for dinner or visited community centers during the summer because they might not get to eat otherwise. Instead, authorities say a small…
(Justin Kerr, courtesy of Brown University) Josué Sáenz did not know where the plane had taken him. It was the mid-1960s, and he was landing at a remote airstrip tucked between the rugged peaks of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas and Tortuguero, Mexico — at least, according to the account he would later…
Physics Light particles normally do not “feel” each other because there is no interaction acting between them. Researchers at ETH have now succeeded in manipulating photons inside a semiconductor material in such a way as to make them repel each other nevertheless. Two light beams crossing each…
In 2012 I won the Solar winds sysadmin contest with a funny story from my first job. I won a 500$ Apple store gift card and they even immortalized my story in a small comic strip: Comic strip about sysadmin contest story Since then I have repeatedly tried to use or sell them but since I'm not…
Photo courtesy of NASA T he new moon night was dark and rich in stars. The line at the bottom of the steps was 200 deep and growing. This was a busy public night at the Martz/Kohl Observatory atop Robin Hill, in Frewsburg, New York, and the rickety old ladder up to the eyepiece of our biggest ‘scope…
The whole world is moving together and signs of a massive bubble that spans asset classes are becoming clearer. Yet, given the driver is cash printed by central banks, indications it could pop are scant. A Credit Suisse gauge known as the cross-market contagion indicator 1 -- which tracks price…
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