A ls Nicole Müller das erste Mal zu Volker Hänneschen kam, hatte sie eine Plastiktüte voll Briefe in der Hand. Darin waren sehr viele Rechnungen. Bestimmt 300 Stück. Es gibt Menschen, die öffnen keine Briefe mehr. Volker Hänneschen fragt dann nicht nach den Gründen. Die wird es schon geben, denkt er…

News Feature March 9, 2023• Physics 16, 40 Condensed-matter physicist Ranga Dias and his colleagues reported on Tuesday the discovery of a room-temperature, near-ambient-pressure superconductor; Dias is also being accused of committing scientific misconduct, including data manipulation and…

[For an English translation: Anarchy2023 – The “International Anti-Authoritarian Meeting” is planning a COVID-superspreader Here’s the Mastodon thread with some further discussion: toot!] tl;dr: Die Pandemie hat auch die radikale Linke gespalten. Verschwörungsmystische Narrative sind bis tief in…

Enno Lenze und Wieland Giebel vor dem zerstörten russischen T-72 Panzer. Foto: Stefan Frank Am 24. Februar 2022 begann die russische Invasion der Ukraine. Ziel war es das Leben, die Kultur, den Staat und die Ukrainerinnen und Ukrainer auszulöschen. Getrieben von einem rassistischen Wahn, setzten…

I released first version of SumatraPDF in 2006. That’s 15 years ago which seems like a good time for a retrospective. The app SumatraPDF is a multi-format (PDF, ePub, Mobi, comic book, DjVu, XPS, CHM) viewer for Windows and currently looks like this: The code SumatraPDF is an open-source document…

Photo cred: my dad For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most…

photo cred: my dad Last month I published a paper by uploading a PDF to the internet and people were like “nice paper, here are some thoughts!” Two weeks ago I wrote a post saying peer review is a failed experiment and that one alternative is to upload PDFs to the internet and some people were like…

So, did you hear about Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy, getting his comic strip pulled from newspapers after going on a lengthy rant in which he called Black people a “hate group” and called for informal segregation of the races? I want to talk a bit about how we got there. Keep reading with a 7-day…

The first time we mentioned the potato diet, in Part III of our series A Chemical Hunger, we shared the story of Chris Voigt, the Executive Director of the Washington State Potatoes Commission, who lost 21 pounds on a 60-day potato diet. By Part X of the series, we started to wonder if someone…

By Josh DziezaDesign by Kristen Radtke Jul 20, 2022, 10:00am ET On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded,…

Published July 12, 2022 05:00AM A month before my 30th birthday, I start getting hives whenever I’m in the water. And during that summer, I am always in water. My boyfriend, Matt, and I are taking a big road trip, from the coast of Rhode Island all the way up to the Bonaventure River in Quebec. He…

Published February 27, 2023 03:00AM Let me tell you a tale of a mythical beast who wanders the wintry peaks. He is your average American resort skier, and he does strange and marvelous things. According to legend, he will sit in traffic for three hours on a Saturday morning to make a drive that…

Explore When, at the dawn of the 19th century, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark traversed western North America, they encountered a wondrous bestiary: the “fleet and delicately formed” coyote, the “bear of enormous size” which we call the grizzly. Yet few creatures impressed them more than the…

On board the ship Garthsnaid at sea. A view from high up in the rigging. Image by Allan C. Green, circa 1920. View original image View dithered image Support Low-tech Magazine via Paypal or Patreon The sailing ship is a textbook example of sustainability. For at least 4,000 years, sailing ships have…

I joined Google just before the pandemic when the company I had co-founded, AppSheet, was acquired by Google Cloud. The acquiring team and executives welcomed us and treated us well. We joined with great enthusiasm and commitment to integrate AppSheet into Google and make it a success. Yet, now at…

An dieser Stelle dokumentieren wir einen Beitrag über die Neuköllner Straßenraumkarte in der kartographischen Fachzeitschrift „KN – Journal of Cartography and Geographic Information“ – Info und Praxis 3 (2022) 72 (PDF, OpenAccess). Die Neuköllner Straßenraumkarte Ein detaillierter Plan des…

Drowning in AI Generated Garbage : the silent war we are fighting by Ploum on 2022-12-05 All over the web, we are witnessing very spectacular results from statistic algorithms that have been in the work for the last forty years. We gave those algorithms an incredibly catchy name: "Artificial…

Vor nunmehr 32 Jahren importierten Schweizer Neonazis das Konzept der neonazistischen Bruderschaft aus den USA nach Europa und gründeten 1990 die «Schweizer Hammerskins» (SHS). Drei Jahrzehnte, in denen das Schweizer Chapter durch Gewalttaten, politische Agitation und Einfluss auf das internationale…

Gegen die gefährlichen Altlasten aus dem Zweiten Weltkrieg geht der Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst täglich vor. https://www.ndr.de

Often, when we think of long-endurance flights, our first thoughts jump to military operations. Big planes with highly-trained crew will fly for long periods, using air-to-air refuelling to stay aloft for extended periods. However, many of the longest duration flights have been undertaken as…

I ch habe nur wenige Erinnerungen an mein Leben als Vierjähriger – das finde ich jetzt, als Vater eines Kindes im gleichen Alter, beunruhigend. Mein Sohn und ich haben eine Menge Spaß zusammen. Zuletzt haben wir mit Lego­steinen uns vertraute Orte nachgebaut, das Café oder das Badezimmer, und den…

Access through your institution None of this was my idea, Detective. Xavier came up with the whole plan. The black hole had been all the rage ever since it appeared, wreaking havoc in the Kuiper belt, but Xavier was the first one to declare he was going to surf the accretion disk. He played it…

"Please allow me to introduce myself" (with apologies to Mick Jagger) I'm a child of the 60's, a son of the north, and a lover of dogs. Grew up in a crackerbox post-war bungalow outside of Minneapolis with my mother and father, two younger sisters, various dogs and cats, and a neighborhood full of…

The Limits of "Computational Photography" Blog Jan 2023 I was recently discussing laser etching with an engineer/font-designer friend of mine, and I wanted to show him a picture of some really good laser etching on a particular piece of optical equipment. No problem, I figured - I would just snap a…

Wie ein neugieriger Junge steckt der alte Mann mit der schmalen silbernen Pilotenbrille den Kopf aus dem Fenster. In der engen Gasse des einstigen Marseiller Arbeiterviertels Belle de Mai hängt Wäsche von über die Straße gespannten Leinen, zwei Jugendliche lungern auf einem Motorroller rum. „Sie…

Become a Supporting Member For 15 years, Longreads has published and curated the best longform writing on the web—and we wouldn’t exist without dedicated readers like you. Give today and ensure that quality journalism continues to flourish. This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and…

NEWS Q&A 13 December 2022 Public-health leader advises early-career researchers ‘not to be deterred’ by public vitriol. By Max Kozlov View author publications Search author on: PubMed Google Scholar Access through your institution This month, Anthony Fauci will step down as director of the US…

Ein neues Bundesamt gibt es nicht jeden Tag. Darum ist es wenig erstaunlich, dass Ende letzten Jahres intensiv um das neue Bundesamt für Cyber­sicherheit gerungen wurde. Verteidigungs­ministerin Viola Amherd wollte es, der damalige Finanz­minister Ueli Maurer ebenfalls. Beide schickten ihre Leute…

See A Satellite Tonight is my most successful side project so far, with 5 million users since launch in 2019. It's been entirely a solo project, and I've used it as a proving ground for a bunch of tech that I wanted to learn. It took dozens of APIs and services to put together the experience I…

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) is a relatively new technique that generates well-lit, complex 3D views from 2D images. If you’ve seen behind-the-scenes looks at how image/motion capture is traditionally done, you know how time-consuming and resource intensive it can be. As this video from Corridor…

Photo by Paula Mariel Salischiker As I type these words, a mass exodus is underway from Twitter and Facebook. After decades of eye-popping growth, these social media sites are contracting at an alarming rate. In some ways, this shouldn’t surprise us. All the social networks that preceded the current…

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “The Switzerland Schedule” by Thalia Williamson. Thalia is a British author based in Riverside, California, where she is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at UC Riverside. She is the author of an…

In case you didn’t realize, we live in a multiverse1 of global street maps. It all started back in the early 1980s in the offices of two startups who were both based in Sunnyvale, California. One was Etak, the original pioneer of in-vehicle navigation systems. The other was a little company called…