Welcome to Galaxy Brain — a newsletter from Charlie Warzel about technology and culture. You can read what this is all about here. If you like what you see, consider forwarding it to a friend or two. You can also click the button below to subscribe. And if you’ve been reading, consider going to the…

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On God, or something, or anything How a journey to Peru changed my perspective Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz 36 min read· May 2, 2021 -- Pachamama, a goddess revered by the indigenous peoples of the Andes (credit) Have you ever had that strange feeling where you momentarily tune out of your usual, everyday…

PSE WARNING: If you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, please consider skipping this post! The visualisations on this page might trigger a seizure. Sorry! The Hypnotic World of Degenerate Spirals Recently, I was looking for a way to add a spiral to my website1. My search led me to this CodePen,…

Tétouan, Morocco, is a picturesque and historic city near the northern tip of the Morocco. Tétouan has a public transport network, featuring modern buses, but no efficient way to plan a journey – until now. Thanks to a 21-year-old developer who calls Tétouan his hometown, residents and visitors can…

The history of tilting trains is on my mind, because it’s easy to take a technological advance and declare it a solution to a problem without first producing it at scale. I know that 10 years ago I was a big fan of tilting trains in comments and early posts, based on both academic literature on the…

Basel Briefing Das wichtigste für den Tag Jetzt Abonnieren Jetzt Member Werden

Neonazis auf dem Vormarsch: Junge Rechtsextreme vernetzen sich Sie posieren mit Sturmhauben, stählen ihre Körper, zitieren Hitler-Reden und stören Zoom-Veranstaltungen – alles online. Die rechtsextreme Bewegung «Junge Tat» ist stark aktiv in den sozialen Medien. Die neue Generation von Neonazis…

Rechtsextreme Gesinnung: JSVP-Mitglied Simon A. aus dem Wallis. «Meine Schweiz, Ich liebe sie. Du sollst deine barbarische Kultur nicht hierherbringen.» Aufkleber mit diesem Spruch auf Französisch tauchten Ende Januar im Unterwallis auf. Sie werden auf Strassenschildern, Laternen und…

A Reporter at Large The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped? April 19, 2021 North Korea, whose government is the only one on earth known to conduct nakedly criminal…

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The infamous exploding whale incident occurred Nov. 12, 1970, in Florence, Oregon. A whale washed ashore on the Oregon beach and with no other means to dispose of it, officials came up with a plan to blow the whale up. The result? Whale carcass all over the local beach. The Oregon Historical…

Text: Basil Schöni Die selbsternannte Jugendbewegung «Mass-Voll» will den Coronademos einen Anschein von Sachlichkeit verpassen. Doch mehrere Kernmitglieder verbreiten Falschinformationen über die Pandemie oder werben in Verschwörungs-Chats um Mitstreiter*innen. Das ‹megafon› hat die öffentlichen…

Photo by Vincent FOURNEAU, Unsplash Hi, this is Eddie! Here at Datawrapper, I enjoy interacting with our users by answering their questions to support@datawrapper.de, managing our social media, and giving training sessions. When not at work, I like traveling and going on adventures. Since COVID-19…

Pager, a nine year old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink. www.neuralink.com

The Great Read Even in the densest human habitations, there are orders of magnitude more ants than there are of us, doing the hard work of making our crumbs disappear. Credit... By Photographs by Eduard Florin Niga April 5, 2021 It is telling, the entomologist Eleanor Spicer Rice writes in her…

Jal Bapasola, Rustom Bhumgara, and Adi Hakim (left to right) rode around the world on Royal Benson cycles. Courtesy Anoop Babani and Savia Viegas In 2017, Anoop Babani, Goa-based former journalist, was recuperating from a cycling accident when he encountered a book from 1931, With Cyclists Around…

After Mapbox announced the closure of Mapbox GL JS, their JavaScript library for displaying maps using WebGL, the community made a collective decision to maintain and further develop the last open-source version and build a free alternative. Read the story and technical details. MapTiler has…

Since the pandemic began, there has been a lot of talk about the supposed lack of scientific information available at the outset, a void which led to our failures to contain the virus. The science has evolved, this line of thinking goes, allowing us to pursue the proper mitigation strategies. On the…

In the photo above, a Wii Remote is sitting on a table next to an open window. People who grew up playing the Wii might remember it; while playing Wii Sports, the game would give you a pop up window of it with a message politely reminding you that you can always take a break. While it might seem a…

Wer gegen Covid-19 geimpft ist, soll in Europa frei reisen können. Diese Idee wird derzeit in der EU diskutiert. Nach dem Vorbild von Israel möchte die Europäische Union einen «digitalen grünen Impf­ausweis» einrichten. Auch die Schweiz arbeitet an einem digitalen Impf­ausweis. Das Parlament hat…

In der Pizzeria einmal ungeniert in die Runde husten: In normalen Zeiten ist das unanständig, in diesen grenzt es an fahrlässige Körper­verletzung. Das Covid-19-Ansteckungs­risiko in Restaurants und Bars ist real – darum ist es wichtig, potenziell Infizierte nachverfolgen und testen zu können.…

Die Meldungen häufen sich: Deutsche Polizisten gehen hart gegen Linke, Klima­aktivistinnen, Migranten, nicht weisse Menschen vor – und lassen gleichzeitig Nazis laufen, herzen Quer­denkerinnen, tummeln sich in rechts­radikalen Chats, klauen für ihre Nazi-Kumpels Tausende Schuss Munition oder legen…

I think one of the defining characteristics of human beings is their tendency to build infrastructures. Many animals do have tools, basically “tech”, but I think few if not none establish these wonderous objects. Infrastructures are not just tech, or tech that’s around for a long time.…

Es gibt Dinge, mit denen ist man nur durch kulturelle Osmose vertraut. Dinge, die in einer (Sub-)Kultur relevant sind, und die man – selbst wenn man sie nicht direkt wahrnimmt – anhand der Reaktionen vieler anderer quasi als Negativabdruck spürt. Ich höre keine deutschen Podcasts. Ich sehe extrem…

Moved to https://buttondown.email/deadchannel/archive/finally-i-am-a-brain-in-a-jar/

Published March 15, 2021 12:00AM A wheelie is the bicycling equivalent of hanging ten on a surfboard or spinning a basketball on your finger—a skill as profoundly cool as it is functionally irrelevant. Pedaling around with one wheel in the air won’t help you win a race or bomb a gnarly descent.…

City simulators like SimCity are serious games — the kind that gets coverage well beyond the video game press. The kind of game that appears in school curriculums. The kind of game your non-gaming uncle has probably spent hundreds of hours in. On the surface, they appear to be exactly what they say:…

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Getty Images Back in the fall, I received an unexpected text from a man I had just started seeing. “Are u on wikifeet?” Assuming he was joking, I laughed and said no. Then he sent me a link to my wikiFeet page. I had never actually heard of the website —…

The titans of Silicon Valley say that the brain-computer interface revolution is coming, and neurotech devices will soon meld mind and machine, allowing us to communicate effortlessly with our computers — and even one another — just by using our thoughts. But I believe their prognostications aren’t…

So many of today’s issues are viewed through a political lens, and that includes Big Tech deplatforming. But in reality, deplatforming is a problem worthy of deeper critical reflection as it touches on topics that are fundamental to democracy itself. Once thought of as an untameable jungle of free…

Tanya Ong Can't trust everything you see online these days. March 17, 2021, 06:22 PM There exists this Twitter account: azusagakuyuki. It is essentially a repository of photos and tweets from what appears to be a female bike enthusiast in Japan. The account currently has over 16,000 followers. Some…