Playing with reality Published incuriouserinstitute · 26 min read· Sep 30, 2020 -- Written by Reed Berkowitz © 2019 Tony Webster “Ask Me Q — QAnon” — CC BY 2.0 I am a game designer with experience in a very small niche. I create and research games designed to be played in reality. I’ve worked in…

Die Schweiz präsen­tiert sich gerne als Forschungs- und Inno­va­ti­ons­na­tion. Und das mit gutem Grund: Kein Land produ­ziert pro Kopf mehr wissen­schaft­liche Publi­ka­tionen und auch bei der Zita­ti­ons­quote der Publi­ka­tionen liegt die Schweiz hinter den USA auf Platz zwei. Mit Abstand…

In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card. I don’t think I saw Terminator 2 in the theater. I probably watched it years later on LaserDisc but the scene left quite an impression on me. I had a similar reaction to the war dialer…

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the Coasting-website (coasting.com) was not online anymore and that the landing page was Shimano’s corporate website, Shimano.com. Just before writing this, I googled it again and there is shimanocoasting.com again, on the bottom of the page, just behind the…

The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure…

By Winston Rowntree of Subnormality. "I think Homer gets stupider every year." — Professor Lawrence Pierce, The Simpsons, "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until…

Almost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar. Smythe, who covered white-collar crime for Bloomberg News, wore mostly black and gray, and usually skipped…

This is a segment from Powderwhore's 2010 movie "TeleVision". You can get the entire movie at www.powderwhore.com Available to download or on DVD.

Special thanks to Jennings Anderson who looked over an early draft of this post and helped me refine it. Also, as usual, the views expressed herein do not represent those of my parents, my wife, my dentist, or my employer. Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash The first time I spoke with Jennings…

Sea beast: The only Soviet-era Lun-class ekranoplan ever completed has been left to rust for 30 years, but now this remarkable flying machine is on the move. Musa Salgereyev/TASS/Getty Images On the beach: The ekranoplan has been moved to a beach near Derbent in the Dagestan region where it'll form…

(Cross-posted from my blog) The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in. Possessions 1. If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google reddit. You’ll get real people arguing, as…

The man who posted himself to Australia Published 6 March 2015 Share page About sharing Image source, AP By Jason Caffrey BBC World Service In the mid-1960s, Australian athlete Reg Spiers found himself stranded in London with no money to buy a plane ticket home. Desperate to get back to Australia in…

Data Science Datalore Python Research We Downloaded 10,000,000 Jupyter Notebooks From Github – This Is What We Learned Here’s how we used the hundreds of thousands of publicly accessible repos on GitHub to learn more about the current state of data science. Inspired by research carried out 2 years…

2020 has been a lousy year. Time magazine’s cover story declared it the “worst year ever” (or at least “in living memory for most Americans”). And it is finishing on a miserable note, with coronavirus deaths reaching horrifying new heights — worse than a 9/11 every single day — while public health…

E s ist der 22. Januar 2020, und ich sitze auf der Beerdigung meines Opas. Draußen reihen sich Gräber aneinander, ein Friedhof, wie es ihn tausendfach in Deutschland gibt, drinnen, in der Trauerhalle, kann ich meinen eigenen Atem sehen, während ich auf den glänzenden Sarg blicke. Ich friere. Aus den…

Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person? Yes: ☐ No: ☐ Prefer not to say: ☐ Yes. Because forms like this – and questions like this – always throw me into confusion, and sometimes into complete mind-stoppage. You appear to be asking a closed question, but ‘consider’ is a word I would use to…

Hi. This post is written by a friend of Margins, who happens to be a product executive at a public tech company. He wrote this initially in September 2020, but we were hesitant to publish it anonymously. Nevertheless, our friend turned out to be very insightful and we thought it’d be a shame (hah!)…

Join Free The Hustle Loading Oh no! We couldn't find anything like that. Try another search, and we'll give it our best shot. Home Originals The man who invented the Zamboni How the son of Italian immigrants created a niche industry for ice resurfacing machines and turned his family’s name into a…

Die Frau mit der Clownsnase zweifelt. Bei der Kundgebung von Corona-Leugner:innen auf dem Kölner Neumarkt kämpft sie sich durch die Menge, bis sie Ralf Ludwig erreicht. Von ihm erhofft sie sich Antworten. Vor der Corona-Pandemie war Ludwig nur ein kaum bekannter Anwalt aus Leipzig, seither…

I spent a large part of 2019 working with the distributed and decentralized web, especially IPFS, also known as the “Inter-Planetary File System”. I’ve written a few articles on the topic, on how you can host a web app on IPFS, one of which even ended up on the front page of HackerNews. For about a…

«Es ist absolut haltlos, zu sagen, dass die SVP rassistisch ist», sagte SVP-National­­rätin Andrea Geissbühler im Juni in der SRF-«Arena» mit dem Titel «Jetzt reden wir Schwarzen». SP-Nationalrätin Samira Marti hatte der Partei vorgeworfen, strukturellen Rassismus zu befördern, und wir waren sehr…

Am 4. September 2014 wird bei den NSU-Prozessen in München ein unge­wöhn­li­ches Beweis­mittel ange­führt: eine 216-seitige Novelle, die mit über 200 rassi­stisch-moti­vierten Morden welt­weit in Verbin­dung gebracht werden kann. Trotzdem bieten Schweizer Online­buch­hand­lungen die „Turner Diaries“…

The last time I spoke to Michael J Fox, in 2013, in his office in New York, he was 90% optimistic and 10% pragmatic. The former I expected; the latter was a shock. Ever since 1998, when Fox went public with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, he has made optimism his defining public…

Office Space How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to. November 17, 2020 As the obligations of knowledge work have grown increasingly frenetic, workers have flocked to productivity tools and techniques.Illustration by Timo Lenzen In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web…

I’ve been reading Garfield comics with my son this week. He’s too young to really follow the narratives — after every strip he pauses, asks what happened, and then says, slowly and calmly, “Why” — but he’s already very fond of the drawings and characters. We’ve been reading specifically late-80’s…

StartseiteDok & ReportagenDOK Im Spiegel – Obdachlose beim Coiffeur Obdachlose Menschen wagen den Blick in den Spiegel. Im mobilen Coiffeursalon von Anna Tschannen begegnen sie ihren eigenen Geschicht

The surprising downsides of empathy 2 October 2020 Richard FisherFeatures correspondent•@rifish Getty Images Empathy for our fellow human beings can have a dark side (Credit: Getty Images) There’s a dark side to feeling the emotions of other people. In some cases, it can even lead to cruelty,…

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown. At GitHub, our priority is supporting open source and the developer community. And so we share…

The person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not the best idea. Just the story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads. Something can be factually true but contextually nonsense. Bad ideas often have at least some seed of truth that gives their followers confidence.…

Member-only story Why you should get an autopsy if it’s the last thing you do Published inElemental · 29 min read· Sep 22, 2020 -- Disclaimer: The images in this story may be disturbing for some people. For most people, the mere word “autopsy” summons up visceral images. Bodies lying cold and blue…

Marc Polymeropoulos awoke with a start. The feeling of nausea was overwhelming. Food poisoning, he thought, and decided to head for the bathroom. But when he tried to get out of bed, he fell over. He tried to stand up and fell again. It was the early morning hours of December 5, 2017, and his Moscow…

By Jaed Coffin | Photographed by Ryan David Brown From our October 2020 issue One sunny afternoon in late July, 12-year-old Zachary Wallace stood on a float beneath the Eastport pier, fishing for mackerel. To one side of him, lobsterboats bobbed at their moorings, backdropped by the low buildings of…

Er hat ein paar miese Tage hinter sich. Ein paar ganze miese Wochen eigentlich. Denn Oliver von Dobrowolski ist Polizist. Und die Polizei stolpert in Deutschland gerade von einem Skandal in den nächsten. Am 4. Oktober wurde publik, dass es in der deutschen Bundespolizei 24 Verdachts­fälle von…

Better necessarily implies different. That’s one of my favorite axioms. It’s both intuitively and undeniably true. But it gets to the heart of a certain universal cognitive dissonance inherent in mankind. We yearn for everything to be better. Yet we are resistant to change. Apple’s new Macs based on…

Practical Doomsday Whether you're wrestling bears in the wilderness, struggling to stay safe online, or shopping for the right home insurance policy, Practical Doomsday has you covered. Go on an engrossing, mind-bending, and data-packed journey through the world of sensible emergency preparedness.…

https://www.ibiology.org/techniques/multi-dimensional-microscopy-datasets Modern microscopy produces large multi-dimensional datasets, which creates new challenges for data storage, processing and visualization. In this talk, Dr. Loic Royer uses a developing drosophila melanogaster embryo to explain…

The Billion Dollar Dataset Next Door 9 min read· Nov 18, 2020 -- Special thanks to Jennings Anderson who looked over an early draft of this post and helped me refine it. Also, as usual, the views expressed herein do not represent those of my parents, my wife, my dentist, or my employer. Photo by…

I was a power user of IFTTT for many years, so I had mixed feelings recently about their decision to change their pricing model. Under IFTTT’s new pricing, you can only have 3 “custom” actions created/enabled at any time – which is quite a downgrade from the current unlimited free plan. On the one…