(This is the second half of an earlier post. If you don't read it, you will understand nothing). Phyllis talks a lot about “the wrong kind of earthquake”. The wrong kind of earthquake in the central United States would strike on a work day when all of the unreinforced masonry buildings are full of…
Jonathan
Joyful Clemantine Wamariya Jun 29, 2015 · 35 min read At age six, I ran away with my sister to escape the Rwandan massacre. We spent seven years as refugees. What do you want me to do about it? Cry? By Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil Portraits by Andrew White T he day we taped the Oprah show,…
The Internet of Things is starting to emerge. You can tell it’s just starting, because we’re still using the ungainly name ‘‘Internet of Things.’’ It’s one of those coinages that tells you that we don’t know what a thing is or what it’s for, like ‘‘horseless carriage’’ or ‘‘3D printer.’’ But there’s…
The future of employment was meant to liberate us from the shackles of a 9-to-5. In fact, it’s leaving people in an impossibly annoying, semi-flexible purgatory. Lauren Smiley Jun 10, 2015 · 19 min read By Lauren Smiley T his spring, Michanne was striding out of a San Francisco apartment lobby in…
Read part I of this story here . “I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.” —home/frosty/documents/ journal/2012/q1/january/week1 The descent was stunning. Chris Tarbell, a special agent from the New York FBI office, was…
“I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it.” —home/frosty/documents/journal/2012/q1/january/week1 The postman only rang once. Curtis Green was at home, greeting the morning with 64 ounces of Coca-Cola and powdered mini…
A Taste of Rust By Evan Miller May 14, 2015 Update : Steve Klabnik has responded to some of the issues I brought up here. It looks like I did not fully appreciate Rust’s optimization levels, among other things. When you’re done with this, go read his comments! The word rust is the last thing I want…
Over at Fusion, Felix Salmon tells folk to chill out over The Great Technical Glitch of July 8, 2015 when a computer glitch grounded all mainland United flights, the NYSE went down for the day, and the website of the Wall Street Journal was down, too. All this came one day after a huge drop in…
You can listen to an audio version of Web! What is it good for? I have a blind spot. It’s the web. I just can’t get excited about the prospect of building something for any particular operating system, be it desktop or mobile. I think about the potential lifespan of what would be built and end up…
The fairy story of Denmark's 1992 European Championship campaign. Tuesday 28th April By “ Du Skal Ikke Tro At Du Er Noget ” — The first commandment of Janteloven , a pattern of group behaviour identified by the Danish-Norwegian writer Aksel Sandemose in his 1933 novel A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks…
From Fluent 2015: There have never been more front-end development power tools at our fingertips than there are right now, but all too often, we’re using those tools in ways that hurt our users and, by extension, ourselves. Sometimes this happens unintentionally, but other times it’s by very…
I feel it’s time to revisit the web vs. native debate, and concede defeat — or, at least, concede that the web cannot, and should not, compete with native when it comes to complex, app-like structures. I feel we’ve gone too far in emulating native apps. Conceding defeat will force us to rethink the…
I was warned not to see the new apocalyptic thriller "Mad Max: Fury Road." I was told it was emasculating feminist propaganda cleverly disguised as an explosion-filled action flick. Advertisement But did I listen to the so-called men's rights advocates who are boycotting the movie? No, I didn't. I…
Seems Facebook (which I don’t use) has put out a new product that allows iPhone users (and only them) to read news articles without leaving Facebook. John Gruber wrote an as-always thought-provoking article about why this could be bad for the web as a whole. Although I don’t agree that the web is…
Emily Guendelsberger, in a thorough and thoroughly entertaining first-person story for Philadelphia City Paper: I talked to lots of drivers. But few kept a meticulous enough log of hours worked, miles driven and expenses paid that I felt comfortable using their data alone. Many drivers worried…
Drop everything and read Seymour Hersh’s astounding alternative history of the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden. Hell of a good read. ★
At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out “what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years.” Photograph by Joe Pugliese On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents’ Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide…
Today’s post is a continuation of Part 1 on emoji semantics. 🙀🔝Last week, Instagram began supporting emoji characters inside of hashtags. On Friday we talked about the rise in emoji usage on Instagram and how to discover the semantics of text. Today’s post will focus on the engineering details of…
Over the weekend, I published “ Time and Emotion ” on The Pastry Box, in which I pondered the way we’re creating the data that the data-miners of the future will use to (literally) thoughtlessly construct emotional minefields—if we don’t work to turn away from that outcome. The way I introduced the…
Silicon Valley Then and Now: To Invent the Future, You Must Understand the Past William Shockley’s employees toast him for his Nobel Prize, 1956. Photo courtesy Computer History Museum. “You can’t really understand what is going on now without understanding what came before.” Steve Jobs is…
It’s a few minutes before midnight on Wednesday and I’m sharing a cigarette with a Blood and Crip at a diner 20 minutes outside of Baltimore. It’s two hours past the government-imposed curfew on this broken city and outside its margins the unlikeliest of encounters is happening. Just two days…
Maia Szalavitz May 1, 2015 · 5 min read Opponents of needle exchange programs always make the same argument — especially now that the data overwhelmingly shows that they work. They claim that it “ sends the wrong message ” — today in Indiana, and even back in the 1980s , when clean needle programs…
What The Fuck *Is* HIV, Exactly? Even though the virus has a hold on rural America, you might not know what it can do — or how to stop it. Here’s a guide. Leigh Cowart Apr 30, 2015 · 5 min read By Leigh Cowart Despite the HIV outbreak burning through Scott County, a small, rural community in…
Yes, women are using Tinder to get laid. No, not with you. Alana Massey Apr 30, 2015 · 8 min read By Alana Massey Illustrations by Ana Benaroya My Tinder match decisions had grown more rapid and decisive. Handsome but no bio and all shirtless gym selfies? Dick is abundant and low value. Lists only…
1 / 10 On May 20, David Letterman will preside over his last episode of “Late Show,” the CBS franchise he established and has hosted since 1993. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York Times 1 / 10 On May 20, David Letterman will preside over his last episode of “Late Show,” the CBS franchise he…
David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote “ Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets ” (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries.…
Football365 POLL Who would you trust with an eight-yard chance? Sergio Aguero Jermain Defoe Romelu Lukaku Harry Kane Zlatan Ibrahimovic Team Pld Pts Chelsea 25 60 Manchester City 25 52 Tottenham Hotspur 25 50 Arsenal 25 50 Liverpool 25 49 Manchester United 25 48 Everton 25 41 West Bromwich Albion 25…
When we were children, my older brother and I looked nearly identical. So identical, in fact, that I sometimes successfully convinced strangers that we were twins, despite the two-year age difference. We wore similar boys’ clothes: baggy jeans, oversized T-shirts boasting our favorite hip-hop…
This terrifying disorder turns people into living zombies. But somewhere in the troubled brains of victims may be the key to consciousness. Continue reading on Medium »
Color photo of the emir of Bukhara; Sergey Prokudin Gorsky, 1911 At a very, very basic level, this is how common photographic film works: film is thin plastic covered in a layer or layers of photosensitive chemicals. When exposed to a very small amount of light — like the tiny amount that hits it…
Rachel Monroe Apr 22, 2015 · 39 min read Doc had a very particular fetish, and he talked about it all the time. He fantasized about being murdered, disemboweled, buried in the desert. His friends thought he was joking. But Doc insisted. By Rachel Monroe Illustrations by Steve Kim On a warm day in…
Fame I Didn’t Ask For Quinn Norton Apr 23, 2015 · 7 min read The moment I understood that life was going to be different was when I heard that his name was trending in Bangalore. I was sitting in a friend’s house in London in a confused haze, trying to clean up, to pack, to figure out what kind of…
Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years: Development 1. Start small, then extend. Whether creating a new system, or adding a feature to an existing system, I always start by making a very simple version with almost none of the…
Lauren Smiley Apr 20, 2015 · 13 min read The on-demand industry says it’s turned our concept of work upside down. But one attorney thinks we’ve been here before — again, and again, and again. By Lauren Smiley Shannon Liss-Riordan rolls a small black suitcase out of the ugly federal courthouse in San…
Anddddddddddddd we’re back. I’d first like to apologize for taking so much time in between this post and my last one, but I’ve been pretty busy with other musical projects…I could talk about what they were, but let’s not waste any more time, right? This time, we’re back with another rap analysis,…
It’s easy to forget that our users have ultimate control over how they view the web, even though it has been said before . As people making the web, we merely offer suggestions. These suggestions of ours should make it easier, not harder for people to access our content in the manner that best suits…
About a year ago I started seeing a lot of headlines about “deep links.” Developers, I soon discovered, are frantically trying to get mobile apps to work together, so that clicking on a link in one app takes you directly to relevant content in another app. Deep linking means to bore a…
One of the selling points of the Apple Watch is that it can help make you less of an asshole. This was the thrust of the first major report about what the watch is like to wear, published before we knew what it looked like. It’s in Apple’s marketing. “You know how very often technology tends to…
[Content Note: Classism; homophobia.] So, one of the common responses I'm seeing—mostly on Twitter, although it came up in comments here, too—to the Indiana pizza place refusing service is: "Har har who even has pizza at a wedding?" Poor people. That's who has pizza at a wedding. I mean, some people…
No articles.