“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Johnathon Swift, epigraph to A Confederacy of Dunces. Sixty… | Continue reading
On February 18, Yoko Ono celebrated her 90th birthday. In the wake of that milestone, this performance from 2010 began showing up on social media. The event was the 30th Annual John Lennon Tribute … | Continue reading
This New York Times article seems to suggest that Twitter is insolvent and choosing not to pay all sorts of bills, many of which will expose them to genuine legal jeopardy. We’ve previously r… | Continue reading
Jason Pargin, author of the John Dies at the End series, has an interesting hot take on how our current online Upside Down came to be. Pargin’s 4th book in the John Dies… series, If Thi… | Continue reading
“Faculty hiring networks in the United States exhibit a steep hierarchy in academia and across all domains and fields….” There are approximately 5,300 universities and colleges in the United States… | Continue reading
Nick Clegg, Nicola Mendelsohn, and Cristian Perrella were identified in court papers as executives of Facebook (now Meta) who took bribes from OnlyFans to “blacklist” the accounts of ad… | Continue reading
Apple’s AirTags are an excellent way to know where your luggage is—and a snitch on airlines who don’t know where your luggage is. Lufthansa is the first to ban them after “an awfu… | Continue reading
Hello and welcome back to Spoken Word with Electronics. This week we discuss technology that should be in every garage: a mobile phone! I don’t mean a cell phone. Put down that slab of glass.… | Continue reading
Like all great things that swing in the consumer’s favor never last like they should, like Netflix’s OG free streaming service accessed via special disc’s for PS3, XBox 360 and Wi… | Continue reading
Technical reference books can be a godsend when working on a project. Most every maker, big and small, is likely familiar with the PocketRef and similar reference guides. In this Tested video, Adam… | Continue reading
Sim City (and similar “sim” games) gives you the power to create and manage cities, but what would happen if you encountered NIMBYism (“not in my back yard”) at every turn? … | Continue reading
Skeptics Eviscerated a Cornell Psychologist Whose Published Evidence Said Yes. A Decade Later, His Data Has Stood Up. More than ten years ago, a prominent research psychologist, Daryl J. Bem, publi… | Continue reading
An old lady in England got a voice assistant as a gift. A devout Catholic, she asked it to say the Hail Mary. Delighted when it did so, she made it a daily habit. And Amazon was charging her for it… | Continue reading
In this clip, Lex Fridman’s interview with John Carmack gets right to the point: his programming setup! I love his thorough attitude toward using debuggers—”your head is a faulty interp… | Continue reading
Readers of NPR Morning Edition were asked to send in poems in the form of handwritten letters (“epistolary”), addressed to anyone they’d like. Their Poet-in-Residence Kwame Alexan… | Continue reading
Last week, I wrote in passing about how WiFi doesn’t “stand for” wireless fidelity. It’s a pun on “Hi-Fi” and “wireless fidelity” doesn’t mean … | Continue reading
Nudging — the idea that a well-designed “choice architecture” can help people make free choices that are better than the ones they would make without the nudge — has a few w… | Continue reading
Zhong Xue Gao, an upscale ice cream company in China, is taking heat after a video on Weibo shows how their frozen desserts just won’t melt no matter how hot it gets. Nicknamed the “Her… | Continue reading
If a loved one has died and you want to remember them by their tattoo, you can call Save My Ink Forever, an Ohio-based firm that retrieves tattoos from the deceased and then preserves and frames th… | Continue reading
“Fractal wood burning” refers to using hacked microwave power supplies to char Lichtenberg figures into wood. It is extraordinarily dangerous, and dozens of people have been killed foll… | Continue reading
This article by Rolling Stone doesn’t reflect the reality I have seen at Disneyland, however, it would appear the author is more Florida focused and I have no clue what goes on in Florida. I … | Continue reading
Tesla is conducting layoffs of salaried personnel due to what Tesla describes as overstaffing during a rapid phase of growth. It is usually illegal to use a reduction in force to eliminate employee… | Continue reading
The court of appeals in the third appellate district in the state of California has ruled that bees are, in fact, fish. From the court document (emphasis added): The California Endangered Species A… | Continue reading
This video is posted as Adam Savage’s “rant on laser printers” but it’s really about how dreadful Google’s search engine is nowadays. He hopped online to research his … | Continue reading
Enginering students from Johns Hopkins University prototyped an edible adhesive tape, called Tastee Tape, to keep burritos and other wrapped foods sealed up during consumption. (In the image above,… | Continue reading
⍼, “RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW”, is a Unicode character of uncertain origin. It may be summoned as the HTML entity ⍼. Jonathan Chan set out to uncover its myste… | Continue reading
Have you ever heard of the Grasshopper mouse? It lives in the deserts of North America, lives on a meat diet, and hunts scorpions. Unlike other animals, it is immune to scorpion venom and actually … | Continue reading
I’ve known Kevin for over 30 years (ever since he was the editor of The Whole Earth Review) and we’ve remained friends ever since. (And for the last 10 years, I’ve been his busine… | Continue reading
Here’s a piece of hackerspace lore from earlier this summer. Rinpoche Fa Zang, a Buddhist monk, believed (incorrectly) that the rule of the San Francisco Noisebridge hackerspace was that R… | Continue reading
After a flight on the low-cost IndiGo airline, Nandan Kumar, a 28-year-old software engineer, determined that another passenger had accidentally taken Kumar’s bag from the baggage claim belt.… | Continue reading
Here’s an interesting analysis of the fairly-recent “Navy UFO” video, which shows correspondences between its movements—or at least those of what you see on the video—and those of… | Continue reading
In a CBS interview, Melinda French Gates said one of the main reasons she divorced Bill Gates, in addition to his affair, was his ongoing friendship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. From the intervi… | Continue reading
Seán Doran gathered 4320-line footage from Mars Perseverance rover puttering around the red planet, and set it to music by Chris Zabriskie. It’s striking yet haunting, a barren place tantaliz… | Continue reading
Cignpost is a government-approved Covid testing firm in the UK. In fine print “buried in online documentation” it discloses plans to sell customers’ DNA to third parties. It got caught.… | Continue reading
Alex Heath, senior reporter for The Verge, is covering an all-hands meeting at the company formerly known Facebook. Zuckerberg is “explaining the company’s updated values”. Zuckerberg i… | Continue reading
Related to yesterday’s post about words known better by men than women, and vice versa, here are words that people in the UK know better than U.S. people and vice versa. I knew only a word or two o… | Continue reading
Software engineer Greg Cannon built an artificial intelligence that plays NES Tetris. In the video above, the AI, named StackedRabbit, tears through 237 levels, scoring 102 million points and revea… | Continue reading
Richard Kyanka, better-known as Lowtax, died yesterday at 45. Kyanka was the founder and longtime operator of Something Awful, the sprawling web forum from which much web culture emerged. The news … | Continue reading
Angelina Lee is an expert in JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js, React AI, and Mia Khalifa. When she worked at Instagram, she was the “team coffee maker” and mined Etherium on company serv… | Continue reading
“Should I get takeout for dinner even if I have leftovers in the fridge?” I asked Delphi, an AI built to answer questions of morals. “It’s okay,” Delphi responded. You… | Continue reading
Here’s an Atari ST that’s been in daily use since 1985 as a general-purpose business machine at a campground, complete with software written by its single careful owner, Frans Bos. Vict… | Continue reading
Here’s a piece of hackerspace lore from earlier this summer. Rinpoche Fa Zang, a Buddhist monk, believed (incorrectly) that the rule of the San Francisco Noisebridge hackerspace was that R… | Continue reading
To the tradition of “would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses?” add “would you rather fly a plane with one horse-sized engine or 50 duckling-sized engi… | Continue reading
Mark Davis worked at a Kmart in Naperville, IL in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Each month, the corporate office mailed a cassette tape to all the stores, which contained easy-listening elevator … | Continue reading
It’s a classic hypothetical conundrum: If you could travel backwards in time, would you kill Baby Hitler before he ever did anything wrong? Whatever Butterfly Effects might arise from the Füh… | Continue reading
I’m in some stupid Dune meme Facebook group and someone from the group paid Gilbert Gottfried via Cameo to recite the infamous “Litany Against Fear” of the Bene Gesserit from Dune… | Continue reading
In this advertisement from Thailand, a man leans a secret about his girlfriend, but fails to return the favor. The agency is Ogilvy & Mather. Here’s another one, about a man packing up hi… | Continue reading
This mischievous stowaway bat caused an Air India flight from New Delhi to the United States to turn around for an emergency landing. The video shows the lively chiroptera having fun and flying aro… | Continue reading