June 16, 2017
badass women in science, technology, engineering, + mathematics
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya created 35 posters celebrating women scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. [more inside]
SLBasketOfMeowingKittens
“Morrowind feels like it begs you to come home,”
Why The Elder Scrolls Online Is Worth Playing In 2017 [MMOS World] “Today, The Elder Scrolls Online is almost a different game. Majority of the complaints from launch have been addressed. Fan favorite Elder Scrolls guilds like the Thieves Guild and The Dark Brotherhood have been added. The game is now on consoles, reaching a wider audience for revenue benefits. Level gated mechanics have been removed with the One Tamriel update, and gone are the days of player limitations. Level scaling arrived as well. On top of all that in the past year and a half, regular developer updates have hinted at things to come and they are worth the wait too. So why should players get excited for 2017? The answer is because the developers aren’t stopping with the good news.” [more inside]
If you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior
Social Cooling describes the long-term negative side effects of living in a big-data-driven reputation economy. Data brokers derive thousands of scores from personal data; these form a “digital reputation”, and have the potential to affect their subjects' lives and opportunities. The long-term effects of this are a culture of conformity, self-censorship, risk aversion and social rigidity.
Don't expand your consciousness, just beg.
Before the war I was a senior VP
The Handman's Tale [slvideo]
The map is not the terrain
If you've ever tried to walk from one subway station to another based on the nicely squared-off map of the routes, you may know that they don't correspond perfectly to actual geography (nor are they supposed to). Here's a series of animated illustrations that show you exactly how far off the transit map is from the real world. Pay particular attention to Austin's.
Rigged: Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing.
A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute. (SL USA TODAY) [more inside]
Bitcoin has not in any sense eliminated human politics
"It can enforce contracts, prevent double spending, and cap the size of the money pool all without participants having to cede power to any particular third party who might abuse the power. No rent-seeking, no abuses of power, no politics — blockchain technologies can be used to create “math-based money” and “unstoppable” contracts that are enforced with the impartiality of a machine instead of the imperfect and capricious human bureaucracy of a state or a bank. ... Unfortunately this turns out to be a naive understanding of blockchain."
Joni, Mary, Mama
Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now (Mama Cass Show 1969) Mama Cass, Mary Travers, & Joni Mitchell - I Shall Be Released (ibid.)
Oregon is first state to issue nonbinary IDs
Starting July 3rd, Oregon will become the first state in the US to issue driver's licenses and state IDs with three gender abbreviations: M, F, and X. [more inside]
I haint afraid of no ghost!
Haint blue is a shade of blue popular for keeping spirits away in the South. The shade itself is a faint robin's egg blue, and it's used to simulate the water that spirits called haints, hate. A haint can't cross water, just like the headless horseman, so you paint your porch to look like water, and you have no problems with haintings!
FISH SMASH
The Fish Hammer is a goldfish-controlled device that smashes tiny furniture. Of course. It was made by artist Neil Mendoza (check out his other work), who posted instructions for making your own Fish Hammer!
Amazon to buy Whole Foods in $13.4 Billion Deal
Paint it red
Tom Keating was a notorious art forger. A cockney, he claimed to have painted more than 2000 'Sexton Blakes'. He was a socialist and hated the gallery system, creating forgeries to undermine it. A couple of years before he died he made the television series Tom Keating on Painters, talking about painting and demonstrating his technique. [more inside]
The saga of a giant, weaponized armadillo
The New Yorker - The Persistence of Prog Rock "Even more than most musicians, the prog rockers aimed for immortality. “We want our albums to last,” Robert Fripp, the austere guitar scientist behind King Crimson, said. In a literal sense, he got his wish: although the progressive-rock boom was effectively over by the end of the seventies, it left behind a vast quantity of surplus LPs, which filled the bins in used-record stores for decades."
Friday night's alright for wrestling (or lots of great podcasts)
HCW Championship Wrestling, 'which has often been called , quite correctly, the worst wrestling ever seen on anyone's TV screen'. To balance that out, lots of great podcasts, starting with Jim Smallman's Tuesday Night Jaw, popular and well liked wrestling podcast on the Distraction Pieces network. [more inside]
« Previous day | Next day »