In this chilling BBC clip, a newsteam ventures to one of LA's new shantytowns made up of people who've lost their homes in the subprime meltdown and now live in tents, improvised shacks or RVs on abandoned land. It's the contemporary Hooverville, and, as the Subliterate Cinephile notes, I wonder why I found out about this from the BBC and not US media.
Github today apologised for firing a Jewish employee who warned co-workers about Nazis and offered him his job back. It also said that "employees are free to express concerns about Nazis". As it happened, the Jewish employee posted to an internal Github Slack channel: "Stay safe homies, Nazis are about." But the comment sparked criticism… READ THE REST
Timnit Gebru, an AI ethics researcher at Google, was fired this week after sending an internal email complaining that marginalized voices at the company were being silenced. Google, for its part, claims that Gebru failed to follow Google's requirements for a paper submission and that she subsequently threatened to resign. Ms Gebru is a well-respected… READ THE REST
Scotty H created this spectrographic animation of a classic dial-up modem's startup noise. Here's a breakdown, by Oona Räisänen, of what each section concerns: READ THE REST
Back in March, most parents thought stay-at-home orders and the advent of distance-learning would mean a few weeks of discomfort before getting kids right back into the classroom. Unfortunately for millions, that's not how education has played out. Instead, despite the best efforts of most teachers and education professionals, learning has become fraught with delays,… READ THE REST
A good parent doesn't raise their child on a constant diet of fast-food hamburgers and other junk. Yet, many pet owners may be feeding their dogs even worse culinary horrors without even realizing it. While there are strict guidelines about the types of by-products and chemicals that can find their way into food consumed by… READ THE REST
Thanks to Netflix's wildly popular series, The Queen's Gambit, chess, a game invented about 1,500 years ago, is surging back into public consciousness. But while the Game of Kings may be riding a wave of increased awareness right now, it is, by no means, the only game that has survived the test of time into… READ THE REST