Sześć lat temu Polacy wyszli na ulice by uratować Europę przed ACTA – międzynarodową umową handlową, negocjowaną z inicjatywy Stanów Zjednoczonych, która groziła wprowadzeniem szeroko zakrojonej cenzury i nadzoru w Internecie w imię rzekomej ochrony praw autorskich.
This morning David and I were texting each other about the Brady Bunch, which we often do because we love the show and so does every member of our families. We got to talking about the episode where the Bradys star in a laundry soap commercial. — Read the rest
Sheryl Sandberg asked Facebook staff to research George Soros because he gave a speech boldly critical of the social media giant as a "menace," reports the New York Times tonight.
The Nairobi neighborhood of Kibera is Africa's largest slum, and it's home to an unlikely, Silicon-Valley-style tech park operated by Samasource (motto: "Artificial intelligence meets human dignity"), who serves clients from Google to Microsoft to Salesforce, using clickworkers who get paid $9/day, compared to the going wage of $2/day in the region's "informal economy" (the company believes that paying wages on par with rich-world clickworkers would "distort the local economy").
I love mandelbrot youtube, where the most important thing is how many iterations is in your deep, hard zoom.
Here's "Mandelbrot zoom to 10E+1116 with deep zoom into minibrot – 75,000,000 iterations":
Or how about some "Mandelbrot deep zoom to 10E+2431 at 60 fps – Needle Julia evolution – 30,000,000 iterations." — Read the rest
Nick Shabazz, a knife reviewer with an amused taste for reviewing particularly bad knives, finds one that "really beats the cake." It's the worst knife he has ever seen, a "fractal of terrible knifemaking" whose terribleness is apparent at every point of inspection. — Read the rest
By creating a surfactant that holds water in place, scientists are able to produce repeatable liquid 3D shapes in these nanoparticle "supersoaps" with modded off-the-shelf 3D printers.
Here are some recent game releases of note and some of what I've been up to in hobby gaming over the past month or so.
Earlier this year, I wrote a piece about my favorite gaming magazine, UK's Tabletop Gaming. — Read the rest
This morning, the EU's legislative affairs committee (JURI) narrowly voted to include two controversial proposals in upcoming, must-pass copyright reforms: both Article 11 (no linking to news stories without permission and a paid license) and Article 13 (all material posted by Europeans must first be evaluated by a copyright filter and blocked if they appear to match a copyrighted work) passed by a single vote.
Christian Thompson has a YouTube channel where he clearly explains how to write neat little game-like programs in Python. It reminds me of the fun I had writing programs in BASIC to generate Mandelbrot fractals and cellular automata. He just uploaded a four-part series on how to simulate bouncing balls. — Read the rest
In 2011 the American Physical Society estimated the cost of pulling a tonne of CO2 from the atmosphere to be $600. A new study, based on the analysis of a pilot CO2-extraction plant that's been in operation since 2015, says the price has dropped to between US$94 and $232 a tonne, which "suggests that the geoengineering technology is inching closer to commercial viability," reports Nature. — Read the rest
A sprawling interview with artist and filmmaker Johannes Grenzfurthner on his latest movie Glossary of Broken Dreams.
Remember the fantastic attention experiment in which you have to count the times the basketball is passed? (If you don't know it, watch the video before reading the rest of this post.)
In a recent paper in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica, University of Cadiz psychologists suggest that like the gorilla experiment, "selective attention" based on our preconceptions about possible extraterrestrials and how they may communicate may cause us to overlook evidence of their existence. — Read the rest
A new study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology (Sci-Hub mirror) conducted microbial surveys of the bathrooms at the University of Connecticut (where the study's lead authors are based) to investigate whether hand-dryers were sucking in potentially infectious microbes and then spraying them all over everything, as had been observed in earlier studies.
The corruption and surveillance culture of Facebook is baked in deep and can never be removed; if you doubt it, just peruse a sampling of their patent filings, which are like Black Mirror fanfic written by lawyers.
YouTuber NileRed was curious about how lactose-free milk is made, so he did a little research and came up with this helpful explainer.
Facebook recently joined Google, Comcast, Verizon and AT&T and contributed over $1 million to a PAC fighting this California ballot initiative that would have let you opt out of data sharing with Cambridge Analytica. — Read the rest
A little birdie sent me this photo and said I couldn't reveal its source. It's the recipe** for the new Crystal Ball Frappuccino drink, which debuts in Starbucks shops March 22.
— Read the rest
Yasukuni Notomi ("a writer who has covered the world of stationery for many years") provides an introduction to the creative explosion in Japanese scissor-design, beginning with the "Pencut," a scissor that fits in a normal pencil-case, with retractable elastic loops for your fingers and full-length blades so you don't sacrifice power for portability.
Every week Donald Bell posts a video about interesting maker projects. This week in Maker Update he looks at an animated wooden sign, new mesh boards from Particle, 3D printed QR coasters, 3D printing on fabric, and his talk with CNC router whiz Jon-A-Tron. — Read the rest
