It’s not just Zoom. Popular video chat platforms have design flaws that exhaust the human mind and body. But there are easy ways to mitigate their effects. | Continue reading
Director of Product - Impraise | Continue reading
by Eric J. Weiner In 1940, at the height of Hitler’s invasion of Western Europe, Walter Benjamin, from Vichy France wrote, “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a conception of history that is in … | Continue reading
A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes | Continue reading
An original member of the crew who locked himself in the Biosphere 2 for two years clarifies inaccuracies about the project. | Continue reading
Toyin Ojih Odutola. Paris Apartment, 2016. Charcoal, pastel and pencil on paper. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman Mourning is in season. Newspapers of record these days publish interactive mass obituaries, images of “ordinary” people fallen to “the opioid crisis” or to Covid-19 (the front page of the Sunday New York Times was recently riven down the middle by a monolith comp … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse Unfortunately, it is always worth your time to read a book in praise of the humanities. Given the unenviable position of the humanities in public education and in contemporary cultural and (especially) political discourse about valuable expertise, any author th … | Continue reading
Turning $65 into $12,000: Positive EV Asymmetric Payoff | Continue reading
Bitcoin Investment Thesis From First Principles | Continue reading
In the early 2000s social media sites like Facebook and Twitter weren’t commonplace yet. Even text messages, at ten cents each, were something to be rationed. For many teenagers the primary means of communication outside school was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). So when it was anno … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray Former Finnish President and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari once gave a talk in our town and we went to see him. The distinguished gentleman who introduced him at Atlanta’s distinguished Piedmont Driving Club listed among Ahtisaari’s achievements “helping to achie … | Continue reading
And why Pinterest and Snapchat are leaving money on the table | Continue reading
Google AI has designed Lyra audio codec to work at a very low bitrate (3 kbps) for speech and voice calls over low-bandwidth internet. | Continue reading
by Sarah Firisen I just spent two months living on the Caribbean island of Grenada. It’s a wonderful place with a somewhat antiquated healthcare system. To visit Grenada, I had to have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of flying. I was planning to go to a clinic and wait in lin … | Continue reading
George had gotten a new job as a contractor at a medium-sized book distributor. He arrived nice and early on Day 1, enthusiastic about a fresh start in a new industry. | Continue reading
Minimalistic, Hands Off, and Enjoyed on My MacBook Air (M1, 2020) | Continue reading
by Michael Liss The Machine has me in its tentacles. Some algorithm thinks I really want to buy classical sheet music, and it is not going to be discouraged. Another (or, perhaps it is the same) insists that now is the time to invest in toner cartridges, running shoes, dress shir … | Continue reading
Late afternoon one day last week as I was waiting for a train at the station in Bruneck, South Tyrol. | Continue reading
Presentation to Internet Archive staff | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt Two profound horrors have plagued the world in recent times: the Covid-19 pandemic and the Trump presidency. And after years of dread, their recent decline has brought me a brief respite of peace. Not that my peace was ever disturbed as much as many others’. One … | Continue reading
"What if you could hear color?" asks Google's latest AI experiment. "Explore Vassily Kandinsky’s synesthesia and “play” his pioneering masterpiece, Yellow-Red-Blue, with the help of machine learning."DesignTaxi writes,Art lovers can now have a taste, or sound bite, of Kandinsky’s … | Continue reading
A few days ago I realized something. I don’t like writing. I realized it because I found creative energy to work on programming projects again, and I experience writing programs differently from how I experience having to write. Even the turn of phrase “having to write” betrays m … | Continue reading
by Philip Graham Whenever I discover a band that sports an accordion in the lineup, I’m ready to listen. But this wasn’t always so. It all goes back to the mid-1960s, those days of my mid-adolescence, when my father’s favorite cousin, who we called our “aunt” May, came to visit n … | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon You may or may not know that sukiyaki is a beef-based Japanese hot-pot dish. But I’m not talking about food. I’m talking about music, specifically, a Japanese pop song entitled “Ue o Muite Arukō” (“I Look Up as I Walk”) which was a hit by Kyu Sakamoto in 1961 in Ja … | Continue reading
Meta-Note: I’m sorry it’s been so long between articles; for better or worse writing here is something that I do for fun, and sometimes work and family get in the way. In this case, I was spending a lot of time trying to learn SQL; you will be pleased to note I am now able to pad … | Continue reading
People Who Appear to Wander Around In Circles Often Find The Value | Continue reading
There are misconceptions about everything, today we are going to discuss 4 misconceptions about the effects of weather on solar panels. | Continue reading
Yesterday I decided to throw a BME280 in a SEM. We purchased the hackerfarm SEM a while back, but recently I’ve been getting a bit more use out of it. I’ve also recently been getting in… | Continue reading
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Self Driving-Cars | Continue reading
Paul Kreitman reviews Timon Screech’s “Tokyo Before Tokyo” and Amy Stanley’s “Stranger in the Shogun’s City.” | Continue reading
Weighted wiggles and smoothed categories | Continue reading