MetaFilter posts by blahblahblah.
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Scorpions are often inspiration for some of the deadliest (and outlandish) ways of creating burning pain. For example, a legendary Chinese poison was made by “sealing venomous snakes, scorpions, and centipedes into a jar and having them fight” which reveals more about cultural relations in ancient China than how to make poison. In Game of Thrones, the way to stop flaming dragons was to use a version of one of the first siege engines, the Roman scorpio, a torsion weapon that you can make yourself (Pdf)! And if you just want to wish you were dead, you can eat the Trinidad Scorpion, one of the hottest peppers in the world, as this fascinating discussion of hot peppers in India shows.
posted on Feb-24-20 at 5:04 PM
Complexity explained offers a set of articles, systems, and interactive toys that explain aspects of the new field of complexity science, from the emergence of the blob, to the reasons for traffic jams, to the dynamics of herd immunity.
posted on Jul-2-19 at 12:41 PM
There are interesting attempts to procedurally generate realistic cities, though it turns out to still be a hard problem, as all the most famous cities in games are built by hand. The exceptions are often interesting to play with, like Wave Function Collapse [PC only] which lets you walk through an infinite and beautiful Mediterranean-style city. If you prefer overhead maps, here is an interactive in-browser fantasy generator or this approach, which generates random navigable cities. Developers keep teasing new approaches to city building however, you can see some animated GIFs generated by another interesting approach to creating a cyberpunk city, along with some procedural brutalism.
posted on Nov-14-18 at 8:10 AM
The joke I most regret asks famous comedians (Cameron Esposito, Weird Al, Patton Oswalt) about the jokes they regret, which provides a fascinating and thoughtful look at how comedy is evolving. For something a little more traditionally funny, also check out the list of jokes that comedians wish they could steal, with lots of good YouTube videos and audio.
posted on Sep-6-18 at 1:52 PM
What if dinosaurs had an advanced civilization? To be clear, they almost certainly didn't. But, if they did, would we know? The question is relevant to xenobiology, which aims to find traces of alien life, perhaps long after it is extinct. A new paper [pdf] suggests that synthetic molecules like plastic and potentially nuclear fallout, would be detectable in the geologic record, although it might be challenging to separate signals like climate change from other abrupt events. Others have argued that, over geologic times, even plastics will be gone. (except from the fascinating book A World Without Us) [prev.],
posted on Apr-12-18 at 12:18 PM
Permanent Redirect is a new piece of art by Donald Hansen, who previously created Shybot, a bot that fled through the desert to avoid people. The trick to Permanent Redirect is that it moves URLs every time it is seen. If you want to chase it down, it was here a few days ago.
posted on Jan-9-18 at 5:51 PM
In 2000, the Clay Millennium Problems were posted - seven unsolved problems in mathematics. If you solve one, the Clay Institute will give you a million dollars. To date, only one problem has been solved, the Poincaré Conjecture, by the reclusive Grigory Perelman, who refused the prize, and who is famously described in this (controversial) New Yorker article [prev]. Now, as described in Wired, interesting questions are emerging over approaches to solve a second challenge, the Navier–Stokes Equations which predict how fluids flow.
posted on Jan-7-18 at 8:52 PM
Bell Labs scientist Gerard Foschini proposed that the chance of intelligent life emerging in our universe was 10^264, meaning that either we are very unlikely to exist or something besides the normal laws of physics predicts life. His derived these odds by speculating about the The Canonical Artifact [pdf], the smallest thing a being could make that could not reasonably be created by chance alone, but that intelligent societies would be drawn to create. He proposed that the Canonical Artifact would be a sculpture demonstrating the 26 sporadic groups (read more if you want to learn about The Monster, Moonshine, and group theory). Now the definitive indicator of intelligence in the galaxy now exists! (though it is not that impressive to look at)
posted on Oct-25-17 at 12:32 PM
A common (and often misleading) internet retort is "correlation does not equal causation" - but than how do we identify causes? And what does correlation equal? The answer can be interesting and complicated, but if you want to understand how modern social science identifies when correlative effects are causal, Alex Edmans' Layman's Guide to Separating Correlation and Causation is a great place to start. Also, posting about correlation is itself strongly correlated (likely causally) with the following two links being posted in the comments, so I preempt them here: the inevitable xkcd comic and the Spurious Correlation site.
posted on Oct-24-17 at 11:47 AM
Anatomy of a Thousand Typefaces is a nifty online tool that helps you find fonts to use by implementing some of the ideas in Cole's Anatomy of Type book. As explained in this post, it uses objective ways to classify fonts by things like the height of the "x" character and the proportions of letters, which make it easier to find similar (or different) fonts. Turn on advanced filters to see the cool area charts.
posted on Oct-23-17 at 10:58 AM
The New York Times has a lovely feature looking at 8 short things, very closely. A 90 second scene from Freaks and Geeks that "takes you from melancholy to sheer delight." A pizza being made. An Eddie Murphy joke. An amazing adaptation of the Swan in dance. The erection of a building on the High Line. The 2-second bleat of Law and Order. A lyric from Lil Uzi Vert. A shoe painted by Manet.
posted on Aug-15-17 at 11:02 AM
Some people want you to care so much about typography that they create single-serve sites to make their points. Smart Quotes for Smart People tells you when you should use smart quotes (basically always) and how to do it. For a (very slightly) broader view, take a look at Quotes and Accents. If you want a wonderful and more in-depth guide to typography, Butterick's Practical Typography has you covered, including a 10 minute introduction to the 5 rules you need to know.
posted on Aug-11-17 at 2:05 PM
Geologist and science fiction writer Alex Acks has some problems with the geology of the mountains of Middle Earth, but less of an issue about Tatooine-like desert worlds, and also gleans insights on what the map of Panem of the Hunger Games tells us about global warming. Meanwhile, geologist Miles Traer has exhaustively developed the geography of Game of Thrones, including a fascinating description of geologic causes of the the Doom of Valyria. If you aren't a geologist but want to build a world, you can follow geologic rules when building your own worlds or simulate your own plate tectonics and create a planet from scratch.
posted on Aug-2-17 at 11:20 AM
Explorable Explainations are interactive online game/toy/video hybrids that teach complex concepts through interactivity. Some classics (which may have been discussed here before) include the Parable of the Polygons about segregation (by Vi Hart and Nicky Case), an interactive guide to p-hacking (from 538), an intro to digital signal processing, a sentencing simulation by the Marshall Project, and a guide to game design using games by Amit Patel. Just added to this list is a really interesting video/interactive tool on what viruses can teach us about design.
posted on Jul-12-17 at 10:30 AM
Research has increasingly shown that emotions are contagious. Emotional or affective contagion has been found between mothers and infants [pdf]; in social networks, where moral outrage increases the spread of ideas by 20%; and especially at work. The emotions of a team member can impact the entire team, changing both attitudes and performance. Do you have negative people around you? Two methods to stop negative contagion that seem to work: be calm, as serenity is one of the most contagious emotions, or else ignore them, as attention is critical to the spread of emotions.
posted on Jun-26-17 at 12:48 PM
Less than a decade ago, peak oil was a constant source of anxiety on MeFi (and around the world), but now the world faces an oil price anchored around $55/barrel. The reason is the swarm - US shale producers that can clamber into the market profitably at that price, and which are getting ever more competitive post recent fracking-bust as they drive down costs (and eliminate jobs, which are increasingly in renewables). Though the future is never certain, almost every major OPEC nation needs prices above $55 to balance their budget. While increased fossil fuel use can be very bad for climate change, the fracking boom is leading to the rapid replacement of coal with natural gas, which is generally a good thing for CO2 emissions, though leaking methane mitigates the benefit to an unceratin extent.
posted on Jun-19-17 at 10:36 AM
Since it was recommended by Bill Gates as the "most inspiring" book he has ever read, Stephen Pinker's thesis on the decline of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature (prev), has been a number one best seller again. Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (that one) had previously critiqued the thesis in an paper [technical pdf, though well explained], concluding that "humanity is as violent as usual." Economist Michael Spagat joined Pinker in writing a response, leading to a reply by Cirillo and Taleb, provoking yet another letter. While the argument isn't violent, there are some nasty feelings on both sides. Very recently, and in an easy-to-follow set of slides, Spagat has laid out a final (for now) and fairly convincing argument that we really are seeing a decline of violence in the world. For a visual tour of declining violence, there is this terrific set of infographics.
posted on May-17-17 at 1:54 PM
Cookbooks based on fictional worlds are nothing new (witness this Dragonlance classic), but there are now many sites that offer recipes from the Hobbit to the Hunger Games to My Little Pony to various video games, with Wired putting together a list of 14 greatest hits. One of the most ambitious fantasy chefs is Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, who has put together an exhaustive Worlds of Warcraft cookbook based on in-game recipes. She also has a site with lots of Game of Throne recipes (among others), and is publishing a Hearthstone (!) cookbook soon.
posted on May-10-17 at 1:58 PM
When Tolkein helped create the modern fantasy genre, he also re-introduced a key fantasy trope, the prophetic poem that is key to the plot of the novel. Whether elegantly written (as in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising poem or Clarke's Prophecy of John Uskglass) or rather awkwardly accumulated (as in the Wheel of Time's Karaethon Cycle), the prophetic verse is often a tired trope, but one which a variety of fantasy novels have used to good effect.
posted on Apr-5-17 at 8:42 AM
Despite Instagram, in-depth and beautiful food blogs are still a thing. A Life Worth Eating covers lovely fancy meals (and coffee) from around the world, such as El Bulli at its height and the sushi restaurant made famous by Jiro, and most recently, the (apparently much improved) Per Se. The long-standing ulterior epicure [prev] is similar, though the writing is longer and clever clever (see this older review of the famous Fat Duck), and there is a healthy (okay, not healthy) dose of much less upscale food from the American Midwest and South, and some excellent top dishes and restaurant lists.
posted on Apr-3-17 at 8:27 AM
Seeing Theory is an amazing interactive introduction to statistics and probability. Though the visualizations and interactive toys are really great, the concepts can get complicated quickly. If you are confused, you may be interested in the free Open Intro to Statistics textbook or the video series by the same authors. For a gentle introduction, consider watching this BBC documentary on statistics by the late, great Hans Rosling.
posted on Mar-2-17 at 11:42 AM
The first nail clippers weren't patented until the late 19th century, so how did people trim their nails before that? Nail care was important in many ancient cultures. In the Iron Age, nail files were a critical feature of the Viking grooming toolkit, important because the Gods would sail on a ship made of dead men's nails to Ragnarok. There was also a lot of attention paid to nail care in ancient Egypt, Rome Greece, and China (take a look at this Egyptian spa painting). Elaborate nail customs persist, including very specific Jewish traditions about the order in which nails are cut, and in traditional nursery rhymes. Whatever you do, apparently you shouldn't bite or pick them.
posted on Feb-13-17 at 12:15 PM
From any perspective, the progress humanity has made in recent history is astonishing, as this fantastic analysis by Oxford economist Max Roser shows. Economically, 130,000 people have exited extreme poverty every day since 1990. In 1800 1-in-10 people were literate, now it is 85%. Child mortality has dropped a 100x in the same period, even as populations levels are expected to peak in 2075. The stats for education are no less impressive. There is a nice infographic summarizing these and other trends as well. You can put together your own interactive own charts using the amazing data gathered by Prof. Roser's Our World in Data site.
posted on Dec-21-16 at 7:45 AM
Unconscious bias is particularly insidious, and most simple methods developed to address it typically work for only a few days, if at all. Of the approaches tested in a 17,000 person study, only 8 techniques appear to lower bias temporarily, and many of those require the rather troubling method of both raising empathy for the minority group and creating negative associations with the majority group. In fact, simply educating people about negative stereotypes can actually increase stereotyping. The problem is still being worked on, and researchers are optimistic. In the meantime, it can be best to avoid triggering bias at all: blind auditions can reduce bias in settings like orchestras (though maybe not in technical hiring, where the problem appears to be that disadvantaged groups give up sooner). It can also help for people from advantaged backgrounds to speak out when they see racism or bias: a just-published study shows that if a "high-follower white male" calls out a harasser on Twitter, there is a drop in overt racist behavior. You can also become aware of your own biases through the Implicit Association Test.
posted on Nov-13-16 at 3:31 PM
After being used to describe boring games (and remaining as a controversial term), the walking simulator is finally getting its due. Recently there have been many great free examples of pure, procedurally-generated walking simulators: no puzzles, no goals, no crafting, no enemies... just walking in a space that was created just for your game. Bernband gives you the feeling of walking through a bustling alien city/mall/something and observing its inhabitants. The ominous TRIHAYWBFRFYH lets you wander around a setting as the apocalypse begins. Secret Habitat creates an island full of art galleries. Sanctuary features a strange, creepy walk among mysterious obelisks. Sacremento is a stunning walk through a watercolor world. If you like realistic walks, Outerra is an amazing engine producing procedurally-generated landscapes using Google Earth data that lets you wander anywhere on the planet, zooming out from a blade of grass to outer space, at which point you probably want to shift to the equally amazing Space Engine to explore other worlds. [all games downloadable, most for Windows and Mac]
posted on Oct-25-16 at 11:53 AM
There are about 60 remaining Futuro ("Flying Saucer") houses left in the world. Sometimes helicoptered into place, and with a groovy interior, these 1960s prefab homes were originally built for skiing (apparently you can still rent one in the Russian Caucus) and vacations. Now, some are abandoned, though one was recently restored and put on display.
posted on Sep-15-16 at 9:19 AM
A brief history of chairs by architect and professor Witold Rybczynski covers the fascinating (really) history of chairs, the subject of his new book Now I Sit Me Down. He has also written about the lack of thoughtful design in airline seats and how architects have struggled to create the perfect chair (researching this article apparently inspired the book). Don't miss the photographs of the 7 chairs that changed the world.
posted on Aug-26-16 at 9:29 PM
A new wave of Lovecraftian stories confront, rather than ignore, the racism and antisemitism that permeated Lovecraft's work, and, indeed, served as the basis for much of the horror. This roundtable of authors discussing how they address the problems of Lovecraft is worthwhile. Some authors are explicitly using Lovecraft as a lens on contemporary racism, such as in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country [PDF preview], while others mine Lovecraft's fear of the other to examine bigotry, as in Ruthanna Emrys's lovely Litany of Earth [full story] (Emyrs is also part of the Lovecraft Reread, which looks at both the Mythos-building and uncomfortable aspects of Lovecraft's stories). Previously, on the World Fantasy Awards and Lovecraft.
posted on Aug-18-16 at 8:05 AM
Are rotisserie chickens a bargain? The short answer is "probably not," except for Costco (and Smart and Final, which I have never heard of). The long answer is an interesting detour through Boston Market, chicken sourcing, and Mark Bittman's famous simple roast chicken recipe. Which rotisserie chicken is the best is subject to somewhat more debate. If cost efficiency isn't your thing, you can dive right in with the $79 version at The NoMad - with foie gras and black truffle.
posted on Aug-16-16 at 11:08 AM
This exhaustive list of useful mental models from the founder of DuckDuckGo, drawing on Charlie Munger's concept of mental models is well worth exploring. It contains a surprising amount of interesting jumping-off points to rules-of-thumb and insights from various fields, from Hanlon's Razor to the critical concept of BATNA in negotiation; and including such useful startup ideas as technical debt, organizational debt, and hunting elephants or flies.
posted on Aug-4-16 at 3:43 PM
CuratedAI is a literary magazine where the poems and stories are written entirely by machines. For example, there is He Lived with Regret ("He lived with regret at his own table– for his own sake have mercy upon him...") by Tolstoyish, a Recurrent Neural Net trained on the work of Leo Tolstoy. Or Defunct ("defunct and master my god is dead with my love/and the man that i give him") by Deep Gimble I, which is minimally trained on public domain poetry and seeded with a single word.
posted on Jul-29-16 at 1:23 PM
You can see everything associated with your Google account that the company is tracking. Going to My Activities will let you see and delete everything from the YouTube videos you watch to the voice commands you have used in Android. Similar company-provided tools exist for Facebook and Amazon. If you want to go one step further, Just Delete Me helps you remove your accounts from many popular services.
posted on Jun-30-16 at 11:05 AM
City Objects catalogues tiny thoughtful features of various cities around the world, from clocks to ticket machines. In the same spirit as the also great littlebig details, which covers the digital world.
posted on Jun-18-16 at 3:06 PM
IF Only by Emily Short [prev.] highlights the new trend in Interactive Fiction (or Text Adventures, if you were born before 1990) for games that use parsers but also manage to be reasonable simple to play by providing limited options in clever ways. Among the highlights she points out are Kerkerkruip which is a rogue-like interactive fiction game, Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom a "faux-retro adaptation of a nonexistent 1979 text adventure" where you play as a dumb barbarian, and Midnight. Swordfight. in which the story takes the form of a stage play. If you want to get more into the weeds, Short also suggests this interesting article on narrow parsers with many more examples.
posted on Jun-15-16 at 1:58 PM
The background engine noises of iconic science fiction spaceships can be remarkably soothing. That is why Spike Snell created 12-hour sound loops of the background hum of the TNG Enterprise (prev.), the old Battlestar Galactica (and the new), a Cylon Basestar, the Discovery from 2001, the Heart of Gold, the Millennium Falcon (made from the sound of a P-51 Mustang), Mass Effect's Normandy, Babylon 5, Serenity, and hundreds more. Strangely, these fake space ship sounds don't sound too different from the actual noise on the ISS or space shuttle Atlantis. And if you don't like any of these, you can always generate your own!
posted on Jun-9-16 at 8:20 AM
This interactive chart of who marries whom may be a horrible example of data visualization, but it contains fascinating information about marriages by occupation for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. For example, actuaries mostly marry database administrators, though male actuaries in same-sex marriages prefer fitness instructors and female actuaries in same-sex marriages go for carpenters. High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, and the most common marriage is between grade school teachers. Hints on how to read the chart inside, as you explore the more interesting parings (for example, proofreaders tend to marry optometrists)
posted on May-31-16 at 5:25 PM
How some of the greatest rappers make rhymes is an impressive video from Vox that explains how the best artists manipulate rhymes, beats, and motifs in exciting ways.
posted on May-19-16 at 7:38 AM
A visual history of the sometimes unbelievable camouflage used by ships during wartime. The most famous approach, Dazzle camouflage (sometimes Razzle Dazzle), was designed by an artist in Britain during World War I, and is designed to disguise apparent motion and direction, [video] at which it was effective, if controversial. During World War II, the US Navy used a variety of schemes to camouflage ships, including false bow waves that made it difficult for submarines to judge how fast a ship was traveling. Recently, the Navy revived dazzle techniques for the first time since WW II.
posted on May-14-16 at 10:29 AM
Optical illusions are not universal, and the differences in how we perceive them can help us to understand cognition. The famous Müller-Lyer illusion is not universal, but differs by culture, with some African tribes unable to see the illusion at all - possibly because of differences in environment. Individuals with autism seem less sensitive to the Sheppard's table illusion, which might help improve an understanding of the condition. Differences in responses are possible because different illusions trick your brain in different ways. BBC has a great history of the evolution of optical illusions, and, finally, here are some auto-kinectic illusions, because they are awesome.
posted on Apr-30-16 at 7:55 PM
Take a look at: 😁. On many browsers, and on Android phones, this looks like a grinning face with smiling eyes (the official label), while on an iOS device, this looks like a painful grimace. A study shows that these differences can lead to difficulties interpreting emotions across platforms (and even within platforms there is a lot of variation)! With linguists arguing over whether emoji can evolve into a language, and with their own distinct grammar, these differences in interpretation can matter. Either way, the real-time tracker lets you see what emoji are being tweeted [prev], and fivethirtyeight sums up the 100 most popular.
posted on Apr-11-16 at 12:36 PM
Reddit 3016 is the result of 4 years of work by Blair Erickson, who built a very detailed parody of what Reddit 1,000 years from now might look like; including alternate sites like HoloTube and Huffington Planet to make the experience complete. Although most of the posts are satire of au courant Reddit trends, it is at least worth admiring the amount of detail, including fake comments on fake Imgur (sorry, Hologur) posts.
posted on Feb-29-16 at 10:13 AM
Often considered to have the best writing of any game, 1999's Planescape Torment (as can be seen in this short video) is getting a spiritual successor. Torment: Tides of Numenera, now in early beta (the first 30 minutes of which can be seen in this Let's Play), features many of the same writers (plus other favorites). To see what made the first game so great, fans have turned the original Planescape game into surprisingly readable novels. One version just contains mostly the dialogue for one particular path through the game with just a little linking text (457 pages worth), the other features an expanded version with more original material (1,219 pages). Both are available in a variety of formats, and you can buy the original game as well.
posted on Feb-1-16 at 9:40 PM
You may have heard about n-grams, which identify particular strings of text in a large corpus (an n=3 n-gram could be "plate of beans"). You probably have played with Google Ngram search which lets you look through millions of books to see the first use of the phrase, or when it was most popular (though be warned, recent research shows some limitations, such as the false popularity of a certain expletive in the 1700s). The newest is the Reddit ngram search by 538, which lets you chart the rise and fall of things progressive and regressive. I await more insights in the discussion...
posted on Nov-22-15 at 9:01 PM
The mysterious Faraday Future (yes, that's the real name), has already hired 400 top automotive engineers (such as the former director of manufacturing for Tesla) and is building a $1B facility to create a new type of electric car as soon as 2017. But what is Faraday Future? Some think its part of Apple's secret "Titan" car project (which will have electric license plates!), while others think it is "China's response to Tesla." The auto industry is changing fast, as, also within the last 24 hours, Toyota started investing $1B in AI and Local Motors rolled out their latest 3D-printed car design.
posted on Nov-6-15 at 2:05 PM
Benny Hill This makes all YouTube videos better by speeding them up and adding Yakkity Sax music. Technology has advanced from the last Benny Hill-ifier on MeFi in 2008, when speeding up technology did not yet exist. Some suggestions: Car chases! Light saber duels! Dirty Dancing (forward in three minutes for maximum enjoyment)! Donald Trump!
posted on Oct-8-15 at 12:38 PM
Who is the greatest person who has ever lived? Those ranking by deaths prevented have put forth Norman Borlaug (over 1 billion), Viktor Zhdanov (300 million), Haber and Bosch (2.7 billion, but then there's the war crimes thing), and, of course, Stanislav Petrov (everyone). Lists of the most important people are often decided by popular vote, with Gutenberg, Einstein, and Darwin generally doing well, but don't count yourself out. More recently, as Cass Sunstein entertainingly covers, there have also been quantitative attempts to measure the most important person., including, most recently, a detailed algorithm by a computer science professor and a Google engineer that tells us that the most important people are, in order: Jesus, Napoleon, Shakespeare, and Muhammed. Smithsonian magazine commissioned them to come up with a special list of the most important Americans. You can also play a historical importance version of the who's hotter game using their algorithm.
posted on Jul-30-15 at 11:25 AM
Do you like Roguelikes? (Yes, you do.) Then you are going to enjoy this collection of over 700 free or open source Roguelikes available by torrent, the full set of which is listed here. Since its a torrent, I should mention that while everything seems legitimate here (Rock Paper Shotgun likes it, and the poster is a moderator on r/games and runs a highly regarded Steam group) from both a rights and a malware perspective, nothing is guaranteed. Suggestions among the 7 GB within...
posted on Jul-27-15 at 11:49 AM
Reddit, the other front page of the internet, turned 10 today (best comment on the anniversary "We made it 10 years without drama!") and celebrated with a look back. It addition to the most liked posts, it also revealed some other interesting posts and replies. Some of the most gilded ever are well-written responses to Reddit's/the Internet's own problems (links go to responses, not topics): attacks on PUAs/MRAs, racism, and jokes about Asians. Of course, more true to popular form, the most gilded ever are about League of Legends and a NSFW thread that combines pranks with too much homophobic subtext. The most saved threads on Reddit tell you how to get free things on the internet, how to study, and where to go before you die. And, of course, there are good old standbys like "what is the best picture on the internet" and "what gif reduces you to laughter every time." Reddit now faces many challenges for its next 10 years.
posted on Jun-23-15 at 12:02 PM
The academic study of existential risk is being taken seriously. The University of Cambridge has the CSER, with its incredibly distinguished list of members, some of whom you can see speak about the risks inherent in scientific progress, or you can read the summary of why we need to work together to stop doomsday by Prof. Martin Rees. Oxford has the Future of Humanity Institute, headed by Nick Bostrom (fascinating profile of him), which has produced this taxonomy of threats, and has argued that far too little emphasis is placed on the issue. In the US, work is done in thinktanks like the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is focused on trying to tame AI, and predict when it will arrive (pdf). Though climate change gets a nod, the main concerns appear to be largely AI (which they are really worried about), nuclear war (chance of happening: between 7% and .0001% a year),threats from technological innovation like biotech or nanotech (pdf).
posted on May-18-15 at 1:12 PM
David Letterman's coming retirement after 6,000 episodes has prompted a look back at some of his best bits, including many of his writers reflecting on the greatest jokes that never made it on air (with comments from David himself). Splitsider has a year-by-year video breakdown of the best material (including John Malkovitch at his creepiest and an amazing bit with Elaine Stritch). The New York Times weighs in with their favorites, while Rolling Stone lists his favorite guests, tensest interviews, best musical numbers (some are very good!), and asks if the famously grumpy Letterman is happy at last.
posted on May-13-15 at 4:53 PM
posted on Feb-24-20 at 5:04 PM
Complexity explained offers a set of articles, systems, and interactive toys that explain aspects of the new field of complexity science, from the emergence of the blob, to the reasons for traffic jams, to the dynamics of herd immunity.
posted on Jul-2-19 at 12:41 PM
There are interesting attempts to procedurally generate realistic cities, though it turns out to still be a hard problem, as all the most famous cities in games are built by hand. The exceptions are often interesting to play with, like Wave Function Collapse [PC only] which lets you walk through an infinite and beautiful Mediterranean-style city. If you prefer overhead maps, here is an interactive in-browser fantasy generator or this approach, which generates random navigable cities. Developers keep teasing new approaches to city building however, you can see some animated GIFs generated by another interesting approach to creating a cyberpunk city, along with some procedural brutalism.
posted on Nov-14-18 at 8:10 AM
The joke I most regret asks famous comedians (Cameron Esposito, Weird Al, Patton Oswalt) about the jokes they regret, which provides a fascinating and thoughtful look at how comedy is evolving. For something a little more traditionally funny, also check out the list of jokes that comedians wish they could steal, with lots of good YouTube videos and audio.
posted on Sep-6-18 at 1:52 PM
What if dinosaurs had an advanced civilization? To be clear, they almost certainly didn't. But, if they did, would we know? The question is relevant to xenobiology, which aims to find traces of alien life, perhaps long after it is extinct. A new paper [pdf] suggests that synthetic molecules like plastic and potentially nuclear fallout, would be detectable in the geologic record, although it might be challenging to separate signals like climate change from other abrupt events. Others have argued that, over geologic times, even plastics will be gone. (except from the fascinating book A World Without Us) [prev.],
posted on Apr-12-18 at 12:18 PM
Permanent Redirect is a new piece of art by Donald Hansen, who previously created Shybot, a bot that fled through the desert to avoid people. The trick to Permanent Redirect is that it moves URLs every time it is seen. If you want to chase it down, it was here a few days ago.
posted on Jan-9-18 at 5:51 PM
In 2000, the Clay Millennium Problems were posted - seven unsolved problems in mathematics. If you solve one, the Clay Institute will give you a million dollars. To date, only one problem has been solved, the Poincaré Conjecture, by the reclusive Grigory Perelman, who refused the prize, and who is famously described in this (controversial) New Yorker article [prev]. Now, as described in Wired, interesting questions are emerging over approaches to solve a second challenge, the Navier–Stokes Equations which predict how fluids flow.
posted on Jan-7-18 at 8:52 PM
Bell Labs scientist Gerard Foschini proposed that the chance of intelligent life emerging in our universe was 10^264, meaning that either we are very unlikely to exist or something besides the normal laws of physics predicts life. His derived these odds by speculating about the The Canonical Artifact [pdf], the smallest thing a being could make that could not reasonably be created by chance alone, but that intelligent societies would be drawn to create. He proposed that the Canonical Artifact would be a sculpture demonstrating the 26 sporadic groups (read more if you want to learn about The Monster, Moonshine, and group theory). Now the definitive indicator of intelligence in the galaxy now exists! (though it is not that impressive to look at)
posted on Oct-25-17 at 12:32 PM
A common (and often misleading) internet retort is "correlation does not equal causation" - but than how do we identify causes? And what does correlation equal? The answer can be interesting and complicated, but if you want to understand how modern social science identifies when correlative effects are causal, Alex Edmans' Layman's Guide to Separating Correlation and Causation is a great place to start. Also, posting about correlation is itself strongly correlated (likely causally) with the following two links being posted in the comments, so I preempt them here: the inevitable xkcd comic and the Spurious Correlation site.
posted on Oct-24-17 at 11:47 AM
Anatomy of a Thousand Typefaces is a nifty online tool that helps you find fonts to use by implementing some of the ideas in Cole's Anatomy of Type book. As explained in this post, it uses objective ways to classify fonts by things like the height of the "x" character and the proportions of letters, which make it easier to find similar (or different) fonts. Turn on advanced filters to see the cool area charts.
posted on Oct-23-17 at 10:58 AM
The New York Times has a lovely feature looking at 8 short things, very closely. A 90 second scene from Freaks and Geeks that "takes you from melancholy to sheer delight." A pizza being made. An Eddie Murphy joke. An amazing adaptation of the Swan in dance. The erection of a building on the High Line. The 2-second bleat of Law and Order. A lyric from Lil Uzi Vert. A shoe painted by Manet.
posted on Aug-15-17 at 11:02 AM
Some people want you to care so much about typography that they create single-serve sites to make their points. Smart Quotes for Smart People tells you when you should use smart quotes (basically always) and how to do it. For a (very slightly) broader view, take a look at Quotes and Accents. If you want a wonderful and more in-depth guide to typography, Butterick's Practical Typography has you covered, including a 10 minute introduction to the 5 rules you need to know.
posted on Aug-11-17 at 2:05 PM
Geologist and science fiction writer Alex Acks has some problems with the geology of the mountains of Middle Earth, but less of an issue about Tatooine-like desert worlds, and also gleans insights on what the map of Panem of the Hunger Games tells us about global warming. Meanwhile, geologist Miles Traer has exhaustively developed the geography of Game of Thrones, including a fascinating description of geologic causes of the the Doom of Valyria. If you aren't a geologist but want to build a world, you can follow geologic rules when building your own worlds or simulate your own plate tectonics and create a planet from scratch.
posted on Aug-2-17 at 11:20 AM
Explorable Explainations are interactive online game/toy/video hybrids that teach complex concepts through interactivity. Some classics (which may have been discussed here before) include the Parable of the Polygons about segregation (by Vi Hart and Nicky Case), an interactive guide to p-hacking (from 538), an intro to digital signal processing, a sentencing simulation by the Marshall Project, and a guide to game design using games by Amit Patel. Just added to this list is a really interesting video/interactive tool on what viruses can teach us about design.
posted on Jul-12-17 at 10:30 AM
Research has increasingly shown that emotions are contagious. Emotional or affective contagion has been found between mothers and infants [pdf]; in social networks, where moral outrage increases the spread of ideas by 20%; and especially at work. The emotions of a team member can impact the entire team, changing both attitudes and performance. Do you have negative people around you? Two methods to stop negative contagion that seem to work: be calm, as serenity is one of the most contagious emotions, or else ignore them, as attention is critical to the spread of emotions.
posted on Jun-26-17 at 12:48 PM
Less than a decade ago, peak oil was a constant source of anxiety on MeFi (and around the world), but now the world faces an oil price anchored around $55/barrel. The reason is the swarm - US shale producers that can clamber into the market profitably at that price, and which are getting ever more competitive post recent fracking-bust as they drive down costs (and eliminate jobs, which are increasingly in renewables). Though the future is never certain, almost every major OPEC nation needs prices above $55 to balance their budget. While increased fossil fuel use can be very bad for climate change, the fracking boom is leading to the rapid replacement of coal with natural gas, which is generally a good thing for CO2 emissions, though leaking methane mitigates the benefit to an unceratin extent.
posted on Jun-19-17 at 10:36 AM
Since it was recommended by Bill Gates as the "most inspiring" book he has ever read, Stephen Pinker's thesis on the decline of violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature (prev), has been a number one best seller again. Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (that one) had previously critiqued the thesis in an paper [technical pdf, though well explained], concluding that "humanity is as violent as usual." Economist Michael Spagat joined Pinker in writing a response, leading to a reply by Cirillo and Taleb, provoking yet another letter. While the argument isn't violent, there are some nasty feelings on both sides. Very recently, and in an easy-to-follow set of slides, Spagat has laid out a final (for now) and fairly convincing argument that we really are seeing a decline of violence in the world. For a visual tour of declining violence, there is this terrific set of infographics.
posted on May-17-17 at 1:54 PM
Cookbooks based on fictional worlds are nothing new (witness this Dragonlance classic), but there are now many sites that offer recipes from the Hobbit to the Hunger Games to My Little Pony to various video games, with Wired putting together a list of 14 greatest hits. One of the most ambitious fantasy chefs is Chelsea Monroe-Cassel, who has put together an exhaustive Worlds of Warcraft cookbook based on in-game recipes. She also has a site with lots of Game of Throne recipes (among others), and is publishing a Hearthstone (!) cookbook soon.
posted on May-10-17 at 1:58 PM
When Tolkein helped create the modern fantasy genre, he also re-introduced a key fantasy trope, the prophetic poem that is key to the plot of the novel. Whether elegantly written (as in Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising poem or Clarke's Prophecy of John Uskglass) or rather awkwardly accumulated (as in the Wheel of Time's Karaethon Cycle), the prophetic verse is often a tired trope, but one which a variety of fantasy novels have used to good effect.
posted on Apr-5-17 at 8:42 AM
Despite Instagram, in-depth and beautiful food blogs are still a thing. A Life Worth Eating covers lovely fancy meals (and coffee) from around the world, such as El Bulli at its height and the sushi restaurant made famous by Jiro, and most recently, the (apparently much improved) Per Se. The long-standing ulterior epicure [prev] is similar, though the writing is longer and clever clever (see this older review of the famous Fat Duck), and there is a healthy (okay, not healthy) dose of much less upscale food from the American Midwest and South, and some excellent top dishes and restaurant lists.
posted on Apr-3-17 at 8:27 AM
Seeing Theory is an amazing interactive introduction to statistics and probability. Though the visualizations and interactive toys are really great, the concepts can get complicated quickly. If you are confused, you may be interested in the free Open Intro to Statistics textbook or the video series by the same authors. For a gentle introduction, consider watching this BBC documentary on statistics by the late, great Hans Rosling.
posted on Mar-2-17 at 11:42 AM
The first nail clippers weren't patented until the late 19th century, so how did people trim their nails before that? Nail care was important in many ancient cultures. In the Iron Age, nail files were a critical feature of the Viking grooming toolkit, important because the Gods would sail on a ship made of dead men's nails to Ragnarok. There was also a lot of attention paid to nail care in ancient Egypt, Rome Greece, and China (take a look at this Egyptian spa painting). Elaborate nail customs persist, including very specific Jewish traditions about the order in which nails are cut, and in traditional nursery rhymes. Whatever you do, apparently you shouldn't bite or pick them.
posted on Feb-13-17 at 12:15 PM
From any perspective, the progress humanity has made in recent history is astonishing, as this fantastic analysis by Oxford economist Max Roser shows. Economically, 130,000 people have exited extreme poverty every day since 1990. In 1800 1-in-10 people were literate, now it is 85%. Child mortality has dropped a 100x in the same period, even as populations levels are expected to peak in 2075. The stats for education are no less impressive. There is a nice infographic summarizing these and other trends as well. You can put together your own interactive own charts using the amazing data gathered by Prof. Roser's Our World in Data site.
posted on Dec-21-16 at 7:45 AM
Unconscious bias is particularly insidious, and most simple methods developed to address it typically work for only a few days, if at all. Of the approaches tested in a 17,000 person study, only 8 techniques appear to lower bias temporarily, and many of those require the rather troubling method of both raising empathy for the minority group and creating negative associations with the majority group. In fact, simply educating people about negative stereotypes can actually increase stereotyping. The problem is still being worked on, and researchers are optimistic. In the meantime, it can be best to avoid triggering bias at all: blind auditions can reduce bias in settings like orchestras (though maybe not in technical hiring, where the problem appears to be that disadvantaged groups give up sooner). It can also help for people from advantaged backgrounds to speak out when they see racism or bias: a just-published study shows that if a "high-follower white male" calls out a harasser on Twitter, there is a drop in overt racist behavior. You can also become aware of your own biases through the Implicit Association Test.
posted on Nov-13-16 at 3:31 PM
After being used to describe boring games (and remaining as a controversial term), the walking simulator is finally getting its due. Recently there have been many great free examples of pure, procedurally-generated walking simulators: no puzzles, no goals, no crafting, no enemies... just walking in a space that was created just for your game. Bernband gives you the feeling of walking through a bustling alien city/mall/something and observing its inhabitants. The ominous TRIHAYWBFRFYH lets you wander around a setting as the apocalypse begins. Secret Habitat creates an island full of art galleries. Sanctuary features a strange, creepy walk among mysterious obelisks. Sacremento is a stunning walk through a watercolor world. If you like realistic walks, Outerra is an amazing engine producing procedurally-generated landscapes using Google Earth data that lets you wander anywhere on the planet, zooming out from a blade of grass to outer space, at which point you probably want to shift to the equally amazing Space Engine to explore other worlds. [all games downloadable, most for Windows and Mac]
posted on Oct-25-16 at 11:53 AM
There are about 60 remaining Futuro ("Flying Saucer") houses left in the world. Sometimes helicoptered into place, and with a groovy interior, these 1960s prefab homes were originally built for skiing (apparently you can still rent one in the Russian Caucus) and vacations. Now, some are abandoned, though one was recently restored and put on display.
posted on Sep-15-16 at 9:19 AM
A brief history of chairs by architect and professor Witold Rybczynski covers the fascinating (really) history of chairs, the subject of his new book Now I Sit Me Down. He has also written about the lack of thoughtful design in airline seats and how architects have struggled to create the perfect chair (researching this article apparently inspired the book). Don't miss the photographs of the 7 chairs that changed the world.
posted on Aug-26-16 at 9:29 PM
A new wave of Lovecraftian stories confront, rather than ignore, the racism and antisemitism that permeated Lovecraft's work, and, indeed, served as the basis for much of the horror. This roundtable of authors discussing how they address the problems of Lovecraft is worthwhile. Some authors are explicitly using Lovecraft as a lens on contemporary racism, such as in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country [PDF preview], while others mine Lovecraft's fear of the other to examine bigotry, as in Ruthanna Emrys's lovely Litany of Earth [full story] (Emyrs is also part of the Lovecraft Reread, which looks at both the Mythos-building and uncomfortable aspects of Lovecraft's stories). Previously, on the World Fantasy Awards and Lovecraft.
posted on Aug-18-16 at 8:05 AM
Are rotisserie chickens a bargain? The short answer is "probably not," except for Costco (and Smart and Final, which I have never heard of). The long answer is an interesting detour through Boston Market, chicken sourcing, and Mark Bittman's famous simple roast chicken recipe. Which rotisserie chicken is the best is subject to somewhat more debate. If cost efficiency isn't your thing, you can dive right in with the $79 version at The NoMad - with foie gras and black truffle.
posted on Aug-16-16 at 11:08 AM
This exhaustive list of useful mental models from the founder of DuckDuckGo, drawing on Charlie Munger's concept of mental models is well worth exploring. It contains a surprising amount of interesting jumping-off points to rules-of-thumb and insights from various fields, from Hanlon's Razor to the critical concept of BATNA in negotiation; and including such useful startup ideas as technical debt, organizational debt, and hunting elephants or flies.
posted on Aug-4-16 at 3:43 PM
CuratedAI is a literary magazine where the poems and stories are written entirely by machines. For example, there is He Lived with Regret ("He lived with regret at his own table– for his own sake have mercy upon him...") by Tolstoyish, a Recurrent Neural Net trained on the work of Leo Tolstoy. Or Defunct ("defunct and master my god is dead with my love/and the man that i give him") by Deep Gimble I, which is minimally trained on public domain poetry and seeded with a single word.
posted on Jul-29-16 at 1:23 PM
You can see everything associated with your Google account that the company is tracking. Going to My Activities will let you see and delete everything from the YouTube videos you watch to the voice commands you have used in Android. Similar company-provided tools exist for Facebook and Amazon. If you want to go one step further, Just Delete Me helps you remove your accounts from many popular services.
posted on Jun-30-16 at 11:05 AM
City Objects catalogues tiny thoughtful features of various cities around the world, from clocks to ticket machines. In the same spirit as the also great littlebig details, which covers the digital world.
posted on Jun-18-16 at 3:06 PM
IF Only by Emily Short [prev.] highlights the new trend in Interactive Fiction (or Text Adventures, if you were born before 1990) for games that use parsers but also manage to be reasonable simple to play by providing limited options in clever ways. Among the highlights she points out are Kerkerkruip which is a rogue-like interactive fiction game, Treasures of a Slaver's Kingdom a "faux-retro adaptation of a nonexistent 1979 text adventure" where you play as a dumb barbarian, and Midnight. Swordfight. in which the story takes the form of a stage play. If you want to get more into the weeds, Short also suggests this interesting article on narrow parsers with many more examples.
posted on Jun-15-16 at 1:58 PM
The background engine noises of iconic science fiction spaceships can be remarkably soothing. That is why Spike Snell created 12-hour sound loops of the background hum of the TNG Enterprise (prev.), the old Battlestar Galactica (and the new), a Cylon Basestar, the Discovery from 2001, the Heart of Gold, the Millennium Falcon (made from the sound of a P-51 Mustang), Mass Effect's Normandy, Babylon 5, Serenity, and hundreds more. Strangely, these fake space ship sounds don't sound too different from the actual noise on the ISS or space shuttle Atlantis. And if you don't like any of these, you can always generate your own!
posted on Jun-9-16 at 8:20 AM
This interactive chart of who marries whom may be a horrible example of data visualization, but it contains fascinating information about marriages by occupation for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. For example, actuaries mostly marry database administrators, though male actuaries in same-sex marriages prefer fitness instructors and female actuaries in same-sex marriages go for carpenters. High-earning women (doctors, lawyers) tend to pair up with their economic equals, and the most common marriage is between grade school teachers. Hints on how to read the chart inside, as you explore the more interesting parings (for example, proofreaders tend to marry optometrists)
posted on May-31-16 at 5:25 PM
How some of the greatest rappers make rhymes is an impressive video from Vox that explains how the best artists manipulate rhymes, beats, and motifs in exciting ways.
posted on May-19-16 at 7:38 AM
A visual history of the sometimes unbelievable camouflage used by ships during wartime. The most famous approach, Dazzle camouflage (sometimes Razzle Dazzle), was designed by an artist in Britain during World War I, and is designed to disguise apparent motion and direction, [video] at which it was effective, if controversial. During World War II, the US Navy used a variety of schemes to camouflage ships, including false bow waves that made it difficult for submarines to judge how fast a ship was traveling. Recently, the Navy revived dazzle techniques for the first time since WW II.
posted on May-14-16 at 10:29 AM
Optical illusions are not universal, and the differences in how we perceive them can help us to understand cognition. The famous Müller-Lyer illusion is not universal, but differs by culture, with some African tribes unable to see the illusion at all - possibly because of differences in environment. Individuals with autism seem less sensitive to the Sheppard's table illusion, which might help improve an understanding of the condition. Differences in responses are possible because different illusions trick your brain in different ways. BBC has a great history of the evolution of optical illusions, and, finally, here are some auto-kinectic illusions, because they are awesome.
posted on Apr-30-16 at 7:55 PM
Take a look at: 😁. On many browsers, and on Android phones, this looks like a grinning face with smiling eyes (the official label), while on an iOS device, this looks like a painful grimace. A study shows that these differences can lead to difficulties interpreting emotions across platforms (and even within platforms there is a lot of variation)! With linguists arguing over whether emoji can evolve into a language, and with their own distinct grammar, these differences in interpretation can matter. Either way, the real-time tracker lets you see what emoji are being tweeted [prev], and fivethirtyeight sums up the 100 most popular.
posted on Apr-11-16 at 12:36 PM
Reddit 3016 is the result of 4 years of work by Blair Erickson, who built a very detailed parody of what Reddit 1,000 years from now might look like; including alternate sites like HoloTube and Huffington Planet to make the experience complete. Although most of the posts are satire of au courant Reddit trends, it is at least worth admiring the amount of detail, including fake comments on fake Imgur (sorry, Hologur) posts.
posted on Feb-29-16 at 10:13 AM
Often considered to have the best writing of any game, 1999's Planescape Torment (as can be seen in this short video) is getting a spiritual successor. Torment: Tides of Numenera, now in early beta (the first 30 minutes of which can be seen in this Let's Play), features many of the same writers (plus other favorites). To see what made the first game so great, fans have turned the original Planescape game into surprisingly readable novels. One version just contains mostly the dialogue for one particular path through the game with just a little linking text (457 pages worth), the other features an expanded version with more original material (1,219 pages). Both are available in a variety of formats, and you can buy the original game as well.
posted on Feb-1-16 at 9:40 PM
You may have heard about n-grams, which identify particular strings of text in a large corpus (an n=3 n-gram could be "plate of beans"). You probably have played with Google Ngram search which lets you look through millions of books to see the first use of the phrase, or when it was most popular (though be warned, recent research shows some limitations, such as the false popularity of a certain expletive in the 1700s). The newest is the Reddit ngram search by 538, which lets you chart the rise and fall of things progressive and regressive. I await more insights in the discussion...
posted on Nov-22-15 at 9:01 PM
The mysterious Faraday Future (yes, that's the real name), has already hired 400 top automotive engineers (such as the former director of manufacturing for Tesla) and is building a $1B facility to create a new type of electric car as soon as 2017. But what is Faraday Future? Some think its part of Apple's secret "Titan" car project (which will have electric license plates!), while others think it is "China's response to Tesla." The auto industry is changing fast, as, also within the last 24 hours, Toyota started investing $1B in AI and Local Motors rolled out their latest 3D-printed car design.
posted on Nov-6-15 at 2:05 PM
Benny Hill This makes all YouTube videos better by speeding them up and adding Yakkity Sax music. Technology has advanced from the last Benny Hill-ifier on MeFi in 2008, when speeding up technology did not yet exist. Some suggestions: Car chases! Light saber duels! Dirty Dancing (forward in three minutes for maximum enjoyment)! Donald Trump!
posted on Oct-8-15 at 12:38 PM
Who is the greatest person who has ever lived? Those ranking by deaths prevented have put forth Norman Borlaug (over 1 billion), Viktor Zhdanov (300 million), Haber and Bosch (2.7 billion, but then there's the war crimes thing), and, of course, Stanislav Petrov (everyone). Lists of the most important people are often decided by popular vote, with Gutenberg, Einstein, and Darwin generally doing well, but don't count yourself out. More recently, as Cass Sunstein entertainingly covers, there have also been quantitative attempts to measure the most important person., including, most recently, a detailed algorithm by a computer science professor and a Google engineer that tells us that the most important people are, in order: Jesus, Napoleon, Shakespeare, and Muhammed. Smithsonian magazine commissioned them to come up with a special list of the most important Americans. You can also play a historical importance version of the who's hotter game using their algorithm.
posted on Jul-30-15 at 11:25 AM
Do you like Roguelikes? (Yes, you do.) Then you are going to enjoy this collection of over 700 free or open source Roguelikes available by torrent, the full set of which is listed here. Since its a torrent, I should mention that while everything seems legitimate here (Rock Paper Shotgun likes it, and the poster is a moderator on r/games and runs a highly regarded Steam group) from both a rights and a malware perspective, nothing is guaranteed. Suggestions among the 7 GB within...
posted on Jul-27-15 at 11:49 AM
Reddit, the other front page of the internet, turned 10 today (best comment on the anniversary "We made it 10 years without drama!") and celebrated with a look back. It addition to the most liked posts, it also revealed some other interesting posts and replies. Some of the most gilded ever are well-written responses to Reddit's/the Internet's own problems (links go to responses, not topics): attacks on PUAs/MRAs, racism, and jokes about Asians. Of course, more true to popular form, the most gilded ever are about League of Legends and a NSFW thread that combines pranks with too much homophobic subtext. The most saved threads on Reddit tell you how to get free things on the internet, how to study, and where to go before you die. And, of course, there are good old standbys like "what is the best picture on the internet" and "what gif reduces you to laughter every time." Reddit now faces many challenges for its next 10 years.
posted on Jun-23-15 at 12:02 PM
The academic study of existential risk is being taken seriously. The University of Cambridge has the CSER, with its incredibly distinguished list of members, some of whom you can see speak about the risks inherent in scientific progress, or you can read the summary of why we need to work together to stop doomsday by Prof. Martin Rees. Oxford has the Future of Humanity Institute, headed by Nick Bostrom (fascinating profile of him), which has produced this taxonomy of threats, and has argued that far too little emphasis is placed on the issue. In the US, work is done in thinktanks like the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which is focused on trying to tame AI, and predict when it will arrive (pdf). Though climate change gets a nod, the main concerns appear to be largely AI (which they are really worried about), nuclear war (chance of happening: between 7% and .0001% a year),threats from technological innovation like biotech or nanotech (pdf).
posted on May-18-15 at 1:12 PM
David Letterman's coming retirement after 6,000 episodes has prompted a look back at some of his best bits, including many of his writers reflecting on the greatest jokes that never made it on air (with comments from David himself). Splitsider has a year-by-year video breakdown of the best material (including John Malkovitch at his creepiest and an amazing bit with Elaine Stritch). The New York Times weighs in with their favorites, while Rolling Stone lists his favorite guests, tensest interviews, best musical numbers (some are very good!), and asks if the famously grumpy Letterman is happy at last.
posted on May-13-15 at 4:53 PM