Coffee drinkers, settle in with a mug for this (French, subtitled) exploration of what, exactly, makes that mug work.
Category: ideas
What Paved The Way For Modern Secularism? 16th-Century How-To Books
“There was a good reason why technical manuals were so often titled ‘books of secrets’. Not only did they reveal closely guarded trade practices, they assumed a world in which there no longer are ‘secrets’ in the sense of mysterious hidden forces in nature.”
Technology Will Make The World Better, Right? Not Always! (We’ve Gotta Change The Way We Think About This)
“Is it possible to get beyond both a naïve belief that the latest technology will solve social problems—and a reaction that rubbishes any attempt to offer novel technical solutions as inappropriate, insensitive, and misguided? Can we find a synthesis in which technologists look at their work critically and work closely with the people they’re trying to help in order to build sociotechnical systems that address hard problems?”
What’s Truly *New* About The Internet
Virginia Heffernan: “Speed and expansiveness, to start. On expanse: The population of our ether – users of cell tech and wifi – is now just about coextensive with the population of the earth. This is fathomless by most minds. And speed: The illusion of near-absolute compression of time and space on the Internet is an illusion so beguiling we are virtually powerless to refuse it as real, except for short periods and with great mental or spiritual focus.”
Remember When You Could Call For The Correct Time? You Still Can, And People Do
“The U.S. Naval Observatory still offers a time-by-phone service. (Call 202-762-1401 today, and you’ll hear a pleasant ticking sound followed by the announcement of the exact time, delivered in an old-timey-broadcasting voice.) Not only does it still exist, but people still use it.” Adrienne LaFrance looks at why.
Scientists Have Built An Artificial Intelligence That Can Read News Stories And Answer Questions
“Soon you could be chatting with your computer about the morning news. An AI has learned to read and answer questions about a news article with unprecedented accuracy.”
There May Be No Accounting For Taste, But The Internet Will Try, Nevertheless
Louis Menand: “The science of preferences dates back to the origins of the advertising and public-relations industries, but the Internet has provided it with a vast new field of operations. Compared with television, which basically had advertisers throwing tomatoes at barns labelled, for example, ‘Women eighteen to thirty-four,’ the Internet is a precision instrument.”
How, And Where, American Tourism Began
“In the early nineteenth century, a few scenic destinations became hot spots for tourism … In fact, by the 1860s [the number-one attraction] was so popular that travelers complained that souvenir sellers and aggressive guides had spoiled the place.”
Elon Musk Says We Might All Be Living In A Simulation. Really?
“Wouldn’t it, I mean, be a remarkable coincidence to find ourselves alive at just the moment where technology finally shows itself to be adequate to reveal to us the true nature of reality? And how are we supposed to interpret the equally certain claims of people in other times and places, who believed that reality in fact reflected some device or artifice of central importance to their own culture (e.g., horologia, mirrors, puppets, tjurungas…)?”
Where Science Went Wrong (It’s Systemic)
“Given the public awareness that science can be low-quality or corrupted, that whole fields can be misdirected for decades (see nutrition, on cholesterol and sugar), and that some basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory), the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval in its irrelevance to present realities.”