Today in “jobs for animals”, these pigeons have backpacks and go to work. The job? Flying around and monitoring air quality. Also tweeting. Well, technically that’s probably handled by robots… or interns, what’s the difference?
“The Law is Clear: The FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite its OS” — great piece from @scrawford
I love the writing of this piece! Author/Professor Susan Crawford expertly analyses both Obama’s body language and the FBI/DOJ’s actions to understand their underlying meanings.
“I am way on the civil-liberties side of this [government surveillance] thing,” he said later, sucking in his lips and looking away from his interviewer into the middle distance, showing both that he was thinking about the problem and a little uncertain.
Do you really need a whole startup? # “Facebook is the new Excel” — @AlexMuir
The author makes a valid point. What Excel was for B2B functions (e.g. accounting), Facebook is for B2C functions. So why bother? /s
Any startup should include Facebook in its competitive analysis. How are people using it? Does it work? What’s missing? And be open to the idea that a Facebook group that does even 80% of what people want might easily be your toughest competitor. You can guarantee that Facebook has already signed up 99% of your potential userbase.
#ASAPbio and what preprints mean for the future of scientific publishing (via @NYTScience)
There’s a lot of great quippy quotes from this actually-really-important article… the following is one of my favorites:
“It’s not beer or tacos,” as James Fraser, an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco put it at last month’s [#ASAPbio] conference, “it’s beer AND tacos.”
While we’re at it, here’s some of the interesting #ASAPbio tweets featured in the article:
What it feels like trying to publish. #ASAPbio pic.twitter.com/bJCaFqrop7
— Jonathan A. Michaels (@JonAMichaels) February 25, 2016
Sci-Hub is illegal: when libraries become illegal, you know something went wrong #copyright
— Sci Hub (@Sci_Hub) February 26, 2016
Will preprints disrupt bioscience publishing? Perhaps they should. Disruption is needed, for many reasons. #ASAPbio @NatureNews
— Jeffrey Flier (@jflier) February 19, 2016
it's pretty amazing that it took 20 years for "scientists should post their work on the Internet" to not be viewed as radical #ASAPbio
— Michⓐel Eisen (@mbeisen) February 22, 2016
#nowplaying: “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going” via @NYTimes
Click through the sidebar to get caught up on some jams that you may have missed, or take time to read the pieces if you can afford it.
I’ve got a few albums to peruse after this, including The Internet, CFCF, and (I know I’m way behind on this) Kendrick Lamar.
Great allegory for tracking scripts using concrete ideas # Trackers · Jacques Mattheij
A great allegory for ‘advertising’ tracking scripts/services, using real life concepts.
“All of this is really too bad, since some of the stores depended to a certain extent on my patronage, but I guess there are not enough people that are concerned about privacy to make a difference. Or are there?”
The Jungle: A Refugee Camp Served by the Burners of Calais | @BurningMan Journal
The hardest part of the trip wasn’t seeing the physical conditions people lived in, but rather the uncertainty. The uncertainty of tomorrow. The uncertainty of whether their homes would be bulldozed or spared. The uncertainty of how much waiting would has to be done and if the dream of England would ever materialize. No one meant to end up in the Jungle, they’re just stuck here. The beauty in a temporary society — the heartbreak at the lack of a real and humane solution.It’s the dynamism of this community that is its strength. It allows the people to make their seemingly unlivable conditions livable.
The Bizarre Branding Of America’s Many, Many Secret Societies
Very cool gallery of Secret Society imagery and branding. I definitely want this book!
Click through for the rest of the gallery.
The Bizarre Branding Of America’s Many, Many Secret Societies
Learn about low-level computing: What is “the stack”? (by Julia Evans)
Want to learn a bit about low-level computing? Not scared of seeing REAL ASSEMBLY CODE? Click on through!
The basic question I want to answer here is — why do people sometimes discuss “the stack” like it’s some kind of revered fundamental object? (the answer is going to turn out to be “because it is”, and I’m going to try to make that as concrete as I can.)
Dlseyixa—Reading With Dyslexia Simulator
Woah. Interesting page that simulates the experience of dyslexia. Definitely worth a quick read.
A friend who has dyslexia described to me how she experiences reading. She can read, but it takes a lot of concentration, and the letters seems to “jump around”.
I remembered reading about typoglycemia. Wouldn’t it be possible to do it interactively on a website with Javascript? Sure it would.