“Elon Musk’s concept of humanity excludes most living and breathing humans. In his September 2016 announcement, he declared that a fully self-sustaining civilisation on Mars would need around 1 million people. From Earth’s current population of 7.125 billion, the Musk Million would bring 0.014035087719298244 per
The offer from President Trump to “destroy” the career of an unnamed state senator in Texas was prompted by a county sheriff’s opposition to a bill of theirs that would prohibit civil asset forfeiture—which, as our stack shows, is a pretty normal position for a law enforcement official
“HOMER: ‘This guy’s a fruit, and a … no, wait, wait, wait: queer. Queer. Queer. That’s what you like to be called, right?’ JOHN: ‘That, or John.’” Oral history of the Simpsons’ 1997 episode where John Waters’ campy character breaks through Homer’s homophobia. / The Ringer “Portrait of Adele
Fascinating stuff: Hackers were able to reverse-engineer the factors that went into slot machines’ pseudorandom algorithms by taping results on their phones. / Wired “One of the most attractive features of cats is that contentment is their default state. They are comfortable with themselves and their lives, and remain in
A puzzle drawn from Reddit to start your Tuesday: Do you want an invisibilty cloak? A key to open all doors? / reddit.com “When I brought up these halcyon days to Alex at the café, his eyes lit up. ‘There were very few people’ like me, he said, about whom
“The reality is, many Indigenous cultures in North America survived an apocalypse. The key word is survived. Any future with us in it, triumphant and flourishing, is a hopeful one.” “A Tribe Called Geek”: Native American writers imagine worlds where technology isn’t used for dominance, and aliens are to
The, uh, non-religious aspects of Trump’s Muslim ban—the pause on all refugee settlements for nearly half a year, for example—will have catastrophic effects on America’s “well-oiled” resettlement program. / irinnews.org Sports economists’ core insight is to use betting lines to enable cross-sport comparison.
Alex Stamos defended Aaron Swartz and embarassed the NSA chief after Snowden revelations. If Trump tries to strongarm Zuckerberg into collaboration, Stamos will be how we know. / boingboing.net “Facts were insults of the king you could go to prison for. Fictions were stories of the king that weren’t
“Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.” Tesla is among the companies betting that lots of small batteries daisy-chained together can supplant gas storage facilities like
They also concluded that the sense of meaning associated with an acid trip is related to seratonin receptors. / Nature “If the Victorians have a reputation for denying or concealing their bodies, it is only because they were obliged to live with them so intensely.” Why Darwin grew a beard (to
