January 11, 2017
1. Apple TV is 10 years old. “The truth is that dents in the universe are only observable after they have occurred.” / stratechery.com
“In 1989, though nearly 80 and nominally retired, Ms. Hollingworth, attired in a safari suit, her working uniform of choice for 60 years, was spotted in Tiananmen Square shinnying up a lamppost for a bird’s-eye view of the government’s violent crackdown against civilian protesters.” Scooping the start of WW2 with a chance glimpse of German tanks could easily have been the most exciting thing about reporter Clare Hollingsworth’s 105 years of life. It wasn’t. / New York Times
“The result was that a percussive rhythm emerged, one that I hadn’t created myself.” / Vimeo
Jeremy England, an MIT physicist, studies the idea that life exists as an emergent property of thermodynamics. / quantamagazine.org
No single ant has any idea where it’s going. But their individual behaviors—quite accepting of chance—reliably add up to something clear, like an anthill. / YouTube
See also: A fun way to emulate the emergent behavior of ant colonies with computer science. / practicingruby.com
“Creatures, cities, and storms self-organize, with low-level rules giving rise to higher-level sophistication. Entirely new properties and behaviors ‘emerge,’ with no one directing and no one able to foresee the new characteristics from knowledge of the constituents alone. The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts.” Learn to spot emergence with 10 examples from NOVA. / PBS
There’s an ongoing debate about whether gravity itself is an emergent—rather than fundamental—force in the universe. The theory, which supposes energy arranges itself so as to maximize entropy, seems to have been disproven last year by experimental data, a few years after being feted as the next big thing. / technologyreview.com, New Scientist
Former Tournament of Books contender Marlon James will be back soon with his follow-up from A Brief History of Seven Killings, which he says will be a trilogy of fantasy novels inspired by African mythology. / Flavorwire
A fun short film on the difficulty of giving someone a mountain for their birthday. See here for background, or some crisp portraits of life in Washington timber towns. / PRI
“Stuck somewhere between soggy melodrama and so-bad-it’s-good lunacy, the franchise never fully commits to a singular personality.” In retrospect, the Twilight movies are just as bad as you remember. / The A.V. Club
The gun lobby is justifiably claiming victory after the election, after the red wave that swept the country’s state legislatures and governors mansions (and, uh, White House). / thetrace.org
“Secret government eavesdropping has a long history in Scandinavia.” Woefully overlooked in the general hullabaloo over American and British eavesdropping exposed by Snowden are the intelligence operations of, uh, the rest of the world. / The New York Review of Books