Every child on their own trampoline (via densediscovery.com).
Capitalism pushes us towards private affluence. We aspire to acquire our own things. Shared things are seen as second best, something of an inconvenience. Politics responds accordingly, prioritising economic growth and ‘more money in your pocket’, rather than shared goods and services. So everyone has their own lawnmower while the grass grows long in the park. People get their own exercise bikes or rowing machines, and the gym at the local leisure centre starts to look tired and under-funded. The wealthy pay for childcare or hire a nanny, but the early years nursery closes down.
How the Personal Computer Broke the Human Body.
As is so often the case, those who did the enduring were women, and in many cases, specifically, women of color. Despite a history of invention that has rendered the ascent of computing as a uniquely white male activity, women were there, everywhere—for it was their bodies that would be on the frontlines of the dramatic transformations in workplace automation wrought by computing terminals in the 1970s and personal computers in the 1980s.
Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet.
If you have a drug with 10 percent bioavailability, for example, the drugmakers, assuming you have intact cytochrome P450s, will prescribe you 10 times the amount of the drug you actually need, because so little will actually make it to your bloodstream. But in the presence of grapefruit, without those cytochrome P450s, you’re not getting 10 percent of that drug. You’re getting 100 percent. You’re overdosing.
Open Access Publication: Catalogue of Policies to Combat Antisemitism.
Can Differential Privacy Save the Census?
Differential privacy disentangles harms that can arise from the statistical teachings of the dataset about the population as a whole from the harms that could come to an individual by choosing to join or not join the dataset.
How clothing and climate change kickstarted agriculture.
The pattern of clothing in Aboriginal Australia can challenge a number of cherished theories about the origin of clothing. For one, routine Aboriginal nakedness implies that humans didn’t invent clothes due to some inherent sense of modesty. Neither, as hunter-gatherers, did we need clothes for the sake of appearance. (…) Australian evidence, or absence of evidence, is likewise pertinent to the origins of agriculture. It’s no coincidence that neither textile clothing nor agriculture featured in the traditional Aboriginal lifestyles. A link between textile clothing and early agriculture can answer many unresolved questions about the transition to agriculture.
Relevant: Abibas-Sneaker, Ponosonic-Gadgets und Ducci-Taschen!
hyperscript is an experimental scripting language designed for the web, inspired by HyperTalk.
The Facebook Oversight Board is itself an Information Operation.
By merging mass surveillance, psychographic profiling, and micro-targeted advertising, Facebook has created a platform that not only enables profit-making from the theft and exploitation of personal data, but also allows your data to be used in ways that take your power away as a citizen and a voter, and gives that power to corporations and political campaigns. The consequences of this business model will continue to mount as long as accountability lags.
Relevant: The emotion business: who's cashing in on your emotions.
The harmful ableist language you unknowingly use.
This kind of ‘ableist’ language is omnipresent in conversation: making a “dumb” choice, turning a “blind eye” to a problem, acting “crazy”, calling a boss “psychopathic”, having a “bipolar” day. And, for the most part, people who utter these phrases aren’t intending to hurt anyone – more commonly, they don’t have any idea they’re engaging in anything hurtful at all.
The way you make a large world without storing much data is by having some code generate it for you.
