Lockdown on Nias island in Indonesia served as a spiritual reset.
When the curfew sounded, at a drum’s command, young and old climbed the creaking staircases, ducking through narrow doorways into gleaming, echoey halls empty of furniture, a communal airy space with dingy, cabin-like cells at the rear. As roof hatches were lowered and doors bolted, the trim, receding dwellings became arks, the outside world dropping away. With the house sealed against contagion and curse, and constituent families – half a dozen per lineage – quarantined between earth and sky six feet above the ground, the isolation was total. Each lineage, with its 40-odd crew, was cut off from its neighbours, afloat on a hilltop, deep in the forest. Such was lockdown in Tanö Niha, the Land of People.
Mini Tokyo 3D (via densediscovery.com).
A real-time 3D digital map of Tokyo's public transport system.
How psychology fills the gap from the disenchantment of the world.
Mythological schemes – including psychology – provide stories about the origins of mortality, sexuality, society, rules and work. They offer a motivation for why things are the way they are. Our shared world is maintained by the practice of rites, of rituals. As the French philosopher Georges Bataille wrote, rites represent rules of conduct in the presence of the sacred, thus protecting and insulating it from the profane. In myths and the rituals that sustain them, we search for a lost sense of intimacy with transcendent sources. By providing explanatory tenets, psychology is thus a means of enabling humans to sustain their practices of personhood and materialism such that we can face the world with greater confidence and increased energy.
Relevant: Sex Robots & Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex & Death.
Demography 101
— Ilya Kashnitsky (@ikashnitsky) March 5, 2021
🔥 WHAT IS LIFE EXPECTANCY ? 🔥
and (even more important)
❌ what it isn't ❌
Join in for the most topical demography primer
🧵 THREAD 1/x pic.twitter.com/5p292vfsGc
Reverse Engineering the COVID Vaccine Source Code (via berthub.eu).
Curious how the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID vaccine works under the hood? The answer is, it almost doesn’t – if not for several very cool bio-hacks in the code...
A real treasure!
Smashing Newsletter #292: JavaScript, Bundlers, Frameworks.
If you are writing JavaScript every day, perhaps you’ll find a couple of useful JavaScript gems in this newsletter issue. We’ve collected some useful resources for you to keep close — whether you are new to JavaScript, or found your way through the trenches of legacy code over the decades.
The edge of our existence: A particle physicist examines the architecture of society.
Strip away the technological bedazzlement, and one finds a cliched tale with two-dimensional characters. In The Wandering Earth, our planet is converted into an intergalactic spaceship, but its society and politics have barely evolved: The nation-state outlives the sun. An engineer by training, Liu, like many of his peers, is more comfortable bending the laws of gravity than reimagining the forms of government.
The Kilobyte’s Gambit (via javascriptweekly.com).
Can you beat 1024 bytes of JavaScript?
The technology industry is hurt at every level by toxic gatekeeping.
Toxic gatekeepers in tech are people with internalized cognitive distortions that either affirm one’s sense of superiority or project their personal insecurities–if not both things.
This is almost always directed towards the end of excluding women, racial or religious minorities, LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent people, and other vulnerable populations from the possibility at pursuing lucrative career prospects.
Google’s FLoC Is a Terrible Idea
FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.