You're Almost Entirely Blind.
What if I told you that you’re almost completely blind? That which you perceive as darkness is you missing 99% of available information. In this issue, I look at ways we can reduce that loss.
Gemini is a new, collaboratively designed internet protocol, which explores the space inbetween gopher and the web, striving to address (perceived) limitations of one while avoiding the (undeniable) pitfalls of the other.
The VR winter.
This should have been a VR moment, and it isn’t.
How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal.
In 2016 I designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, and then spent a couple of months building a micro-data-pipeline, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources. Then, having all those crosswords in a simple format, I wanted to see if there were any common grid patterns--and discovered egregious plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years.
An essay called The psychology of learning from 2003 by Robert Strandh, director of the Département d'Informatique at Université Bordeaux, France, describes a trend in computing where close-mindedness (my phrase) risks opportunities for learning and effectiveness.
What Happened to the Webmaster?
(…) if you could stick a web interface in front of the SPIRES-HEP database people could access it directly and librarians wouldn’t have to spend all that time fielding requests from researchers and manually querying the database. It would be a massive time-saver and a way to distribute the content from the database to an even wider audience.
No to .io, yes to .xyz!
(…) by buying .io domains, one directly supports the still-actual behavior of the UK government defending their colonial history and acts against human rights.
No future.
A Future For Space Billionaires.
It’s imperative that we reject visions of the future designed for billionaires to extend their power and wealth for decades, if not centuries, to come. We need visions that bring us back down to Earth, and put the well-being of the many before the self-interest of the few.
Das Erdmännchen-Lied.
Article is from April but duh!
Corona-Zahlen: In Österreich herrscht ein intransparentes Chaos.
Open Data für Zahlen über den Stand der Corona-Infektionen ist in Österreich noch ein Fremdwort. Technisch ist das kein Problem. Es fehlt der politische Wille.