These collections aren’t digitized. The only way to find out what’s inside them is to ask for a particular box — often with just a vague notion of what will be in it — and to hold the old papers in your hands. “I don’t know how one could be interested in libraries and not archives,” Lannon told me. They tell you “the stories behind things,” he said, “the unpublished, the hard to find, the true story.”
Did our cosmos emerge from a sea of inflating bubbles?
Maybe we don’t have to speculate about what life is like inside a bubble. It might be the only cosmic reality we know.
o_0
A camera that sees around corners could help improve self-driving cars.
Coming soon to a country near you!
There's a Word for the State of American Democracy: Kakistocracy.
From cabinet officials jetting around on the public dime, to Trump's shattering of ethical norms, to disregard for congressional procedure—there’s growing evidence the United States is governed by the least scrupulous of its citizens.
Does Online Crowdfunding Reward Actual Innovation?
The study’s authors found that the amount of money pledged increased when the product description emphasized either originality or utility — but dropped when both attributes were mentioned. The findings suggest that the crowd does not yet prize true innovation.
Not the ONION.
Austria burqa ban: Man dressed as shark falls afoul of new law.
From the Red Sea to Hong Kong in 10 minutes – a stunning cargo-ship timelapse.
Vienna Principles – a vision for scholarly communication.
People self-select into bubbles along all sorts of axes. Some of these bubbles are obvious and easy to explain, like rich people mostly meeting other rich people at the country club. Others are more mysterious, like how some non-programmer ends up with mostly programmer friends. Still others are horrible and completely outside comprehension, like someone who tries very hard to avoid abusers but ends up in multiple abusive relationships anyway. Even for two people living in the same country, city, and neighborhood, they can have a “society” made up of very different types of people.
It seems I am getting more and more dissociated from what’s happening net-wise.
Through the imho quite well done documentary Dark Net I learned that a company called Gaggle completely surveils and monitors online communication of US high school students.
(Another episode about how Western predators instigate and perpetrate abuse of children on the Philippines using the Web made me really cringe heavily.)