Meet the Winners of This Year's Ig Nobel Prizes.
Chemistry Prize: Volkswagen, for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested.
How the Latest Great Migration Is Reshaping Europe.
With the worst history of xenophobia, Germany has taken in the most refugees of any European country. The stakes of the experiment are high. (…) Hostility toward immigrants in Germany has been strongest where the fewest of them live, in the former East German states.
Buzzworld.
IBM Design Thinking.
Farewell, etaoin shrdlu.
The last day of hot metal press before computers come in at The New York Times.
Coding is not ‘fun’, it’s technically and ethically complex.
In an ever-more intricate and connected world, where software plays a larger and larger role in everyday life, it’s irresponsible to speak of coding as a lightweight activity. Software is not simply lines of code, nor is it blandly technical. In just a few years, understanding programming will be an indispensable part of active citizenship. The idea that coding offers an unproblematic path to social progress and personal enhancement works to the advantage of the growing techno-plutocracy that’s insulating itself behind its own technology.
不気味の谷現象
Now, here’s the kicker, the real key to creepiness: essences don’t come in degrees. It’s part of the notion of essences that if a thing possesses an essence, it possesses it completely. In our ordinary, pre-theoretical ways of cognising animals, if we think of something as a dog, we are inclined to think of it as completely a dog, and if we think of something as a lizard, we are inclined to think of it as completely a lizard. Now, consider the example of a dog with a lizard’s head. According to the implicit logic of essentialism, such a creature must be completely a dog and completely a lizard. But that’s impossible, because each of these excludes the other.
Opposition to Galileo was scientific, not just religious.
Anti-Copernicans such as Locher and Brahe show that science has always functioned as a contest of ideas, and that science was present in both sides of the vigorous debate over Earth’s motion.
I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses…
Medical students revise their Hippocratic oath to reflect modern values.
Relevant: The Declaration of Geneva.
Caveat, male feminists.
The Easy Failure of Professional Male Feminism.
The professional white knight is a male feminist who makes workplace feminism a vehicle for their own self-congratulatory complacency.
Made in Austria.
Pepper – A friendly contact widget for your website.