Nine riders. All nine hit.

Five Bicycles in Kalamazoo.

Retromania, Retro-historicism, and History.

The Trouble with Contemporary Music Criticism.

A real-life Da Vinci Code, involving a Harvard professor, a onetime Florida pornographer, and an escape from East Germany.

The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife.

What is Differential Privacy?

“Imagine you have two otherwise identical databases, one with your information in it, and one without it. Differential Privacy ensures that the probability that a statistical query will produce a given result is (nearly) the same whether it's conducted on the first or second database.”

Where is the Data Dealer Squad when you need it?

Nylas N1 looks like an awesome alternative e-mail client for the future but I assume you should be very aware of the following issue before even installing it:

“(…) the user's entire email mailbox including all historical email is silently uploaded to your (i.e. Nylas) servers as the default behaviour for the application.”

And there is more. The N1 issue tracker is full with questions about privacy and security – and honestly: I think a lot of these valid concerns are answered quite lukewarmly (example).

Where do broken hearts go?

The U.S. welcomes a branch of Croatia's Museum of Broken Relationships.

The museum in Zagreb is definitely worth a visit – lucky me for having such a well-informed girl-friend.

The thing about Vaporwave

is that it immediately struck severals nerves with me:

1. In my teen years I was crazy for the early 3D computer animations. Fascinated and astounded I watched those perfect shapes move, the checker board, the glass sphere, the ray-traced reflections. I learned that it’s much easier to render the smoothest surface than to depict even the least realistic landscape with all its roughs and sketchiness. (Fractals to the rescue!) – And of course: Kraftwerk’s Musique non stop video.

2. Of course it was the 1980s (and a wee bit of the 1990s due to the time it took for everything to arrive in Central Europe) and everything now Vaporwave just resembles that time: Miami Vice colors, Aerobic commercials for almost any product, terrible font choices, terrible hairstyle choices, terrible clothing choices. I had it all. The future was bleak (if existing at all) but hey, I still wanted to see it. Sure, there was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation but when you noticed there was one “day after” too many you would rather choose a soulless life instead of one of a lifeless soul. The Vaporwave people really picked their material ingeniously: reduced to the max! And who knows, 2016, maybe time’s up again…?

3. The time was full with horrible pop and rock music and I enjoyed it: clean and sterile over-produced bombast presented by superstars (think M. Jackson) or supergroups (think Toto… which actually was most of Jackson’s music if not all of the popular music, anyway). Techno was still underground but it went into the same groove shortly afterwards pretty rapidly. Nevertheless, I also started composing music myself with some electronic instruments, a sequencer, a sampler and a nice analog synth, and at best it actually sounded exactly like four bars of a poppy tune in a never-ending loop. Vaporwave. And I could mesmerize yours truly with it forever and some nightly hours. Nowadays, such tunes help me to concentrate on my work. Or to imagine driving through a megacity.

4. Some say Vaporwave picks up the pieces of all what is wrong about a capitalistic approach to art and music, or even about capitalism itself; some say it is totally not. (Some even say Vaporwave already died in 2011.) That’s all fine with me. But hardly any other music video so simply and elegantly shows the emptiness of consumerism, the stupidity of office life and the glitches of technological progress than this Vaporwave masterpiece: Eco Virtual’s Clear Skies. You be the judge.

5. Whether rumors of Vaporwave’s death are greatly exaggerated or not: I think it already had some obvious impact on mainstream music (e.g. Washed Out). And ignoring the fan boys already claiming several subgenres or dissing you for wrongly labelling a band – here is my current favorite: Home’s Resonance.

As usual I am late to the party but nevertheless I found a new and old musical home with Vaporwave.

Relevant: How Tumblr and MTV Killed the Neon Anti-Corporate Aesthetic of Vaporwave.

The good news is we may have time to stop it.

Stop the Government’s Tattoo Recognition Experiments.

“Government researchers and the FBI are trying to crack the codes in our tattoos. They’re developing tattoo recognition technology with the aim of using our ink to reveal who we are, what we believe, and who we’re connected to. These experiments exploit prisoners without proper oversight and with little regard for privacy, civil liberties, or human dignity.”

Taking children to an aquarium is a lesson in cruelty.

“By taking children to these places, we are communicating to them indirectly that it is acceptable to confine non-human animals to small tanks that dramatically restrict their movement, and derive pleasure from gawking at them.”