5971
Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society
A playable post on how harmless choices can make a harmful world.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,149 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
5972
Academia as an ‘anxiety machine’
We learned recently of the suicide of Stefan Grimm, a successful professor at the prestigious Imperial College in London. Professors Grimm regularly published highly cited articles in the best journals. He was highly productive. Unfortunately, some of his colleagues felt that he did not secure sufficiently large…
5973
5974
Publish and Perish at Imperial College London: The Death of Stefan Grimm
Jump to follow-up This week’s Times Higher Education carried a report of the death, at age 51, of Professor Stefan Grimm: Imperial College London to ‘review procedures’ after death of academi…
5975
The resource leak bug of our civilization
A couple of months ago, Trixter of Hornet released a demo called "8088 Domination", which shows off real-time video and audio playback on t...
5976
An age-old question
Back to: Let's put the future behind us | Forward to: On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
5977
5978
5979
5980
5981
Let's put the future behind us
To the eternal whine of the superannuated free-range SF geek ("dude, where's my jet pack? Where's my holiday on the moon? Where are my food pills? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century!") can be added an appendix: "and what about those L5 orbital space colonies the size of Manhattan?"
5982
All In All, Another Brick In The Motte
One of the better things I’ve done with this blog was help popularize Nicholas Shackel’s “motte and bailey doctrine”. But I’ve recently been reminded I didn’t do…
5983
Ursula K. Le Guin at the National Book Awards
parker higgins is an artist and activist in brooklyn, new york
5984
Google disables SSL search at BT’s request
Update – Since this was posted, Max Allan and Damion Yates have investigated further and found that BT are intercepting DNS queries and replying with doctored DNS results, which I didn’…
5985
What does the NSA think of academic cryptographers?
Brighten Godfrey was one of my officemates when we were grad students at Berkeley. He’s now a highly-successful computer networking professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, …
5986
A Question
I have a question for all the people that use their iPhone or Android to complain on Twitter, Facebook, or reddit about the lack of innovation… Or message their friends on WhatsApp or Snapchat...
5987
5988
What women in technology really think (150 of them at least)
What women in technology really think (150 of them, at least)
5989
5990
All cameras are police cameras
Welcome to The Nor, a series of essays by James Bridle commissioned by the Hayward Gallery in 2014/5. In order, the essays are: All Cameras Are Police Cameras , Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum , and Low Latency , as well as an Epilogue . These are accompanied by photographs and a map , and additional content…
5991
5992
The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy
One of the most widely misused terms on the Net is "ad hominem". It is most often introduced into a discussion by certain delicate types, delicate of personality and mind, whenever their opponents resort to a bit of sarcasm . As soon as the suspicion of an insult appears, they summon the angels of ad hominem to smite…
5993
5994
The Reddit Front Page Is Not a Meritocracy
I was pleasantly surprised when somebody shared my traveling salesman animation to reddit and the post made it all the way to reddit’s default front page (i.e. the top 25). The gif racked up over 1.3 …
5995
Delegative Democracy – a scalable voting model
In between representative democracy , where voters elect politicians to make decisions on their behalf, and direct democracy , where voters directly decide the issues, lies a third model that deserves more consideration. In this model, people have the choice of either voting directly on a decision, as in direct…
5996
5997
Cantonese Proverbs in One Picture
The Great Canton and Hong Kong Proverbs” : illustrations of 83 Cantonese proverbs in one picture
5998
Japanese zoning
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
5999
I Hope Twitter Goes Away
About seven months ago, I abruptly quit Twitter. Though I’d been thinking about it for a while, ultimately leaving was a snap decision for me. Lately I’ve been reflecting on why I hate Twitter so much.
6000
