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A collection of 194 posts

Science

Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere to counter global warming (Curtis Bartley)

Airplane contrails are real, but we know what they are: water vapor  and small amounts of other combustion products created by jet engines.   The other pollutants may be somewhat harmful, but they are basically the  same thing as produced by any other form of combustion.  So what are  chemtrails?  Wikipedia

Science

In Fiji, ants have learned to grow plants to house their massive colonies (ArsTechnica)

High in the trees on the Fiji islands, ants in the species Philidris  nagasau are doing something extraordinary. They've brought in seeds from  several species of a large, lumpy fruit from a plant known as  Squamellaria and carefully planted them in the nooks and crannies of the  tree

Comics

The Next Great Stoic Competition (Existential Comics)

Stoicism, which was founded by Zeno of Citium, is largely based on the  acceptance of things which you cannot control. Zeno believed that the universe was determinisitc, and it was irrational to get angry or upset at the universe for existing the way that it does. Stoicism gained great popularity

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Adblock Plus now sells ads (The Verge)

Adblock Plus is launching a new service that... uh, puts more ads on  your screen. Rather than stripping all ads from the internet forever, Adblock Plus is hoping to replace the bad ads — anything it deems too big, too ugly, or too intrusive — with good ads, ones that are smaller,

Comics

Beauty standards (Owlturd Comics)

Comics

One van to screw them all (Bonkers World)

Hey Siri, set recurring alarm for 4 AM. OK Google, set recurring alarm for 4 AM. Alexa, set recurring alarm for 4AM. Hey Cortana, set recurring alarm for 4 AM. Hey Siri.... source: http://www.bonkersworld.net/one-van-to-screw-them-all/

Comics

Catching pokémon & meaning of life (Existential Comics)

Dead philosopher in heaven, about the meaning of life. God – It could be anything: helping people, making great art, catching pokémon. Anything really. Phil. – Catching pokémon? God – Look, here's what they don't tell you about freedom. If  you let people pick themselves, some of them are

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Ruin My Search History - Ruin your Google search history with a single click

This site will make crazy google search requests from your computer and put you on surveillance watchlists across the planet. As a bonus, you will get funny ads from google from now on ;) ['how to appear funny', 'why are my thumbs uneven', 'am i lack

Science

The brachistochrone curve: the problem of quickest descent

Suppose there is an incline such as that shown below. When a ball rolls from A to B, which curve yields the shortest duration? Let’s assume that we have three hypotheses: a straight line, a quadratic, and a cycloid. The shortest path from A to B is the straight

Science

Fire in Microgravity

In microgravity, flames given so little oxygen that on Earth they  would extinguish, do not go out but break up into tiny, two-dimensional  caps called flamelets. Much like smoldering coals in a banked hearth,  these flamelets can persist for long periods under near-limit conditions  and, if oxygen is reintroduced, ignite

Technical

Hey, You Have Given Me Too Many Knobs! (Greg Wilson)

This paper makes a first step in understanding a fundamental question of configuration design: "do users really need so many knobs?" To provide the quantitatively answer, we study the configuration settings of real-world users, including thousands of customers of a commercial storage system (Storage-A), and hundreds of users

Technical

What is Differential Privacy?

Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple announced that they will be using a technique called “Differential Privacy [https://www.wired.com/2016/06/apples-differential-privacy-collecting-data/]” (henceforth: DP) to

Science

Harvard Scientist Engineers Bacterium That Inhales CO2, Produces Energy

Nocera’s artificial leaf, developed while he was at MIT, made a splash five years ago because the wafer of silicon and other elements can be dropped in water, exposed to sunlight, and it will continuously split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen, a clean burning fuel, is typically

Science

Drug and Food Interactions with Caffeine (World on Caffeine)

Most of the caffeine you ingest is metabolized by a CYP450 liver enzyme called “CYP1A2.” This means that the body uses CYP1A2 to “demethylate” caffeine molecules, transforming them into other substances, chiefly paraxanthine, which are ultimately excreted in the urine.  CYP1A2 is one of the most abundant CYP liver enzymes

Science

The bizarre beasts living in Romania's poison cave (BBC)

In the south-east of Romania, in Constanța county close to the Black Sea and the Bulgarian border, there lies a barren featureless plain. The desolate field is completely unremarkable, except for one thing. Below it lies a cave that has remained isolated for 5.5 million years. While our ape-like

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AdBlock Plus teams up with Flattr to help readers pay publishers (Techcrunch)

AdBlock Plus just announced that they’re working with startup Flattr on a new product that allows readers to pay the publishers who produce the content they read, listen to and watch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/03/adblock-plus-teams-up-with-flattr-to-help-readers-pay-publishers/

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Why we use adblockers: 'We need to have more control over what we're exposed to' (The Guardian)

The UK’s culture secretary John Whittingdale described adblocking companies as acting like a “modern-day protection racket”. [The Guardian] asked [its] readers why they use adblocking software when browsing the web, and what they thought media companies should do to fund content in the future. * ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ - Lorrie

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Brave's Payment Spec Out for Developer Input (Brave)

The new Brave browser automatically blocks ads and trackers, making it faster and safer than your current browser. Soon, micropayments and better ads will give users and publishers a better deal. We know and respect that content on the Internet is largely advertiser supported, so our goal is not to

Advertising

Using Adblock Plus to block ads is legal, rules German court—for the fifth time (Ars Technica)

Adblock's whitelisting scheme for advertisements also acceptable, Munich court says. Using Adblock Plus to block ads on websites is legal, a German regional court has ruled. The suit, brought by the company behind the leading German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, is the fifth such case to be decided in

Society

After Cash: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses a Bank Account (Bloomberg View)

There’s a lot to like about the idea of a cashless society, starting with its effect on crime. (...) A cashless society would also see a decline in the next level of robberies: stickups of retail outlets. (...) One step beyond that, there’s the effect on criminal enterprises, for whom

Society

Why do we work so hard? (1843 Magazine)

Maybe it’s because work is satisfying. Maybe it’s because we’re trapped. Or maybe, as Ryan Avent suspects, it’s because of a troubling combination of the two. Why? One possibility is that we have all got stuck on a treadmill. Technology and globalisation mean that an increasing

Society

Paris Is on Wartime Footing (Foreign Policy)

Three months after the Islamic State attacks, France is (was) on the verge of declaring a state of emergency, forever. What a difference a year makes. Just 12 little months and the spirit of solidarity after the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks — which drew millions to the streets across France

Technical

Unlocking my Lenovo laptop battery (Matthew Chapman)

Two months ago, I bought a new battery for my Lenovo laptop (a ThinkPad X230T). I was about to go away on holidays and wanted a battery that could last me through a plane flight; the original battery was by then barely lasting ten minutes. Little did I know that

Science

Wendelstein 7-X fusion device produces its first hydrogen plasma (IPP)

The Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald produced its first hydrogen plasma on 3 February 2016. This marks the start of scientific operation. Wendelstein 7-X, the world’s largest fusion device of the stellarator type, is to investigate this configuration’s suitability

Science

Is it true that no two snowflakes are the same? Never, ever ever? (NY Times)

Not quite, said Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, who found a way to create what he calls “identical twin” snowflakes in his lab. Since each snowflake faces a different turbulent path through the atmosphere, each twist, turn and fall grants it a unique symmetry.