5 Intriguing Things
1. One of the best writers working, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, on the glories of autocorrect.
"It's not too much of an exaggeration to call autocorrect the overlooked underwriter of our era of mobile prolixity. Without it, we wouldn't be able to compose windy love letters from stadium bleachers, write novels on subway commutes, or dash off breakup texts while in line at the post office. Without it, we probably couldn't even have phones that look anything like the ingots we tickle—the whole notion of touchscreen typing, where our podgy physical fingers are expected to land with precision on tiny virtual keys, is viable only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us. Because we know autocorrect is there as brace and cushion, we're free to write with increased abandon, at times and in places where writing would otherwise be impossible. Thanks to autocorrect, the gap between whim and word is narrower than it's ever been, and our world is awash in easily rendered thought."
2. A project to allow Facebook users to do "collaborative audits" of their News Feeds.
"The FeedVis project shows users on the left all posts by friends on your specific network. On the right are the posts that actually appear on your newsfeed. The projects that appear in both are highlighted. Users were astonished by how long the left column was and how many things are hidden from Facebook. For most subjects, this was the first time they were aware of the existence of an algorithm. 37.5 percent of participants were aware, and 62.5 percent were not aware or uncertain."
3. When you think the human is a machine.
"his paper presents some important issues on misidentification of human interlocutors in text-based communication during practical Turing tests. The study here presents transcripts in which human judges succumbed to theconfederate effect, misidentifying hidden human foils for machines. An attempt is made to assess the reasons for this. The practical Turing tests in question were held on 23 June 2012 at Bletchley Park, England. A selection of actual full transcripts from the tests is shown and an analysis is given in each case."
4. Mariner 1's very expensive hyphen.
"A NASA Post-Flight Review Board determined that the accidental
omission of a hyphen in coded computer instructions transmitted
incorrect guidance signals to the rocket. The omission caused the
computer to swing automatically into a series of unnecessary course
correction signals which threw spacecraft off course so that it had to
be destroyed. The software bug destroyed a $18.5 million (1962 dollars, $146 million in 2014 dollars) spacecraft."
5. What fruit fly "ovarioles" look like.
"Each ovary of the female fruit fly houses multiple ovarioles or 'assembly lines' in which individual egg chambers develop into fully formed fly eggs. Each egg chamber consists of 16 large germline cells (one of which is the future egg cell), surrounded by a thin sheet of smaller cells. In this picture, cross-sections of ten ovarioles from different female fruit flies are arranged with stem cells and early stage egg chambers at the center, and the more mature chambers at the periphery. The nucleus of each cell is stained yellow/orange. The cell membranes are stained blue."
+ That's the People's Choice winner of the Art of Science competition, worth checking out in full.
Writer advisory: The Atlantic's technology section is looking for pitches on the theme of Hide and Track. Readers of this newsletter would already know the types of things we might find intriguing.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
catachresis (adj. -estic). (Gram.): 'misuse.' Wrong application of a term, use of words in senses that do not belong to them. The popular uses of chronic=severe, asset=advantage, conservative=low, & mutual=common, are examples.
The Ingots We Tickle