5 Intriguing Things
"The upshot? Not only are the techniques found in use years ago still employed widely on some of the Internet's highest-trafficked sites, but new methods and improvements have appeared, and there's still neither an effective way to block most of these tracking tricks nor effective regulation and enforcement to dissuade companies from pursuing them. We can be tracked from page to page, session to session, and often site to site even when we tell companies not to and take every available measure to halt it. And it's not getting better. Sorry."
2. Fascinating: on the relationship between Camus and the French biologist Jacques Monod.
"Sean B. Carroll, the American developmental molecular geneticist, reveals the deep friendship between Camus and Monod in Brave Genius. Their relationship, Carroll finds, not only illuminates the work of both men, but also unlocks the political and philosophical contingencies of a key moment in 20th-century thought. Camus, the victim of a tragic car accident a decade before the publication of Chance and Necessity, had himself been a Nobel laureate and France’s most celebrated moral voice. The friendship between the two men was forged in the Cold War years through a shared antipathy toward Soviet totalitarianism and a shared nostalgia for the glory days of the Résistance. It was in that first crucible — Camus writing stirring editorials for the national Résistance newspaper Combat under the pseudonym “Bauchard” and Monod, as commander 'Malivert' in the Forces Français de l’Intérior, directing anti-Nazi guerrilla activity — that two ordinary lives met the extraordinary circumstances that would push them to greatness. Subsequently, having uncovered with his colleagues the 'second secret of life,' Monod became a 'Camus in a lab coat' of sorts: his philosophy of biology, Carroll argues, is best understood as the scientific counterpart to his literary friend’s existentialism. "
"Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first, ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun playing all kinds of games together - until he died, when i was just 6. i couldnt touch that console for 10 years. but once i did, i noticed something. we used to play a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty awesome for the time it came. and once i started meddling around... i found a GHOST. literaly. you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded as a ghost driver? yep, you guessed it - his ghost still rolls around the track today. and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and... i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete it. Bliss."
"There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all. The institution of computers will be delayed interminably under the male control system, since the male has a horror of being replaced by machines."
+ From the 1968 S.C.U.M Manifesto.
5. Internet service providers are spending relatively less on their networks.
"How much money do the nation's biggest Internet providers invest in upgrading their networks every year? The answer can affect how reliable your connections are, what kind of speeds you get and the amount you pay for service each month. And with all the debate about big telecom mergers, net neutrality and the future of broadband, capital expenditures — or the resources companies sink into their networks — offer an important source of insight into how it all works. It turns out that, as a percentage of the money they pull in, ISPs have generally spent less on infrastructure over time — from a high of 37 percent of revenue in some cases to a low of around 12 percent more recently."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
catchup. Usual US spelling. Brit. usually KETCHUP.
+ This chart suggests that this particular tip was misguided, or very, very old. The real contender was CATSUP.
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