5 Intriguing Things
1. On the man behind Slack, enterprise software that's slicker than the slickest app.
"Slack’s strategy is to insinuate itself into the workplace from the bottom up. The idea is that it will get so popular inside organizations that IT departments will have to embrace it. When you’ve got just a few people using the free version, it works well enough. But as it catches on in the workplace, features like unlimited message search and custom integrations with other software become increasingly vital. And to get those features you have to pay to upgrade. By now, you’re hooked. So you convince your CIO to pony up—or at least, that’s the hope. I mean, it’s working for Dropbox, right? Until now, Slack hasn’t even done any advertising. It has grown entirely (and phenomenally) by word of mouth."
+ We use this tool—and it is awesome.
2. Philosophy Bites is a great, accessible podcast with some of the world's best philosophers.
"Sebastian Gardner on Jean-Paul Sartre on Bad Faith
Jessica Moss on Plato and Aristotle on Weakness of Will
Daniel Kahneman on Bias
Pat Churchland on Self Control
Adina Roskies on Neuroscience and Free Will
Stephen Darwall on Moral Accountability
Gideon Rosen on Moral Responsibility
Neil Levy on Moral Responsibility and Consciousness"
"Since the first version went on sale in 2012, the budget computer has gained popularity, as expected, among hobbyists, enthusiasts, and aspiring hackers. The Raspberry Pi foundation has sold 3 million altogether. But it has also attracted hardware startups, and Raspberry Pi has taken note of the new trend. The foundation noticed an uptick in bulk orders from industrial companies looking to use Raspberry Pi to make products, and this fall will release a version specifically for hardware makers. 'The compute module is going to be very central to our plans going forward,' Eben Upton, one of the founders of the Pi Foundation, said."
4. A key early self-driving car research project.
"The DARPA Autonomous Land Vehicle (ALV) was a 12-foot tall, eight-wheeled robot with multiple sensors, tasked to go from point A to point B without human intervention in the hills outside of Denver in about 1985. This was a large applied research effort that presented many opportunities for unusual experiences."
5. A monkey took some awesome selfies with a photographer's camera, and then things got complicated.
"Meanwhile: This summer, a crested black macaque got hold of photographer David Slater’s camera and snapped off 'hundreds' of pictures while investigating it, including the rather amazing self-portrait above. Later, Slater said that he gave the monkey the camera to play with on purpose, in the course of defending his claim to hold the copyright on the monkey-made images, an assertion amusingly and convincingly challenged by TechDirt’s Mike Masnick. I’d like to set the legal issues aside and state without reservation that this image might be my favorite new photograph of the year. I think I'd like it even if it were a conventional picture; but knowing that it's the result of an essentially chance interaction between technology and a monkey, I just love it. There’s something here not even McLuhan can be said to have anticipated: We shape our tools, and thereafter … a monkey makes a surprisingly charming image? Perhaps an infinite number of monkeys with Instagram-enabled smartphones could create a groundbreaking museum show. Or at least a kick-ass Tumblr."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
cheerful, cheery. The latter has reference chiefly to externals—voice, appearance, manner, &c. Resignation may be cheerful without being cheery; & a person may have a cheerful, but hardly a cheery spirit without his neighbors' discovering it. The cheerful feels & perhaps shows contentment, the cheery shows & probably feels it.
Without Human Intervention in the Hills Outside of Denver