5 Intriguing Things
1. The translated poems of Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn worker who committed suicide.
“On My Deathbed”
I want to take another look at the ocean, behold the vastness of tears from half a lifetime
I want to climb another mountain, try to call back the soul that I’ve lost
I want to touch the sky, feel that blueness so light
But I can’t do any of this, so I’m leaving this world
Everyone who’s heard of me
Shouldn’t be surprised at my leaving
Even less should you sigh or grieve
I was fine when I came, and fine when I left.
2. Scientists dressed up a little rover as a penguin chick.
"In another experiment, the researchers disguised the rover as a penguin chick and sent it into a colony of notoriously shy emperor penguins. The birds allowed it to approach ) and in one case even infiltrate a creche of chicks."
3. When the "risk society" was born, according to fascinating, ambulatory post by Adam Curtis.
"The book was powerful because it laid out a new way of looking at the world. Beck said that what the scientists and technologists had been doing with these giant projects was not building a new and glorious future. Without realising it they had been doing the opposite - they had been creating enormous new dangers for the world. Beck used the word risk. The scientists he said had been 'manufacturing risks.' In the past the big risks to human societies tended to be freak events of nature - like earthquakes and volcanoes and storms. But now the risks came from human ingenuity and ambition. Much of what had been created had potentially world-threatening side effects - like atomic fallout and ecological disasters."
"Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole. Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough -- so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued."
5. What is Facebook? What is any web service app thing?
"Most of us building software are no longer designing destinations to drive people to. That was the dominant pattern for a version of the Internet that is disappearing fast. In a world of many different screens and devices, content needs to be broken down into atomic units so that it can work agnostic of the screen size or technology platform. For example, Facebook is not a website or an app. It is an eco-system of objects (people, photos, videos, comments, businesses, brands, etc.) that are aggregated in many different ways through people’s newsfeeds, timelines and pages, and delivered to a range of devices, some of which haven’t even been invented yet. So Facebook is not a set of webpages, or screens in an app. It’s a system of objects, and relationships between them."
Yes, friends, Five Intriguing Things is back for my first day at Fusion. I'm making a few small changes. First, I added a credits section at the bottom, mostly linking Twitter handles. Second, pictures are coming back. I cut them for several months, but they are coming back, usually in the second slot. I'm also going to more consciously look for forecasts about the future and drop them into the 3 slot. (And—GASP—I might drop the "5" from the name, but I haven't been able to make up my mind.)
If you're wondering, there has always been a structure to the order. 4s are almost always historical. 1s tend to be newsier. 5s are wildcards. I'm not dogmatic about how the newsletter is put together, though. There are other things to consider: the flow and connections between items, the lengths and densities of the entries, the spread of large and small sites, etc. But I try to maintain a hidden infrastructure that shapes how you experience the newsletter.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
concept is a philosophical term, & should be left to the philosophers. The substituting of it for the ordinary word conception as below is due to NOVELTY-HUNTING: (a caricature has been described) Now this point of view constantly expressed must have had its influence on popular concepts. See POPULARIZED TECHNICALITIES.
The Credits: 1. libcom.org, @larsonchristina / 2. wired.com / 3. bbc.co.uk, @somebadideas / 4. multivax.com, @darrenaronofsky / 5. intercom.io, @marshallk
They Fed It Data