1. The Burners of the Afghanistan war.

"What we were looking at was a data-visualization tool he had created, called Antz. The patterns on the screen reflected actual information from the environs in Jalalabad—records of attacks on coalition forces, funding and logistical data for various reconstruction projects, the movements of people. Warner believed the program was a step toward better intelligence analysis. But he made a point of telling me that none of the information on the screen was classified. He had built the model entirely from freely available data that he and his team had harvested from the city... On principle, he refused to get a security clearance, out of a belief in something he called 'radical inclusion.' The most valuable information in a conflict or disaster zone, he said, was information that could be shared with everybody. The term radical inclusion stopped me. I recognized it from the summer of 1998, when I had gone to Burning Man, the hedonistic-fire-worshipper-art-festival that occurs every summer in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Radical inclusion is one of the event’s 'Ten Principles.' When I mentioned this, Warner’s eyes lit up. He dug into his T-shirt and pulled out a shining Burning Man medallion. 'Dude,' he said, grinning in the firelight. 'This is a Burner bar.'"

2. It would be fun to see a low-end wearable take off.

"'It has no display, no lights, no gimmicks,' Olodort said. No buttons. No switches. Nothing except a little 8-gram pod (6 grams if you take the clip off and just slip it into a pocket) with a Bluetooth connection to your phone and a powerful vibrating motor inside. For $29, the pod serves as a remote vibrating notification device for your phone. You use a companion app (iOS or Android) to tell it what you consider important: Your boss sending you an email, for instance, or the babysitter calling you during the day."

3. The new trap. 

"I attached a piece of bread to my GoPro, and a squirrel picked it up and carried it up a tree. After eating the bread, it swiftly discarded the GoPro."

+ Then the video went viral and he hired an outfit called Newsflare to "manage" it.

4. The Air Loom. 

"Mike Jay recounts the tragic story of James Tilly Matthews, a former peace activist of the Napoleonic Wars who was confined to London’s notorious Bedlam asylum in 1797 for believing that his mind was under the control of the 'Air Loom' – a terrifying machine whose mesmeric rays and mysterious gases were brainwashing politicians and plunging Europe into revolution, terror, and war. "

5. On cities, the invention.

"As for cities in general: I think they might be our greatest invention. They drive creativity, they help us manage resources, and they can be hives of tolerance. In a village, you can’t stick out too much. In the city, if anyone judges you, you tell them to go to hell. So, there’s that positive side. But the other side is that they are simply so congested with material history and the spiritual traces of those histories, including some very dark events. Your contemporary Chicago is haunted by the Chicago of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Chicago of innovation and of systematic exclusions. Rural landscapes can give the double illusion of being eternal and newly born. Cities, on the other hand, are marked with specific architecture from specific dates, and this architecture, built by long-vanished others for their own uses, is the shell that we, like hermit crabs, climb into." 

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

contemn. Chiefly a literary word meaning to despise, scorn; not to be confused with condemn (to adjudge to be wrong, guilty).

The Credits:  1. psmag.com /@thwang 2. newscientist.com 3. youtube.org /@pbump 4. publicdomainreview.org/@notrobwalker 5. bombmagazine.org/@elisebackwell

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