1. This is a very interesting possibility for decentralizing the web. 

"'Distributed technology can and does empower users,' says BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, 'and can solve what we see as some pretty big problems facing the net today: privacy, openness, efficiency.' BitTorrent proposes to fix those problems by moving away from the longstanding internet behavior of users connecting to a server to view a webpage or access content. Instead, Klinker and the BitTorrent team set out to answer the question of "what if more of the web worked the way BitTorrent worked?" In this vision, web publishers could publish, distribute, and update an entire website through the BitTorrent protocol, and others visiting the page would automatically help share the site's content, just as anyone downloading a file over BitTorrent would also start sharing the file with other peers."

2. Swarms in everything, a RAND report from 2000.

"From command and control of line units to logistics, profound shifts will have to occur to nurture this new way of war. This study examines the benefits — and also the costs and risks — of engaging in such serious doctrinal change. The emergence of a military doctrine based on swarming pods and clusters requires that defense policymakers develop new approaches to connectivity and control and achieve a new balance between the two. Far more than traditional approachesto battle, swarming clearly depends upon robust information flows. Securing these flows, therefore, can be seen as a necessary condition for successful swarming."

3. A fascinating portrait of the body-cam-enabled future. 

"The Programmer followed his curiosity to its natural conclusion. What would happen, he thought, if he filed requests for all the videos ever filmed by police departments? He says it wasn’t until he did so that he realized the many issues that his requests presented. The lessons came quickly. The first was that, even after the KOMO ruling, obtaining a massive amount of videos and other records—including 911 calls and computer searches—would not be easy. SPD—one of 20 agencies with whom he filed requests—declared itself overwhelmed, and said it was even considering dropping a pilot project to outfit officers with body cameras due to start later this month. The prospect of creating more video that would need to be turned over was too much. Poulsbo and Bremerton, both also hit with the Programmer’s requests, resolved to scrap their body-camera programs too."

4. Octopus intelligence/worship.

"I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent. Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus’s large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me—and if so, what was she thinking?"

5. Aliens as the best movie about technology. 

"What I love about Aliens is that it juxtaposes these massive, romantic themes with a much more prosaic view of tech, and of space. In Aliens’ future world, space is just a place people work. There’s two borrowed phrases from Ridley Scott’s Alien that are important here: 'truckers in space,' and 'the used future.' The tech is sloppy, it’s everyday, it’s ugly, it’s pragmatic — it’s craven. What saves Ridley from drifting through space forever isn’t the love of the gods: it’s a deep salvage team, who are pissed off that they broke into the ship’s hull for nothing because there’s a live human inside."

Today's 1957 American English Language Tip

countenance, face, physiognomy, visage. Face is the proper name for the part; countenance is the face with reference to its expression; physiognomy to the cast or type of features; visage is now a LITERARY word, used ornamentally for face without special significance.

The Credits:  1. theverge.com 2. rand.org / @costasamaras 3. seattleweekly.com / @pmocek 4. orionmagazine.org / @_grendan 5. medium.com

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A Deep Salvage Team