1. A German steelworks was physically damaged by a digital attack.

"The BSI document states that a steelworks site was directly targeted using a very sophisticated spear phishing and social engineering method to gain access onto the office network of the facility. From there, the adversary moved into the production network which resulted in 'massive damage to machinery.' They reported that failures became more frequent in the individual control components as well as the overall system and the failures resulted in the blast furnace not being regulated properly. This is only the second time a reliable source has publicly confirmed physical damage to control systems as the result of a cyber-attack. The first instance, the malware Stuxnet, caused damage to nearly 3,000 centrifuges in the Natanz facility in Iran. Stories of damage in other facilities have appeared over the years but mostly based on tightly held rumors in the Industrial Control Systems (ICS) community that have not been made public."

2. Tremendous feature about nerds, and being one.

"Result: The overculture started the process of absorption and commodification. Nerds became an economic bloc to be marketed to. And with some strategic improvements in visual-effects technologies, other people—snorks, as they’re called here on ship—could come to appreciate the pop culture staples that had sustained us through the dark years. Now everyone is into geeky stuff. Now all the movies are superhero movies. That’s how The Avengers made more than $1 billion worldwide in 2012." [Pocket]

3. Keep an eye out for this anthology from an interesting collective of African writers.

"I see Jalada’s Afrofuture issue as an expression of the Pan-African vision of Afrofuturism. Afrofuturistic art has always been about crossing the borders of time and space: it reaches into the distant past as well as the far future, and across the traumatic breach of the Middle Passage. I love that this anthology brings together voices and visions from different parts of Africa and the diaspora—to me, that’s the true spirit of Afrofuturism."

4. Yeah, what did ever happen to graphene?

"At I.B.M., which has invested more than a decade of research and tens of millions of dollars in the material, there is great reluctance to admit defeat. Guha introduced me to George Tulevski, who helps lead I.B.M.’s carbon-nanotube research program. When I mentioned graphene, he evinced the defensiveness that might be expected of a scientist who has devoted nearly ten years to one recalcitrant technology only to be told about a glamorous new one. 'Devices have to turn on and off,' Tulevski said. 'If it doesn’t turn off, it just consumes way too much power. There’s no way to turn graphene off. So those electrons are going superfast, and that’s great—but you can’t turn the device off.'" [Pocket]

5. The uncanny valley of behavioral targeting.

"An unexpected finding emerged through the interviews as participants talked about a 'weird' negative feeling that they sensed when the targeted ad was getting too personal. Their comments strongly resounded with the phenomenon that takes place in the 'uncanny valley' effect (Mori, 1970). This term, initially conceptualized to describe how humans feel about robots, claims that as a machine acquires greater similarity to humans, it becomes more appealing. However, when it becomes too close to the likeness of a human, people experience a strong discomfort; when a machine looks “perfectly human” the positive emotions are revived. Other than robots, the idea of the uncanny valley has been applied to other computer-generated entities such as animated characters in video games and movies. A similar phenomenon was seen in behavioral targeting whereas if the targeted ad was too obvious about tracking the participant’s behavior, they felt uncomfortable." [Pocket]

Two small things: 1) I flubbed the link to Dave Roberts' piece in Grist about Seattle's tunnel megaproject disaster yesterday. Here it is. 2) I'm looking for current or ex-Apple people to talk about Cupertino, as a place, and what it's like making imaginative, groundbreaking things in a town like that. 

crooked. (1) The figurative use of crooked (dishonest, perverted, &c.) is not colloq. but of long literary tradition. As applied to material things dishonestly come-by (His whole output was crooked) it is US colloq.

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