5it

5 Intriguing Things

April 15, 2014

1. Pew says roughly a fifth of US Internet users have had an account compromised or personal information stolen. Yeesh. "18% of online adults have had...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 14, 2014

1. Google figured out how to hack Washington: spend lots of time and money. "The behind-the-scenes machinations demonstrate how Google — once a lobbying...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 9, 2014

1. MIT geographers map the coffeesheds of San Francisco. "This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in San Fracisco and the walking-shed...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 8, 2014

1. Oliver Sacks on what plants and earthworms and insects think. (Or how they think.) (Or if they think.) "For Darwin, the ability to modulate responses...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 4, 2014

1. WhatsApp + Siri = Emu. "If you text a friend to ask if she’d like to grab lunch, you’ll both see a little bubble you can tap to make a calendar...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 3, 2014

1. In 1978, a well-respected science journalist published a book claiming a millionaire had cloned himself. The writer remains convinced. "In His Image: The...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 2, 2014

1. The semiotics of skincare. "In all 87 advertisements collected under Scientific Purity, scientific intervention and eventual conquest over Nature, and...

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5 Intriguing Things

April 1, 2014

1. Michael Lewis describes how high-frequency trading computers see Manhattan and beyond in his new book Flash Boys. "Any trading signal that originated in...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 31, 2014

1. Intellectual property in a world without scarcity. "More recently, new technologies promise to do for a variety of physical goods and even services what...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 28, 2014

1. The latest IPCC report on climate change takes a new approach to talking about forecasts. "The 2007 report was almost all about the impacts of climate...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 27, 2014

1. An important update on human-dolphin communication. "It was late August 2013 and Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean. The dolphin pod she had...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 26, 2014

1. Walter Pichler's "portable living room." "Around forty-five years ago a man wore a submarine-like white helmet that extended from front to back. His...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 25, 2014

1. Akira Kurasawa was born on March 23 1910. Here, Lionel Trilling reflects on what he and the filmmakers of his generation meant. "If it is new, it is good,...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 24, 2014

1. The human response to robopoetry. "Learning to detect the difference between these two mingled kinds of poetry could be the legacy of early robopoetics...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 21, 2014

1. The San Francisco of tomorrow: it's gonna get tall and dense in SoMa. "The Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) engaged steelblue to create a suite of...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 20, 2014

1. Funk band Vulfpeck tries to fund its tour by fans stream a silent album on Spotify. "Last week, they uploaded a 10-track album of complete silence called...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 19, 2014

1. Treble strikes back against the forces of bass in the age of the drop. "At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the possibilities...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 18, 2014

1. What even a little tiny bit of metadata can say. "Mayer and his team showed that participants called public numbers of 'Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores,...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 17, 2014

1. Bruce Sterling's keynotes at SXSW tend to get more fascinating as time goes by, but here it is right as it goes into the bottle. "The future is about old...

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5 Intriguing Things

March 14, 2014

1. The state of New York City's infrastructure: better than it was in the 1980s, but 30 years older, too. Much of New York City’s skeletal infrastructure...

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