Archive (Page 6) • 5it • Buttondown

5 Intriguing Things

1. A warning about new image-recognition capabilities from a leader in the techniques. "Before, it would take months of my time to build a classifier for...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The democratization of the Truman Show. "Previously, park visitors received a payment card-sized pass with a magnetic stripe and an embedded radio...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Let's just go with the headline: "YouTube’s Biggest Star Is An Unknown Toy-Reviewing Toddler Whisperer." "DisneyCollectorBR is a faceless YouTube channel...

5 Intriguing Things

1. How to become the world's only frozen-dumpling billionaire. "Using mechanical parts harvested from the hospital junk pile, Chen built a two-stage freezer...

5 Intriguing Things

1. New web tracking strategies have evolved, which make it roughly impossible to use the Internet without generating data for someone. "The upshot? Not only...

5 Intriguing Things

1. One of the best writers working, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, on the glories of autocorrect. "It's not too much of an exaggeration to call autocorrect the...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Cities as molecules. "With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of...

5 Intriguing Things

1. User-centered design... for animals. Although animals have been involved in machine interactions for a long time, their perspective has seldom driven the...

5 Intriguing Things

An amazing reader of the newsletter—Mr. Jay H.—created an archive of all the things, or at least the intriguing ones. Check out the editions in chronological...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A drone aerial photo contest! (When will the novelty of these angles wear off?) "I think it is a new visual language, a new way of discovering things and...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Robots in everything: beet farm edition. "The Ladybird recently moved out of the lab and into a test field, spending three days monitoring the vegetative...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Inside a FedEx logistics center where they sort 1.5 million packages a night. "When the packages hit Input, they're put onto one of three belts, the top,...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The New York Daily News takes a happy traipse through the NYPD's surveillance technologies. "He recounted a recent CompStat session where bullet...

5 Intriguing Things

1. This little essay is, ostensibly, about how much Union soldiers loved coffee, but it's really about closing the distance between their time and ours....

5 Intriguing Things

1. Sensors everywhere really mean analytics everywhere. "The company says that it provides e-commerce style metrics for brick-and-mortar stores using sensors...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Food and memory, food and Mars, food and pretending to be on Mars. "Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) is a four-year project: a...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Meet the claustrum, which may be the seat of consciousness within the brain. "Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single...

5 Intriguing Things

1. What happens when the rich can live to 120 years old? "What if the mantra ‘80 is the new 50’ could apply to us all? But the coming longevity gap might set...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The person now running Google Glass is not exactly who you'd expect. "The Glass job would seem to be tailored for yet another young male engineer...

5 Intriguing Things

Welcome, readers of David Carr's New York Times column! It's great to have you here. A quick orientation: 1) If you want to get in touch, all you have to do...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A major prostitution portal was seized by Federal authorities. "Some law enforcement officials hailed the move as a victory against sex trafficking. But...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Proto-beliebers: there was an insane fan community on Prodigy centered around New Kids on the Block. "We traded bootleg analog content with a new...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Nils Barricelli, the father of research into digital life forms. "Barricelli programmed some of the earliest computer algorithms that resemble real-life...

5 Intriguing Things

1. How Google lobbies on the state level, where a lot of the action is. "Google this year has retained a quartet of lobbyists in Maryland to remove any...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Movement is also thinking, even Robin van Persie's. "The idea of 'muscle memory' encourages this – allowing us to cordon off feats of motor skill as a...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The occult phone. "The key to the telephone as miracle, metaphor, and medium for ghosts lay in what Hubert and Mauss called the 'numerous slits' in...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Roboticists should learn from cartoons. "A companion robot is something you'll want to have because it does valuable work for you–but only if it also has...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Designer Min Ming Lo looks at the different icons that mean "share this thing" on different operating systems. His favorite is pre-2011 Android's old Y....

5 Intriguing Things

1. Coal reaches its largest share of the global energy market since 1970. "Coal has reached its highest market share of global energy consumption for more...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A geneticist and blogger sequenced his son's genome in utero. "An infant delivered last week in California appears to be the first healthy person ever...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Data mining which classified documents the government releases to see what they've left out. "In early 2012, Connelly put aside his research on the Cold...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A sports section from April 2018, recently sent out to 130,000 people in Manchester. "How will the so-called beautiful game of global football be...

5 Intriguing Things

A short advisory: I am looking for a mobile developer to make an app for 5IT. It will be a very simple app. And I'd like to turn the collaboration on and...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Meet the Tankchair. "Soden is the inventor of the Tankchair, which is a wheelchair in the same sense that an aircraft carrier is a boat. His fearsome-...

A Planetary Error

Dear Saturn,I have insulted you, and I apologize. As you will have undoubtedly seen, in today's newsletter (#80), I gave possession to one of your moons,...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A proposed autonomous submarine for exploring the hydrocarbon sea of Kraken Mare on Titan, one of Jupiter's moons. "Titan is unique in the outer solar...

5 Intriguing Things

1. It's the world's one-year Snowdeniversary, and the EFF is trying to rally the troops about surveillance. "On June 5, 2013 the Guardian newspaper published...

5 Intriguing Things: Balloon Edition

1. James Bridle is flying a balloon over London this summer. "This summer, artist and writer James Bridle is flying a balloon from the roof of Bold...

5 Intriguing Things

1. How cars and car operators colonized our roads. "Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play....

5 Intriguing Things

1. Surveillant anxiety may not catch on as a term, but Kate Crawford's essay on the topic is outstanding. "Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin:...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A Department of Energy-funded report by the. J. Craig Venter Institute finds that the way the USDA APHIS program regulates genetically modified plants...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Maybe the most interesting section in the big new Federal Trade Commission report on data brokers is the description of what the companies call...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A stirring love letter to words disguised as a blog post about changing the default dictionary on your computer. "I don’t want you to conclude that it’s...

5 Intriguing Things

1. It's hard to overstate how profoundly our cultural relationship with bacteria has changed in the last five years. "For most of my life, if I’ve thought at...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Ta-Nehisi Coates' cover story for our magazine on reckoning with the nation's "compounding moral debts" is so, so powerful. "'In 1860, slaves as an asset...

5 Intriguing Things

1. What does it mean for an AI system to work 'like the brain'? "But here’s the thing: this 'like the brain' label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A kind of grisly, kind of sweet new application of machine vision. "Still mourning the loss of your little buddy Chairman Meow? Upload a photo of him or...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Robots in everything. "Frauke Zeller, an assistant professor at Ryerson, has built two robots with very different purposes: one tweets art criticism and...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Your affectation will be automated. "@hipsterbait1 is a bot that lives on twitter and tumblr, it creates ‘hipster bait’ in the form of post-post-ironic...

5 Intriguing Things

1. It seems everyone has a currency these days; so why not humans in close proximity? "Unlike typical currencies, which aim to represent and store value,...