Archive (Page 7) • 5it • Buttondown

5 Intriguing Things

1. Group video chat is dumb and hard. But group animated GIF chat is... awesome? "Imagine having a fixed time for recording yourself on camera - let’s say...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Woods Hole lost its Nereus remotely operated vehicle on a 10,000 meter dive. "Everything was going fine. Two sets of pushcores were in the sample basket,...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The obsolescence of the car chase. "Over the past few years, companies like Starchase have begun developing technologies like its 'GPS bullet' pursuit...

5 Intriguing Things: Virginia Hughes Guest Edition

Editor's note: We have a guest editor today! Meet Virginia Hughes, an excellent science writer who (mostly) covers genes, brains, and drugs. She's got a new...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The case against going to Mars. "The uncomfortable truth is that, despite the technical tour-de-force of our robotic reconnaissance, looking for water on...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Meet the "snowflake babies," adopted as embryos. "As the use of IVF grows, so, too, will the number of embryos in storage. Physicians and patients reduce...

5 Intriguing Things

1. An interview with Julian Oliver, an author of the The Critical Engineering Manifesto. "So what I want to do with my work — and I know this is the same for...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The White House issued a report with the classic promise/peril framing about Big Data. One focus: discrimination by machine. "The detailed personal...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Paul Ford proposes a software canon, and in the slot at the top, he places Microsoft Office. "What Office provides is a language for doing office things....

5 Intriguing Things

1. Somehow I don't think chanting 'sharing is caring' helps the Airbnb cause. "'We know that this proposal would make it nearly impossible for regular people...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Wages for Facebook, by Laurel Ptak. "Ptak’s own elegant, angry manifesto has bewildered as much as it has enlivened. Some people on Twitter wondered if...

5 Intriguing Things

1. What Ray Kurzweil is doing at Google: teaching computers to read. "So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Body hackers try to acquire animal powers. "Now, some prosthetics wearers, body hackers and amateur scientists are taking this to a different level. With...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Finding habitable exoplanets is bad news for our long-term survival as a species because if there are lots of places to live but no aliens we can...

5 Intriguing Things

1. What's up with tablets these days? Apple's earnings report today will tell us a little something: how many iPads they've sold and whether that number is...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Surveillance by artificial intelligence... how else did we think law enforcement would process all that video footage? "Artificial intelligence is already...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Astra Taylor's new book on what happened to the Internet, The People's Platform, looks really good. "I was struck by how ours is a diminished utopianism....

5 Intriguing Things

1. How we misunderstand innovation... a meditation. "But there is another form of ignorance which seems to be universal: the inability to understand the...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The math of large numbers means that companies with lots of employees are going to try to optimize everything. "Technology means that no matter what kind...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Beautiful feature on the future of streaming music. "If the recording industry has its way, music ownership will give way to a model completely based on...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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,...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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,...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

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...

5 Intriguing Things

1. This detailed investigation into how Target let hackers steal 40 million credit card numbers does not inspire confidence in the corporations who handle...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A powerful argument that investor-driven changes in corporate structure—abetted by communication technologies—are largely responsible for the decline in...

5 Intriguing Things

1. A physicist suggests ditching the transistor for a new type of computing. "Joshua Turner, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory... has...

5 Intriguing Things

I'm still digesting the responses to the questionnaire I sent out on Friday. According to the early returns, however, I don't think the frequency or number...

5 Intriguing Things

I hear from subscribers that this newsletter might be too much of a good thing. Let me know if you feel that way—or have any other feedback—at this little...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The architecture that surrounds you probably changes the microorganisms inside you. "The interactions between building design, microbial diversity, and...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Brussels officials are not messing around with Uber. "Briggte Grouwels, Brussels’ minister of public works and transport, already made it clear that it...

5 Intriguing Things

1. The return of the female condom. "By 2003, they had hit on the solution: a dissolving applicator. The engineers created a condom that looked like a...

5 Intriguing Things

1. Refugee housing developed by Ikea. "The house comes in a flat pack that can be put together without tools. It is equipped with solar lighting and is...

5 Intriguing Things

February 28, 2014

1. I'm not sure I like Michio Kaku's vision of the 'brain-net.' "Already, people who are totally paralyzed, who are living souls trapped inside a vegetable...