Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet: The 5 most over-hyped tech devices.
Don’t be a hater – CueCat will make a comeback!
David Roth at The New Yorker: How “Starship Troopers” Aligns with Our Moment of American Defeat: Verhoeven’ s Starship Troopers depicts “a society whose fixation on force has left it preening, idiotic, and paradoxically weak. This state manifests as endless columns of cultishly revered and supremely well-equipped violence workers who know how to do only one thing, and a culture that exists exclusively to celebrate their efforts….”
Eli Reiter at OneZero: My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire
Lake Murray from Cowles Mountain, five miles from home, 2018. Maybe I’ll do the climb again this weekend. 📷
Two years ago today I was at the Google Next conference in San Francisco. I mistook another editor for a waiter at a stand-up cocktail reception and tried to take food off his plate.
Julie got me this cunning hat for my birthday yesterday, which I will wear with pride on my next trip back east in winter. I think it’s a great look for me. 📷
The least likely scenario for the 2020 election is that Trump both loses and accepts defeat graciously.
What Could Happen If Donald Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat?. By Masha Gessen at The New Yorker.
“Hurting people at scale: Facebook’s employees reckon with the social network they’ve built. Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman go in-depth for BuzzFeed News.
The most charitable interpretation of Facebook’s behavior is that it’s trying to remain neutral in a fight against racism and autocracy.
“Delicious, but too messy to handle,” was how Ruth Burt described the new ice cream treat her father, Harry Burt, concocted in 1920—a brick of vanilla ice cream encased in chocolate. So her brother, Harry Jr., offered a suggestion: Why not give it a handle?”
A brief history of the Good Humor ice cream truck: How the Ice Cream Truck Made Summer Cool, by Colin Dickey at Smithsonian Magazine.
That was, indeed, unexpected.
Zoom and Enhance! from r/Unexpected
In his biography of Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson makes a case that Franklin was one of the greatest people who ever lived, anywhere at any time.
Franklin rose from poverty to become a successful businessman, writer, publisher, journalist, diplomat, statesman, politician, and political philosopher. Success in any one of those fields could get him a couple of statues. Franklin succeeded in all.
Franklin was a leader in building a government that has lasted longer than any other extant today. No other major nation today is still using the government it had in the 18th Century.
Franklin was also a legitimate scientific genius.
And as a friend points out, Franklin invented technology that is still in use today: his stove, lightning rod and bifocals.
Also, Franklin invented swim fins, the urinary catheter and a musical instrument called the armonica. The last invention is not still in use much today, but it’s lovely.
Venice is reducing the number of people allowed on individual gondolas, as tourists have gotten fatter. “Going forward with over half a ton of meat on board is dangerous.”
Previously, “Greece banned hefty tourists from riding donkeys on the popular island of Santorini, after activists complained that the animals were suffering spinal injuries.”
Biden went into this campaign with his chief credential being that he was a nonentity who would do nothing. With Biden as President, Americans could go back to ignoring politics.
Instead, Biden is turning into a fire-breathing radical – and I love it.
He appears to be building an FDR-style transformative Presidency, which is what the US and the world need right now.
The fate of civilization and billions of lives literally depend on it.
Although now that I think of it, to call Biden a “radical” is wrong. When the house is on fire, it’s not radical to shout, “The house is on fire!”