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Why Facebook Just Spent $19 Billion on a Messaging App
Updated, Thursday 2:30 p.m. Late Wednesday, Facebook announced its purchase of WhatsApp for $16 billion. $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in Facebook stock were granted to the company, with an...
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5 Intriguing Things: Thursday, 2/20
1. Paleontologists discovered a snake that was more than 42 feet long, the largest in the fossil record. "The scientists estimate the snake lived 58 to 60 million years ago and was around 13 metres...
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How the Internet Uses Nostalgia
Vanilla Ice is selling Kraft macaroni and cheese now. The dudes of Full House are selling Greek yogurt. Boyz II Men recently made a cameo on How I Met Your Mother. This year's Super Bowl featured, of...
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Today's Fun With Maps: Where the People Are, and the Trees
Synthetic Population map of the Los Angeles basin, showing race of each household. Red dots are for white households; turquoise for black; purple for Asian, etc as explained at their site.As John...
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WhatsApp and the Erosion of the Network Effect
Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp isn't just a milestone for the current generation of mobile apps. It also shows how, in the mobile world, some of the key assumptions about the way...
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Welcome to Algorithmic Prison
Corporations and government are using information about us in a new – and newly insidious – way. Employing massive data files, much of the information taken from the Internet, they profile us, predict...
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Life Before (and After) Page Numbers
Print media evolved into its present forms. In, say, 1469, there were no page numbers. This obvious and now necessary part of the book's user interface simply did not exist. The earliest extant...
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WhatsApp, Scourge of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Communities
Very religious communities tend to have a fraught relationship with technology. The Amish's eschewal of electrical power and cars is merely shorthand for the conflicts and compromises that arise when...
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Hershey's Is Hiring a Chocolate Futurist
The Hershey Company—makers of the eponymous candy bar, York Peppermint Patties, and Reese’s Cups—is a big, complex organization. Not only is it the largest chocolate manufacturer in the United States,...
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5 Intriguing Things: Monday, 2/24
1. Keep an eye on ARPA-E's new RANGE program, which is funding a bunch of new battery concepts. "Let’s look at a couple projects in this portfolio using solid-state chemistries. Colorado-based Solid...
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Selfies With Yanukovych
When ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych went into hiding this weekend, he fled not only a revolution, but also the compound he'd lived in outside Kiev. Which was pretty much, as United...
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American Aqueduct: The Great California Water Saga
Hood, California, is a farming town of 200 souls, crammed up against a levee that protects it from the Sacramento River. The eastern approach from I-5 and the Sacramento suburb of Elk Grove is bucolic....
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5 Intriguing Things: Tuesday, 2/25
Hi friends. I make it a rule not to spam this list with my stories. However, rules are made to be broken. I wrote a piece about the saga of California's water and culture. It's the most ambitious story...
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To the Humanitarians of Tinder
Humanitariansoftinder.tumblr.comDo not mock the humanitarians of Tinder. Do not resent them, or be horrified by them, or assume that the images they have posted to a proximity-based hookup app are...
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Inside the Hive Mind of Stock Photography
One day, I'm going to create a board game called "You Get Three Guesses About What This Stock Photo Is." Here, I'll show you how to play: Three guesses about what search term yielded a picture of a USB...
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The Year Most News Home Pages Looked the Same
Earlier today, Bloomberg View—the online opinion arm of the Bloomberg News behemoth—unveiled its new homepage design. The site, below, presents itself as a set of mostly gray boxes with mostly white...
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The Blood Harvest
The thing about the blood that everyone notices first: It's blue, baby blue. The marvelous thing about horseshoe crab blood, though, isn't the color. It's a chemical found only in the amoebocytes of...
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Bye, Bye, Captain: Drone Ships May Soon Take to the Seas
Rolls-Royce HoldingsShips, at this point, carry 90 percent of the world's trade. They also carry people—captains and crew who, inconveniently, tend to require food, water, sleep, electricity, and...
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5 Intriguing Things: Wednesday, 2/26
1. Monsanto, DuPont, and Deere are stoked about big data. "I see it as another potential transformation of the company," says Robert Fraley, chief technology officer for Monsanto, based in St. Louis....
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Future Humans Will Thank Us for Their Barley and Okra
The most biodiverse room in the world is carved into a mountain in an archipelago north of Scandinavia. It’s meters from one of the world’s most important satellite relay stations, and about 600 miles...
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