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Fun With Chinese Agitprop, Presidents' Day Edition
The video below is all over the China-related community but may not have made attracted the general awareness it deserves. I'm tempted to make a joke about the video, because it is preposterous in 16...
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A Video Game That Plays Itself
A major part of the experience of playing video games is, as anyone with an older sibling can tell you, watching someone else play video games. And maybe that's why Dreeps, the new iOS game that plays...
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How to Actually Take a Good iPhone Photo of the Moon
Perhaps you have seen it on Instagram, or Twitter, or in a well-meaning Snapchat. Perhaps you have even made one yourself. It is a photograph of the Moon, taken with an iPhone. You need only witness...
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Han Solo Shot First
Time bends on the outer rim of the Wikiverse. Visit the Luke Skywalker entry on Wikipedia, and you’ll find his adventures described in the present tense, a tacit acknowledgment that his story is a...
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The Good and the Bad of Escaping to Virtual Reality
In Silicon Valley, in 1985, a ragtag band of programmers began exploring the concept of virtual reality from a tiny cottage in Palo Alto. Spearheaded by the 24-year-old Jaron Lanier, VPL Research...
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The Ghost of Earthquakes Past
The 6.7-magnitude earthquake that rattled Northern Japan on Monday struck just over 100 miles away from the epicenter of the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami that killed at least 15,890 people...
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The 500-Pound Fireball Over Pittsburgh
With a brilliant flash of light, a fireball pierced the predawn sky over Pittsburgh on Tuesday. Not one, not two, but three NASA cameras caught footage of the fiery streak—which turned out to be a...
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The Science Behind Human-Controlled Weather
It hasn't been an enjoyable winter for much of the United States. Record snowfall has blanketed cities like Boston, while below-freezing temperatures and relentless wind chills have sent shivers all...
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How the Inventor of the Polaroid Championed the Patent
In 1928, a 19-year-old Edwin Land, who would later become the father of instant photography and the founder of Polaroid, dropped out of Harvard before the end of his freshman year. He had to finish his...
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Solving a Museum’s Bug Problem With Legos
The Natural History Museum in London has a gargantuan task ahead: the mass digitization of its sprawling collections. Over the next five years, the museum plans to scan more than 20 million pinned...
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Why Photos of Space Should Belong to Everyone
In the early evening of February 11, a Falcon 9 rocket, owned and operated by Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company SpaceX, applied 1.3 million pounds of thrust to its launch pad in Cape Canaveral,...
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A Time Machine in the Mojave Desert
The sign said, “Dedicated to Research in Life Extension.” George Van Tassel, an aviator and UFOlogist, put it outside a structure he described as “a time machine for basic research on rejuvenation,...
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A Google Spreadsheet for Your Thoughts
What are you thinking right now, at this moment in time? That's what Laura Olin asked last week in Everything Changes, her delightful newsletter that, well, changes in format, theme, and frequency each...
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The Luxury Liner of the Future
Watching the process of loading a cruise ship is a bewildering spectacle of logistics and organization. Tons of food and drink join a seemingly endless assembly of trucks packed with other essential...
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Why People Probably Won't Pay to Keep Their Web History Secret
AT&T is conducting an experiment in how much money Americans will pay for privacy. If consumers in Kansas are willing to pay an extra $30 per month for super-fast fiber-optic Internet access, the...
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Finally, Emoji People of Color
There are emoji for pears, koalas, and jack-o’-lanterns; for a pine tree, a pizza slice, and a dragon’s head on a plate. But there are no emoji for black people. That seems likely to change soon:...
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Why Tech Valuations Just Keep Getting Bigger
Determining value is a tricky, fluid business. And in Silicon Valley, it's a largely private one. This is part of why the latest in another string of mega-valuations—Pinterest at $11 billion, Snapchat...
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How to Send a Message 1,000 Years to the Future
“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was fitting that J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the physicists who helped design the atomic bomb, chose to quote from the Bhagavad Gita in response...
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Is Anything Trendy Anymore?
What is trendy right now? I write about music from time to time, so I suppose it’s my job to know this. But I don’t know if I can tell you confidently what schools are ascendant. Some artists are...
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Sobering News Out of China, Part Four Million
Last week I mentioned the latest chapter in the Chinese government's efforts to seal the country off from the rest of the Internet—and what I considered an out-of-date report in the Guardian about the...
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