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The Scourge of Fake Emoji
Finland.fiNext month, the nation of Finland will mark Advent in a historically unusual way.Every day from December 1 to Christmas Eve, Finland will post a new small, evocative icon of Finnishness to a...
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Engineering vs Programming: Your Responses
Battling the blazing remnants of Deepwater Horizon on April 21, 2010 (Reuters / Coast Guard) We received a ton of email over my recent piece on why computer programmers shouldn’t call themselves...
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Where the Cloud Rises From the Sea
Point Arena lighthouse Jan Butchofsky / CorbisImagine you're the kind of person who drives out to see submarine-cable landing sites for fun. This should not require too much imagination. We're talking...
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Is Email Evil?
John Lund / CorbisSometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s,...
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Where Americans Can Be Tracked Without a Warrant
Danish Siddiqui / ReutersSmartphones handle the jobs of many other objects: walkie-talkies, calculators, cameras. They pretend to be landlines and laptops and lightbulbs. They accomplish much of this...
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Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks
Mike ReddyThere are people who stand every morning outside the Carroll Street station in Brooklyn staring dead-eyed into the middle distance. They stand still in ones and twos, clearly strangers to one...
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Food at Your Fingertip
Several readers have responded to Robin Sloan’s piece on app-based food-delivery services. (Sprig, Caviar, and Good Eggs are featured in the above video.) The first reader vents:What the screaming F**k...
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A Brief History of Human Energy Use
Phil Noble / ReutersPeople are always asking Bill Gates if he's really read all of Vaclav Smil.Smil is a professor at the University of Manitoba. His bio says he does “interdisciplinary research in the...
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How The Old Farmer’s Almanac Previewed the Information Age
Edward Penfield's watercolor of a farmer consulting The Farmers' Almanac, painted sometime between 1884 and 1925 Library of CongressBefore the Internet—and I mean long, long, long before the...
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How Cameras Have Shaped Student Protests
National Guard troops drive University of New Mexico students out of the union building, during the nationwide campus unrest of May 1970. Steven Clevenger / CorbisArgue about protests, and pretty soon...
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Houston, We Have a Pancakes Emoji
ugod / FlickrFor the world’s fastest growing language, emoji’s vocabulary is awfully constrained. Although creative combinations are always possible, it’s possible to send a high-five through emoji—but...
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The End of Thirst
Alvaro DominguezImagine turning on your tap and seeing no water come out. Or looking down into your village’s only well and finding it dust-dry. Much of the developing world could soon face such a...
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A Eulogy for Rdio
Adam Campbell / FlickrThe Internet—it’s branded as the electronic equivalent of the marketplace of ideas, but the best homes online, the places you wind up spending your time, they never feel like a...
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Fighting Crime, With Pollen
Daniel Becerril / ReutersOn June 25, the remains of a child were found in a trash bag on the shore of Boston’s Deer Island. It wasn’t clear how long she’d been dead, but there was some decomposition....
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The Strange Geopolitics of the International Cloud
Shipping containers at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach Bob Riha Jr / ReutersRoad trips are always defined by the places there isn't enough time to see. Writing about The Cloud through the lens...
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Restricting Encryption Would Not Have Prevented the Paris Attacks
Mal Langsdon / ReutersSoon after gunshots rang out in Paris on Friday evening, European officials began speculating about how such a well-planned attack went undetected until it was too late.Spies from...
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McMansions Are Making Americans Less Energy-Efficient
Owaki / Kulla / CorbisThanks to new technologies in insulation, water use, heating and cooling, and household appliances, American homes are more energy-efficient than ever.There were a lot of...
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Virtual Reality Is Making Its Big Play for the Mainstream
Brendan McDermid / ReutersIt’s been a big few months for virtual reality.Palmer Luckey, the plucky inventor of the Oculus Rift, made the cover of the August issue of Time magazine. In September, his...
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One Small Worry About Facebook Safety Check
FacebookSince last Friday, I’ve been thinking about Facebook Safety Check—what it means as a technology, and what it means for our perception of terrorism in the world.On its face, Safety Check is...
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