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Google on Its Own Transparency Report: This Is Not Good Enough
GoogleEver since Google began releasing its semi-annual Transparency Report in 2010, the company has announced each iteration with statements like: "When Google’s services are blocked or filtered, we...
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Wine Snobs: Justified by Science, Sort Of
Video: Dan Quinn; GIF: Megan GarberHave you ever described a wine as "chewy"? Have you ever swirled that wine in a glass, then plunged your nose into the bowl to take in the bouquet? Have you ever...
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5 Intriguing Things
1. The Smithsonian is releasing 3D scans of its objects — like Amelia Earhart's flight suit — so you can print them at home. "Curators and educators can use 3D data as the scaffolding to tell stories...
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Red States, Green Power
Ed Andrieski/APThe rap against renewable energy is that it doesn’t provide what energy wonks call “baseload” power around the clock. While a fossil fuel power plant will keep cranking out kilowatts...
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The Clever New Digital Wallet That Will Never, Ever Succeed
Today a new startup, Coin, launched with an intriguing product: A battery-powered, credit card-sized device that stores all your credit card information in one place. Perhaps intentionally, it looks a...
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For Sale: Ghost Town With Liquor License, $225,000
Out here in California, we had a Gold Rush. People swept in from across the world, anchoring in San Francisco Bay, and running for the hills. As the men climbed into the Sierra Nevadas, they built...
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The Bearable Lightness of ButtGenerator.com
The critic David E. Nye has theorized that there might be an American technological sublime. That is, sometime during the Industrial Revolution, he writes, Americans substituted the seemingly divine...
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'The Online Image Is Deathless'
Martha Rosler, Photo-op from House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, collage, 20041. Why cutting and pasting doesn't provide the satisfaction of gluepaperscissors collage. "It was possible...
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'It Repels the Reader': Tech Glitches Led Moby-Dick's First Critics to Pan It
The AsylumHere is one of the first reviews of Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, published in the London Spectator in October 1851 and re-reprinted, a month later, in the New York International magazine: This...
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Newspaper Corrects 1863 Editorial Calling the Gettyburg Address 'Silly'
A copy of The Harrisburg Patriot and Union, November 24, 1863 (AP/Matt Zenecy via Pennlive.com)Next week—November 19, to be precise—will mark the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's delivery of the...
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What Is Snapchat?
A typical snap and reply.Snapchat is a photo-sharing service with one key distinguishing feature: the photos you send disappear. Seconds after opening "snaps," users can no longer access them and the...
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Absurd: The Very Basic Thing It's Still Illegal to Do With Your Mobile Phone
ReutersDo you own a smart phone? Do you know how easy it is to break the law using only that smartphone? It’s this easy: After your current contract with your wireless provider (perhaps Verizon)...
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The Death of Coal
Paul Foy/APThe Great Energy Shift will not likely be legislated from Washington or emerge wholesale from a Silicon Valley garage. Rather it is happening in fits and starts in places like Arizona and...
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Batkid: A Heartwarming, Very 2013 Story
Much of the work we do for our kids, whether as parents or as siblings or as detached aficionados of the adorable, involves fiction. We tell children stories, about dragons and princes and mischievous...
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Disneyland, 1965
USC LibrariesDisneyland was built in Anaheim, California, next to suburbs and orchards. It opened in 1955. Ten years later, a man flew over in an airplane and took photographs of the new park. You can...
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Bjork Explaining Television Is Everything You'd Imagine Bjork Explaining...
Björk. Ethereal, tiny, quixotic, Icelandic Björk. At some point in the past, someone stuck a camera in front of her face and told her to explain television. She does, sort of, referring to the...
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Marmots on a Plane and Other Intriguing Things
Nothing like a rocket on a launch pad at night (NASA).1. NASA launches the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission today. "Mars is a complicated system, just as complicated as the Earth...
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Google Prods a Coal-Fired Utility Into Making Money on Green Power
APUtilities have taken their share of abuse as bureaucratic relics of the previous century, technological dinosaurs about to be obliterated by a giant asteroid called the Great Energy Shift as...
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Haulin' Data: How Trucking Became the Frontier of Work Surveillance
All American truckers will soon transmit a swarm of data on their performance (Reuters/The Noun Project/Alexis Madrigal).Because his truck is fitted with a refrigerator unit, Dick Pingel often hauls...
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Every Nerd Will Love This Errol Morris-Benoit Mandelbrot Interview
Perhaps it's because they create an infinity of interesting from simple equations. Perhaps it's because they suggest that many seemingly chaotic phenomena have an underlying order. Perhaps it's...
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