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5 Intriguing Things: Monday, 12/22
1. So, so, so much data is being collected about each and every one of us. Now what? "A Senate committee released a report this week that goes to great lengths to determine all of the things that data...
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The New Psychogeography of Tempelhof Airport, Once a Nazi Landmark
Tempelhof, 1937 (Stockholm Transport Museum)This week, millions will take to the airways for Christmas travel. As families slog through the mundane reality of contemporary air travel, we might pause to...
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Recreating 'Bohemian Rhapsody' Out of Real Tweets
Everybody loves to sing Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody." That is just a fact of modern life, at least since Wayne's World (1992). And what's true on road trips is true on Twitter: People regularly tweet...
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Christmas Is the Biggest App Downloading Day of the Year
Uncle Larry adds a calendar reminder to download an app on 12/25 (Shutterstock).Last year, on December 25, the day that marks the birth of Jesus Christ as well as the arrival of Santa Claus, people...
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What Was Once the World's Largest Building Has Now Been Completely Demolished
K-25, once upon a time (AP)A site built for the purposes of destruction has itself been destroyed. In the mid-1940s, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, inside the walls of K-25, some 12,000 Manhattan Project...
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When Beyoncé Samples Your TED Talk, This Is What Happens to Your Book
World's best book promoter (Reuters)On the list of humans pleased by Beyoncé’s surprise eponymous album—besides all of them—was Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie’s talk on why “we...
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Happy Holidays! Here's an E-Book About a 3D-Printed Sad Keanu
It is not every day that I have an idea as bad/good as May 26, 2013. It was on that day that I took a tiny 3D printed doll of Keanu Reeves looking sad into the real world and detailed his adventures in...
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How Astronauts Nearly Missed Taking the Iconic Earthrise Photo on Christmas...
NASAForty-five years ago today, Christmas Eve 1968, astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw something no human had ever seen before—our planet as it appeared to rise over the...
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At Last, An Easy Way to Wrap an App
Truly, a problem for us all (Reuters)How do you wrap an app? It’s a silly but salient question. Christmas Day 2013 is expected to be the biggest app downloading day ever. Developers will succeed or...
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Stanford Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People
ReutersIn defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers dialed, lengths of...
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2013: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year for the Tech Industry
Google Glass was the standard bearer for disappointments in a year that saw little change in the technology used by most consumers. (AP)All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry...
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Alan Turing's Body
Jon Callas/FlickrOn Christmas Eve, Queen Elizabeth II pardoned the computer scientist Alan Mathison Turing. Nearly all of the modern world is constructed on Turing’s accomplishments. He helped crack...
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Study: Consumers Will Pay $5 for an App That Respects Their Privacy
ReutersEver since the iPhone came out in 2007, the going rate for many of the most popular apps has been exactly $0.00. Consumers pay nothing. But of course, nothing is free. Instead, consumers pay...
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Making Virtual Reality Less Virtual
A virtual picnic (flickr/University of Salford)A decade ago, the dream of a separate, virtual world didn’t seem so far-fetched. Second Life, a digital world where people could create and interact with...
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5 Intriguing Things: Friday, 12/27
1. A consumer can now purchase high-resolution video from space. It's watching the individual cars that will freak you out. "With our ability to capture up to 90 second video clips at 30 frames per...
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No, Wikipedia Is Not Experimenting With Ads
If Wikipedia ever gets ads, they won’t look this bad. (Wikipedia)Yesterday, Wikipedia users saw images on entries that looked like—and claimed to be—ads. Affected entries included those for Mahjong and...
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When Does Technology Change Enough That the Law Should Too?
Yes, the '70s. A good time for all. (Wikimedia Commons)In the past 10 days, two separate courts have handed down "diametrically opposed" rulings on the legality of the NSA's bulk telephony metadata...
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The First HD Video of Earth From Space—That You Can Buy
Check out the video below. It’s high-resolution video taken from space, images of places like Tokyo, Las Vegas, a mine in Australia, and a power plant in Maryland: It’s the first imagery of its kind...
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5 Intriguing Things: Monday, 12/30
Fukushima (Reuters).1. Why (and how) governments leak. "The leak laws are so rarely enforced not only because it is hard to punish violators, but also because key institutional actors share...
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How Far You Can Travel From New York City in a Day
Before directions provided by Google Maps, the interstate highway system, cars, the transcontinental railroad, and the Erie Canal, a traveler in New York City could expect to spend a whole day and...
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