1,117 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2017
    1. The powerful movement causes a series of whirlpools to form, called maelstroms due to their extraordinary force.

      This must be how the (now closed) ride at Disney got it's name.

    1. What’s more, they seem to be enjoying the island’s many comforts: although they’re generally considered to be forest-dwelling bats, their squeaks have been detected near the ocean, over the island’s famed sandplain grasslands, and even on the golf course driving range.

      Bats on Martha's Vinyard.

    1. Although many studies have tried to provide solutions for measuring vulnerability, and there is a wide range of vulnerability quantifying methods (for example, Turner et al. 2003; van der Veen et al. 2009; Sterlacchini et al. 2014), a fundamental challenge remains how to make vulnerability operational (Hinkel 2011).

      This is interesting!

    1. Deep in the Pacific Ocean, scientists may have discovered a ghostly new species of snailfish. Snailfish are the deepest dwelling vertebrates on Earth. Some live over 5 miles below the surface. This one was observed at a depth of 1.5 miles, in the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. It’s possible this is the first time it’s ever been observed by humans.

      Cool!

    1. There are many celebrated writers in this world, but few ever reach the rockstar-level status of dark fantasy author Neil Gaiman.

      Love him!

    1. the problem of orphan works—those whose copyright status is murky—is yet to be solved.

      There is a real sense that this orphan works problem will be whittled away...

    2. Dan Cohen, the recently appointed university librarian at Northeastern University.

      I hadn't heard this. Congratulations, Dan!

    3. In fact, academics now regularly tap into the reservoir of digitized material that Google helped create, using it as a dataset they can query, even if they can’t consume full texts.

      It's good to understand that exploring a corpus for "brainstorming" or discovering heretofore seen connections is different than a discovery query that is meant to give access to an entire text.

    1. A lot of people, including myself, are fascinated with abandoned locations. We’ve been lucky enough to actually write about a few of them here at LittleThings: we’ve seen abandoned resorts, stadiums, psychiatric hospitals, and even train cars.

      I think they are totally cool.

    1. The real doozy that hit me was the question about handwritten note cards. I love these but did not know that possibly doing these, by hand, was a directive from the mothership. Interesting.

      I think the notecards are pretty dumb. How do you even know who wrote them?

    1. For instance, in partnership with Cambridge University Press and the technology firm Hypothes.is, and with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, QDR has begun to develop a new approach to transparency called “annotation for transparency inquiry (ATI).” ATI allows social scientists to link relevant data – a document or interview transcript, for instance – directly to a particular passage within a digital publication, and to use digital annotations to elucidate how those data support their claims and conclusions.              

      Very nice reference. Thanks for the shout out!

    1. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly.

      Amazing!

    1. About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.

      Love Idris Elba!

    1. The greatest racehorse of the 18th century was allegedly born during the 1764 solar eclipse, which tracked from Iberia to Scandinavia, at noon on April Fool’s Day. He was named, appropriately, Eclipse, and had a brief racing career of just 17 months. At that point he had to be retired, not for any physical reason, but because he won so consistently that no one bet on any other horse.

      There should be a movie about him!

    1. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

      Firefox direct linking test. Link here.

    1. Despite growing interest in Open Access (OA) to scholarly literature, there is an unmet need for large-scale, up-to-date, and reproducible studies assessing the prevalence and characteristics of OA. We address this need using oaDOI, an open online service that determines OA status for 67 million articles.

      Firefox direct linking test.

    1. one group has never really wavered: the leaders of the conservative movement.
    2. “I’ve been to the White House I don’t know how many more times in the first six months this year than I was during the entire Bush administration,” Mr. Perkins said.

      Test for deep linking. Go here.

    1. animated his campaign last year. Critics said the proposal would undercut the fundamental vision of the United States as a haven for the poor and huddled masses, while the president and his allies said the country had taken in too many lo

      Test of deep linking.

    1. Over and over again, we have noticed that cursory examinations of the data often support a gender-normative narrative, but diving deeper into the data reveals far more surprising (and interesting) relationships between gender and gameplay

      this is cool! Also check out this article!

  2. Jul 2017
    1. satisfy the two usual distributive laws. Singlesemirings as well as classes of semirings form important structures in Automataand Formal Languages Theories [5

      Like so.

    1. shift to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a subject.

      I think about this a lot now that my business is annotation.

    1. Some smaller publishers have sought safety in numbers, banding together to offer their own Big Deals. For instance, that is the objective of the Learned Journals Collection. Launched in 2003 by the ALPSP, the Learned Journals Collection is managed in partnership with SWETS. The aim is to offer “a cross-publisher collection allowing smaller publishers to participate in a Big Deal,” says McCulloch.

      Again, when was this article researched?

    2. “Libraries find the majority of their budgets are taken up by a few large publishers,” says David Hoole, director of brand marketing and institutional relations at NPG

      How old is this article? David hasn't been there for years...

    1. When it comes to Star Wars and Disney's theme parks, though, Disney CEO Bob Iger has made it clear that he sees a bright future for augmented reality, which uses a headset to superimpose computer-generated images onto a real-world view.

      Also Augmented Reality!

    2. In addition to putting the next wave of visual technology to work on the big screen, Disney and Lucasfilm, the division that produces Star Wars, are also hard at work developing virtual reality and augmented reality products that can let the film's fans feel like they're inside the world of the movies, even if they're at home (or, maybe, at a Disney theme park).

      Star Wars comes to life in virtual reality!

    1. I created a spoof manuscript about “midi-chlorians” – the fictional entities which live inside cells and give Jedi their powers in Star Wars.

      Great topic!

    1. I have often wondered about where you are on a mileage run if you never “really” enter a country as well as pre-clearance countries i.e. that you re-enter the USA before you get to the USA. If you have ~10 minutes today I think you will enjoy the clip as much a I did.

      This is a fascinating video!

    2. I think almost all of us who travel a ton live in absolute fear of one thing – losing you passport.

      This is one of my biggest fears...

    1. Yale University, Wieland had spent the beginning of his career chasing down dead animals, gaining a certain amount of renown for his discovery of Archelon ischyros, a Cretaceous-era sea turtle that remains the largest known to man.

      That's my favorite thing at the Peabody Museum!

    1. But the real selling point lies in Multi's ability to facilitate far more elaborate or complex buildings. Until now, architects have had to design around the elevator shafts, which can comprise 40 percent of a building's core. Multi could allow them to install elevators almost anywhere, including the perimeter.

      That could be really exciting!

    1. “With every attempt at transparency Donald Trump Jr. digs himself more deeply into the hole of criminality,” he told me via email. “He appears to have gone into that meeting—and likely others—looking for something of value—dirt on Hillary Clinton—from sources he should have stayed away from. His judgment was bad, to say the least.”

      Trump Jr

    1. You can describe the algebra you use in specific words, and follow an orderly process. In this chapter, you will explore the words used to describe algebra and start on your path to solving algebraic problems easily, both in class and in your everyday life.

      This is interesting!

    1. The installations in The Jazz Age reflect this rise of international exchange. British designer Wells Coates’s green, circular Bakelite radio, one of the manufacturing innovations being spread to the new middle class, rests on German designer Kem Weber’s sage-hued, streamlined sideboard, which was also intended for serial production.

      So cool!

    2. The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s is billed as the “first major museum exhibition to focus on American taste in design during the exhilarating years of the 1920s.”

      Would love to see this!

    1. 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with 97 percent of all life on Earth dead

      Why aren't we talking about this?

    1. preprint servers could be a way to make predatory publishers obsolete.

      This doesn't follow... Tenure isn't made by posting pre-prints...

    2. In the early '90s, so-called open access journals started to make scientific research free to anyone with working WiFi by shifting costs to scientists, who pay an upfront fee to cover editing.

      Why say "so called" open access journals?

    1. It is a phenomenon that happens every changing of the season. Germans seem to care more about what the calendar says rather than what the weather forecast says.

      This is so true!

    1. Avid lovers of books and nature, they conspired to marry the two in a vast library woven into the Western landscape — a literary refuge where patrons could spend the night among the books, attend lectures and maybe catch a trout.

      Sounds cool, and I don't even like the outdoors...

    1. Insulin sends a message to our cells that nutrients are available, meaning it’s time to grow and proliferate. When the levels of the hormones drop, it’s a signal to cells that its time to enter a life-extending mode of conservation. Such a system makes evolutionary sense.

      Very good explanation!

    2. That progress has been spurred by huge investments from Silicon Valley titans, including Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.

      Billionaires want to live forever.

  3. Jun 2017
    1. The original trees eventually died, but not before new sprouts could take root. For over 130 years, trees have continued to sprout, grow, and die in a so far endless cycle atop the courthouse

      Very odd claim to fame!

    1. Leaving the foster care system at age 18is referred to as aging out of foster care.This study aimed to understand the outcomes of peoplewho aged out of foster care.

      Test.

    1. Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.

      So interesting!

    1. Inflatable tanks, fake radio broadcasts, and actors impersonating generals were all part of an arsenal of brilliant tricks used by a top-secret WWII army unit called The Ghost Army.

      I love reading about this--so creative!

    1. this symbol was likely the maker’s brand, and would normally be obscured by the sword’s hilt.

      Interesting

    2. Late last month, an excavator operator was working at a peat bog in the Polish municipality of Mircze when he accidentally stumbled upon this glorious specimen of 14th century craftsmanship. The remarkably well-preserved longsword is a unique find for the area, and its discovery has prompted an archaeological expedition.

      Awesome archeological find!

    1. The Galápagos are an archipelago of 20 islands, originally called the Enchanted Islands, and made famous by Charles Darwin, who visited the islands in 1835, later formulating his theory of evolution based on his trip.

      Galapagos--on the bucket list!

    1. A rare pod of derelict midcentury Futuro and Venturo houses lines a semi-abandoned beachfront resort outside Taipei. 

      Would be cool to go visit this!

    1. Unseen beneath the Tennessee pink marble floor lies a cavernous three-story, 43,800-square-foot basement with architecture that wouldn’t look out of place in a World War II bunker.

      Obviously, something should be built there!

    1. there was, essentially, no “scientific revolution” during the Renaissance, only a continuation of work that was already happening in the “dark ages” of medieval thought.

      This puts my whole minor field of study thought in question!

    2. A 13th-century conflict between faith and science ultimately led to a surprising outcome: a medieval multiverse theory.

      Very surprising!

    1. If you were a forward-thinking individualist in 1800s America, building an eight-sided abode was a great way to show it.

      I always wanted to live in an octagonal house...

    1. The House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee announced this week that it thinks our space defense capabilities are pathetic, so it set a vote for Thursday to create the U.S. Space Corps, a new military service designed to defend our interests in space.

      Glad they are working on practical things...

    1. Hypothesis now uses DOIs to join variants of the same document in the same way it uses PDF fingerprints. Both pieces of metadata — the DOI, and the PDF URL — are typically included in HTML metadata.

      This is really cool! Thanks for the great explanation!

    1. Oliver Curtis, Taj Mahal, Agra, India, from Volte-Face

      This one is really cool!

    2. Oliver Curtis traveled to the world’s most-photographed tourist sites, from the Parthenon to the Hollywood sign, and took pictures while facing the “wrong way.”

      Interesting concept!

    1. sparking a new generation of biomimetic systems. A high level of functionality in the artificial counterparts is achievable through hybrid combinations of hydrogels and soft-to-solid materials, from elastomers to polymers, metals, or mineralized tissue. Without addressing issues of adhesion, impressive demonstrations of tough ionic hydrogels and elastomer membranes for transparent

      HTML test

    1. Curiosity is heading to the ridge to analyze outcrops upon which the iron oxide hematite has been spotted from orbit. The rover probably couldn’t tell that the orbiter’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera was keeping watch over it.

      So cool!

    1. One of the world's largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgement on 21 June against websites that provide illicit access to tens of millions of research papers and books. A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) project and related sites.

      I'd like to see them try to collect it!

    1. Cortana, the AI diva of the Microsoft empire, scans my inbox for promises I’ve made to people, and prompts me to fulfill them

      This could be really really useful!

    1. series of small, powerful and inexpensive paper-based “BioBatteries” that developed from a simple origami shape in the lab of Assistant Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi, PhD—and run on bacteria found in a few drops of dirty water—could transform point-of-care diagnostic testing in remote locations across the globe where medical resources are scarce

      Cool!

    1. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti will light up the sky on Thursday with the Bat-signal in honor of actor Adam West.

      A great tribute! RIP Adam West!

    1. Scientists studying the brain have discovered that the organ operates on up to 11 different dimensions, creating multiverse-like structures that are “a world we had never imagined.”

      Very cool!

    1. some analysts expressed concern about a slowdown in the growth of its Snapchat messaging app.

      Snap's time has passed? Or was it the fact that I downloaded it?

    1. When David Limp thinks about the future of Alexa, the AI assistant he oversees at Amazon, he imagines a world not unlike Star Trek—a future in which you could be anywhere, asking anything, and an ambient computer would be there to fulfill your every need.

      We've all been waiting for that for a long time!

    1. It was August 2011 and “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the absurdly debonair character I played on the Dos Equis beer commercials, had become an international cultural phenomenon.

      Loved him!

    1. graduating seniors might do well to remember that winning high school isn’t everything. And for those who want to change the world, a perfect GPA is not a prerequisite.

      Duh. I think people know this.

    2. The research, published by Boston College researcher Karen Arnold, showed that while nearly all the valedictorians did well, precisely none were standout successes. Though 90% were professionals and 40% reached the highest tier in their fields, there were no visionaries in the group.

      No visionaries... How many visionaries does the world need?

    1. However, Virgin Atlantic has slowly been undoing these access limits. Today it was announced that Delta SkyMiles Diamond and Platinum Medallion members flying in economy or premium economy on Delta or Virgin Atlantic out of Heathrow will once again have Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse access.

      Finally, yay! No. 1 Lounge was horrible!

  4. May 2017
    1. eighty-five million dollars for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to hire hundreds of new agents; $1.2 billion for ICE to expand its detention facilities; and another hundred and thirty-one million dollars to institute a mandatory program for employers to run immigration background checks on potential hires.

      Like this.

    1. AlphaGo is going out on top. After beating Ke Jie, the world’s best player of the ancient Chinese board game Go, for the third time today at the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, Google’s DeepMind unit announced that it would be the last event match the AI plays.

      This makes me feel worse somehow than if it was going to continue to play. Seems like it is saying: well, tick the box for beating humans at Go...

    1. recess in particular helps children restore their attention for learning in the classroom.

      Recess has been decimated across the board and it should be criminal to do so.

    1. If all things go well, we’re about to finally see what a black hole looks like, as the Event Horizon Telescope connects six telescopes sprawled across the world and makes them work in tandem to image the supermassive black hole at the center our very own Milky Way galaxy.

      Black holes

    1. Every time you check your phone and see a like or comment or retweet, your brain releases a little bit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with reward.

      Device addiction

    1. Scientists think that the increased melting of permafrost in polar regions could lead to the revival of viruses that haven't been around for thousands of years.

      This is scary!

    1. Some of the best cross-partisan conversation online happens on sports forums and sports bulletin boards, because, [the assumption is] “Hey, we’re all Patriots fans first, and Democrats and Republicans second.”

      Interesting to think about...

    1. that bat-watchers have nothing to fear if they don't try to handle bats; and that on the nightly flights out from under the bridge, the Austin bats eat from 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of insects, including agricultural pests.

      Always wanted to see these bats, and now I hope to get my chance!

    1. Her own high school actually passed on the idea, so she took it to Bear Creek, where her mom teaches, according to the reports.

      This site is wonky.

    2. This is an amazingly cool idea!

    1. Eye tracking and head movement detection are widely investigated as alternative interface methods

      This relates to this topic here.

    2. It also provides the ability to control many devices by mapping the position of the head into control signals.

      This is interesting!

    1. As the first step for motion tracking, registration, and many other cardiac imaging analyses, segmentation is often needed to isolate the myocardium from the background information throughout the cardiac cycle before further processing.

      This article relates to the eye tracking article.

    1. Amazon calls the default seller in the Buy Box — the one who gets the business when a customer clicks “Add to Cart” without looking for more options — the “Buy Box winner.”

      This is wacky...

    1. Within a couple of decades Strunk was a full professor of English, and decided to privately publish a little book called The Elements of Style (1918).

      Such a famous book! (For nerds!)

    1. But when it comes to weather prediction, America lags behind a European prediction model that does a better job at telling us how warm or cold it will be three to 10 days out.

      I wasn't aware of this. Curious!

    1. When pilots stopped using “Morse” code and switched to voice operation, they used the word “Roger,” which was the phonetic designation for the letter “R,” which was previously the abbreviation for “received.”

      Cool!

    1. Dramatic cell phone footage captured the startling moment that a sea lion grabbed a young girl’s dress and pulled her into the water at a harbor in Canada.

      Don't feed the wild animals, please!

    1. That student’s name was Pauli Murray. Her law-school peers were accustomed to being startled by her—she was the only woman among them and first in the class—but that day they laughed out loud.

      So excited to learn more about her!

    1. The remains of their innovative networks of water capture, storage, transport, and irrigation systems are found to this day throughout this area.

      Awesome stuff to observe!

    2. Petra was once a thriving trading center and the capital of the Nabataean empire between 400 B.C. and A.D. 106.

      Love it!

    1. Step one: You lie yourself, all the time. Step two: You say it’s your opponents and the journalists who lie. Step three: Everyone looks around and says, “What is truth? There is no truth.”

      A pretty accurate picture.

    2. Trevor Noah had historian Timothy Snyder on to “The Daily Show” this week to discuss his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.

      Everyone should watch this.

    1. rump's ousted National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who resigned over his contacts with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak, has yet to honor the Senate Intel Committee's subpoena, per the AP.

      Wow!

    1. Sara Berman’s Closet opened in the American wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Installed in a niche next to the gallery’s period rooms, the closet was recreated by Sara’s daughter, Maira Kalman, and her grandson, Alex Kalman, based on the actual closet in Sara Berman’s studio apartment on Horatio Street, where she lived between 1982 and 2004.

      What an interesting idea for an exhibit!

    1. The FAQ laid out a detailed seven-step plan for tunneling faster, but also addressed the big dirty concern of digging underground. The answer, according to the Boring Company team, is to make bricks.

      Sounds like a good plan!

    1. the work of historical fiction centers on the very real deaths of Thomas Kinnear and his pregnant mistress/housekeeper Nancy Montgomery, allegedly murdered by two of Kinnear’s servants, Grace Marks and James McDermott in Upper Canada, a region that is now Ontario.

      I don't remember being very impressed by this one... Love Atwood though.

    1. The Black Rat Café, is headed to San Francisco. Whereas KitTea Café in Hayes Valley and Cat Town in Oakland let patrons meet and adopt cats over coffee, tea, and snacks, the rat café will do the same with rodents.

      Love it!

    1. Section 139A of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 is amended by adding at the end the following new sentence: “This section shall not be taken into account for purposes of determining whether any deduction is allowable with respect to any cost taken into account in determining such payment.”.

      This is important.

    1. The Curiosity Rover is on an important geological mission in the Bagnold Dunes, collecting samples and climbing the tallest mountain on Mars’ Mount Sharp.

      Love to know that Curiosity motors on!

    1. It inspired his work at Google, where he led the creation of the historical map platform Field Trip, and then, the Pokémon Go precursor, Ingress.

      I loved field trip for Glass!

    2. Niantic, the maker of Pokémon Go, is teaming up with the Knight Foundation in a multiyear commitment promoting civic engagement in communities. That means the two entities will pitch in time, money, and plenty of Pokémon to get citizens outside, exploring their towns in city-organized events.

      Very interesting development!

    1. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of congresspeople announced the formation of the Reality Caucus, with the intention of working with companies and monitoring issues that arise, but any concrete legislation is a long ways away.

      A reality caucus. i love it!

    2. The regulation of an entire burgeoning industry, and the interpretation of the Constitution in the digital age, could be impacted by the court’s decision in a case inspired by Pokémon.

      This is a really interesting case. How have I not heard of it?

    1. You carry some gadget, a phone or a watch or a pendant or an implant in your palm, and use it to animate any screen or surface you encounter.

      This would be useful in some situations, but maybe not when you don't want others to see what you are looking at.

    1. Before you simply dismiss this as another frivolous time waster, consider the fact that in order to layer a digital effect atop your smiling face, for instance, Facebook must identify exactly where your smiling face is within a camera’s field of vision at any given time, and that requires a deep neural network.

      Augmented Reality on your phone.

    1. Impressively, that’s exactly what happened: people spammed the line with stories about space aliens. Which led to an amazing statement from ICE, describing the calls as a cheap publicity stunt “beyond the pale of legitimate public discourse” that is both “absurd” and “shameful.”

      Awesome!

    1. There are between 1,000 and 3,000 of these trucks, according to varying estimates, hauling tens of millions of gallons per day through Bangalore. By many accounts, the tanker barons of Bangalore—the men who own and direct these trucks—now control the supply of water so thoroughly that they can form cartels, bend prices, and otherwise abuse their power.

      This reads eerily like the plot of The Water Knife.

    1. Mr. Russell, or some version of him, assays the role with a weird, disrupting digital face-lift that’s meant to suggest the young Ego, but really only makes you contemplate whether this Benjamin Button-style age-reversing is going to become an increasingly standard (and creepy) industry practice.

      So, in Ant Man, there is the same thing with Michael Douglas. I totally think it will be a common thing. Not just for flashbacks but for actors who want to play the role "younger."

    1. Unanimous A.I. used a technology called “swarm intelligence” to coordinate a group of racing fans to correctly predict the Kentucky Derby superfecta (the first four places, in order). The swarm beat 540-to-1 odds, along with the most-trusted handicappers in the world.

      Is this cheating? Is it legal?

    1. At full capacity, the factory is set to produce batteries faster than the rate of bullets leaving a machine gun.

      Okay, I literally cannot imagine this!

    1. While our definition of a standard beer has been 5% ABV, a 2014 study by consumer research group Mintel found that the average craft beer is 5.9% ABV

      This is an important difference. I hadn't thought about it this way.

    1. The diffusion and the public endorsement of data FAIRness has been rapid

      Good to see posts on this.

    1. Video Game History Foundation is racing to preserve ephemeral gaming material and the physical documentation of video games.

      Would love to go to a museum like this!

  5. Apr 2017
    1. She and her colleagues are using neural networks—complex mathematical systems for identifying patterns in data—to recognize diabetic retino­pathy, a leading cause of blindness among US adults.

      Wow, this is a very interesting application!

    2. Prakash’s lab introduced the Paperfuge, a 20-cent centri­fuge inspired by an ancient spinning toy, which can be used to diagnose diseases like malaria.
    3. In 2014 his lab unveiled the Foldscope, an origami-like paper microscope that magnifies objects up to 2,000 times but costs less than $1 to produce.

      Read about this invention! Very neat!

    1. Once upon a time, the seas teemed with mackerel, squid and sardines, and life was good. But now, on opposite sides of the globe, sun-creased fishermen lament as they reel in their nearly empty nets.

      This should be sounding loud warning bells!

    1. For about $3,000 each, telepresence robots -- which look like iPads mounted on small Segway self-balancing, battery-powered machines -- are making distance learning easier, clearer and more realistic for online students at hundreds of colleges and universities.

      I think this is cool!

    1. The Echo Look suffers from two dovetailing issues: the overwhelming potential for invasive data collection, and Amazon’s lack of a clear policy on how it might prevent that.

      Important to remember. Amazon shares very little about what it collects and what it does with what it collects.

    2. Previously, Alexa lived inside speakers. Now, it’s in a camera.

      Natural evolution, I'd say...

    1. The first, say, one hour and thirty-five minutes of The Circle are enormously powerful, in an intelligent, worry-inducing kind of way. The film’s last fifteen minutes, which feel rushed, don’t quite measure up. The ending is ambiguous, confusing, and strangely open-ended. But maybe that’s only appropriate. It feels the most like reality.

      This is better than the NYT review said.

    1. Obscura Day 2017! Join our global celebration of exploration and discovery. May 6 window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '206394544492', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.5' }); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.create', function(response) { Cookies.set('fb_subscriber', '1', { expires: 200, path: '/' }); }); FB.Event.subscribe('edge.remove', function(response) { Cookies.set('fb_subscriber', '0', { expires: 200, path: '/' }); }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); Sign In Join Find Near The Atlas Top Destinations Newly Added Places Most Popular Places Random Place Lists Add a Place Newly Added Places View All Places » Edgartown, Massachussetts Heath Hen Sculpture 41.4133, -70.6035 Northern Mariana Islands Atomic Bomb Loading Pits 15.0709, 145.6412 Aarhus, Denmark Christian Jacobsen Drakenberg's Last Home 56.1547, 10.2096 Monterey, California Fort Ord 36.6266, -121.6914 Top Destinations Countries Australia Canada China France Germany India Italy Japan Cities Amsterdam Barcelona Beijing Berlin Boston Budapest Chicago London Los Angeles Mexico City Montreal Moscow New Orleans New York Paris Philadelphia Rome San Francisco Seattle Stockholm Tokyo Toronto Vienna Washington, D.C. SEE ALL 5604 DESTINATIONS IN THE ATLAS Stories BROWSE STORIES BY Columns Features Interactive News Video Visual Most Recent Stories View All Stories » One of the Earliest Industrial Spies Was a French Missionary Stationed in China 16 hours ago The Largest Centaur in the Solar System Has Rings 17 hours ago Who Is Shaving Virginia's Cats? 18 hours ago College Student Shotguns 13 Beers During Half-Marathon 20 hours ago Events Quick Links All Events Obscura Day 2017 Explore Events Chicago Los Angeles New York Philadelphia San Francisco Seattle Washington, D.C. Upcoming Events View All Events » Apr 29 Los Angeles Uncovering Echo Park Apr 29 Washington, D.C. Touched by Cereal Royalty Apr 30 Brooklyn Uzbek Food Shopping Tour in Brooklyn Apr 30 Reseda Homeward Bound: Pigeon Navigation Trips Quick Links All Trips Where We Travel Berlin Bhutan Bulgaria Cuba Iceland Kazakhstan Morocco The Amazon Ukraine Venice Yucatán Upcoming Trips View All Trips » Unlocking Berlin's Wunderkammer May 25–May 29, 2017 Music and Medinas of Morocco Jun 23–Jun 30, 2017 Hidden Venice with a Psycho-Mambo Twist Jul 10–Jul 16, 2017 Kazakhstan and the 2017 World Expo Sep 02–Sep 10, 2017 Obscura Day 2017 Sign In Join Search Find or Near Search 59.3099, 18.0203 Lost Toys of the Nybohov Funicular, Sweden What's near me? if (!isSmallScreen()) { googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('Rotational_Top_Slot'); }); } When Squirrels Were One of America’s Most Popular Pets Benjamin Franklin even wrote an ode to a fallen one. by Natalie Zarrelli April 28, 2017 9,392 Email This Article From To Please separate multiple addresses with commas. We won't share addresses with third parties. Subscribe me to the Atlas Obscura Newsletter displayFbCount('http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pet-squirrel-craze', '.js-facebook-count'); Pete the squirrel, who was a pet of President Harding. Library of Congress/LC-DIG-hec-42488 In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute. “Few squirrels were better accomplished, for he had a good education, had traveled far, and seen much of the world.” Franklin wrote, adding, “Thou art fallen by the fangs of wanton, cruel Ranger!” Mourning a squirrel’s death wasn’t as uncommon as you might think when Franklin wrote Mungo’s eulogy; in the 18th- and 19th centuries, squirrels were fixtures in American homes, especially for children. While colonial Americans kept many types of wild animals as pets, squirrels “were the most popular,”

      So interesting the change in thinking!!

    1. Seats in the back of the plane, behind the trailing edge of the wing, had a 69 percent survival rate, while seats over the wing and in coach had a 56 percent survival rate. The front 15 percent of seats had a 49 percent survival rate, analysts found.

      Next thing you know, they'll be charging more to sit in the back!

    1. Swiss voters will decide in a referendum on June 5 whether to introduce a “basic income”. In proposed reforms to the social welfare system, all residents would be entitled to a guaranteed income of SFr30,000 ($30,275) a year from the state — unconditionally.

      I don't think this happened?

    1. But on April 13, 1970, an oxygen tank explosion aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft set a harrowing mission into motion—and its success would turn a team of heartland boys into national heroes. A little more than two days into the mission’s voyage to the moon, the command module began to lose its supply of electricity and water. That’s when astronaut John Swigert uttered the phrase that would implant mission control in the public’s consciousness: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

      Such an amazing story. Heard about it from my dad, before there was a blockbuster book and movie!

    1. The famous saxophonist was sitting beside a woman “who was raising money for charity” and he got up in the aisle and played for donations. He “collected more than $2,000 for the [unnamed] charity.”

      I think it's cool!

    1. Stopovers on awards. This is my one HUGE hot button issue that always drives me crazy. Delta had what some may call a generous stopover rule – that is, you could stop, each way, for up to 11 months as part of your trip. I have had amazing stops in cities along my flight path in the past and miss this perk of SkyMiles. It gave the Delta SkyMiles points program real value that it is today sorely lacking.

      This would be amazing!

    1. American Airlines responded quickly to the incident on Friday night, removing the flight attendant in question and posting the following statement on its website:

      That is the least they can do. The very least.

    1. Residents of the Canadian town of Ferryland, a small fishing village in Newfoundland, recently welcomed a new visitor: a huge iceberg that ran aground just offshore.

      This would be so amazing to see!

    1. Some describe it as the scent of popcorn, Fritos, or corn chips. In any case, it smells like something crunchy, corn-based, and delicious.

      Need to smell some doggie toes!

    1. We should’ve known that dragon blood would have healing properties. Rubeus Hagrid used it on his injuries after being attacked by giants, after all.

      Okay, ha ha, to the journalist that put this line in!

    2. a dark horse that may help to save the day against these seemingly invincible “superbugs”: the Komodo dragon. This rare animal’s blood contains antibiotics that may be useful in stopping diseases in humans.

      Wow, who would think to check this?

    1. Role models now existed, and they could be followed by younger women who aspired to be medical doctors or University Professors. A new pathway was opened.

      Here are more role models!

    2. However, most historians agree that this apparently auspicious achievement must be taken with a grain of salt: these women scientists were mostly hired in positions “according to their femininity”, often in lower level jobs and always as subordinates in the research teams performing research projects during the War. In most cases,

      Learn more about this!

    1. approaches have proven invaluable for understanding metabo-lism and improving metabolite production (Wiechert 2002;Patilet al. 2004), metabolic engineering ‘design principles’ are yet tobe fully elucidated due to our incomplete knowledge of livingsystems. Subsequently, it can take many iterations of the classi-cal design-build-test cycle to achieve engineering objectives,some of which may even be impossible to meet using availablebiological knowledge.An elegant way to overcome the challenges associated withengineering in biology is to apply a selective pressure to a genet-ically diverse population so that cells with the desired pheno-type can be isolated.

      This is key!

    1. An asteroid more than a quarter mile (400 meters) wide will pass close to Earth on Wednesday, zooming by at a distance of just over a million miles (1.8 million km), but with no chance of impact, according to NASA scientists.

      That could have been in the headline!

    1. teamed up with the BBC, Jane Goodall and Sesame Street to offer 50 “Voyager” stories, each of which offers an interactive exploration of a new part of the world.

      This could be cool!

    1. The problem was, the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the four other warships in its strike force were at that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.

      Well, you know, it was kind of in the region...

    1. It features side-by-side portraits of Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), bisected by the beam of a lightsaber, whose glow goes from blue to red. It's held up by Rey (Daisy Ridley), who appears in miniscule form but prominently, front and center, in a powerful warrior stance.

      Interesting.

    1. Overall, department stores employ a third fewer people now than they did in 2001. That’s half a million traditional jobs gone — about eighteen times as many jobs as were lost in coal mining over the same period.

      And this decline is rarely talked about.

    1. The first was his gargantuan vision. He did not see himself merely chipping away at Barnes & Noble’s share of retail book sales; he saw himself developing one of the greatest retailers in history, on the scale of Sears Roebuck or Walmart. Secondly, Bezos focused relentlessly on customer service — low prices, ease of use on his website, boundless inventory, and reliable shipping. To this day, Amazon is remarkably successful at pleasing customers.

      Important to note about Amazon and still true 2 1/2 years later.

    1. Which brings us to the biggest lesson from this survey: If you're mad at an airline, don't complain only to the airline. Complain to the Department of Transportation, too.

      Important to note this.

    2. "While [the airlines] aren't delaying too many flights, they're canceling a lot of them," says Brent Bowen, one of the report's authors and professor and dean of the College of Aviation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

      This is a secret.

    1. North Korea launched a ballistic missile Sunday morning from near its submarine base in Sinpo on its east coast, but the launch was the latest in a series of failures just after liftoff,

      This is actually bad news, as it will have made Kim angrier and more likely to do something reckless...

    1. Using 3-D cameras, it builds a picture of the crops, looking for individual plants under stress. Should the tower spot something awry, it dispatches Vinobot. The rover uses its robotic arm to create a detailed 3-D model of the plant, showing scientists the exact angles of leaves, for instance, to determine how different kinds of corn handle drought.

      Really interesting!

    1. The centrality of that deal in our lives makes it outrageous that there are companies who seize our time and attention for absolutely nothing in exchange, and indeed, without consent at all—otherwise known as “attention theft.” 

      This will become more and more prevalent...

    1. Each pixel you see was placed by hand. Each icon, each flag, each meme created painstakingly by millions of people who had nothing in common except an Internet connection.

      This is absolutely amazing!

    1. Back in the 1960s and '70s, that debate led to a brand new school design: Small classrooms were out. Wide-open spaces were in. The Open Education movement was born.

      Independence High School in Columbus, OH was like this!

    1. As humanity’s greatest incubator of comedic gems, the internet has birthed a thousand kittens and inner-monologuing dogs.

      Too true!

    1. The SpaceX landing Thursday evening marked the first time in history that a rocket was used to put a satellite into geostationary orbit and then return to Earth.

      A huge achievement!

    1. Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions has completed its review of applications for the Class of 2021 and has offered admission to 2,272 students from a pool of 32,900 applicants. With Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin colleges scheduled to open in fall 2017, the incoming freshman class will be the largest in Yale College history —  with approximately 1550 students, 15% larger than recent classes.

      Interesting to see how the bigger class will impact the university.

    1. Chiang’s story is driven by the obsolescence of the virtual world that is the host platform for the digients, who can continue to exist as social beings only if their software engine is ported to its successor. Unfortunately, their parent corporation has gone bankrupt and so porting the software is not commercially viable. The digients, who are themselves clamoring for individual liberties—you can think of them as woke Tamagotchi—have become what the industry would term abandonware. It is thus left to their small circle of caretakers and enthusiasts to create an incentive for the port—for example, by licensing the digients to a company specializing in artificial sex partners. In all cases, however, the real value of the digients turns out to be their accumulated experiential history as sentient lifeforms.

      Sounds so thought-provoking!

    2. Feral spambooks will deploy probabilistic text generators seeded with the contents of your own ebook library to write a thousand vacuous and superficially attractive nuisance texts … They’ll slide them into your ebook library disguised as free samples, with titles and author names that are random permutations of legitimate works, then sell advertising slots in these false texts to offshore spam marketplaces.5

      Whoa!

    3. This is something the digients of Chiang’s story would understand very well, for their existence is continually imperiled by the limited capacity of the virtual worlds they inhabit to render their digital selfhood across changing platforms.

      Fascinating thing to think about!

    1. “The current measures are not an acceptable long-term solution to whatever threat they are trying to mitigate. Even in the short term it is difficult to understand their effectiveness. And the commercial distortions they create are severe,” said IATA director general Alexandre de Juniac.

      Hard to understand what any of this achieves...

  6. Mar 2017
    1. In 1990, eight shades — maize, lemon yellow, blue gray, raw umber, green blue, orange red, orange yellow and violet blue — were retired and eight new ones, including the yellow hue known as dandelion, were introduced.

      I remember many of these...

    2. After 27 years, the crayon color dandelion is taking a retirement, making way for an upstart in the blue family

      Seems sad in a way...

    1. “It blew my mind,” recalled Giacobbe. He hadn’t called Alitalia directly in years. He was accustomed to almost always relying on Skyscanner for the best deal.

      Always try the airline directly.

    1. Unfortunately, rider Nick Bull wasn't quite prepared for the moment that Shamrock, a 9-year-old bay gelding, decided to kick their ride up a notch.

      Scary stuff1

    1. But for the many tourists who visit Madidi National Park, the crown jewel of Bolivia’s protected rainforests, an excursion into its depths is not so much a danger but an exhilarating prospect.

      Exploring the Amazon is not for amateurs!

    1. Small, portable medical devices can offer patient's newfound mobility. Engineers at the University of Pittsburgh developed an artificial lung that can be carried in a patient’s backpack. Trials have so far shown that the device works on sheep and could offer relief and mobility for people who suffer from lung failure.

      This is incredible!