The LG Sport and Style, the first Android 2.0 watches, come out this week. ACLU Amazon Dash Button. Vizio TV settles with FTC for $2.2 million over secret viewer tracking. House passes email privacy act. Facebook filters fake news in France. Google and H&M team up to design dresses.
Stacey's Things: Sergeant Tabata and Logitec ZeroTouch with Alexa
Jeff's Number: 1003 #resist Meetups
Leo's Tool: Michael Bolton's Big, Sexy Valentine's Day Special on Netflix
https://youtu.be/9hQklVVOrh0
Bacon reserves at a 50 year low. Our picks for the best tech billionaires' apocalypse bunker islands. Musical Trump tweets. Club Penguin shuts down. Super scary walking robots with wheels. Facebook de-verifies God. Google beats Q4 estimates; Facebook stomps all over them. Released: Feb 1st 2017
Jeff's Number: 97% of voice apps are used for one week
Stacey's Thing: Flash Forward Podcast
Leo's Tool: June Oven
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNqBVUJSk84
This smartphone microscope lets you play games with microbes.@richcampbell @CarlFranklin –> Full Episode: https://t.co/jvaUzPPMix pic.twitter.com/FTF0Yt04JL
— ChrisAldrich (@ChrisAldrich) February 28, 2017
Marty McGuire (martymcgui.re)This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition is a weekly audio summary of This Week in the IndieWeb, a digest of activities of the IndieWeb community.
Neanderthals did not descale their teeth regularly, for which modern scientists can be very thankful. Embedded in the fossilized calculus, or tartar, on teeth from the Shanidar cave, in Iraqi Kurdistan, and elsewhere are some remarkable remains that are beginning to shed far more light on what Neanderthals ate. I don’t want to give too much away just yet. Let’s just say that if, like me, when you think of the Neanderthal diet you think of a bunch of cavemen and women sitting around chewing their way through a woolly mammoth, you’re in for a surprise.
My guide through the recent discoveries on Neanderthal diet is John Speth, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Amanda Henry’s research clearly points to moist-cooked starch grains in the mouths of Neanderthals (but did they swallow?). Archaeologists, however, have found almost no evidence of Neanderthals using the hot-rocks boil-in-a-bag method of modern people who lack fire-proof containers. And surprisingly, they didn’t know what John Speth discovered while watching TV in a motel room: that it is perfectly possible to boil water in a flimsy container over a direct fire. In the interests of time I had to cut his fascinating description of an experiment to make maple syrup by boiling the sap in a birch-bark tray over an open fire, which concluded that it was “both efficient and worthwhile”. So, now that they know it can be done, how long before they discover it was done?
There is evidence that Neanderthals ate moist-cooked starch. There is evidence that one can moist-cook without fire-proof containers and hot rocks. All we need now is evidence that Neanderthals used similar techniques, and the palaeo-dieters can add a nice mess of potage to their daily fare.
Notes
- Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium). (A scientific paper.)
- National Geographic’s early report on Amanda Henry’s discovery of plant remains on Neanderthal teeth and a more recent report from the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
- More on Neanderthal diets at John Hawks’ weblog.
- Photograph of the Regourdou Neanderthal mandible used by permission of the photographer, Patrick Semal, and the Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord.
- Intro music by Dan-O at DanoSongs.com.
- Final music played by Ljuben Dimkaroski on a replica of a Neanderthal bone flute found in a cave in western Slovenia.
While I’ve read lots of research surrounding this area, this is the kind of area which more mainstream food journalists, entertainers, and educators could and should be covering. Aside from a semi-regular appearance of Deb Duchon, a nutritional anthropologist, appearing on Alton Brown‘s Good Eats, this may be one of the few places I’ve seen such an interesting interview of this type.
We are naturally drawn to finding solutions. But are there ever problems we shouldn't try to solve? Lulu Miller visits a town in Belgium with a completely different approach to dealing with mental illness. Families in the town board people – strangers - with severe mental illnesses in their homes, sometimes for decades. And it works, because they are not looking to cure them.
We like to think of our own personalities - and those of our spouses, children and friends - as predictable and constant over time. But what if they aren't? In this episode, Alix Spiegel visits a prison to explore whether there is such a thing as a stable personality. And Lulu Miller asks whether scientists can point to a single thing about a person that doesn't change over time. The answer might surprise you.
Yet another great episode, though to me not as intriguing as some of their other prior efforts. Still overall, a stellar podcast series.
Preparing for and reacting to Apple implementing your app’s core functionality themselves.
Upshot: Cover the 3 sigma edge cases that the bigger corporation won’t bother to support.
In Our Computers, Ourselves, a look at the ways technology affects us, and the main question is : Are computers changing human character? You'll hear from cyborgs, bullies, neuroscientists and police chiefs about whether our closeness with computers is changing us as a species.
I can’t believe I flew through season one so quickly.
The Power Of Categories examines how categories define us — how, if given a chance, humans will jump into one category or another. People need them, want them. The show looks at what categories provide for us, and you'll hear about a person caught between categories in a way that will surprise you. Plus, a trip to a retirement community designed to help seniors revisit a long-missed category.
The story about the Indian retirement community in Florida is interesting, but it also raises the (unasked, in the episode at least) question of the detriment it can do to a group of people to be lead by some the oldest members of their community. The Latin words senīlis (“of or pertaining to old age”) and senex (“old”) are the roots of words like senate, senescence, senility, senior, and seniority, and though it’s nice to take care of our elders, the younger generations should take a hard look at the unintended consequences which may stem from this.
In some sense I’m also reminded about Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and why progress in science (and yes, society) is held back by the older generations who are still holding onto outdated models. Though simultaneously, they do provide some useful “brakes” on both velocity of change as well as potential ill effects which could be damaging in short timeframes.
In Entanglement, you'll meet a woman with Mirror Touch Synesthesia who can physically feel what she sees others feeling. And an exploration of the ways in which all of us are connected — more literally than you might realize. The hour will start with physics and end with a conversation with comedian Maria Bamford and her mother. They discuss what it's like to be entangled through impersonation.
One of the more interesting take-aways: the thoughts and emotions of those around you can affect you far more than you imagine.
Four episodes in and this podcast is still impossibly awesome. I don’t know if I’ve had so many thought changing ideas since I read David Christian’s book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. [1] The sad problem is that I’m listening to them at a far faster pace than they could ever continue to produce them.
In "How to Become Batman," Alix and Lulu examine the surprising effect that our expectations can have on the people around us. You'll hear how people's expectations can influence how well a rat runs a maze. Plus, the story of a man who is blind and says expectations have helped him see. Yes. See. This journey is not without skeptics.
Is it possible that this podcast is getting more interesting as it continues along?! In three episodes, I’ve gone from fan to fanboy.
In "Fearless," co-hosts Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller explore what would happen if you could disappear fear. A group of scientists believe that people no longer need fear — at least not the kind we live with — to navigate the modern world. We'll hear about the striking (and rare) case of a woman with no fear. The second half of the show explores how the rest of us might "turn off" fear.
Stacey's LONG list of great IoT gadgets at CES. The Ara modular smartphone's rise and fall. The death of Google Hangouts API. WayMo makes LIDAR way cheaper. Marissa Mayer to leave Yahoo after sale. Bogus "inventor of e-mail" sues Techdirt. Aaron's Thing: The Onion Omega2 Stacey's Do Buy: truMedic Instashiatsu Plus Neck and Shoulder Massager Stacey's Don't Buy: GE Z-Wave Wireless Smart Door Sensor Leo's Thing: Project Fi - A World of Thanks
https://youtu.be/94RLrs5eJGk
I’ve hinted before that I’d like to do more constructed shows here, where I speak to a few different people about a topic to try and get a broader sense of the subject. They’re harder to do, but more rewarding, and they consistently get more listeners. The problem is that as a one-man band, I don’t have the time I need to do that kind of show very often. As an experiment, I’m going to try chunking episodes into seasons, with a break between seasons when I’ll be working on those more complex shows. I’m not sure yet how long either the seasons or the breaks will be.