Google brings AMP to email, smart replies to messages, ad blocking to Chrome, and warnings to insecure websites. Cryptocurrency mining comes to Salon and 4200 other sites. Pixel Visual Core comes to Facebook and Snapchat, but not Google Camera. Logan Paul off YouTube - for now. Facebook loses the youngs. • Kevin's Stuff: Beaker Browser and Fritter • Jeff's Number: 280 character wedding vows • Stacey's Thing: Mango Mirror
https://youtu.be/FZYvZBLsd1o
On February 20, 2008 the Omeka team released its public beta, version 0.9.0., and last week, a few days shy of this 10-year milestone, we released version 2.6. Back in 2008, I don’t think any of us from the original team imagined Omeka celebrating its 10th Birthday. It is time to celebrate and reflect on this journey.
Steven Pinker (Viking)The follow-up to Pinker's groundbreaking The Better Angels of Our Nature presents the big picture of human progress: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science. Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing. Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation. With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress.
h/t to Cesar Hidalgo and Philip Ball
Four American soldiers were ambushed by militants in a remote desert in Niger in October. It was all part of a shadowy war going back to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The special counsel’s charges against 13 Russians reveal a sophisticated plot to turn Americans against one another — one that seems to still be working.
The AR-15 assault rifle used in Parkland, Fla., this week was purchased legally, officials said. How did a weapon designed for warfare become easier to buy than a handgun?
Israeli chef Mike Solomonov recently won the James Beard Award for outstanding chef. He created the restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia, built a food empire, and expertly hid a drug addiction from everyone in his life. He talks with Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic's editor in chief, about what he felt when his brother was killed, and how the tragedy first fueled and then helped him fight his addiction. Now in a long recovery, he cooks Israeli food as a kind of cultural mission.
