For the first time the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is charging a license fee to TV stations and networks that broadcast live shows
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Mozilla Acquires Pocket | The Mozilla Blog
We are excited to announce that the Mozilla Corporation has completed the acquisition of Read It Later, Inc. the developers of Pocket.
How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind
Self-Care Lessons for the Resistance
Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying | New York Times
In the conservative media, we conditioned people not to trust facts or mainstream news outlets.
👓 A Conversation with @LPachter (BS ’94) | Caltech
Pachter, a computational biologist, returns to CalTech to study the role and function of RNA.
Why the Obamacare repeal effort is suddenly a huge mess | Axios
The future of Medicaid expansion is a big disagreement — and the divide over replacement is getting bigger.
👓 Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker
New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.
Chief digital officer steps down from White House job over background check | Politico
The background check must be completed by White House staffers for positions that cover national security.
An Open Letter to The Uber Board and Investors | NewCo Shift
By now a staggering number of people recognize the name of Susan Fowler and have read some account of her experiences of sexism, sexual…
An Open Letter to The Uber Board and Investors
By now a staggering number of people recognize the name of Susan Fowler and have read some account of her experiences of sexism, sexual…
Feb. 23rd, 2017 By now a staggering number of people recognize the name of Susan Fowler and have read some account of her experiences of sexism, sexual harassment and horrendous management at Uber. So what explains the silence of Uber’s investors? Continue reading An Open Letter to The Uber Board and Investors
Chief digital officer steps down from White House job over background check | POLITICO
The background check must be completed by White House staffers for positions that cover national security.
👓 Physicists Uncover Geometric ‘Theory Space’ | Quanta Magazine
A decades-old method called the “bootstrap” is enabling new discoveries about the geometry underlying all quantum theories.
In the 1960s, the charismatic physicist Geoffrey Chew espoused a radical vision of the universe, and with it, a new way of doing physics. Theorists of the era were struggling to find order in an unruly zoo of newfound particles. They wanted to know which ones were the fundamental building blocks of nature and which were composites. But Chew, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argued against such a distinction. “Nature is as it is because this is the only possible nature consistent with itself,” he wrote at the time. He believed he could deduce nature’s laws solely from the demand that they be self-consistent. Continue reading 👓 Physicists Uncover Geometric ‘Theory Space’ | Quanta Magazine
Elon Musk Is Really Boring | Bloomberg
The billionaire visionary is digging in on a tunnel project to skirt gridlock, but there’s a hole in his Trump-era business bet.
Kenneth Arrow, Nobel-Winning Economist Whose Influence Spanned Decades, Dies at 95 | The New York Times
Professor Arrow, one of the most brilliant minds in his field during the 20th century, became the youngest economist ever to earn a Nobel at the age of 51.
👓 Encouraging individual sovereignty and a healthy commons by Aral Balkan
Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto outlines his vision for a centralised global colony ruled by the Silicon Valley oligarchy. I say we must do the exact opposite and create a world with individual sovereignty and a healthy commons.
The verbiage here is a bit inflammatory and very radical sounding, but the overarching thesis is fairly sound. The people who are slowly, but surely building the IndieWeb give me a lot of hope that the unintended (by the people anyway) consequences that are unfolding can be relatively quickly remedied.
Marginalia
We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities.
To some extent, this thesis could extend Cesar Hidalgo’s concept of the personbyte as in putting part of one’s self out onto the internet, one can, in some sense, contain more information than previously required.
Richard Dawkin’s concept of meme extends the idea a bit further in that an individual’s thoughts can infect others and spread with a variable contagion rate dependent on various variables.
I would suspect that though this does extend the idea of personbyte, there is still some limit to how large the size of a particular person’s sphere could expand.
While technological implants are certainly feasible, possible, and demonstrable, the main way in which we extend ourselves with technology today is not through implants but explants.
in a tiny number of hands.
or in a number of tiny hands, as the case can sometimes be.
The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.
This is a whole new tragedy of the commons: people don’t know where the commons actually are anymore.