Category: Weird
In Life, as in Wordle, Success Often Depends on Where You Start
As a writer, words are my tools, so I fell quickly for Wordle, a simple but challenging online game that lets me sharpen my tool…
How to Safely Travel Within the US
The Covid-19 pandemic is not over, but as we pass the two-year anniversary of when SARS-CoV-2 reached the US, we’ve learned how to manage the…
How Much Pi Do You Really Need?
If we use the single digit version in which π = 3, what would happen to our height calculation? The answer: nothing. Remember that the…
Palmer Luckey Says Working With Weapons Isn’t as Fun as VR
It’s still continuing. We have towers deployed all along the southern border and the northern border. It’s part of Congress’s annual budget. But the vast…
Deepfakes Can Help Families Mourn—or Exploit Their Grief
We now have the ability to reanimate the dead. Improvements in machine learning over the past decade have given us the ability to break through…
The War Puts Ukraine’s Clinical Trials—and Patients—in Jeopardy
The biggest historical proponent of clinical trial quality conducted his first one during a war. In 1941, in Salonika, Greece, Archibald Cochrane, a soldier for…
This Is What an RPG for Indie Movie Heroines Would Look Like
Fall in Love??? (What’s Love ANYWAY?): This level has two bosses. The first, Red Flag Man, will tell you after you sleep with him that…
China’s Gig Workers Are Challenging Their Algorithmic Bosses
“Even minor disruption in the form of these very small-scale collective actions can bring the station-level managers to the bargaining table,” says Eli Friedman, an…
How People Actually Make Money From Cryptocurrencies
You saw the many cryptocurrency-related Super Bowl ads, and maybe you found them weird, or deeply dystopian, or just disturbingly familiar. Nevertheless, perhaps you believe…
Rest Easy With Our Favorite White Noise Machines
I cannot sleep in total silence. I need the hum of a fan or crack of a fire. Too much outside noise and I can’t…