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From Interconnected: “Thirty years ago, a company called Etak released the first commercially available computerized navigation system for automobiles. Spearheaded by an engineer named Stan Honey and bankrolled by Nolan Bushnell, the cofounder of Atari, the company’s Navigator was ahead of its time. Benj Edwards, a technology historian, discovered that the dart-shaped arrow that Etak used for location is the same arrow that Google Maps uses to show your current location. But Edwards’ research went even further back: He discovered that an engineer who worked in a nearby office had shown the team a vector-based video game called Asteroids, and Etak’s on-screen representation of the car in its naviation system wound up using a vector triangle almost identical to the ship from Asteroids. Google then adopted something very similar for the car in its next-generation car navigation system product.”

Why hearing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” sometimes made people run for the exits

From Now I Know: “Circuses, historically, haven’t been the safest form of entertainment. Wild animals, random pyrotechnics, people on tightropes, etc. A loose animal or a fire can not only put guests in harm’s way, but once customers begin to react, others may panic — and that’s a recipe for disaster. To combat this, circuses had to find a way to let everyone know that something was urgently wrong, without alerting the audience. Music became an easy solution. Circuses back then often had bands that regaled patrons with all sorts of tunes, and everyone could hear the band. At some point, the management of one of the circuses decided to use the band as an alert system — if the band played a previously specified tune, that was a signal to the circus personnel that something bad was happening. And the song they chose? “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The idea of using “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as the so-called “Disaster March” spread throughout the circus industry.” 

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Continue reading “Google Maps shares a feature with this ancient video game”

From The Cut: “Fifty miles northwest of New York City is a town built as a kind of experiment: an attempt to insulate a religious community from the vagaries of time and assimilation. There, the women serve Sabbath meals that would not be out of place in 19th-century Eastern Europe — gefilte fish, golden challah, buttery kokosh cake — and the men dress in black coats and long sidelocks. In that town, a girl grew up to be a woman, and she got married, and the marriage turned bad. For four years, 30-year-old Malky Gold Berkowitz has been fighting to be freed from her husband, Wolf Berkowitz, a man who she says has subjected her to extensive harassment and physical assault. Malky lives in Kiryas Joel, or the City of Joel, an ultra-Orthodox enclave whose strictures on women make it an outlier even among other ultra-Orthodox sects — a world within a world.”

The rocket scientist who invented the Super Soaker water gun in his spare time

From The Smithsonian: “You might think it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to invent a squirt gun like the Super Soaker. But Lonnie Johnson, the inventor who devised this hugely popular toy that can drench half the neighborhood with a single pull of the trigger, actually worked on the Galileo and Cassini satellite programs and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he helped develop the B2 stealth bomber. Johnson is a prodigious creator, holding more than 120 patents on a variety of products and processes, including designs for lithium batteries and electrochemical conversion systems, heat pumps and a ceramic proton-conducting electrolyte. But Johnson has also patented such amusing concepts as a hair drying curler apparatus, wet diaper detector, and Nerf Blasters, the rapid-fire system with foam darts that tempts the child in all of us.”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “The sex strike that has shaken the ultra-Orthodox world”

From Popular Science: “When Concetta Antico looks at a leaf, she sees much more than just green. “Around the edge I’ll see orange or red or purple in the shadow; you might see dark green but I’ll see violet, turquoise, blue,” she said. “It’s like a mosaic of color.” Antico doesn’t just perceive these colors because she’s an artist who paints in the impressionist style. She’s also a tetrachromat, which means that she has more receptors in her eyes to absorb color than the average person. The difference lies in Antico’s cones, structures in the eyes that are calibrated to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain. The average person has three cones, which enables him to see about one million colors. But Antico has four cones, so her eyes are capable of picking up dimensions and nuances of color—an estimated 100 million of them—that the average person cannot. “It’s shocking to me how little color people are seeing,” she said.

He has climbed Mount Everest every year since 1994 and holds the record at 29 times

From the BBC: “Kami Rita Sherpa, 54, scaled the world’s tallest mountain for a 29th time. Already the world-record holder, he beat his own landmark in setting the new standard. A guide for over two decades, he first climbed the summit in 1994 and has made the peak almost every year since. The climbing season has just started on Mount Everest, which is expecting hundreds of climbers to make the trek over the coming weeks. Sherpa reached the 29,000ft summit on Sunday. Last week, he had posted to Instagram from Everest base camp saying he was back to try a 29th summit “to the top of the world”. The sherpa has said his climbs are just work – but he did do the trek twice last year to reclaim his crown from long-time rival and compatriot Pasang Dawa Sherpa.”

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Continue reading “She can see 100 times more colors than the average person”

Facebook users are probably aware that what they see in their news feeds is determined by the company’s recommendation algorithms. (Well, most users.) Many are accustomed to this fact, but some believe that there are alternatives to this kind of centralized control. Ethan Zuckerman is among them—and that’s why he and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia recently filed a lawsuit against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, asking a court to empower users to employ third-party tools to filter their news feeds. The suit relies on a novel interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was initially designed to protect digital platforms from legal liability for content posted by users.

Zuckerman is not just any Facebook user: He is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the school’s Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure; previously, he led the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Zuckerman wrote that the Facebook algorithm “forgets friends I want to hear from, becomes obsessed with people to whom I’m only loosely connected, and generally feels like an obstacle to how I’d like to connect with my friends.” But his lawsuit is about more than that, he says. If it succeeds, he argues, “we can decide how social media works for us and for our children through tools we can control,” instead of being at the mercy of The Algorithm.

Zuckerman told me this week that he got the idea for the lawsuit after Louis Barclay, a British software developer, came up with a browser extension called Unfollow Everything, which allowed users to undo some of the workings of Facebook’s algorithm. Meta blocked the extension, describing it as a breach of its terms of service, and banned Barclay from the platform permanently. The more he looked into the decision, the more Zuckerman felt that it was wrong—not only ethically, but legally. Barclay “produced something genuinely helpful,” Zuckerman said, “and I felt there should be a legal argument about whether he could do that or not.”

Note: this post was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Continue reading “A university professor is suing Meta over Facebook’s recommendation algorithms”

From The Smithsonian: “An upcoming show at Galerie Canesso features two paintings by a mysterious artist who was active in northern Italy in the 1600s. The painter’s oil canvases depict early iterations of the stiff blue fabric beloved today, as worn by Italian peasants. According to a statement, the pieces have proved to be important artifacts in garment history, pushing back the provenance of blue jeans by centuries. When Levi Strauss started selling denim work pants in the late 1800s, he merely added metal rivets and structure to a fabric that already boasted a storied European past. Jeans come from Genoa, while denim comes from the French city of Nîmes. Until the 11th century, no one could wear blue fabric because they didn’t know how to make blue color adhere; the genius of the Genoese was to find the indigo stone in India and make it a low-cost process.”

General Weyler and the New York City Army Cats of 39 Whitehall Street

From Hatching Cat: “General Weyler was a cat. Not just any cat, but a veteran in a troop of Army cats who served their country in the commissary storehouse in New York City’s Army Building at 39 Whitehall Street. In Old New York, most warehouses and other large buildings in Lower Manhattan were infested with mice and rats. The best soldiers cut out for the job of extermination were the Army cats. Cats were first employed by the U.S. Army shortly after the end of the Civil War. In July 1898, America was involved in the short-lived Spanish-American War. During this time, many of the Army cats had names affiliated with Spain and the war. One of the cats serving in New York City was Queen Regent (named for the queen regent of Spain, Maria Cristina De Habsburgo-Lorena). There was also General Blanco (named for Ramón Blanco, the Captain-General of Cuba).”

Note: This is a version of my personal newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

Continue reading “Blue jeans were actually invented in the 1600s”