The US has one of the worst payment systems in the world. US credit and debit cards have a magnetic stripe that contains all the financial information necessary to make a purchase.
Category: Uncategorized
Coors Light Party Train Crash
shitty beer is deadly
Europe biggest antivaxxers
weirdly, the epicenter isn’t in southern california. looks like europeans are the worst. makes sense given the irrational GMO / nuclear / chemicals fears over there.
The goldilocks zone
a 10x larger goldilocks zone in planetary systems will revise everyone’s estimates in the drake equation upwards. “The surfaces of rocky planets and moons that we know of are nothing like Earth. They’re typically cold and barren with no atmosphere or a very thin or even corrosive atmosphere. Going below the surface protects you from a whole host of unpleasant conditions on the surface. So the subsurface habitable zone may turn out to be very important. Earth might even be unusual in having life on the surface.”
Good urls matter
~10 years ago, jon udell was one of my favorite thinkers about the web. after a long hiatus, he is coming back to form, here on why good urls matter.
In a 1997 keynote talk Andrew Schulman put up a slide that contained just a URL: UPS Tracking “Think about what this means. Every UPS package has its own home page on the web!” Also, potentially, every bank transaction, every calendar appointment, every book (or paragraph within every book), every song (or passage or track within every song), every appliance (or component within every appliance). If we needed to, we could create URLs for grains of sand, each as compact and easy to exchange as Andrew Schulman’s Fedex URL. The supply of web names is inexhaustible, and the universe of their meaning is unbounded.
Industrial scale cloning
in case you were confused where biotech progress happens these days.
A cloning factory – an incredible notion borrowed straight from science fiction. But here in Shenzhen, in what was an old shoe factory, this rising power is creating a new industry.
Selling Shame
we have made some tiny steps in the right direction since then. of course as long as you still get all that “for womenz” pink-colored shit, it isn’t that much better.
Prison admission falling
I was startled and encouraged to see that under current policies, we are at a 20 years low in the prison admission rate.
a little bit of good news in an otherwise pretty bleak field: the “war on drugs”
France Uber mob
Taxi protest in Paris turns to guerrilla warfare as Uber car attacked on freeway
totally predictable, and makes you wonder whether entering france is just a huge PR move to generate disgust with the incumbents.
Online as a % of total video
Canada 20%, Australia 16%, US 16%. EU countries 3% to 8%. China 58%
as usual, europe is behind with internet usage, but china, wow.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 