Tag: stupid

Bricked shoes

Nike users are experiencing some technical difficulties in the wild world of connected footwear. Nike’s $350 “Adapt BB” sneakers are the latest in the company’s line of self-lacing shoes, and they come with the “Nike Adapt” app for Android and iOS. The app pairs with the shoes and lets you adjust the tightness of the laces, customize the lights (yeah, there are lights), and see, uh, how much battery life your shoes have left. The only problem: Nike’s Android app doesn’t work.

Mosque Plans

Sascha Baron Cohen put on a funny disguise and went to a small town in the United States to tell the residents of a plan to invest 100s of millions of $ into the local economy. The townsfolk were excited by the prospect until they found out the plan involved the construction of an enormous mosque. When the townsfolk complained about terrorists, Cohen told them that the worshippers would be well protected from terrorist attacks against them.

Ibiza

Aptly named Ibiza, the film follows 3 American girls (who struggle to pronounce Ibiza correctly the entire film) as they travel to everyone’s favorite clubbing paradise and if luke-warm rom-coms are your thing, then you’re in luck. The lead character falls in love with an EDM DJ and absolute hilarity ensues (it doesn’t). We spoke to the director Alex Richanbach, who has never even been to Ibiza, about how he made the film, his influences and his take on glamorizing drugs. This is perhaps the most awkward interview we’ve ever done.

Conservation of Threat

as the environment becomes safer we manufacture new threats. To study how concepts change when they become less common, we brought volunteers into our laboratory and gave them a simple task — to look at a series of computer-generated faces and decide which ones seem “threatening.” The faces had been carefully designed by researchers to range from very intimidating to very harmless. As we showed people fewer and fewer threatening faces over time, we found that they expanded their definition of “threatening” to include a wider range of faces. When they ran out of threatening faces to find, they started calling faces threatening that they used to call harmless. Rather than being a consistent category, what people considered “threats” depended on how many threats they had seen lately.

Mindless Consciousness

Speaking of actual geniuses, Noam Chomsky was there. It’s unclear why, because he doesn’t seem much interested in theories of consciousness, though obviously his mere presence classes up any would-be academic gathering — and he left MIT last year for the University of Arizona, so it’s not like he has to fly in for the gig. During his presentation to a packed ballroom, Chomsky compared the current state of neuroscience to a marionette: We can examine the puppet and its strings, but we know nothing of the puppeteer. When a fellow panelist challenged him, citing recent discoveries, Chomsky breezily dismissed the objection as beside the point. Chomsky’s rhetorical powers have been endlessly praised, but let’s give a shout-out to the brutality of his nonchalance. He eviscerates with a shrug.

Tiny Instagram Shit-Talker

I’m not sure whether I’ve solved the mystery of Lil Tay. I’m not sure what answer there could have possibly been, besides the one that exists: She has a stage mom who wants to make money from her fame. There’s obviously a great deal of care and thought being put into Lil Tay’s persona. The question that matters is who exactly is taking care of her.