As that rare group of regular readers knows, eliminating gerrymandering and related cockamamie contrivances to prevent people from voting is near and dear to my heart. As explained by German Lopez in Vox, the Supreme Court has recently ruled in a redistricting case in North Carolina in a way that may help combat cockamamie efforts in the future.
Any name factors into one’s identity whether it’s unusual or common. Not having visited Scandinavia, I’ve only ever met one other Bjorn in person. Names are fascinating, arbitrary things. So what do you make of someone who has the same name as you? Julie Beck, the recipient of an uncommon yet not unique name, details her quest in The Atlantic to find all the other Julie Becks in the United States. Perhaps because a name is…
Sean Illing has an interview in Vox with biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey about his work on tackling aging. Aubrey de Grey, whose prodigious beard is dwarfed by his prodigious research ambitions, famously believes that combating aging is an engineering problem. In other words, medical therapies can be developed and can be worked on now given our current scientific understanding of aging damage. I remember first learning about the work of Dr. de Grey when he and others set up…
I have a long, long list of articles I save to read later… and eventually, later becomes “now.” Alan Levinovitz has a piece in Vox from March 2016 that is sure to chill certain technophiles to the bone: going through modern life without a cell phone. Missing a friend’s birthday party was my final impetus to get a cell phone originally. My confusion about the location would have been solved with a two minute phone call or a…
Alex Abad-Santos has a couple of interviews in Vox with the creators of God Loves, Man Kills, the seminal X-Men graphic novel that debuted 35 years ago. For many avid comic readers at the time –including myself– this was an eye-opening paradigm shift in what stories “comics” could tell. (For ardent comic/graphic novel historians raising their hands to point out the work of Will Eisner, I was too young to read A Contract with God when it came out in…
The saying goes that you know you’re a book lover when you still get upset thinking about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. As many as 400,00 scrolls and whatever wisdom they contained have long since been ashes. What to feel then, about a modern day collection of knowledge that not burned, but nevertheless hidden away? James Somers has a long-form article in The Atlantic that tells the tale of Google Books: the catalysts behind its creation…
When I talk about automation with people, I often like to point out how the scope of automation now appears to encompass what knowledge workers do. Indeed, from what I’ve read, various implementations of automation, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are already coming into play in both the legal and healthcare sectors of the economy. In other words, well beyond traditional notions of automation, which usually involve manufacturing and factory work. While I had heard of algorithms…
As mentioned in a post last month, I’m very interested in addressing gerrymandering, the political practice of dividing up voting districts in a way that would befuddle the designers of Tetris. Last month, I highlighted Brian Olson’s algorithm to make voting districts more compact. However, in this article by Erica Klarreich, she suggests that a district’s compactness is not the sole criterion for gerrymandering and talks more about ways to address the problem. Hopefully, this…
For many of us writing science fiction, a common decision point is how hard or soft we should make the world(s) we’re building. A perennial area is whether we allow faster-than-light travel or not (i.e., warping, folding space, entering stargates, traveling through hyperspace, etc.). Scientist and science fiction author Catherine Asaro explains her own journey in coming up with a way to have interstellar ships that can move at the speed of narrative without willfully ignoring…
Although I’ll frequently list articles worth reading on the blog –such as the changing dynamics of film financing or the automation of work— I rarely do “listicles” not only because they’re usually slick, quick pieces designed as clickbait, but also because they don’t give me too much upon which to reflect. Perhaps it’s the timing, but this Forbes(!) listicle by Jessica Hagy made me reflect about what I know now that I don’t think I understood…