“ In the 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, Robin Hood splits an arrow down the middle. Some consider this the ultimate archery trick. They're wrong. The ultimate archery trick is splitting an incoming arrow in two with one of your own. We do not recommend you trying this at home.

There were 644 new measles cases in 27 states last year, according to the CDC. That's the biggest annual number we've seen in nearly a quarter-century. A 2014 AP-GfK survey found that only 51 percent of Americans were confident that vaccines are safe and effective, which is similar to the proportion who believe that houses can be haunted by ghosts. 

Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself.

But what happens if you put a rat in a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends? The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. And when rats that were heavy drug users were moved to the good cage, they went back to having a normal life.

It’s bigger and more substantial than Google Glass, but far less boxy than the Oculus Rift. If I were a betting woman, I’d say it probably looks something like the goggles made by Magic Leap, the mysterious Google-backed augmented reality startup that has $592 million in funding. But Magic Leap is not yet ready to unveil its device. Microsoft, on the other hand, plans to get Project HoloLens into the hands of developers by the spring.

Fricatives convey “faster” and “smaller” — as do vowels that are voiced near the front of the mouth, like the a in “bat” or the i in “hid.” Plosives, or stops, convey “slower” and “bigger” — as do vowels that are voiced at the back of the throat, like the o in “token” or the double o’s in “food.” So-called voiceless stops like k, p, and t are more alive and daring than voiced stops like b, d and g, while the voiceless convey less luxury than the voiced. And all sound-symbolic effects manifest differently depending on context. They take on properties of the product being named.

Trials with 216 babies up to 12 months old indicated they were unable to remember new tasks if they did not have a lengthy sleep soon afterwards.

The University of Sheffield team suggested the best time to learn may be just before sleep and emphasised the importance of reading at bedtime.

“It is clear Simon has experienced a tragedy—something monstrous, like the death of someone close. I get to his office and gently open door. Simon is sitting at his desk, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. His skin is pale and he is out of breath from screaming.

“Goddam Internet’s down,” he says. “Second time this morning.”

“What is internets?” I ask.

 

“It’s a thing on computers.”

 

“What is computers?”

 

It takes him long time, but eventually Simon is able to explain. A computer is a magical box that provides endless pleasure for free. Simon is used to constant access to this box—a never-ending flow of pleasures. When the box stops working—or even just briefly slows down—he becomes so enraged that he curses our God, the one who gave us life and brought us forth from Egypt.

The decades-long drought in antibiotic discovery could be over after a breakthrough by US scientists.

“So far 25 new antibiotics have been discovered using this method and teixobactin is the latest and most promising one.

“I gave my son a crash course in video game history, compressing 25 years of gaming history into about four years.

Of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, only one in 10 can support complex life like that on Earth, a pair of astrophysicists argues. Everywhere else, stellar explosions known as gamma ray bursts would regularly wipe out any life forms more elaborate than microbes. The detonations also kept the universe lifeless for billions of years after the big bang, the researchers say.

“Does the criminal justice system treat African-Americans fairly? I decided to waste my precious free time reading seven zillion contradictory studies to figure out what was going on.
(...)
There seems to be a strong racial bias in capital punishment and a moderate racial bias in sentence length and decision to jail.

There seems to be little or no racial bias in arrests for serious violent crime, police shootings in most jurisdictions, prosecutions, or convictions.

About 100 years ago, we’re told, boys wore pink clothes, but then during the early 20th century, it flipped over. This is often used as an example of how arbitrary gender stereotypes are.

However according to psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the whole “pink-blue reversal” is an ‘urban legend’. According to Google NGram, a searchable database of over 5 million books, there are lots of instances of the terms “blue for boys” and “pink for girls” going back to 1890, but none for the reverse at any time point.

The exceptions are four magazine articles – quoted in the paper that started the whole debate – but these examples may be typos or attempts to subvert existing conventions.

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg justified Facebook's $2B purchase of virtual reality pioneer Oculus VR by calling it the next great communication platform? It sounds like Magic Leap wants to do the same thing—only layered on top of the real world.

It sounds like they hope to do that with a lightweight headset mostly indistinguishable from eyeglasses, save a fiber optic cable running down to a pack where the projector (and possibly the battery and other processing components) are housed. It sounds like that device will be absolutely jam-packed with cameras and sensors to exactly know where it is, and which direction it's pointing, inside a depth-mapped recreation of the real world. It sounds like it will run Android, have its own app store, and focus on games and interactive comic books to start.

In other words, it sounds absolutely bonkers. But $542 million in funding and Google on the board of directors suggests it's pretty damn real, and that it might only be a matter of time until Magic Leap can make it small enough to comfortably wear. Which could put Facebook and Google in one heck of a battle for the future of wearable computing, I imagine.

Blue Peacock was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s. One technical problem was that during winter buried objects can get very cold, and it was possible the mine's electronics would get too cold to work after some days underground. One particularly remarkable proposal suggested that live chickens be included in the mechanism. The chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water; they would remain alive for a week or so. Their body heat would, it seems, have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature. This proposal was sufficiently outlandish that it was taken as an April Fool's Day joke when the Blue Peacock file was declassified on April 1, 2004. Tom O'Leary, head of education and interpretation at the National Archives, replied to the media that, "It does seem like an April Fool but it most certainly is not. The Civil Service does not do jokes."

Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.”

In retrospect, Kubrick’s black comedy provided a far more accurate description of the dangers inherent in nuclear command-and-control systems than the ones that the American people got from the White House, the Pentagon, and the mainstream media.

Most recommended author: Ursula K. Le Guin (Nine Lives, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Word for World is Forest, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, The Dispossessed, The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, Always Coming Home, Changing Planes).

Second place: Philip K. Dick (The Defenders, Autofac, Time out of Joint, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ubik, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Radio Free Albemuth, A Scanner Darkly).

Third place: Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others) and Greg Egan (Learning to Be Me, The Infinite Assassin, Permutation City, Diaspora, Axiomatic, Reasons to be Cheerful).

A nice overview of Metafilter, one of the very best websites out there.

“If Twitter is people you don’t know at their wittiest, and Facebook is people you do know at their most mundane, then MetaFilter, I would say, is a family of strangers.

The PhotoMath app solves equations using the camera on an iOS or Windows phone and will be available for Android early next year. More important, PhotoMath is not just a camera-based calculator. Its value is not just in giving the phone user the answer but in being able to display the solution in steps taken to solve the problem. The user can understand the process that was used to solve the problem.

“The rape threats and hate speech are coming from only one, extremely vocal, extremely visible faction within Gamergate. These radical individuals distract from the main message of Gamergate. It is important to remember that the members of Gamergate, only some of whom threaten to rape and murder women, are simply fighting for ethics in gaming journalism.

In order to clarify their message, members of Gamergate have seen to it that any individual who unfairly singles out the violent and bigoted aspects of the movement for criticism immediately becomes the target of sustained online harassment. Needless to say, we don’t mean for that last sentence to sound like a criticism of Gamergate. We’d even go so far as to say that anybody critical of Gamergate probably had it coming, if that is better.

Listen: If you’re thinking about targeting the authors of this article, or mounting a campaign to get funding for this website pulled, please reconsider, and instead, just tell us how to make this thing look the way you want it to look.

Like you, we value ethics in journalism, and will alter our content in whatever way you feel best supports those values.

Please don’t hurt us.

The car can’t travel a single inch without a map that describes the exact three-dimensional location of streetlights, stop signs, crosswalks, lane markings, and every other crucial aspect of a roadway. Google admitted that the process it currently uses to make the maps are too inefficient to work in the country as a whole. The company frequently says that its car has driven more than 700,000 miles safely, but those are the same few thousand mapped miles, driven over and over again.

It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage. It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal. Because it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper, it will try to drive around both if it encounters either sitting in the middle of the road.