“Companies like Microsoft and Sony frequently marketed toxicity as a key selling point for their new online gaming platforms. This is a puzzling strategy from the vantage point of 2020, a time when toxicity is practically synonymous with online gaming and too often spills over into real-world harassment.

“A VFX producer friend of a friend was hired in November to finish some of the 400 effects shots in @catsmovie. His entire job was to remove CGI buttholes that had been inserted a few months before. Which means that, somewhere out there, there exists a butthole cut of Cats. Finding this cut is my white whale #ReleaseTheButtholeCut

Airbnb has a patent for AI that crawls and scrapes everything it can find on you, including social media.

“This is by no means a definitive list of cool indie games coming out this year. But they are the ones that caught my eye.

Download the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save for free as an eBook or audiobook.

“In the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Life You Can Save, Peter Singer brings his landmark book up to date. In addition to presenting his compelling arguments about how we should respond to extreme poverty, Peter examines the progress we are making and recounts how the first edition transformed the lives both of readers and the people they have helped.

The AI face generator was recently improved, and the results are a lot more realistic. Although you still sometimes get ears or front teeth of different sizes, and headgear like scarves can look weird.

Calculus Made Easy is a book on calculus originally published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson, considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject.

“The preliminary terror, which chokes off most fifth-form boys from even attempting to learn how to calculate, can be abolished once for all by simply stating what is the meaning–in common-sense terms–of the two principal symbols that are used in calculating.

These dreadful symbols are:

(1) d which merely means “a little bit of.”

(2) ∫ which is merely a long S, and may be called (if you like) “the sum of.”

Thus ∫dx means the sum of all the little bits of x.

Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life.

When the team rank individuals by wealth, the distribution is exactly like that seen in real-world societies: 80 percent of the population owns only 20 percent of the total capital, while the remaining 20 percent owns 80 percent of the same capital.

That may not be surprising or unfair if the wealthiest 20 percent turn out to be the most talented. But that isn’t what happens. The wealthiest individuals are typically not the most talented or anywhere near it. 

So if not talent, what other factor causes this skewed wealth distribution? “Our simulation clearly shows that such a factor is just pure luck,” say Pluchino and co.

Canadian camouflage manufacturer Hyperstealth Biotechnology has applied for patents on its ‘Quantum Stealth’ material.

“The reason no government wants you to think about all this is because there is no serious humanitarian response possible to a nuclear explosion. There’s no way to really help the immediate victims of a nuclear attack. This is not a hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, or nuclear accident — it is all of these things at once, but worse. No nation on earth is prepared to deal with it.

“This is a regularly updated guide to abstract strategy games: what they are, which are the best, and where to learn, play, buy, and discuss them.