Topic: ART - on July 16, 2016 at 6:25:00 PM CEST
Ulysses and the Lie of Technological Progress
How a broken Twitter adaption of James Joyce’s novel reveals the secret of Bloomsday. Today is Bloomsday, a folk holiday adopted to celebrate the life and work of the Irish writer James Joyce, in particular his 1922 novel Ulysses. The name derives from the book’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, one of the Dubliners the book follows through the day of June 16, 1904. First celebrated mere years after the novel’s publication, Bloomsday festivities have been enjoyed for decades. Today, Bloomsday is marked globally in various ways, but especially in Dublin, where it has taken on the character of a citywide festival and as a pilgrimage for aspiring high modernists worldwide. In our age of fast-obsolescing smartphones and apps, it’s hard to find fault in a makeshift holiday that celebrates a book nearly a century old. But nevertheless, it’s also troublesome to observe Bloomsday as a rote paean to Joyce and Ulysses.
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Topic: STRANGE - on July 16, 2016 at 6:13:00 PM CEST
For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that's coming to LED bulbs.
In 1924, representatives of the world's leading lightbulb manufacturers formed Phoebus, a cartel that fixed the average life of an incandescent bulb at 1,000 hours, ensuring that people would have to regularly buy bulbs and keep the manufacturers in business. But hardware store LED bulbs have a typical duty-cycle of 25,000 hours -- meaning that the average American household will only have to buy new bulbs ever 42 years or so.
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Topic: SCIENCE - on July 16, 2016 at 6:10:00 PM CEST
The Curious Case of the Bog Bodies
One Saturday in the spring of 1950, brothers Viggo and Emil Højgaard from the small village of Tollund, in Denmark, were cutting peat in a local bog when they uncovered a dead man. He looked as though he had only just passed away. His eyelashes, chin stubble, and the wrinkles in his skin were visible; his leather cap was intact. Suspecting murder, the brothers called the police in nearby Silkeborg, but the body wasn’t what it seemed. Cracking the case required a special breed of forensic analysis. Famed Danish archaeologist Peter V. Glob, from the University of Aarhus, arranged for the body, along with its bed of peat, to be excavated and transferred to the Silkeborg Museum in a giant wooden box. An examination of the contents of the dead man’s stomach suggested—and radiocarbon dating later confirmed—that he had lived during the third century B.C., in the pre-Roman Iron Age. For more than 2,000 years, Tollund Man, as the corpse became known, had lain at the bottom of the bog, nearly untouched by time, as all of recorded history marched forward over his head.
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Topic: Phone - on July 16, 2016 at 6:08:00 PM CEST
Are We All Becoming Pavlov’s Dogs?
Blame your smartphone (and Steve Jobs).
Scenario 1: Your smartphone buzzes. Without a moment’s hesitation you grab it out of your pocket and check the alert: Was it an email? A test? A Facebook notification? Or just a phantom vibration? Scenario 2: You looked at your phone a few minutes ago, but now you're standing in line at the market and grab it to check for messages even though your phone has not beeped, vibrated, or flashed. Scenario 3: You posted on Facebook a few minutes ago and although you have not been notified of any responses, likes, or whatever, you tap the icon and scroll through the newest posts. You see that your best friend from high school just posted a photo of her trip to Maui, and you smile when you become the first to “like” it. Scenario 4: You are at dinner with a group of friends and you have all agreed to put your phones on silent and stash them away. After the appetizer, you get up to go to the restroom (even though you really don’t need to go) and upon opening the restroom door, you grab your phone and check the sports scores, your email, or whatever. Looking around you notice that every other person in the restroom is doing the same.
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Topic: WEB - on July 16, 2016 at 6:07:00 PM CEST
Fast jeder Zweite surft am Klo im Internet
Dies ergab eine Umfrage des Portals YouGov Einer Umfrage von YouGov zufolge nutzt mittlerweile fast jeder Zweite das Smartphone am Klo. 45 Prozent der 1035 Teilnehmer gaben an, dass sie auf der Toilette selten oder regelmäßig im Netz surfen. Für 61 Prozent der Frauen ist die Internet-Nutzung am Klo eher tabu als für Männer (48 Prozent). Nur 13 Prozent der 18- bis 29-Jährigen gaben an, noch nie das Smartphone oder Tablet für Internetzugang auf der Toilette verwendet zu haben.
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Topic: WEB - on July 16, 2016 at 6:05:00 PM CEST
WWW-Erfinder ruft EU-Bürger auf, sich noch an Netzneutralitäts-Debatte zu beteiligen
Bis Montag noch kann sich jeder der EU-Konsultation zur Netzneutralität beteiligen Am 18. Juli endet die öffentliche Konsultation der EU zur Netzneutralität. In einem offenen Brief fordert WWW-Erfinder Tim Berners-Lee gemeinsam mit der Stanford-Professorin Barbara van Schewick und Creative-Commons-Gründer Lawrence Lessig EU-Bürger auf, sich daran zu beteiligen. Sie appellieren an Nutzer, Aktivisten und Organisationen, "das Internet in Europa zu retten".
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Topic: WEB - on July 16, 2016 at 6:03:00 PM CEST
2 Days to Save the Open Internet in Europe: An Open Letter
We have four days to save the open Internet in Europe By Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Lawrence Lessig, and Professor Barbara van Schewick Network neutrality for hundreds of millions of Europeans is within our grasp. Securing this is essential to preserve the open Internet as a driver for economic growth and social progress. But the public needs to tell regulators now to strengthen safeguards, and not cave in to telecommunications carriers’ manipulative tactics. We are so close. In October, the European Parliament voted on network neutrality rules for the European Union. Now regulators are writing guidelines to determine how the law will be applied in practice. These guidelines could secure net neutrality in Europe – if regulators use them to close potential loopholes in the law.
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Topic: WEB - on July 16, 2016 at 6:00:00 PM CEST
How the internet was invented
In 40 years, the internet has morphed from a military communication network into a vast global cyberspace. And it all started in a California beer garden.
In the kingdom of apps and unicorns, Rossotti’s is a rarity. This beer garden in the heart of Silicon Valley has been standing on the same spot since 1852. It isn’t disruptive; it doesn’t scale. But for more than 150 years, it has done one thing and done it well: it has given Californians a good place to get drunk. During the course of its long existence, Rossotti’s has been a frontier saloon, a gold rush gambling den, and a Hells Angels hangout. These days it is called the Alpine Inn Beer Garden, and the clientele remains as motley as ever. On the patio out back, there are cyclists in spandex and bikers in leather. There is a wild-haired man who might be a professor or a lunatic or a CEO, scribbling into a notebook. In the parking lot is a Harley, a Maserati, and a horse.
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Topic: War and Peace - on July 16, 2016 at 5:58:00 PM CEST
Russia building hypersonic stealth bomber than can launch nuclear bombs from space
Russia's Defense Ministry has said that media reports concerning its development of a stealth bomber capable of launching nuclear attacks from space had been "misinterpreted". In a statement issued to Tass.ru, a ministry spokesperson said that while Russia is developing advanced jet engines capable of space flight, the idea that a bomber would be able to launch a nuclear strike from space was "hypothetical."
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Topic: 911 - on July 16, 2016 at 5:56:00 PM CEST
White House says 28 pages of 9/11 report show no evidence of Saudi role
After years of political wrangling, the suppressed section of a 2002 congressional report that detailed possible ties between the Saudi government and the 9/11 terrorist attacks was released today. The classified documents have been the source of heated speculation for years, as they highlighted alleged links between high-ranking members of the Saudi royal family and the 9/11 hijackers. Many political figures who had previously seen the report led the charge calling for its release, including former Sen. Bob Graham, who said the 28 pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia,” and Minnesota Congressman Rick Nolan, who said the pages “confirm that much of the rhetoric preceding the U.S. attack on Iraq was terribly wrong.”
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Topic: Religion - on July 16, 2016 at 5:53:00 PM CEST
1,600-Year-Old Illuminated Manuscript of the Aeneid Digitized & Put Online by The Vatican
It’s fair to say that every period which has celebrated the literature of antiquity has held epic Roman poet Virgil in extremely high regard, and that was never more the case than during the early Christian and medieval eras. Born in 70 B.C.—writes Clyde Pharr in the introduction to his scholarly Latin text—“Vergil was ardently admired even in his own day, and his fame continued to increase with the passing centuries. Under the later Roman Empire the reverence for his works reached the point where the Sortes Virgilianae came into vogue; that is, the Aeneid was opened at random, and the first line on which the eyes fell was taken as an omen of good or evil.”
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