22nd August 2021

Did America just lose Afghanistan because of WhatsApp? ‘It appears the Taliban tried something different this time around. Open source reporting shows that rather than rocking up and going toe to toe with the Afghan national army, they appear to have simply called everyone in the entire country, instead, told them they were in control, and began assuming the functions of government as they went.’

Another instance in which Bitcoin is seen to be helping individuals achieve some form of economic independence in an authoritarian regime. As political demonstrations show the world that Cubans are tired of dictatorship, Bitcoin is providing an option to peacefully protest and opt out of a broken system.

Is anyone surprised? Harvard just discovered that PowerPoint is worse than useless.

Five truths about covid that defy our intuitions by Tim Harford. ‘It’s striking how much Covid confusion still reigns. Some of the informational miasma is deliberate — there’s profit for some in the bewilderment of others — but much of it stems from the fact that epidemics defy our intuition.’

Beauty filters are changing the way young girls see themselves. When augmented-reality face filters first appeared on social media, they were a gimmick. They allowed users to play a kind of virtual dress-up: change your face to look like an animal, or suddenly grow a moustache, for example. Today, though, more and more young people—and especially teenage girls—are using filters that “beautify” their appearance and promise to deliver model-esque looks by sharpening, shrinking, enhancing, and recolouring their faces and bodies.

Wonderful. Adam&eveDDB launches worlds biggest inclusivity movement for people with disabilities – ‘#WeThe15’. Supported by the International Paralympic Committee, the film supports the 15% of the global population who have a disability. (1’51”)

Perhaps the true value of an adventure is that it shrinks our ego. From Conde Nast Traveller – For the most intrepid travellers, exploration has more to do with mental resilience than trying to reach a destination.

Asteroid update. Scientists think they know where the asteroid which killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago came from. Researchers simulated more than 100,000 asteroid trajectories, finding that an asteroid more than six miles wide hurtled towards Earth 250 million years ago. Frequency of occurrence is five times more common than previously thought. Nasa has increased the odds of an asteroid hitting Earth before the year 2300, from 1 in 2,700 to 1 in 1,750. The riskiest single date is 24 September 2182, so make sure to pop that in your diaries.

Pixel: a biography. ‘An exact mathematical concept, pixels are the elementary particles of pictures, based on a subtle unpacking of infinity’. This brief history of the pixel begins with Joseph Fourier in the French Revolution and ends in the year 2000.

Blip is a short 2D animation that explores the topic of digital addiction, an issue increasing year by year and especially during the pandemic lockdown. (1′ 12′)

1st August 2021

From @storythings. The Death of Counterculture: Where Are All The New Style Tribes?
‘In the early days of the teenager we had mods and rockers fighting on Brighton beach. But since grunge, the idea of style tribes has faded. This piece looks at a few ideas as to what happened: “Put simply, thanks to the internet, the churn of ideas, and the speed with which those spread – and become co-opted by fashion brands – makes the establishment of a style tribe a seriously tall order. Style tribes need time to bed in – those cited above didn’t just explode, but seeded and grew over the best part of a decade – and the internet’s info torrent does not allow that: the new is old almost instantaneously.”

From the excellent Tortoisemedia. ‘First he came for your friends, with a mission to bring the world closer together. Now Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has announced an even bigger ambition: to build Facebook into a unified and interconnected digital world…. a goal to “transition” Facebook into a “metaverse company”? To Zuck, it’s a “successor to a mobile internet” where “instead of just viewing content – you are in it”. That means that Facebook users would feel as present in it, as if they were in the real world. 

Apparently, TikTok never drops below 95% in the proportion of installed users that open up the app weekly. Here is a useful WSJ video on how the TikTok algorithm works.

The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Zhang has supplied concrete evidence to support what critics had long been saying on the outside: Facebook makes election interference easy, and that unless such activity hurts the company’s business interests, it can’t be bothered to fix the problem.

A good read on the problem of link rot – the phenomenon of article links no longer pointing to their original target. This story reveals the extent to which the internet, which holds so much of our knowledge, is rotting: overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links, have at least one rotted link.”

Interesting perspective from The Atlantic, on a remote work future. ‘Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.’

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian and expert on climate denial at Harvard, says the anti-vax movement is following the same playbook. “The doubt mongers have a much easier job than scientists because they don’t have to prove anything.”

Young people can make real money selling vintage clothes online — if they can stay on the right side of the algorithm. These are the Teen Tycoons of Depop.

Great piece from The Guardian. Mental health memes are everywhere – can they offer more than comic relief? A meme may help, but it doesn’t come close to a hug.

As a keen paddler, I particularly liked this piece – Swimming gives your brain a boost – but scientists don’t know yet why it’s better than other aerobic activities. 

18th July

Super Human: Channel 4’s Awesome Paralympic Games Advert. This moving and upbeat film by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young shows a real human side to Britain’s elite athletes competing in Tokyo this summer. Top marks for featuring a Bugsy Malone song as a soundtrack and the line “To be a Paralympian there’s gotta be something wrong with you.”
(3′:00″) (HT@storythings)

“To be an optimist is to be highly familiar with the historical situation of mankind throughout most of its existence.” This piece, explores thenotion of “reflexive modernity”. As a society, we have progressed from “unconscious modernity,” where science and technology developed without any concern for the consequences of its evolution, to a world where what humanity does is reflexively examined for its potential future risks.

The Faults. Mountains are huge creatures on a scale of billions of years, and this work presents a fast-forward look at the changes in these mountains, not only in the form of growth, but also in the form of fractures and destruction. These movements are driven by different noise algorithms. (1′ : 41″)

After Twitter’s launch fifteen years ago, the LA Times described it as an alternative to “your MySpace page”.

No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world. The number of gamers there, is bigger than the entire populations of the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK combined.

For years, mathematicians have said it’s unknowable. New proof suggests otherwise. How many numbers exist? We might know one day.  Not every infinity is the same.…

Wonderful. Watch Beluga whales migrating on this livestream.

You should use emojis at work 👍 A well-placed emoji can save you a whole lot of words...and apparently, Clippy’s coming back. This time as an emoji.

Video tricks by a stop motion animator. This wizardry is outrageously good. (30″)

1. Just marvellous. This quirky Pedigree campaign imagines thefantastical former lives of shelter pets. (1′:00″)