Soon young people will no longer understand what a neon sign looks like, much less a city filled with them. What will The Sound of Silence mean to them then? Another part of our cultural inheritance, lost...

A speed increase ranging from 5.4x to 7.4x would sound impressive, if only they said just what kind and quantity of data was being compressed. Was it English text? If so, how many characters? Was it a bitmap file? PCM audio? Whatwhatwhat? It says LZ4 prioritizes speed over compression, but I didn't learn much about the compression ratio or any time/ratio trade-off, either. How can anyone judge based on what's in this article?

Very cool! Then again, I see them using an iPad app to calibrate the prosthetic, which raises obvious questions: How dependent is it on that app? How secure is it? How long will it be maintained?

And, what are her options if the company that manufactures this exotic piece of bespoke technology goes out of business? If it can happen to your e-bike, it can happen to your highly-customized body part. Is there such a thing as open standards for electronic limbs? We should all hope that tech like this becomes as widespread, cheap and commoditized as possible.

"Up next in science news: Decades after its discovery, scientists have at last determined the elusive molecular structure of BO. Film at 11."

I'm grateful to TFA for mentioning the Apple podcast app, which whatever you think of the design has been broken since at least version 15.0 and possibly earlier. (The 'Up Next' queue simply doesn't work anymore.)

See this thread if you really, really want to spend your day reading a litany of complaints.

I don't have a number for you. But given the number of scams that fit this description, any such offer should be considered a scam until proved otherwise.

'Boustrophedon' spotted in the wild: hmph. That has to be the first time I've seen that word used outside the Jargon File.

How the hell is this story supposedly about falsehoods promulgated on social media? It's about a falsehood sourced from 2018 social media, and promulgated today by the Prime Minister of Israel, through his spokesman!

The actual headline here should be 'Israeli spokesman misrepresents video footage lifted from social media', or words to that effect. Media need to put the responsibility for things that governments say and do, in the here and now, squarely where it belongs. In this case, on the Israeli government.

Jesus.

Compression produces artifacts, as we all know. So what might video compressed through deep learning actually look like, especially at low bit rates? Instead of 8x8 pixel blocks, would you see semantic errors or "close enough" matches manifest as video 'ghosts'?

Imagine watching a time lapse of your favourite YouTuber gluing 100,000 matches together or whatever, but when they set it aflame an actual face shows up 'cause of a fluke. Religious types will say it's Jesus or the devil. Or suppose, whenever a single-bit error creeps into your stream, the algorithm produces the kind of f'ed up nightmare fuel from of its training set that Google Deep Dream was so notorious for. Messing with AI could make for a fun party game.

Will it help make crystal meth? Asking for a friend.

"Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty." Job 5:17

The story "Division by Zero" by Ted Chiang. Can be found in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others (they're all great stories, actually).

The story "Luminous" by Greg Egan, from the collection of the same title. What happens when mathematicians discover that: (a) there is a flaw in the structure of mathematical truth; and (b) that mathematical truth can be altered by performing calculations around the flaw.

Someone has already collected a bunch of mathematical fiction here.

This topic was covered in a segment of RadioLab a few years back.

So, I guess Tomorrow Dies after all...

The difference between establishment, Eisenhower-style conservatism and today's variety, dominated by the South, is that conservatives of the Southern stripe tend to score much lower on openness to experience. This way of thinking tends to feel that it already knows what it needs to know, and that anyone who comes along proclaiming that, say, we need to put a price on carbon actually has some other agenda, like taking away your freedom because of how eeevil and librul they are. Since the fundamental tenet of science is empiricism (i.e. being committed to accepting what experience is telling you about reality, no matter how unintuitive), it's small wonder that science comes to be viewed with suspicion.