Extenuating Circumstances

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 24th from 06:02 to 10:20:

• How Facebook’s Messenger Got Its New Look in a New Jersey Basement | WIRED – "Other M4 design elements show things like the backlog in your inbox and an improved way to organize group communications."
• 2018 American Institutional Confidence Poll – Georgetown University Baker Center McCourt School of Public Policy – Well I guess the propaganda worked, then
• UCR Spiders Site: Myth of the Brown Recluse –
• Redefining the Mole | NIST –
• The Thing (listening device) – Wikipedia –

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 23rd from 11:03 to 16:01:

• DTA goes cold on blockchain – InnovationsAus.com – "“Our position today, and this is an early write-up, is that blockchain is an interesting technology that would be well worth being observed, but without standardisation and a lot more work, for every use of blockchain that you would consider today there is a better technology,” Mr Alexander told the hearing."
• Martian Overrider Blues: Thin Air by Richard K. Morgan | Tor.com – "And now, eleven years after the release of his last science fiction novel, Richard K. Morgan returns to the genre in grand form with Thin Air, a (yes, dark and gritty) novel set in the same universe as Black Man/Thirteen. (More about this shared universe later!)"
• W+K: Hair Nah! | Wieden+Kennedy –
• An Alternative History of Silicon Valley Disruption | WIRED – "But did the digital revolution have to end in an oligopoly? In our fog of resentment, three recent books argue that the current state of rising inequality was not a technological inevitability. Rather the narrative of disruption duped us into thinking this was a new kind of capitalism. The authors argue that tech companies conquered the world not with software, but via the usual route to power: ducking regulation, squeezing workers, strangling competitors, consolidating power, raising rents, and riding the wave of an economic shift already well underway."
• The Sims’ Unseen Design Notebooks – Revealing Gaming’s History – Game Informer – "In the video above, the museum's director Jon-Paul Dyson and archivist Julia Novakovic page through legendary game designer Will Wright's notes and sketches showing the earliest glimpses into the creation of the gaming juggernaut The Sims."
• Home | The Strong – "The Strong® is a highly interactive, collections-based museum devoted to the history and exploration of play. It is one of the largest history museums in the United States and one of the leading museums serving families."
• Huawei Is Launching A New Gaming Phone To Rival The Switch, And It Costs Over $1,000 – Nintendo Life –
• Katamari Damacy’s Creator Had To Move Mountains To Get His Game Made – Excerpt from Laura's book!
• Gamasutra: David Lightbown’s Blog – Classic Tools Retrospective: The tools that built Deus Ex, with Chris Norden – Ooh, this is interesting
• How Many Space Stations Does This Planet Need? – The New York Times – Well that's a complicated question
• Android: a visual history of Google’s OS on its 10th anniversary – The Verge –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 22nd from 20:18 to 11:56:

• The Sims’ Unseen Design Notebooks – Revealing Gaming’s History – Game Informer – "In the video above, the museum's director Jon-Paul Dyson and archivist Julia Novakovic page through legendary game designer Will Wright's notes and sketches showing the earliest glimpses into the creation of the gaming juggernaut The Sims."
• Home | The Strong – "The Strong® is a highly interactive, collections-based museum devoted to the history and exploration of play. It is one of the largest history museums in the United States and one of the leading museums serving families."
• Huawei Is Launching A New Gaming Phone To Rival The Switch, And It Costs Over $1,000 – Nintendo Life –
• Katamari Damacy’s Creator Had To Move Mountains To Get His Game Made – Excerpt from Laura's book!
• Gamasutra: David Lightbown’s Blog – Classic Tools Retrospective: The tools that built Deus Ex, with Chris Norden – Ooh, this is interesting
• How Many Space Stations Does This Planet Need? – The New York Times – Well that's a complicated question
• Android: a visual history of Google’s OS on its 10th anniversary – The Verge –
• Thalmic Labs rebrands as North, launches $999 Alexa-powered holographic glasses | VentureBeat –
• API Developer Portal V2 –

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 22nd from 15:07 to 16:10:

• Governing Artificial Intelligence | Data & Society – "The report draws the connections between AI and human rights; reframes recent AI-related controversies through a human rights lens; and reviews current stakeholder efforts at the intersection of AI and human rights."
• Establishing an AI code of ethics will be harder than people think – MIT Technology Review – "Philip Alston, an international legal scholar at NYU’s School of Law, proposes a solution to the ambiguous and unaccountable nature of ethics: reframing AI-driven consequences in terms of human rights. "[Human rights are] in the constitution," Alston said at the same conference. "They’re in the bill of rights; they’ve been interpreted by courts," he said. If an AI system takes away people’s basic rights, then it should not be acceptable, he said."
• Tactical Sat Headed for Orbit, Testing | EE Times – "the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a research effort in 2012 nicknamed “SeeMe,” for Space Enabled Effects for Military Engagements. The DARPA program has since been cancelled, but Raytheon continued internal development of a prototype satellite designed to quickly deliver high-resolution battlefield imagery comparable to commercial satellites."
• AI and the Trolley Problem | Tor.com – "A provocative story about the relationship between the humans on a British airbase and the AI security system that guards that base. When a group of humans are killed, the question is who is responsible and why."
• Opinion | To the Next ‘BBQ Becky’: Don’t Call 911. Call 1-844-WYT-FEAR. – The New York Times – what if the new york times, but buzzfeed
• iPhones are hard to use  ¶  Personal Weblog of Joe Clark, Toronto –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 21st from 21:56 to 13:24:

• The Urge to Strangle(The Strangler Pattern) | LeadingAgile –
• Opinion | Who Will Teach Silicon Valley to Be Ethical? – The New York Times – "How can an industry that, unlike other business sectors, persistently promotes itself as doing good, learn to do that in reality? Do you want to not do harm, or do you want to do good? These are two totally different things."
• ‘Not good enough’: Toronto privacy expert resigns from Sidewalk Labs over data concerns | CBC News – "A privacy expert who resigned this week from her role as an advisor to Sidewalk Labs, the Google sister company set to build a "smart" neighbourhood on Toronto's waterfront, is concerned that the "treasure trove" of data collected there will be vulnerable to attacks."
• Deep Learning on a Mac with AMD GPU – Fabrice Daniel – Medium –
• Royal Statistical Society Publications –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 19th from 21:21 to 14:29:

• Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon: Cryo-arithmetic engines? –
• Cryo-arithmetic engine | Revelation Space Wiki | FANDOM powered by Wikia –
• Army of Trolls’s Store | Society6 –
• Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? – Issue 65: In Plain Sight – Nautilus –
• Veronica Mars Revival: What We Know About Season 4 on Hulu –

This is an auto-posted collection of my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 19th from 12:10 to 12:35:

• Stet, a gorgeous, intricate, tiny story of sociopathic automotive vehicles / Boing Boing –
• STET –
• Piano training enhances the neural processing of pitch and improves speech perception in Mandarin-speaking children | PNAS – Musical training is beneficial to speech processing, but this transfer’s underlying brain mechanisms are unclear. Using pseudorandomized group assignments with 74 4- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children, we showed that, relative to an active control group which underwent reading training and a no-contact control group, piano training uniquely enhanced cortical responses to pitch changes in music and speech (as lexical tones). These neural enhancements further generalized to early literacy skills: Compared with the controls, the piano-training group also improved behaviorally in auditory word discrimination, which was correlated with their enhanced neural sensitivities to musical pitch changes. Piano training thus improves children’s common sound processing, facilitating certain aspects of language development as much as, if not more than, reading instruction.
• The Org Chart Test – Rands in Repose –
• Backwards or forwards; Reflection for a restless mind | SB129 – I end up feeling bored by the ideas I’ve already thought, annoyed at the banality of my brain, and with this come the loss of curiosity and excitement. I want to move to new pastures, think new things and imagine a different set of possibilities. This is made worse  because I’m away from teaching and away from Goldsmiths; so the book feels like I’m making a prison for myself. A way to remain in the past.

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 18th from 16:29 to 09:15:

• The Trump administration’s crazy losing streak in the courts: No, Jeff Sessions, it’s not about the judges – The Washington Post – "The case, she wrote, was “quite easy. Under the most elementary precepts of administrative law, an agency has no choice but to provide a reasoned explanation for its actions….”" – this is your slow burn constitutional crisis, right here – when the government of the day decides that administrative law can be thrown out the window and government is run by edict
• The Howard/O’Brien Relate Counseling Session Transcripts – Part 1 – Chapter 1 – cstross – The Laundry Files – Charles Stross [Archive of Our Own] –
• DisneyQuest is dead, and Disney’s VR experiments are gone with it – Polygon –
• You can now get Alexa to use its inside voice with Whisper Mode – The Verge –
• Weather Channel continues its terrifying mixed reality campaign with wildfire segment – The Verge –

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 17th from 13:29 to 12:40:

• Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind | Smart News | Smithsonian – "A new study suggests that exposure to large home libraries may have a long-term impact on proficiency in three key areas" – Man, I have a bunch of opinions about this, mainly because "books"
• There’s nothing dystopian at all about these high-tech blinkers for humans – The Verge – "The Wear Space certainly has a dystopian vibe. It looks like a high-tech version of the “wings” (or bonnets) worn by characters in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. In the book, these are designed to hide the wearer from view but also limit their ability to perceive their surroundings, smothering any feelings of independence or freedom."
• Exploring Custom watchOS Watch Faces – David Smith, Independent iOS Developer –
• Nostalgic photographs that capture Hong Kong in its prime in the 1970s and ’80s | Creative Boom – looks legit, but photographs do not get across the smell at all
• Journal raises $1.5 million to bring Google-like search to your personal life | TechCrunch – An Entire History of You

This is an auto-posted collection of public links I’ve either posted to, or favourites from Twitter, my Instapaper bookmarks and my public links posted to Pinboard.in for October 16th from 11:19 to 10:43:

• The Reference Frame: Chapline: black holes don’t exist – “George Chapline just gave the most provoking and most bizarre colloquium we have seen at Harvard for years. (I guess that the talk would not be bizarre enough for Quantoken and perhaps not even for Arun, and I apologize if they will be disappointed by the amount of strangeness.) Chapline used to be a T.A. for Feynman's lectures, he was awarded by various awards, but his goal right now is to revolutionize our understanding of the strong gravitational fields.”
• [gr-qc/0012094] Quantum Phase Transitions and the Breakdown of Classical General Relativity – “It is proposed that the event horizon of a black hole is a quantum phase transition of the vacuum of space-time analogous to the liquid-vapor critical point of a bose fluid. The equations of classical general relativity remain valid arbitrarily close to the horizon yet fail there through the divergence of a characteristic coherence length. The integrity of global time, required for conventional quantum mechanics to be defined, is maintained. The metric inside the event horizon is different from that predicted by classical general relativity and may be de Sitter space. The deviations from classical behavior lead to distinct spectroscopic and bolometric signatures that can, in principle, be observed at large distances from the black hole.”
• On the viability of gravitational Bose–Einstein condensates as alternatives to supermassive black holes | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Oxford Academic – “It is argued that astrophysical Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs) most likely form through a quasi-static contraction of ultradense cores of neutron stars. Such an evolutionary track would ensure that there is sufficient time left for the nuclear matter to stably liberate the excess of thermal energy, enable the core’s matter to intercommunicate and undergo a phase transition to form stellar BECs.”
• Dark Energy Stars – “Event horizons and closed time-like curves cannot exist in the real world for the simple reason that they are inconsistent with quantum mechanics. Following ideas originated by Robert Laughlin, Pawel Mazur, Emil Mottola, David Santiago, and the speaker it is now possible to describe in some detail what happens physically when one approaches and crosses a region of space-time where classical general relativity predicts there should be an infinite red shift surface. This quantum critical physics provides a new perspective on a variety of enigmatic astrophysical phenomena including supernovae explosions, gamma ray bursts, positron emission, and dark matter.,”
• Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars? – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus – “Chapline and Laughlin argue that they can describe the collapsed stars that most scientists take to be black holes as regions where spacetime has undergone a phase transition. They find that the laws of general relativity are valid everywhere in the vicinity of the collapsed star, except at the event horizon, which marks the boundary between two different phases of spacetime.”
• What I loved about Paul Allen | Bill Gates –
• Mailbag: AI Research on Dialogue and Story Generation | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling –
• Google’s AI-powered Piano Genie lets anyone improvise perfectly by bashing buttons – The Verge –