ReHacked vol. 201: GATTACA is still pertinent 25 years later, One line browser notepad, Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years and more
I never want to debate, but if I had to, I would hope to lose. --Derek Sivers
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GATTACA is still pertinent 25 years later | Nature Genetics #art #history #futurism
GATTACA, a film directed by Andrew Niccol, was released 25 years ago, only a couple of years before the June 2000 announcement of the first working draft sequence of the human genome at the White House Rose Garden. Similarly auspiciously, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was released a year shy of Apollo 11’s landing in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.
Notably, the world presented in Kubrick’s films and books, with regular human space travel to and beyond Jupiter, is still completely removed from current technological capabilities. The notion of human travel to Jupiter now seems even further in the future than it did then, especially with the US national space program languishing in anachronistic technologies. Even the new Artemis Space Launch System, per US Congress dictate, is obliged to use space-shuttle-derived components dating back almost 40 years1. December 2022 marks half a century since humankind last stepped on the moon, and it will be perhaps decades more until astronauts are systematically traveling to Mars or orbiting Jupiter.
One line browser notepad (Example) #lifehack
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
The sound of the dialup, pictured #computers #history
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean?
Tomorrow’s world: A guide to the next 150 years - BBC Future (2013) #history #futurism
As we begin a new year, BBC Future has compiled 40 intriguing predictions made by scientists, politicians, journalists, bloggers and other assorted pundits in recent years about the shape of the world from 2013 to 2150.
Why did men stop wearing high heels? - BBC News #fashion #history
"The high heel was worn for centuries throughout the near east as a form of riding footwear," says Elizabeth Semmelhack of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
Good horsemanship was essential to the fighting styles of Persia - the historical name for modern-day Iran.
"When the soldier stood up in his stirrups, the heel helped him to secure his stance so that he could shoot his bow and arrow more effectively," says Semmelhack.
Estimating Square Roots in Your Head #science #lifehack
Until further notice, think twice before using Google to download software | Ars Technica #security
Searching Google for downloads of popular software has always come with risks, but over the past few months, it has been downright dangerous, according to researchers and a pseudorandom collection of queries.
“Threat researchers are used to seeing a moderate flow of malvertising via Google Ads,” volunteers at Spamhaus wrote on Thursday. “However, over the past few days, researchers have witnessed a massive spike affecting numerous famous brands, with multiple malware being utilized. This is not ‘the norm.’”
Has the first person to live to be 150 been born? – Harvard Gazette #health #futurism #longread
Aging has been long believed to occur through accumulated mutations to DNA, which gradually interfere with the normal functioning of cells, tissues, and organs. In January, Harvard researchers reported that they’d turned the clock back on laboratory mice by altering the epigenome, a suite of molecules that turn DNA on and off in ways specific to different tissues. Because the epigenome is easier to alter than DNA itself, the finding raises the prospect of being able to reset the body to fight diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, whose incidence increases as we get older. The Gazette spoke with Genetics Professor David Sinclair, director of Harvard Medical School’s Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, and postdoctoral fellow Jae-Hyun Yang about the work and its implications for human health and lifespan.
Driverless Buses Take To The Road In Scotland | Hackaday #technology #futurism
Scotland! It’s the land of tartans, haggis, and surprisingly-warm kilts. It’s also ground zero for the first trial of full-sized driverless buses in the United Kingdom.
It’s not just automakers developing driverless technologies. Transit companies are desperate to get in on the action because it would completely upend their entire existing business structure. Now that self-driving buses are finally approaching a basic level of competence, they’re starting to head out to haul passengers from A to B. Let’s look at how the UK’s first driverless bus project is getting on out in the real world.
Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU - Blog | Mullvad VPN #privacy
Right now, the EU Commission is intensely working on a legislative proposal that would monitor and audit the communication of all European Union citizens. The regulation is called Chat Control, and it really does include all types of communication. This means that all of your phone calls, video calls, text messages, every single line that you write in all kinds of messaging apps (including encrypted services), your e-mails — yes, all of this — can be filtered out in real time and flagged for a more in-depth review. This also applies to images and videos saved in cloud services. Basically, everything you do with your smartphone. In other words, your personal life will be fully exposed to government scrutiny. So, why is it that almost no one is talking about this?
Foone Turing — FUN FACT: I own porn I can't watch. #hstory #art #subculture
So this is a copy of Adultery for Fun & Profit, a 1971 X-rated film. It won the Grand Prize at the Amsterdam Adult Film Festival, for the year 1970-1971!
BUT it’s on Cartrivision.
Cartrivision was an early home videotape format announced in 1970, released in June 1972, and dead by July 1973.
It has some “fun” features, like not selling VCRs for it: you had to buy it build into a new console TV. Which were huge, because it was the 70s.
EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems - Blog | Mullvad VPN #privacy
The EU is currently in the process of enacting the chat control law. It has been criticized for creating an EU-wide centralized mass surveillance and censorship system and enabling government eavesdropping on all private communication. But one little talked about consequence of the proposed law is that it makes practically all existing open source operating systems illegal, including all major Linux distributions. It would also effectively ban the F-Droid open source Android app archive.
W3C re-launched as a public-interest non-profit organization | W3C News #internet
Our Director, Tim Berners-Lee, noted: “Today, I am proud of the profound impact W3C has had, its many achievements accomplished with our Members and the public, and I look forward to the continued empowering enhancements W3C enables as it launches its own public-interest non-profit organization, building on 28 years of experience.”
I want to lose every debate. | Derek Sivers #philosophy
I never want to debate, but if I had to, I would hope to lose. I don’t want to convince anyone of my existing perspective. I would rather be convinced of theirs. It’s more interesting to assume that they are right.
Spaghetti-tree hoax - Wikipedia #history #fun
The spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water; a number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled".
Porn conventions are decadent and depraved (and also very mainstream) #adultcontent #extralongread #longread #subculture
Oz—as in The Wizard of Oz— fancied himself as the man pulling the strings behind the curtain. The way Oz saw it, porn, which he called “adult entertainment,” or simply “adult,” was on the cusp of going mainstream, thanks to the internet’s power to democratize culture and an untapped well of freak flags just waiting to rise up from the analog ashes of late 20th century moral majoritarian America.
In order to work for Oz, you needed to produce clean copy, demonstrate unsound news judgement, and most of all, believe in Oz’s vision of mainstream porndom. I was a believer, not because I thought Oz was right, but because I knew my paycheck depended on my fealty to Oz’s idiotic claim. Like Upton Sinclair once observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
BBC Modi Documentary Removal - Internet Archive Blogs #freespeech #internet #censorship
We have observed some confusion about the Internet Archive’s removal of links to a BBC documentary about Indian PM Narendra Modi (“India: the Modi Question”). Internet Archive can confirm that it has removed links in response to DMCA takedown requests from the BBC.
The Mystery of the Dune Font - Fonts In Use #design
Putting a name to the typeface that defined the visual identity of the science fiction series and its author, Frank Herbert
Biotech CEO, 45, May Have Reduced His Biological Age by 5 Years: Bloomberg #health #futurism
Johnson is a biotech entrepreneur who hopes to game nature's course of aging and have the organs and health of an 18-year-old by going through an intense data-driven experimental program he's called Project Blueprint.
According to a recent Bloomberg profile of the CEO, Johnson could spend up to $2 million on his body this year and there are early glimpses that show he may be on track to unlocking the secret to age reversal.
Test results from doctors suggest that Johnson has the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old, and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old, Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance reported.
How France's Largest Semiconductor Company Got Nationalized in Plain Sight #economy
TLDR: China owned a 10.93% stake in Soitec and could have pushed to control it, but instead France just nationalized the company. In a series of power plays, the French board installed a CEO who best reflected National Interests. Management got blindsided.
100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying | Life and style | The Guardian #lifehacks #wellbeing
Whether it’s taking fruit to work (and to the bedroom!), being polite to rude strangers or taking up skinny-dipping, here’s a century of ways to make life better, with little effort involved …
A Brief History of Video Games - EPC #computers #games #history
Many mistakenly cite Atari’s Pong as the first video game, but this simply isn’t true. While Pong was the first successful arcade game, the first interactive electronic game was patented in 1947 by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and was known as the cathode-ray tube amusement device. According to the patent, the “player” would physically attach images of targets such as airplanes to the face of the tube onto preprogrammed coordinates. Using a set of knobs, the player would have a limited amount of time to manipulate a beam of light to fire at the targets. If the beam successfully “hits” the target, a crudely simulated explosion would occur. While Goldsmith’s device was never commercially produced, and it’s likely no prototype was ever built, the patent is the earliest known concept of an electronic device designed for interactive entertainment.
9,000-Year-Old Stonehenge-Like Structure Found Under Lake Michigan #history #nature
Archaeologists found something much more fascinating than they got credit for when searching under the waters of Lake Michigan for shipwrecks: they uncovered a rock with a prehistoric carving of a mastodon, as well as a collection of stones arranged in a Stonehenge-like manner.
In modern archaeology, the use of remote sensing techniques is common: scientists regularly survey lakes and soil for hidden objects.
US Marines Defeat DARPA Robot by Hiding Under a Cardboard Box - ExtremeTech #security #warfare #ai
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested some of its resources into a robot that’s been trained—likely among other things—to identify humans. There’s just one little problem: The robot is cartoonishly easy to confuse.
Army veteran, former Pentagon policy analyst, and author Paul Scharre is gearing up to release a new book called Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Despite the fact that the book isn’t scheduled to hit shelves until Feb. 28, Twitter users are already sharing excerpts via social media. This includes The Economist‘s defense editor, Shashank Joshi, who shared a particularly laughable passage on Twitter.
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