September Fifth
A veritable cornucopia of things you could treat your eyeballs to this long weekend
Did you know you can download the coronavirus from a database? That’s one of the many techniques the 900-strong team at Pfizer’s vaccine lab are utilizing to stay ahead of this ever-mutating blight. Olivia Goldhill takes you on a tour of the facility for Stat News. link
“It's a very, very repetitious, grinding, scary and sometimes disappointing career, where you're doing things that don't work over and over and over again," No, that’s not me talking about my time working as a greeter at a haunted house. That’s Marc Randolph, Netflix’s other co-founder, talking about startup life. Clearly he’s done well, but he’s right to contravene the standard glorification of the startup career. This is a short read covering a talk he gave at the Qatar Foundation. link
“A clock is a flow meter for entropy.” So says Gerard Milburn, one of the quantum researchers probing the thermodynamics of this quotidian device that, when you think about it, is really just measuring the universe’s inexorable decay into chaos. Sit down with Natalie Wolchover to learn more about the new physics of clocks. link
There are 323 versions of Wikipedia, and they disagree about a lot. The distributed encyclopedia is created and maintained by volunteers, and they have done so in 323 different languages. Keeping a single instance of the world’s repository of knowledge up-to-date with what’s notable and what has happened sounds like the most herculean of endeavors, so it shoudn’’t come as a shock that doing it 323 times over isn’t really happening. Stephen Harrison outlines some of the ideas put forth at the recent Wikimania conference prosing a more programmatic approach to syndicating content around the world. If data structures and big hairy problems are your thing, don’t miss this one. link
Someone figured out how to game the Google search algorithm to get on the first three pages of search results no matter what you put in the box… in Norwegian. Naturally, like most things on the internet these days, it all leads back to crypto. Read more about what’s happening, and how they might have done it. (Credit to Dale for showing me this one). link
Native American hunter-gatherers may have exceeded the bounds of that particular categorization. Researchers argue in a new paper that a site of ancient earthworks at Poverty Point, Louisiana demonstrate our continental forebears possessed not just advanced engineering skills, but an ability to organize their labor in a way that confounds our typical understanding of hunter-gatherers’ political capabilities. link
Getting struck by lightning does odd things to the body. When Shana Williams Turner was struck she had no visible marks or injuries, but started forgetting things and dozing off in the middle of the day. James Walker writes about Shana’s story, and the lightning strike survivors group that helped legitimize her injuries and keep her life on track. link
Another day, another startup promising fat salaries and fatter budgets for scientists working on human longevity. Antonio Regalado pieced together a picture of Altos Labs, a nascent enterprise which has recently started hiring researchers to focus on cell reprogramming. Jeff Bezos is among the many deep-pocketed investors rumored to be behind this particular struggle against death. link
You can draw a straight line between areas of the American south that relied heavily on antebellum slave labor, and those that are economically depressed today. The disparities concurrently manifest in the form of sparse public infrastructure like schools and libraries, and subsequently low educational attainment. These insights come from The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee’s deep investigation into the inextricable linkage between the American economy and racism. I’ve only just begun digging into this book, but it has already begun to reshape how I view our country’s economic and political systems. link