What if we’d grown up with The Usborne Book of 2020s instead of The Usborne Book of the Future? Adapted from a Twitter thread. Forest fires now burn continuously across the USA Forest fires now burn continuously across the USA. Satellites in orbit and drones detect and provide early warning of forests aflame, but much of the population…

This was originally published as s12e10: Shattered, on Wednesday, May 25 2022. For more like it, you can subscribe to my newsletter, Things That Caught My Attention but honestly, today? I don’t care. I’m going to start like this today. I’m sitting at my desk. I’ve just taken five, deep…

Six year old children are primed with the ability to fixate upon and form obsessions about anything. Many children choose as their fixation the Transformers, the subject of a documentary series first broadcast in the United States in 1984. These underrated documentaries tell the story — in an effective, moving…

Starfleet Engineering and the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D Engineering Team take security bugs in ship systems seriously. The Enterprise is not just Starfleet’s flagship. It is also the most technologically advanced and complex starship in the Federation fleet. …

The best, most effective programmers have an understanding of how long computers take to perform certain key operations. This information is known as latency numbers. Programmers should memorize them: knowing them helps create better programs and better experiences for users. For example, it takes: 1 nanosecond to reference a CPU’s…

You need to know this context about yesterday’s think piece. Yesterday, we published a think piece about something that happened. At press time, our contributor (who has now been terminated) asserted that what had happened was not what was initially reported, but instead something else. This has turned out not…

Something happened. Here’s what you think about it. — The thing that happened really matters. Or doesn’t. The only way to learn whether it does or not is to read this think piece. By reading this think piece, you’ll learn that what you thought happened didn’t actually happen. Only people who aren’t smart will think that what they thought…

I was late paying the water bill, so the parking meter refused service until I coughed up. The meter said I had 30 seconds to pay the water bill until I had to move my car, and… I just froze. Of course, then the meter attendant came. Said they were…

Here’s a story about how subtly things that seem “good” can also be harmful. (It also appeared earlier on Twitter. I have re-written it slightly.) I logged into Facebook this afternoon and at the top of my feed was a dialog asking if my workplace was also my business (it…