Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Jason Kessler outside the Charlottesville City Hall on August 13, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia Photo: Getty Last summer’s infamous neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia was supposedly about “free speech.” But that claim was always ridiculous. The latest evidence? Jason Kessler, one of the organizers of the rally, sued a woman for swearing at him. And…
President Trump screeches at one of his “campaign-style” neo-fascist rallies in Montana on July 5, 2018 Photo: Getty President Trump gave a speech at the United Nations in September of 2017 where he famously called Kim Jong Un, “rocket man.” Now, in one of the most bizarre stories we’ve heard this week, Secretary of State…
Mark Brown adjusts clocks on the wall at Brown?s Old Time Clock Shop March 6, 2007 in Plantation, Florida. Photo: Getty The European Commission is giving citizens of the European Union the opportunity to cast their vote in a public poll that could lead to the elimination of the sleep-depriving practice of changing clocks twice…
The Sun and Earth, seen from the International Space Station. Photo: NASA All-time heat records have been set around the world this week, in North American cities including Denver, Colorado; Burlington, Vermont; and Montreal, Quebec; as well as in cities in Europe and Russia. But here’s something that might confuse you: Today is also aphelion…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible. The SIGGRAPH 2018 computer graphics and design conference…
French Licorne nuclear test, July 3, 1970. Image: Pierre J/Flickr There are currently about 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth—enough to blow our planet to kingdom come. It’s complete overkill, literally. But how many nukes is enough to deter an enemy? And how many nukes could an aggressor nation drop on an enemy before the effects…
Illustration: Gizmodo What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And guess what: it’s…
Photo: AP On Monday, reports emerged in Page Six, the tabloid New York Post’s gossip page, that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is dating none other than musician Grimes. At first, I didn’t know what to make of this, because—confession: I had absolutely no idea who Grimes is. But reader, after roughly 20 minutes…
Screenshot: Count Dankula (YouTube) Last month, Scottish YouTube comedian Mark Meechan was found guilty of a hate crime after posting a video of his girlfriend’s pug Buddha raising its paw to the words “Sieg Heil.” Though Meechan argued that the motivation behind the anti-Semitic video was simply to prank his girlfriend, he has been fined…
Graphic: Getty The vast majority of Facebook user data that was harvested by Cambridge Analytica came from Americans. But smaller countries are actually better at demonstrating just how big the problem got. Access to just 53 users in Australia reportedly allowed data firms to potentially capture information on over 310,000 people. According to data obtained…