13 November, 2017

In 1973, I invented a “girly drink” called Baileys

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My dinner-party party piece for many years was to say, “Well, actually, I invented Baileys. You know, Baileys Irish Cream. I did that back in 1973.”

If one of the unfortunate listening group is a woman – and this is based on actual past experience – she is likely to respond something like this: “Oh-my-God. Baileys. My mother absolutely adores it. Did you hear that, Jocasta? This man invented Baileys. It’s unreal. I don’t believe it. He must be terribly rich. Baileys Cream. Wow!”

And it’s not as if these rather posh people really adore Baileys. Or even hold it in the same esteem as, say, an obscure Islay single malt or a fine white burgundy from Meursault. Not a bit of it. They might have respected it years ago but most people of legal drinking age regard Baileys as a bit naff. To my mind, they’d be very wrong…

David Gluckman (The Irish Times)

“I Forgot My PIN”: An Epic Tale of Losing $30,000 in Bitcoin

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In January 2016, I spent $3,000 to buy 7.4 bitcoins. At the time, it seemed an entirely worthwhile thing to do. I had recently started working as a research director at the Institute for the Future’s Blockchain Futures Lab, and I wanted firsthand experience with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that uses a blockchain to record transactions on its network. I had no way of knowing that this transaction would lead to a white-knuckle scramble to avoid losing a small fortune…

Mark Frauenfelder (Wired)

The First Time I Met Americans

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HANOI, Vietnam — I first visited the United States in the summer of 1998, when I was invited to attend a literary conference in Montana with four other Vietnamese writers. We flew from Hanoi to Taiwan to Los Angeles. As we crossed the Pacific Ocean, passing through many time zones, I buried myself in sleep and woke up only when the plane hit the tarmac. At passport control, we found ourselves in a huge hall, and I was abruptly taken aback: There were Americans all around us, lots of them! I will never forget that strange feeling. It was bizarre, unbelievable, surreal, that I, a veteran of the Vietnamese People’s Army, was in the United States, surrounded by Americans.

The first time I ever saw Americans was when I was 12 years old. It wasn’t actually blond-haired, blue-eyed Americans that I was seeing up close. The Americans I saw that day were F-4 Phantom bombers, brutally attacking small towns on the shore of Ha Long Bay. It was Aug. 5, 1964, and I was at the beach on a school trip, swimming with my classmates. That was right after the Tonkin Gulf incident, the day President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his decision to expand the war throughout Vietnam…

Bao Ninh (New York Times)

The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how

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Before the year 2014, there were many people using Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Today, there are still many people using services from those three tech giants (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN). Not much has changed, and quite literally the user interface and features on those sites has remained mostly untouched. However, the underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically changed, and those three companies are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the Web.

It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.

Internet activity itself hasn’t slowed down. It maintains a steady growth, both in amount of users and amount of websites…

André Staltz

Welcome To Nauru, The Most Corrupt Country You’ve Never Heard Of

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Nestled in a cluster of islands in the central Pacific Ocean is Nauru, a small country with a totally insane story.

In 1980, the island nation was considered the wealthiest nation on the planet; in 2017, BusinessTech listed it as one of the five poorest countries in the world.

This is a story of a country that journeyed from rags to riches and back to rags. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when a nation exploits its natural resources at the expense of people’s lives…

Ilana Gordon (dose.)

An Extremely Close Reading of Pop Song Duets

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MOST SONGS give you only one perspective: She will always love you. Billie Jean was not his lover. You can check out of “Hotel California” but you can never leave.

But popular music history is studded with the occasional duet that serves more of a purpose than simply an excuse for the existence of cool harmonies, or to provide an opportunity for Paula Abdul to dance around with an anthropomorphized rapping cartoon cat—no offense, MC Skat Kat (and Posse). These duets actually use the form to explore two different, often dueling, perspectives on the same relationship…often, relationships in which men are getting called out on their bullshit.

Let’s assess!

…

Laura Olin (Topic)

Introduction (to SMAC)

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Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri[1] (which we fondly refer to here as SMAC, both as an acronym and in reference to its potent addictive properties) opens in an odd way for a science fiction game. Most such games open with spaceships, star travel, or some futuristic technology. They seek to hook the imagination. But our game begins much more humbly.

SMAC begins with a largely static image of the stars as a woman reads a passage from the book of Genesis, telling the story of man’s final and irrevocable expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The reading goes on for about twenty seconds, which is long enough for the lack of action to be quite noticeable. The effect is that we, the players, are being invited to join the woman in literary contemplation. This, in and of itself, is a strange thing to find in a game – and a strategy game, no less!

The attentive viewer will notice that as the woman ends her quotation, she cites her source as “The Conclave Bible, Datalinks”. Odd … one would normally expect chapter and verse from a bible quote. What are the Datalinks? And which edition is the Conclave Bible?

There isn’t much time to dwell on those questions, though. As the woman finishes, the music strikes up and we are treated to a series of disjointed images from the Earth we know. The context isn’t clear, but the message certainly is. These are scenes of chaos: fire; military equipment; rioting crowds; nuclear explosions; escalating debt – each one flashes by just after it has time to register. The world is out of control. It’s literally on fire. And it’s hurtling toward calamity…

Nick Stipanovich (Paean to SMAC)