Even if you develop hives at the sight of the words “bitcoin” and “blockchain”, you probably couldn’t help noticing the shouty news the past week. Bitcoin is down! Bitcoin is slightly up! Way down! Little bit up again. As LWON went to press, Bitcoin was either on the verge of another runaway valuation that would climb […]
The first thing you need to do right now is read Ann’s meditation on vulnerability. She has stitched together three disparate parts of the world no one else would put together, and created something that will make you hate people, love them again, and finally remember that we are all on a different part of […]
May 28 – June 1 2018 This week, LWON guest contributor Robin Meija takes a look under the hood of the Puerto Rico death toll numbers – and finds something disturbing in the statistics On a lighter note, do you like insane apocryphal philosophy and AI? Then you’ll love my story about Descartes’ robot daughter. […]
You’ve heard of René Descartes. 17th century French philosopher; cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am); first principles of enlightenment philosophy and science and all that. You might be less familiar with Descartes’ robot daughter Francine. The tale of her birth and gruesome death makes for a wild historical(ish) ride in its own right, but […]
It started with the maggots. One hot Australian January morning, unlucky beachcombers had discovered millions of the fleshy nubs orgiastically crawling over each other and everything else on Newport Beach. No one knew where they had come from, and the beach-storming maggots left without an explanation. But when they returned, it was for good. They […]
If you’re like most people, you haven’t heard of Roko’s Basilisk. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered the phrase “timeless decision theory”, and immediately stopped looking into it. However, if you did manage to slog through the […]
April 9 -13 What is it like to find yourself masticated by the outrage clickbait industrial complex? Regrettably, Michelle found out when her otherwise uncontroversial article about how to talk to your kids about climate change got “rebranded” for maximum outrage by an anti-climate change propaganda site. Warning: this is not an easy read. The comments […]
The fever and rash appeared the day before we were scheduled to get on a 747 from London to New York. Twin 1’s face was a streaky, sickly red except for death-pale stripes around her mouth. I knew what I was looking at, because Twin 2 had just finished the last of her 10-day course […]
