“Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago,” but polling is now the centerpiece of American politics, with “the media obsessing over each statistically insignificant blip”. Why do we pay so much attention to this bullshit?
nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/music/sean-combs-sam-bankman-fried-jail.html
Holds hand to earpiece... Correction: they’re bunking in a jail cell together in Brooklyn, not Gotham. We regret the error.
Link: nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/music/sean-combs-sam-bankman…
“The state should not give itself the right to kill human beings — especially when it kills with premeditation and ceremony, in the name of the law or in the name of its people, and when it does so in an arbitrary and discriminatory fashion.”
The NY Times is beta testing a sports version of their popular Connections game.
Ross Anderson on The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball. “It allows a small group of perfect strangers with little in common besides basketball to experience a flow state — a brief, but intense, form of group transcendence.” Super interesting sociology.
hackaday.com/2024/09/22/hands-on-with-new-iphones-electrically-released-adhesive/
Donald Papp at Hackaday:
There’s a wild new feature making repair jobs easier (not to mention less messy) and iFixit covers it in their roundup of the iPhone 16’s repairability: electrically-released adhesive.
Here’s how it works. The adhesive looks like a curved strip with what appears to be a thin film of aluminum embedded into it. It’s applied much like any other adhesive strip: peel away the film, and press it between whatever two things it needs to stick. But to release it, that’s where the magic happens. One applies a voltage (a 9V battery will do the job) between the aluminum frame of the phone and a special tab on the battery. In about a minute the battery will come away with no force, and residue-free.
Clever.
Foliage season is ramping up here in New England — here’s this year’s foliage prediction map for the US.
“Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.” JFC.
