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Railhead = YA Hyperion + Culture
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on Railhead = YA Hyperion + CultureI’ve been a fan of Philip Reeve after reading his thrilling Mortal Engines quartet. Strictly speaking, Philip Reeve is a young adult SF/fantasy author, but I found this series to be more imaginative and darker than many other ‘adult’ novels. A lot of his other books have been for younger children, but when I heard…
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Invariable Reinforcement
Our office manager Sophie passed me the phone. “It’s someone from Google,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. Perhaps this was an invitation to an event, or another chance to test prototype hardware, or something even more magical. I unmute the phone. “Hello?” “Hi, I’m Tim, from Google Digital Development. I’d love to talk about…
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Understanding Pain
Two weeks ago, I was at the Six to Start offices discussing the cost of shipping packages internationally for our next Virtual Race. I bent over to pick up something on the floor and felt an intense stabbing pain in my lower right back. I attempted to straighten up, but it hurt to much that…
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Initial Thoughts on KSR's Aurora
Spoilers abound for the entire plot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy changed my life. I was 14 and reading plenty of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov when I idly flipped through our monthly book club brochure. They usually didn’t have any…
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Shootings, and how not to prevent them
In order to prevent yet more tragedies like the shooting at the Planned Parenthood centre in Colorado Springs, gun rights activists – and rightwingers in general – often suggest that we need to prevent the ‘mentally ill’ from gaining access to firearms. In fact, even Democrats and centrists say that, “I think as a state,…
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Do adblockers favour legacy brands?
With the advent of ‘content-blocking’ in iOS 9, I run an adblock on all my devices* – desktop, laptop, phone, and tablet. Like several hundred million other people, I see next-to-no display adverts on the web. After a few days it becomes so normal to see the online world without ads that it’s a genuine…
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Sentience Footprint
I’m confident that in a hundred years, eating meat will be regarded in the negative way we now view racism or sexism – an ugly, demeaning, and unnecessary act. Like smoking, it will simply fall out of fashion because we’ll find better and healthier alternatives, although we’ll still occasionally eat humanely reared-and-killed animals. Note that…
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Two Million Runners Five
Zombies, Run! just passed the two million sales-and-downloads mark. It’s the fifth-most popular running app in the US, and the most successful smartphone fitness game of all time — a phenomenon on par with Soulcycle, Crossfit, or Tough Mudder. Four years ago, we began as an fun, amusing app idea on Kickstarter. Today, we’ve become a massive…
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Guardian comments are destroying civilization
A vast swathe of people now believe that it’s impossible to have intelligent debate online. This is not an unreasonable belief; scroll down on any newspaper website, let alone YouTube, and you’ll discover the shouting matches that inhabit most comments sections. Jessica Valenti recently wondered whether we shouldn’t simply shut down all comments, like Popular…
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A History of the Future, Now Free
Two years ago, A History of the Future in 100 Objects was published. The book describes a hundred slices of the future of everything, spanning politics, technology, art, religion, and entertainment. Some of the objects are described by future historians; others through found materials, short stories, or dialogues. Today, I’m making all 100 chapters available…
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