| The Best Screen Time |
[23 Jul 2015|11:30am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/07/tech_goes_home_program_teaches_computer_basics_to_low_income_parents_and.html BOSTON—The library in Boston’s Haynes Early Education Center is a bright, cheery space filled with well-stocked bookcases, tables ringed by small wooden chairs, art supplies, cushions for story time, and dozens of laminated vocabulary words strung below an oversize paper alphabet. But one of the most important learning tools here is a small gray box lit by a blinking green LED, perched well above kid-height on a yellow wall by the door. It’s the Wi-Fi transponder that brings broadband Internet to the fingertips of about 175 small children—preschool through first grade, mostly from low-income black and Hispanic families.
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| Baths Are Better Than Showers |
[23 Jul 2015|03:50pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/07/baths_are_better_than_showers_a_manifesto.html I’d like to think that I am measured on my intellect, but the truth is that the most radical and fascinating thing about me seems to be that I take a bath every day. People can’t get over it. They’ll act like they’ve let it go, and then years later, when I think we should have pizza and they think we should have burritos, they’ll say, “Well, you take baths.” I’m honestly just impressed by how much it matters to people.
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| Do Androids Dream of Electric Bananas? |
[23 Jul 2015|05:09pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/07/google_deepdream_it_s_dazzling_creepy_and_tells_us_a_lot_about_the_future.html Last month Google introduced a trippy program called DeepDream, which early adopters have used to generate psychedelic variations of everything from Hieronymus Bosch to porn (NSFW!). By taking these objects and subjecting them to analysis using a “neural net”—or what’s known as “deep learning”—DeepDream produces images bubbling with eyes, birds, blinding contours, and other things that look like they belong on the cover of a King Crimson album. It’s dazzling and surreal—further evidence of Salvador Dalí’s discovery that eyeballs can only improve art—but also creepy. It suggests some sort of creativity in the mind of the machine doing the processing, and some sort of dreamer at the heart of the dream.
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