James Erwin, a writer for software manuals in Des Moines, Iowa, responded to a Reddit thread wondering what would happen if the U.S. Marines battled the Roman Empire. His comments lit up the Internet: The 35th MEU is on the ground at Kabul, preparing to deploy to southern Afghanistan. Suddenly, it vanishes. The section of […]
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10 Great Reads About the Senses
10 Great Reads About the Senses tetw: A Tetw reading list The Blind Man Who Learned To See by Michael Finkel – A fascinating profile of a man who is helping other blind people to see using echolocation. Mixed Feelings by Sunny Bains – How researchers can tap the plasticity of the brain to hack our 5 senses, and […]
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Researchers have worked for years to develop a prosthetic limb controlled by the brain or myoelectric activity. For now, many still prefer the old prosthetics that use centuries-old technology: Watching the arm intently as it goes through these motions, Lehman imagines his missing arm moving in the same way. This focused mental exercise triggers neuromuscular […]
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A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy? I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few […]
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Q&A with the man who created Mosaic and Netscape, and has since funded some of the biggest companies on the web: The future was much easier to see if you were on a college campus. Remember, it was feast or famine in those days. Trying to do dialup was miserable. If you were a trained […]
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How Moammar Gadhafi’s regime built a surveillance network called the Electric Army that captured all Internet traffic going in and out of Libya, and how dissidents fought back. Gwaider’s favored method, like that of Kevin Mitnick, the famous American hacker he admired, was “social engineering,” which meant tricking the victims into giving up access themselves. […]
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A look at the rise of the hactivist group Anonymous, and why they’ve targeted certain organizations: On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 […]
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Entrepreneurs continue to reflect on the lessons of Steve Jobs—is his story ultimately a cautionary tale about a person obsessed with the wrong things in life? Soon after Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he decided that a shipping company wasn’t delivering spare parts fast enough. The shipper said it couldn’t do […]
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For centuries, humans who were infected with the rabies virus had a fatality rate of 100 percent. A new treatment is providing hope, but its effectiveness is being called into question: Not long ago, the medical response to this grim situation would have been little more than ‘comfort care’: administration of sedatives and painkillers to […]
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Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Deadspin, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Financial Times, a fiction pick, plus a guest pick from Megan Hess.
