Seen in → No.99
- 🦏 🇰🇪 😭 What I learned documenting the last male northern white rhino’s death. “Sudan’s death was not unexpected, yet it resonated with so many. When I arrived, he was surrounded by the people who had loved him and protected him. Joseph Wachira, the man pictured [above] and one of his dedicated keepers, went to give him one more rub behind his ear. Sudan leaned his heavy head into Wachira’s. I took a photo of two old friends together for the last time. … Watching a creature die—one who is the last of its kind—is something I hope never to experience again. It felt like watching our own demise.”
- 🤯 🧮 📹 Beautiful! The Mandelbulb is a 3-dimensional fractal: since a canonical 3-dimensional Mandelbrot set does not exist, it is possible to construct Mandelbrot sets in 4 dimensions using quaternions & bicomplex numbers
- Why Fortnite Went Down During the Season X Finale. “Why do this? This is a media playbook. Season X is Fortnite’s ‘Avengers: Endgame’. You build it up with suspense, and after go radio silent to build up anticipation Monocultural events require live, synchronous experiences – which need to be ‘shaped’ or ‘produced’” [Btw, this is on Matthew Ball’s new website, which you should keep an eye on. He also wrote one of my favorite pieces this year, Fortnite Is the Future, Probably Not for the Reasons You Think]
- 👀 🛰 Are We Ready for Satellites That See Our Every Move? “We must consider the longer-term implications of having commercial high-resolution satellite image of this quality and what will happen when we can identify individuals or license plates from space — because that’s not far-off. We are not ready for the ethical boundaries this invasion of privacy will cross.”
- 🚗 💩 Worn-Out Flash Memory Is Suddenly Bricking Tesla Cars. “The issue is with a flash storage chip called the eMMC that is embedded on a board called the MCU1. According to experts who have studied the problem, Teslas are writing vehicle logs to this flash storage chip so much that it eventually goes bad.”
- 💸 💩 How A Massive Facebook Scam Siphoned Millions Of Dollars From Unsuspecting Boomers. “The subscription trap works by tricking people into buying what they think is a single free trial of a celebrity-endorsed product. Although the customers would receive the product — which in most cases was not made by Ads Inc. itself — in reality, the celebrity has nothing to do with the offer. And in purchasing the free trial, the customer unwittingly commits to a pricey monthly subscription designed to be hard to cancel.”
- Paris zoo unveils the ‘blob’ slime mould with 720 sexes which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal. “The blob has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs and wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut. It has no brain, but is able to transmit knowledge if merged with another blob.”