Last minute geek

1. Mysterious "shark lair" turns out to be epic buffet
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... to be lacking the kind of prey or habitat that the toothy carnivores prefer. But the researchers made a remarkable discovery. Instead of blank, barren sea, the expedition, led by scientists with Stanford ...

2. Twitter to let you turn reverse-chronological feed back on
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... Twitter search flags that generated a reverse-chronological snapshot of your follows, and last week Enna Kinema discovered that you could vanquish suggested tweets and highlights by muting their metadata ...

3. Elon Musk sued by cave rescuer he called a "child rapist" then dared to sue
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... if Musk has some oppo-research dirt on Unsworth he's been sat on all this time, and there's no evidence at all that he has, what's the point? Musk's behavior has the air of pathology about it in general, ...

4. Sights and sounds of Haitian vodou
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... and the footage that resulted in the entrancing 1981 film above, completed two decades after Deren's death by her third husband and his wife. Now, the Psychic Sounds Research & Recordings label has remastered ...

5. Google Sound Search, riconoscimento musicale con IA
(Italiano/webnews)

Google ha migliorato la tecnologia Sound Search e ora può riconoscere un numero maggiore di brani musicali in un tempo inferiore rispetto a Now Playing. The post Google Sound Search, riconoscimento musicale ...

6. My fab five cases for the new iPhone Xs Max
(English/the-gadgeteer)

Like many of you including our very own Julie Strietelmeier I set my alarm for 3am EST to preorder the new iPhone Xs Max. Of course, I’ll be needing a new case to protect my hefty investment, so I searched ...

7. Kavanaugh's alleged victim, a California psychologist and professor, tells her story
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Christine Blasey Ford is a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California: “I thought he might inadvertently kill me. He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” When the first murmurs ...

8. Review: This case for my Surface Go is wicked heavy but wicked good
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... the compromises. First, at 10.2 ounces, this is a frigging heavy case. Given that the Surface Go itself weighs 18.4 ounces, I had to really search my soul for the answer of whether or not I want to use ...

9. AMA study: shooters armed with semiautomatic rifles kill twice as many people
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

The record on "active shooter" fatalities is fragmented; as a result, the AMA researchers who published Lethality of Civilian Active Shooter Incidents With and Without Semiautomatic Rifles in the United ...

10. More googlers are quitting over the company's plan to launch a censored, surveilling search product in China
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

The revelation that Google had been secretly creating a censored, surveilling search product (codenamed Project Dragonfly) in order to re-enter the Chinese market prompted more than 1,000 googlers to ...

11. Google brings its AI song recognition to Sound Search
(English/engadget)

Google's Now Playing song recognition was clever when it premiered late in 2017, but it had its limits. When it premiered on the Pixel 2, for instance, its on-device database could only recognize ...

12. Google's rumored 'Dragonfly' search prototype tied data to phone numbers
(English/engadget)

While Google employees push back against and lawmakers ask questions about a rumored version of its search engine for China -- with censorship and blacklists for terms like human rights, democracy or protest ...

13. Apple's claims about recycling and sustainability are kinda entirely nonsense
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... worth the price. This feature over at Motherboard took years to research and details how Apple forces the recycling companies that they work with to play the game by their rules, while paying lip service ...

14. Researchers say Facebook’s anti-fake news efforts might be working
(English/engadget)

Since the 2016 US presidential election, social network sites have acknowledged the issue of fake news as well as their roles in spreading it. Companies like Facebook and Twitter have made efforts to address ...

15. Google's censored Chinese search engine links every search to the user's phone number
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Google's Project Dragonfly was a secret prototype search engine intended to pave the way for the company's return to China; it featured censored search results that complied with Chinese state rules ...

16. Gentleman sent to prison for shooting imaginary clowns in his apartment
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... next to the house holding a shotgun and ordered him to put the gun on the ground. Matthias told police that two small clowns were running around his apartment and he had shot at them. The house was searched ...

17. NASA will launch its ice-tracking satellite ICESat-2 on Saturday
(English/engadget)

On Saturday, NASA will attempt to launch its Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2, or ICESat-2, a satellite that will help researchers measure the height of natural features on Earth. With the help ...

18. Congress wants to know if Google plans to relaunch search in China
(English/engadget)

A cross-party group of congresspeople have asked Google if it plans to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, as has been rumored. In their letter to Google, the 16 Democrats and Republicans ...

19. RIP Village Voice co-founder John Wilcock, 1927-2018
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... book in John's lifetime. John lived many lives almost simultaneously, and it's been a massive research project effort to connect his experiences into one cohesive timeline. It's with some regret that while ...

20. Senior machine learning scientist quits Google over plan to launch censored Chinese search tool
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Jack Poulson was a senior research scientist at Google whose work on machine learning work was used to improve Google's search results; now he's quit the company over its Project Dragonfly, a once-secret ...

21. Swapping batteries on a 2011-era MacBook Air
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... tried cycling the battery to restore some lost capacity. It did not help. I looked at the iPad Pro with a keyboard. I even looked at the Surface Pro. Then I researched batteries and the replacement looked ...

22. Mysterious repeating radio bursts from distant galaxy could be sign of extraterrestrial technology
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

Researchers from extraterrestrial research initiative Breakthrough Listen, the SETI Institute, and UC Berkeley used machine learning to detect mysterious repeating radio bursts from a galaxy 3 billion ...

23. Six years ago, North Carolina Republicans voted in a law decreeing that the seas weren't rising
(English/BoingBoing ibag)

... likely to rise by 39" over the century; the Republican legislature, backed by property developers building in low-lying coastal regions, passed a bill prohibiting any such research and decreeing that the ...

24. Ad-blocking browser Brave says Google is breaking EU privacy law
(English/engadget)

Ad-blocking browser Brave has hit Google with a formal complaint that could set an important privacy precedent for search engines and digital advertising firms. Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich and his ...

25. The BBC has 'solved' the lag between live streams and TV
(English/engadget)

... have licked the problem, however. Its researchers have... Read all  ...