Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The Queen’s Gambit, is not someone you’d want as a friend. She takes money from her childhood mentor—the old janitor who taught her chess—and never pays him back, visits him or thanks him… Read More ›
Articles
Remembering the Ditto and Mimeograph
When I was at the library recently, I reviewed a 1946 publication by an urban planning agency. The purple color of the text of the document jogged my memory. The pages had been printed on a ditto machine. I had… Read More ›
Phone addiction not driven by notifications
Smartphone addiction is unlikely to be caused by notifications, a study by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) suggests. It found that 89% of interactions with phones were unprompted, with only 11% responding to an alert. Group… Read More ›
The future of Moore’s law seems uncertain
Moore’s Law was first proposed in 1965, then again in revised form in 1975. Assuming an 18-month average doubling period for transistor density (it was ~1 year early on, and lately has been ~3y) there have been about 40 doublings… Read More ›
Video games can improve mental health
Video games are fun and interesting, and doing fun, interesting things makes you happy. Would we need a study to show that watching a few episodes of a beloved TV show makes you feel good, or that sitting down with… Read More ›
Is Apple really a privacy-first company?
Cook also announced that after the release of the next iteration of their mobile operating system, known as iOS 13, any app that offers the option to sign in with Google or Facebook will also be required to offer Sign… Read More ›
A device connected to my heart could save my life. It could also be hacked.
The pain was overwhelming, like being grilled alive. It ran out from a center point in my chest and flowed into every organ, every limb, into my fingers and toes. Later, waiting in the trauma section of the Mount Sinai… Read More ›
The nation faces an unprecedented crisis, and the president has left a void.
The nation cries out for leadership, yet amid one of the worst crises to face the country in decades, President Donald Trump is nowhere to be found. He is hunkered down in the White House, not giving interviews or speaking… Read More ›
“Why is my mood all over the place at the moment?”
Unlike during the first lockdown, my mood has been all over the place. When I say I can’t predict what my mood is going to be like from one day to the next, I’m not being dramatic: one moment I’ll… Read More ›
What Is a Particle?
The easy answer quickly shows itself to be unsatisfying. Namely, electrons, photons, quarks and other “fundamental” particles supposedly lack substructure or physical extent. “We basically think of a particle as a pointlike object,” said Mary Gaillard, a particle theorist at… Read More ›