Jaywalking shouldn't be a crime. Everyone does it; it's part of the self-governing behavior of urbandwellers, and is so routine that I've suspected it plays a crucial role in a… Read the rest of the article: Why we should get rid of jaywalking laws

In the original 1992 Castle Wolfenstein 3D, you fought off Nazis and their dogs. Now there's a mod called Woof3D — also known as "Return to Castle Woofenstein" — which… Read the rest of the article: A skin of Castle Wolfenstein where all you do is pet dogs

Vim is a text editor greatly loved by many programmers, because of its radically keyboard-centric design. When you're coding in Vim, you generally never touch the trackpad or mouse; everything… Read the rest of the article: "The Vim Clutch": a footpedal for the code-editor Vim

Janelle Shane of AI Weirdness is awesome: She's trained neural nets to invent all sorts of hilarious material, from the names of new colors to odd new food recipes to… Read the rest of the article: "Skyknit": Knitting patterns produced by a neural net

Zeynep Tufekci was researching Trump videos on Youtube back in 2016 when she noticed something funny: Youtube began recommending and autoplaying increasingly extreme right-wing stuff — like white-supremacist Holocaust-denial videos.… Read the rest of the article: Why Youtube's algorithms push extreme content on every possible subject

This is fascinating: Millions of clocks across Europe have lost time, because of a dispute over electricity generation. Citizens across Europe had been noticing that clocks in certain devices —… Read the rest of the article: Clocks in Europe running six minutes slow because of a power-grid dispute

The Disconnect is a literary magazine published on the web with a fun wrinkle: You can only read it if your wifi is off. You can load the magazine by… Read the rest of the article: A web magazine you can read only if you turn off your wifi

I am having too much fun reading A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published in 1788 to provide definitions of the sort of vile, unmannerly slang employed by 18th-century… Read the rest of the article: A 1788 dictionary of vulgar slang

The folks at Snarkitecture collaborated with the Portuguese design firm UVA to create the "Slip Chair", which looks like it's tipping over, but is safe to sit in. Or so… Read the rest of the article: The "Slip Chair" looks too unstable to sit in, but isn't

Another marker of the mainstream-ization of emoji: Dictionary.com is now offering entries that explain their meaning. As Time reports: As Dictionary.com can now make clear with authority, having researched this… Read the rest of the article: Dictionary.com now offers definitions for emoji

Untitled (the flower game) is a gorgeous game — playable online, or via a downloadable app — where you draw a gradually evolving flower, using the left-right keys. It offers… Read the rest of the article: A meditative online game where you draw gorgeous flowers

Robin Sloan, the author of wonderful novels like Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, also spends his time messing around with neural nets that compose and transform language in delightful… Read the rest of the article: A neural net that generates weirdly evocative sentences

Here's a fascinating finding: When the NRA holds its annual convention, the national rate of gun injuries goes down temporarily by 20% — seemingly because the 80,000-odd attendees are hanging… Read the rest of the article: Gun injuries go down by 20% during NRA conventions

There's a good, long piece in this issue of Smithsonian about the scientific debate over whether trees talk to one another. Trees certainly communicate. In forests, they're connected to each… Read the rest of the article: Do trees really talk to each other?

Rhino Stew Productions has produced a new game – David Lynch Teaches Typing. I won't give out too many spoilers here, but suffice to say, it gets weird quickly.

Garnette Cadogan, an old-school flâneur and essayist, wrote a fantastic piece describing the differences between walking while black in his home county of Jamaica, compared to New Orleans and New… Read the rest of the article: Walking while black, in Jamaica vs. the US

In this paper, law professor Lynn Lopucki ponders the question: What happens if you turn over control of a corporate entity to an AI? Pretty terrible stuff. Odds are high… Read the rest of the article: What happens if you give an AI control over a corporation?

The folks at Priceonomics crunched some data and found that one-star product reviews online are more likely to have incorrect spelling and grammar than five-star ones. As they note: According… Read the rest of the article: One-star ratings have worse grammar and spelling than five-star ones

Josh Comeau, a software developer at the Khan Academy, has created a superb interactive tutorial showing how sound-waves work. It's really, really good. I've used synthesizers for years, but never… Read the rest of the article: Interactive tool showing how sound waves work

So, what exactly is going to happen to that Tesla that Elon Musk shot into space? It's going to wander around the solar system, sure. But there are planets and… Read the rest of the article: Physicists find a small chance the spacefaring Tesla will slam into Earth or Venus