Mike Conner sits in his truck atop a hill in Boring, Oregon, where he can feel the summer breeze through the window and see the sun at its meridian over the fields and the snowcapped tip of a distant Mount Hood poking into a cloud-dotted sky. He sits here and thinks about cutting off his feet. His…

At Holman Correctional Facility, in Atmore, Alabama, the prisoners have a tradition of beating their doors when guards take a man from the holding area colloquially known as the “death cell” to the execution chamber to be killed. More than 150 men slam their full strength against solid steel,…

Abstract What began as a National Geographic expedition, lead by Dan Buettner, to uncover the secrets of longevity, evolved into the discovery of the 5 places around the world where people consistently live over 100 years old, dubbed the Blue Zones. Dan and his team of demographers, scientist and…

Photo cred: my dad Two truths (no lies): 1. Once you are moderately happy, it’s very hard to get any happier. 2. Everybody secretly believes they can be the exception to this rule. Psychologists have known for fifty years that people tend to adjust to the good things that happen to them, ending up…

The best theory physicists have for the birth of the universe makes no sense. It goes like this: In the beginning—the very, if not quite veriest, beginning—there’s something called quantum foam. It’s barely there, and can’t even be said to occupy space, because there’s no such thing as space yet. Or…

10 min read· Sep 25, 2022 -- TL;DR Recently we’ve launched an offline maps application for Apple Watch. This project has taken more than two years and the full attention of our small team of enthusiasts. We’ve faced so many product and technical issues along the way that we simply need to share. So…

Elon Musk, in a tweet (of course): Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app. Kara Swisher explains: He is essentially talking about a “super app,” which is common in China but not the U.S. and might include payments, subscriptions, entertainment etc. It’s the right idea but…

Als Manuel C. Widmer nach den Herbst­ferien 2019 ins Berner Schulhaus Tscharnergut zurückkehrte, lief überhaupt nichts mehr so, wie es sollte. «Man konnte nicht drucken, Daten gingen verloren, die neuen Tablets konnten nur teilweise benutzt werden, und schliesslich stotterte auch noch das Internet»,…

Stellen Sie sich vor, ein Mann zieht ein T-Shirt von Osama bin Laden an und provoziert damit an einer Trauer­feier für Opfer eines islamistischen Terror­anschlags. Oder mit einem T-Shirt des Islamischen Staats vor einer Kirche oder einer Synagoge. Und als der Mann irgendwann angegangen und…

Rachel Gerberding has a green thumb. So when her mother died this April, Gerberding decided to compost her. Gerberding, who lives in Washington state in a house surrounded by flowers, had heard about a newly legal method to turn human remains into soil. “I was like, ‘Mom, it would be such a…

Ever since the U.S. Senate failed to convict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection and disqualify him from running for president again, a lot of people, myself included, have been warning that a second Trump term could bring about the extinction of American democracy. Essential…

Unfassbar, aber wahr: Auch in Deutschland kommt die Digitalisierung an. Mittlerweile sogar in Arztpraxen. Termine buchen, Akten durchsuchen, Krankschreibungen und Abrechnungen ausstellen – das alles kann mit einer Software erledigt werden. Die kennt dann Praxen und Patient*innen sehr gut – sehr,…

In our world, we can do anything that we want to do here. Any old thing.- Bob Ross, The Joy Of Painting Season 29 Episode 1 Watching a vibrant Seattle sunset the other day, my imagination started running. The otherworldly hue of the sky evoked something from science fiction. The hazy orange-purple…

Aerodynamics are an important factor in gravel racing and riding. Gravel racing speeds are high—the fastest riders in the 200-mile Unbound average 20 mph (32 km/h) across the Flint Hills of Kansas. And many gravel races can be extremely windy. Optimizing the aerodynamics of a gravel bike is…

The blank screen was already intimidating enough. Then, out of nowhere, an incorporeal know-it-all popped up to make us feel even worse about the novel notion of word processing in the mid-’90s. “It looks like you’re writing a letter,” a googly-eyed, caterpillar-browed paperclip in Microsoft Word…

A love letter to tools that changed everything for me. Programming over the years Programming got vastly more varied compared to when I started dabbling in AmigaBASIC in the mid-1990s. Back then you could buy one very big book about the computer you’re programming and were 99% there. That book, full…

part 1 | you are here | part 3 | part 4 After our time milling around the Mercury cafeteria, it was back aboard the coach to enter the test site proper. As our guide explained, the NNSS can be divided into work areas such as Mercury and the range itself. On the days that tests were scheduled,…

part 1 | part 2 | you are here | part 4 I said up front that the NNSS remains in use for several different purposes, although the level of activity today is not nearly as high as it once was. To my best ability to remember the numbers, I think we were told that during the period of active testing…

part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | you are here And now, the conclusion. Lunch at the Nevada National Security Site is a strange experience of its own. Our coach dropped us off at the Bistro, a second, smaller cafeteria located further into the site and thus more conveniently to many of the workers in the…

you are here | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 I promised a travelogue, and here we go. I'm not exactly a travel writer, but I was recently able to visit a place that's fairly difficult to get to, so I think it's worth sharing my observations. I started writing this because I thought there should be more…

This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss GQ story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Press play to listen to this story: John Lovedale is feeling pretty good, despite the fact that he should not be walking right now. It’s…

Unless you have skipped a lot of school, or work, or both – or you live in the USA – you have probably used an A4 sheet of paper before now. Have you ever wondered why it is the shape or size it is? Time to dust off some high-school level maths to investigate. Just in case you have never actually…

Share An array of supercomputers crunching the fiendishly complex windtunnel data of 121 terracotta cyclists has revealed that a rider in the sweet-spot of a peloton experiences up to ten times less air resistance than previously assumed. It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a…

State of the Map 2022 Ilya Zverev OSM Mapping Playlists: 'sotm2022' videos starting here / audio 26 min 2022-08-20 2022-09-19 167 Fahrplan OpenStreetMap is a collector's dream. While there is a finite set of stamps or coins, there are millions of shops and beauty salons, and new ones are opened…

Hello Autopians! Have you ever wondered why designers show sketches of concept cars with massive deep dish wheels, but when those cars actually make it to production the wheels end up being fairly flat? Adrian Clarke talked about this recently from a designers point of view, but I’m going to tell…

Editor’s Note: This story earned the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan:…

A talk about chunked storage using N5 and Fiji given for the 2022 From Images to Knowledge conference. https://www.i2kconference.org/ https://imagej.net/ https://github.com/saalfeldlab/n5

Featuring Matt Henderson. Check https://brilliant.org/numberphile for Brilliant and get 20% off their premium service (episode sponsor) More links & stuff in full description below ↓↓↓ Matt Henderson on Twitter (he posts lovely animations there): https://twitter.com/matthen2 Matt Henderson…

In a race for your life from a belligerent madman, there is no worse getaway vehicle than a recumbent bicycle. Particularly on any sort of climb. At least that’s what Alan* and I discovered as we crept up a desolate stretch of Arizona highway, necks craning behind us to see if the knife-wielding…

Seth Hettena, of Rolling Stone, on Twitter: Erik Prince’s latest venture is the Unplugged phone, an $850 standalone mobile device with its own app suite that’s being developed in Israel and will allow “patriots to communicate securely.” Unplugged says it is based in Cyprus. Prince is best known for…

Archaeologists excavate the remains of friars buried at the former Augustinian friary in central Cambridge. Cambridge Archaeological Unit The Augustinian friars of medieval Britain pledged themselves to a life of poverty, but their friaries offered a pretty high standard of communal living. The…

Like what you’re reading? Subscribe to The Atavist Magazine today for access to our full archive. Follow the Leader In the waning days of the Cold War, Rainer Sonntag helped fuel a neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a Communist spy—and worked for Vladimir Putin. By Leigh…

Wer in Russland etwas im Internet sucht, wird den Begriff vielleicht googeln. Doch wahrscheinlicher wird er oder sie den Begriff yandexen. Yandex.ru ist mit 60 Prozent Markt­anteil die führende russische Such­maschine. Doch ihre Startseite ist viel mehr als das: Sie ist quasi das Eintritts­tor zum…

Bronsch­hofen, Kanton St. Gallen, Studio von Stricker-TV: Rechnen mit Daniel Stricker. Das ist gar nicht so einfach. Denn wenn es um seine Ein­nahmen geht, wird der Mann, der den Medien vorwirft, gekauft zu sein, plötzlich sehr wortkarg. Wir sagen, wir vermuten, dass er eigentlich ziemlich viel Geld…

It's not "ego." It's a claim that you encounter a lot—an insult really—that people are buying bigger and bigger trucks to compensate for… something. Here's one particularly cringeworthy example, because the person making it doesn't seem to realize the go-kart he's praising doesn't meet US emissions…