Ross Andersen in Aeon:

Last December I came face to face with a Megalosaurus at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. I was there to meet Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who has made a career out of contemplating distant futures, hypothetical worlds that lie thousands of years ahead in the stream of time. Bostrom is the director of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a research collective tasked with pondering the long-term fate of human civilisation. He founded the institute in 2005, at the age of 32, two years after coming to Oxford from Yale. Bostrom has a cushy gig, so far as academics go. He has no teaching requirements, and wide latitude to pursue his own research interests, a cluster of questions he considers crucial to the future of humanity.

Bostrom attracts an unusual amount of press attention for a professional philosopher, in part because he writes a great deal about human extinction. His work on the subject has earned him a reputation as a secular Daniel, a doomsday prophet for the empirical set. But Bostrom is no voice in the wilderness. He has a growing audience, both inside and outside the academy. Last year, he gave a keynote talk on extinction risks at a global conference hosted by the US State Department. More recently, he joined Stephen Hawking as an advisor to a new Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge.

Filmmaker Marc Isaacs sets himself up in a London tower block lift. The residents come to trust him and reveal the things that matter to them creating a humorous and moving portrait of a vertical community.

Nature vs. nurture.

Spent about 6 hours of my day off nerding out over this guys videos. All you ever wanted to know about power turbines.

Ben Schott in the NYT:

In the first of a new series on private languages, we offer a selection of secret codes used in the dining rooms and in the kitchens of some of New York’s finest establishments.

By someone at http://kasparallenbach.ch, original link was http://kasparallenbach.ch/blog/weiterlesen/costa-concordia, but that is now dead.

Leon Neyfakh in The Boston Globe:

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus’s “The Plague.” It wasn’t that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn’t done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them.

I went to buy a door handle for my car, and met this 9 year old boy, who had spent his summer building this elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto part store. Caine invited me to play, and I couldn’t pass up his FunPass deal.

Imagine an America in which all-female families survived the Great Depression raising children and farming homesteads in the absence of men (and in the absence of today’s detractors to gay marriage.)

Artist Debbie Grossman visualizes an alternate reality of dusty plains and simple family meals drawn from the Farm Security Administration’s archives, creating an endlessly interpretable world in which the contemporary idea of family is presented as historical.

Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.

The ants are still alive : the process will continue…

Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.

Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. User names, hostnames, IP addresses, unencrypted email fragments, web pages, images and voice extracted from this data and then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.

Danielle Sucher:

I just released my first Chrome extension! It’s called Jailbreak the Patriarchy, and if you’re running Chrome, you can head over here to install it.

What does it do?

Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.

Headlines always try to cram a lot of information into a small number of words, but some Bloomberg headlines are in a class of their own.

OMG, the Commando high score. Mind blown. (at 3:15)

A Chris Burden piece where no one is bleeding. The man has gotten really tame in his old age. But it rocks socks anyways.

MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch says to graffiti artists “If you harness your talent you can be in a museum some day, make a contribution and a living from it.”, so Eddie Colla responds with this nice little fuck you :)