Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
The Ultimate Retaliation: Pranking My Roommate With Targeted Facebook Ads
On the surface, it's a brilliant prank: he found a way to create a custom targeted audience of just one person, about whom he knew more than Facebook's ad system did. But it shows the potential for online harassment, especially since it ties in with our fears about online privacy.
Fake Cell Phone Towers Across the US
“We can’t choose a world where the US gets to spy and the Chinese don’t. We get to choose a world where everyone can spy, or a world where no one can spy.”
(Also, the “towers” referred to in the title are apparently not physical towers so much as interception devices that mimic a cell tower on the network. It’s imprecise language that has propagated through just about every article on the topic.)
Avast! I be seein' offers of sails — I mean sales — fer Talk Like A Pirate Day. O'Reilly Books I can understand…but MedicAlert?
Great photo: It’s rare to see a circular rainbow because usually we see them from the ground, and there aren’t enough raindrops below the horizon to produce a lower arc. But from a high enough vantage point (say, in an airplane or helicopter), with the right rain and sun conditions, you can see a full circle.
Why More Trees in the Sierra Mean Less Water for California
Unintended consequences: Decades of suppressing fire in the Sierra Nevada mountains have led to overgrown forests, which reduces runoff into the rivers and reservoirs used by the rest of the state because the extra trees are using more water.
Interesting: One of the ongoing questions about the rise in autism spectrum cases is how much is an increase in diagnosis (not to mention expanding definitions, but that’s easier to adjust for) and how much is an increase in actual prevalence. A new study looks at data worldwide from 1990 to 2010 and finds that the rate has actually remained constant across that time. That suggests that the rise in documented cases is almost entirely due to better diagnostics.
Comcast Wi-Fi serving self-promotional ads via JavaScript injection
The practice raises security, net neutrality issues as FCC mulls Internet reforms.
Comcast is modifying websites that you access through their hotspots.
10 Uses for Baking Soda: Guidelines for Cleaning Your Bathroom
And yet no one ever says, “You can clean your toilet with baking soda? Eeew! Imagine what it does to your stomach!”
It turns out that El Niño years don’t correlate very strongly with wet winters, unless you only look at the strongest El Niños.
Los Angeles Isn’t London, and Other Things that are Wrong with California
It’s a bit late for the zillions of suburban houses already in existence here, but yeah, there are definitely other home designs than solid-box-with-a-lawn that would be more suitable to the California climate.
Boston Globe: The Internet’s fake news problem
Always check the source before you share that news story, even if it sounds politically believable.
Mystery No More: The Sliding Stones of Death Valley
A team of scientists has finally figured out what makes those mysterious moving rocks in Death Valley move – and caught it on camera!
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-g-california-drought-map-htmlstory.html
Drought maps of California from 2011 to this week.
Another XKCD What If? analysis tackles the question: “Has humanity produced enough paint to cover the entire land area of the Earth?” I wonder if the asker was inspired by the Sherwin-Williams Paints logo showing an upended paint can, burying a globe in paint with the slogan “Cover the Earth.”
Related to that earlier post, a look at at how smartphone gyroscopes work.
Wired: The Gyroscopes in Your Phone Could Let Apps Eavesdrop on Conversations
Wow. Even without access to the microphone, it's possible to measure how sound waves move the phone's position sensors precisely enough to identify nearby speech.
If you live in California, you should read this.
How Fast You Drive Reveals Where You Drive
Insurers’ data-gathering devices give enough info to determine your location, say Rutgers engineers
Interesting: It's possible to correlate a record of your driving speed with your starting point and street layouts, and figure out where you went.
Watching a flock of wild parrots caroming down the street. Kiddo was impressed.
Ring Around the Rainbow