Ever wake up to find your smartphone at zero percent, despite it staring back at you from the wireless charger on your bedside table? You likely didn’t align the two perfectly before bed, which means you now need to plug your phone in with a cord to quickly get some juice before the day starts,…
If the pandemic wasn’t enough reason to take your cycling inside last spring, the cooler weather this fall will be. And while sweating up a storm in your basement after a glorious season of summer outdoor riding seems, well, kind of gross, there are still a lot of reasons to rejoice over the increasing sophistication…
Modern statistical displays of data—grids of scatterplots for inspecting correlations, for example—succeed by being transparent and allowing trends in the data to stand out. In contrast, classic data visualizations often succeed, paradoxically, by being a bit opaque: a puzzle that a reader figures out. Consider the visualization created by information designer Will Burtin in 1951…
In July 2015, two founders of DeepMind, a division of Alphabet with a reputation for pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence, were among the first to sign an open letter urging the world’s governments to ban work on lethal AI weapons. Notable signatories included Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Jack Dorsey.Last week, a technique popularized…
I had just about given up on smart toothbrushes when the especially cute Colgate Hum arrived at my door.Over the last few years, it seems that the toothbrush companies got together and decided we should all start shelling out several hundred dollars for brushes with internet-connected capabilities. The problem—besides the fact that you can buy…
For parents and teachers, the reopening of schools has been a chaotic mess. Guidelines and procedures seem to change daily. Classroom policies or even whether in-person learning occurs at all depends on where you live and often the politics of who sits in the governor’s mansion. But for epidemiologists, this fall is proving to be…
In February, a lobbyist friend urged Erik Sartorius, the executive director of the Kansas League of Municipalities, to look at a newly introduced bill that would affect cities. The legislation involved “personal delivery devices”—robots that, as if in a sci-fi movie, might deliver a bag of groceries, a toolbox, or a prescription to your doorstep.…
Being a woman means many things. Many of those things really have nothing at all to do with being a woman—they are contrived, invented, imposed, conditioned, unnecessary, obstructive, damaging, and the effects are felt by everyone, not just women.How can mathematical thinking help?As I am a woman in the male-dominated field of mathematics, I am…
On August 2, an anonymous TikTok account that posts jokes and memes from a conservative perspective called @the.republican.hub uploaded an unusually somber video for its 57,000 followers. In the clip, an animated elephant moves its trunk up and down to the beat of melancholic elevator music. “If TikTok is banned this is my chance to…
As promised, Google is bringing a new organization feature to tab hoarders. Beginning today, Chrome users can group tabs in their desktop windows. The tab groups are customizable — you can label them with names and colors — and you can easily collapse, expand or drag-and-drop them. They’ll pop up any time you close and…
