'Remarkable' decline in fertility rates
Half of the world's countries now have too few babies being born to maintain their populations.
The forgotten Muslim soldiers of World War One
Historians say highlighting the Muslim contribution during the Great War 'silences' far-right groups.
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2018-11-10T20:28:01+0000
How Bill Gates Aims to Save $233 Billion by Reinventing the Toilet
Bill Gates thinks toilets are a serious business, and he’s betting big that a reinvention of this most essential of conveniences can save a half million lives and deliver $200 billion-plus in savings.
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2018-11-09T05:02:57+0000
9 Out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work
They’d give up a significant amount of their future earnings.
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Posted on 2018-11-09T04:59:31+0000
Sci-Fi Writer Greg Egan and Anonymous Math Whiz Advance Permutation Problem | Quanta Magazine
A new proof from the Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan and a 2011 proof anonymously posted online are now being hailed as significant advances on a
Hasnain says:
“Now, Houston and Pantone, joined by Vince Vatter of the University of Florida in Gainesville, have written up the formal argument. In their paper, they list the first author as “Anonymous 4chan Poster.”
“It’s a weird situation that this very elegant proof of something that wasn’t previously known was posted in such an unlikely place,” Houston said.”
Posted on 2018-11-06T16:11:20+0000
A century on, why are we forgetting the deaths of 100 million? | Martin Kettle
The 1918 Spanish flu outbreak killed more people than both world wars. Don’t imagine such a thing could never happen again, says the Guardian columnist Martin Kettle
Hasnain says:
“By the time the pandemic finally ended, it had killed around 25 times more people than any other flu outbreak in history. It killed possibly more people than the first and second world wars put together. As Laura Spinney puts it in her new book, Pale Rider – the best modern account of the Spanish flu crisis – “the flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death”. Think about that. Not the western front, not Hitler’s invasion of Russia, not Hiroshima. But the flu.
In the face of such figures, it seems unbelievable that we forget or look away. Yet we do. Perhaps that is because, unlike equality for women, a disease has no ultimate prize to win and celebrate. Perhaps it is because, while wars have victors, pandemics leave only the vanquished, as Spinney puts it. Perhaps too, as the critic Walter Benjamin once argued, silences about public horrors can permit human societies to cope with collective recovery and to progress. Or perhaps, as Spinney also reflects, the Spanish flu has been consigned to the footnotes because its onslaught did not occur in public but in private, behind closed doors in millions of homes.”
Posted on 2018-11-04T20:25:38+0000
Why one of America’s richest states is also its poorest
NIMBYism is partly to blame
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Posted on 2018-11-04T17:37:10+0000
Thread by @Foone: "It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974. This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windows 10, dates back to […]"
Thread by @Foone: "It is 2018 and this error message is a mistake from 1974. This limitation, which is still found in the very latest Windowss back to BEFORE STAR WARS. This bug is as old as Watergate. When this was developed, nothing had UPC codes y […]"
Hasnain says:
Great tweet storm / thread on how far Microsoft goes with backwards compatibility, and a segue into the history of computing
Posted on 2018-11-04T07:32:54+0000
Three Sales Mistakes Software Engineers Make
PipelineDB is an open-source relational database that runs SQL queries continuously on streams, incrementally storing results in tables.
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Posted on 2018-11-04T02:52:56+0000
Why Big Tech pays poor Kenyans to programme self-driving cars
The data that powers the most cutting edge technology in Silicon Valley begins in Nairobi's slum.