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For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER

Nigerian players are dominating Scrabble tournaments with the surprising strategy of playing short words even when longer ones are possible, in an extreme form of rack management.

Click to view the original at www.wsj.com

Hasnain says:

"Across the developing world, more governments are funneling money and organization into the sport. In Pakistan, 700-plus people competed in last year’s national championship, which was televised live. A Gabonese man’s second-place finish in the French-language world championship sparked a national Scrabble league in that African state."

Posted on 2016-05-23T07:21:47+0000

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How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich

The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment

Click to view the original at www.wsj.com

Hasnain says:

"Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, had the right idea in what he said to Reason magazine last year: “When people ask, ‘Will our children be better off than we are?’ I reply, ‘Yes, but it’s not going to be due to the politicians, but the engineers.’ ”"

Posted on 2016-05-23T06:59:31+0000

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Pakistan's Senate Gets Smart About Terrible Cyber-Crime Bill

Over the last few months, Pakistan's Internet community has been fighting to stop the passage of one of the world's worst cyber-crime proposals: the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Bill (PECB). Thanks in part to the hundreds of messages sent to Pakistan's senators, they secured a major victory this…

Click to view the original at eff.org

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The Father of Modern Metal - Issue 36: Aging - Nautilus

Sometime in 1882, a skinny, dark-haired, 11-year-old boy named Harry Brearley entered a steelworks for the first time. A shy kid—he…

Click to view the original at nautil.us

Hasnain says:

"What’s more, Harry Brearley didn’t know it then, but the stuff he cast from the electric furnace at Firth’s on Aug. 20, 1913, was nothing new. At least 10 others had created it, or something like it, before; at least half a dozen had described it; and one guy even explained it, and explained it well. Others had patented it, and commercialized it. Before Brearley got around to it, at least two dozen scientists in England, France, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United States were studying alloys of steel by varying the amounts of chromium, nickel, and carbon in it. Faraday had tried as much nearly a century earlier. It’s not like Brearley was exploring unknown territory. That he is credited with discovering stainless steel is due mostly to luck; that he is credited with fathering it is due mostly to his resolve."

Posted on 2016-05-21T06:43:38+0000

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Fox 'Stole' a Game Clip, Used it in Family Guy & DMCA'd the Original - TorrentFreak

This week's episode of Family Guy included a clip from 1980s Nintendo video game Double Dribble showing a glitch to get a free 3-point goal. Fox obtained the clip from YouTube where it had been sitting since it was first uploaded in 2009. Shortly after, Fox told YouTube the game footage infringed it...

Click to view the original at torrentfreak.com

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Edge.org

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Click to view the original at edge.org

Hasnain says:

"And as if that were not enough, here’s the kicker. This was not some kind of massive high-throughput screen of the kind we so often hear about in biomedical research these days. The researchers tried this approach just once, in essentially their back yard, on a very small scale, and it STILL worked the first time. What that tells us is that it can work again—and again, and again."

Posted on 2016-05-21T06:18:49+0000

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Hasnain says:

Super well written, and extremely scary. I also had no idea google had a design ethicist.

"We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first. People’s time is valuable. And we should protect it with the same rigor as privacy and other digital rights."

Posted on 2016-05-21T06:14:39+0000

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