09-30-2015, 10:52 PM
There's a way to listen to music without speakers. Instead, it's possible to send sound vibrations through bones in your head and directly into the parts of the ear that register sound. It's called bone conduction technology, and a company called StudioBananaThings is planning to use it to make headphones that don't leak sound and don't block outside noise so you can remain aware while listening to music or on a phone call.
Wireless bone conducting headphones - Tech Insider
Automating and networking cars has the potential to make the roads safer. It also figures to remap the automotive industry, putting more power in Silicon Valley’s hands as software and applications become a key differentiator in the driving experience. But as these stories from the MIT Technology Review archives remind us, the technology will create new potential problems. How, for example, can automated cars keep drivers from completely checking out, given that they might be needed to take over on a moment’s notice? In fact, are fully automated cars even possible?
Revisiting the Cars of the Future | MIT Technology Review
I once dreamed I was a grey kitten of perhaps four months of age; in the best part, I jumped from a table onto the distant wooden floor. The soft pads of my paws cushioned my landing in a deeply pleasurable and unexpected manner, and I found myself sashaying around and swishing my tail in contentment. This dream (a favourite, and one I often relive in memory) demonstrated my long-held belief in the many superiorities of cats to humans. The bodies of cats are exquisitely mobile; they can leap huge distances relative to their size; they are fast and alert and elegant; they have long, sensitive whiskers and delicate ears that can focus in any direction they choose. They can purr, communicating a delight that reverberates through their whole bodies. They also sleep half the day! There’s so much to envy there. So much to admire.
BBC - Culture - How cats won the internet
Angelo Torres punches in to work at 5 a.m. each weekday and spends the next eight hours cleaning up debris on Staten Island’s Midland Beach. It’s a grueling job, says the veteran Parks Department maintenance worker, but also a welcome escape from the uncertainty of living on the streets as one of the city’s more than 300 full-time workers who are homeless... Torres earns $33,662 a year but says it’s not enough to find four walls and a roof to call his own in a city where, according to StreetEasy, the median rent is $2,690 a month.
Hundreds of full-time New York City workers are homeless - MarketWatch
Simon Johnson wrote a remarkably blunt article for the Atlantic in May 2009 titled The Quiet Coup. In case you managed to miss it, it remains critically important reading. He provided an update of sorts in a New York Times column today. Johnson, a former chief economist to the IMF, described how the financial services industry had effectively engaged in a banana-republic-style takeover of government. And the IMF’s experience of countries that had suffered economics crises due to mismanagement of the ruling oligarchs was that there was one condition that was key to whether reforms stuck: at least some of the ruling group needed to break ranks and be willing to cede power. Clearly, nothing of the kind has happened here.
Simon Johnson Reminds Us That the Banks' Quiet Coup is Still Very Much in Place | naked capitalism