Fascinating backgrounder to all those stories of Google buses getting protested and Glasses getting smashed. As a Torontonian interested in urban issues it is fascinating to learn a little about another city’s struggle with gentrification.
Google announces that Google’s algorithm can beat Google’s CAPTCHAs – those text puzzle things that are supposed to prove you’re a human – 99% of the time. In other news, Google’s SkyNet becomes self-aware.
Did I really not link to this before? Anyway, yeah. WARNING: may cause trance
•I think game glitches are my favourite category of humour now. I still sometimes rewatch the skate 3 video and bust a gut. (thanks xorkaya)
•Chris Ware (via)
It’s basically a sequel to Alpha Centauri in all but name.
FiveThirtyEight analyzes data from Minneapolis, apparently the best US city for biking (who knew!) and New York. You have to build the lane on streets that are not close to capacity already, however – tough one in Toronto, where I’m guessing all downtown streets are near capacity at rush hour.
There are other benefits of bike lanes, however: streets report fewer accidents, and long term, having a bike-friendly city means more people bike and thus there are fewer cars on the road.
In the oeuvre of Rob Ford parody videos, this is a masterwork.
•John Barber in Torontoist:
The cars have not failed to press their advantage. In 2011, they managed to kill about 20 pedestrians and cyclists—and far more of the former than the latter. Last year, they killed twice as many. Altogether, there were more traffic fatalities than homicides in Toronto last year. And so far, there isn’t a single mayoral candidate who appears to have a problem with that.
An IMAX doc on Toronto streetcars is coming out soon. I was going to make a joke about hobo piss re: the 501 Queen, but c’mon, this flick looks great.
•Back in the 80s parents were really terrified of Satan. He was behind heavy metal music after all.
Kickin’ it old school!
I like Dropbox as much as the next nerd, but my work blocks it. I’d switch to Google Drive but I don’t really trust Google anymore. So I was glad to learn about Copy, another competitor in the cloud storage category with a couple of good things going for it. First, it starts at 15GB, and if you sign up with this link you’ll get an extra 5GB (full disclosure: so will I). Second, it will use a service called mover to migrate all your stuff from Dropbox or whatever over to Copy automatically. It has apps for every ecosystem you’d probably want (including Raspberry Pi!), but I doubt it has the broad-based support amongst iOS text editors that Dropbox does. Anyway, after a few days’ use, it seems pretty sweet.
by Matt Zoller Seitz
Japanese farmers apparently dress like young hip supervillain henchmen (via)
Gee, I wonder what they talked about.
On the new hot-shit economist who is basically proving what lefties have been saying for a while: the rich should pay a lot more tax.
This album is great. Pitchfork said best new music and also called it dad-rock.
thanks, ÿ
Where ‘killer’ means ‘ripoff’ but I do think it’s inspired to style the thing after Cortana from Halo
They announced their Roku / AppleTV competitor. It’s touting voice search, plus it looks like it can play Android games (and there’s a sold-separately game controller).
A look at some of Orphan Black’s real T-dot locations. Must be the first show in which Markham is dressed up to look like… Scarborough?