Whether hoverboards end up underneath every Christmas tree in America or on the shelves of the Gaoke company store, discounted for the people who made them — depends on the persistence of the capricious global consumer market, fomented by social media, which over the past six months has anointed these gliding hunks of metal and plastic its objet du jour and accepted their rapid appearance more or less unquestioningly, even though the facts around them are totally bizarre. You can’t generally buy them in brick-and-mortar stores, only off sketchy-looking Shopify sites that sometimes list fake physical addresses, or out of trucks in big cities, or in barely regulated mall kiosks. Big chains can’t even decide whether to sell them online. The price spread of the boards makes no sense: Some of them are $1,800 and some of them are $300, but they all look the same.

It’s as if the boards have come here faster than the places that should be selling them can handle. This is not a coincidence. The hoverboard industry that has unfurled in the concrete of Bao An and other similar districts is on-demand IRL content production, a super-flexible churn that hands us the playthings of social-media-driven seasonal diversion. It is the funhouse mirror reflection of the viral internet, the metal-and-cement consequence of our equally flexible commercial hype machine. It happened before with selfie sticks, and before that with drones. It may soon happen with virtual reality headsets and body-worn police cameras. It happens all the time.

Call it memeufacturing. It starts when a (typically) Western company, eager to cash in on a product made popular by the social internet, contracts a Chinese factory to make it. From here, the idea spreads throughout the elaborate social networks of Chinese electronics manufacturing until the item in question is being produced by hundreds and hundreds of competitors, who subcontract and sell components to each other, even as they all make the same thing. It reaches its saturation point quickly. It moves from product to product without sentiment. And it is proof that our never-ending digital output, our tweets and Vines and Instagrams and Facebook posts, has the power to shape the lives of people on the other side of the world.

Inside China’s Memefacturing Factories, Where The Hottest New Gadgets Are Made – BuzzFeed News

Back in 1991, in what now seems like a far more innocent time, Robert Reich published an influential book titled The Work of Nations, which among other things helped land him a cabinet post in the Clinton administration. It was a good book for its time—but time has moved on. And the gap between that relatively sunny take and Reich’s latest, Saving Capitalism, is itself an indicator of the unpleasant ways America has changed.

The Work of Nations was in some ways a groundbreaking work, because it focused squarely on the issue of rising inequality—an issue some economists, myself included, were already taking seriously, but that was not yet central to political discourse. Reich’s book saw inequality largely as a technical problem, with a technocratic, win-win solution. That was then. These days, Reich offers a much darker vision, and what is in effect a call for class war—or if you like, for an uprising of workers against the quiet class war that America’s oligarchy has been waging for decades.

Source: Challenging the Oligarchy by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books

Source: #1177; Stay the Course

The absolutely brilliant Bret Victor has done a fantastic piece about technologists and what role they can play in averting catastrophic climate change. Even if you’re not a technologist, this piece is remarkable: it’s one of the most lucid explanations of clean energy and climate change that I’ve ever seen, full of both well-written text and fantastic visualizations. I recommend it very highly.

What can a technologist do about climate change? A personal view.

Quite a bit of interesting info on this page.

HRQOL is a broad multidimensional concept that usually includes self-reported measures of physical and mental health.

For example, here’s a map of unhealthiness by state (2009 data):

Surveillance | HRQOL | CDC

To approach the subject of red mercury is to journey into a comic-book universe, a zone where the stubborn facts of science give way to unverifiable claims, fantasy and outright magic, and where villains pursuing the dark promise of a mysterious weapon could be rushing headlong to the end of the world. This is all the more remarkable given the broad agreement among nonproliferation specialists that red mercury, at least as a chemical compound with explosive pop, does not exist.

Legends of red mercury’s powers began circulating by late in the Cold War. But their breakout period came after the Soviet Union’s demise, when disarray and penury settled over the Kremlin’s arms programs. As declining security fueled worries of illicit trafficking, red mercury embedded itself in the lexicon of the freewheeling black-market arms bazaar. Aided by credulous news reports, it became an arms trafficker’s marvelous elixir, a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need: guide missiles, shield objects from radar, equip a rogue underdog state or terrorist group with weapons rivaling those of a superpower. It was priced accordingly, at hundreds of thousands of dollars a kilogram. With time, the asking price would soar.

Source: The Doomsday Scam – The New York Times

Champion of regeneration, the freshwater polyp Hydra is capable of reforming a complete individual from any fragment of its body. It is even able to remain alive when all its neurons have disappeared. Researcher the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have discovered how: cells of the epithelial type modify their genetic program by overexpressing a series of genes, among which some are involved in diverse nervous functions. Studying Hydra cellular plasticity may thus influence research in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. The results are published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Source: Hydra can modify its genetic program

“Every day, it was like every device on the menu got crushed,” Rios says. “It was all bad. Really, really bad.” The teams didn’t have time to dive deeply into the vulnerabilities they found, partly because they found so many—defenseless operating systems, generic passwords that couldn’t be changed, and so on.

The Mayo Clinic emerged from those sessions with a fresh set of security requirements for its medical device suppliers, requiring that each device be tested to meet standards before purchasing contracts were signed. Rios applauded the clinic, but he knew that only a few hospitals in the world had the resources and influence to pull that off, and he walked away from the job with an unshakable conviction: Sooner or later, hospitals would be hacked, and patients would be hurt. He’d gotten privileged glimpses into all sorts of sensitive industries, but hospitals seemed at least a decade behind the standard security curve.

“Someone is going to take it to the next level. They always do,” says Rios. “The second someone tries to do this, they’ll be able to do it. The only barrier is the goodwill of a stranger.”

Source: Hospital Gear Could Save Your Life Or Hack Your Identity – Bloomberg Business

The night i saw my first black helicopter—or heard it, because black helicopters are invisible at night—I was already growing certain that we, the sensible majority, owe plenty of so-called crackpots a few apologies. We dismissed them, shrugging off as delusions or urban legends various warnings and anecdotes that now stand revealed, in all too many instances, as either solid inside tips or spooky marvels of intuition.

The Atlantic: If You’re Not Paranoid, You’re Crazy