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Sunday 3rd February, 2019 #

  • Nick Offerman - Full Q&A - Oxford Union
  • The plan to send iphone sized space crafts to the nearest stars on flyby missions, could have photos back on earth by 2060 (we should defo do this imo), also earth’s star (the sun) will become uninhabitable in about 5 billion years
  • Review of the pretty cool story about the bizarre elongated interstellar object called Oumuamua
  • Kenyans Say Chinese Investment Brings Racism and Discrimination - Chinese bosses call their African employees monkeys, and say they are free like monkeys are free
  • Machine learning leads mathematicians to unsolvable problem - Pretty interesting idea, quite badly explained, I think the article might be saying that determining whether an algorithm has learned something or not is an undecidable problem (we manage to do it somehow though don't we) - Also mathematician/philosopher Gödel used to wear a black streak in his hair according to the photograph in this piece
  • XKCD on the dishonesty implicit in the sharing options in social media
  • Harassment, Transphobia, and Racism - A Look Inside Blind's Anonymous Chatting Forum for Google Employees - This is horrible stuff, as bad as it might be at least it's still possible to leave the social network that has this type of dynamic going on, I hope that that is always possible, in a world where you can't leave the network and everything you do is automatically added (when social networks become much more integrated into daily life), what do you do if the network is acting in a racist way towards you? Being racist might be your only way to fight back - I hope that day never comes