Janet Jackson
The modern forecasting community largely emerged from the work of one man: Philip Tetlock. In 1984, Tetlock, then a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, held his first forecasting tournament. His goal was to investigate whether experts — government officials, journalists, and academics — were better at making predictions in their areas of interest than intelligent laypeople. The upshot: Experts make for terrible forecasters.
“It is the teenage women …who are advancing [language] change.” The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new. William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change. […] in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681. The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men.
How farms are using ‘magic dust’ to capture carbon — The dust is crushed basalt – volcanic rock which can be found in abundance in quarries across the country.
Scientists plan to seed part of the Pacific Ocean with iron to trigger a surface bloom of phytoplankton that will hopefully suck carbon dioxide out of the air, reviving field trials of a geoengineering technique that has been taboo for more than a decade.
When Was the Last Time We Built a New City? — California Forever wants to build a new city in Solano county. On paper, it would be an affordable, high-density urbanist wonderland — but can they actually pull it off?
A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. […] One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video. […] It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used.
