99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic.

— Google Maps Hacks, Simon Weckert

I keep a notebook next to me at all times, like Linus van Pelt clinging to his blanket. When I get an idea, I put it down. I’ve had to stop on the side of the road to do this. I’ve put off eating to get notes down and write things, and I never put off eating for ANYTHING. Sometimes I get annoyed when I can’t get the thought down quick enough, when I’m not writing at the speed of my brain. When I’m somewhere without access to a pen and paper, like in the shower, that impatience grows even more pronounced. I gotta make sure to catalog the notes I wanna make in my brain so that I can get them down the second that shower is over. I mentally repeat the thoughts to myself, like I’m reciting some kind of really dull mantra. Then, once the thoughts are down, they’re safe. I don’t need a lot of words to note what I need. Just a couple of scribbles act as a keyword search and brings me directly to the original thought.

— How to Make Writing a Lot Easier, Drew Magary in Forge

Part of the problem here is metadata is hard. Someone has to sit there and fill out the author, title, subtitle, summary, page count - and they’re probably not going to do it for free. Amazon is a good at it but is hostile to publishers. Goodreads has much potential but seems to have stagnated. Linking to the book’s Wikipedia entry would be my preference but very few books have an entry.

— Digital Tools I Wish Existed by Jonathan Borichevskiy

The officer tried to reach the command center for authorization to shoot but couldn’t get through. So he fired an antiaircraft missile. Then another.

The plane, which turned out to be a Ukrainian jetliner with 176 people on board, crashed and exploded in a ball of fire.

— How Iran Covered Up the Downing of an Airliner, Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times

Prince Charles inherits the possessions of anyone who dies in Cornwall without a will or next of kin, a power that in some years has yielded hundreds of thousands of pounds. He funnels the money into charities after deducting his costs.

— Harry and Meghan’s Big Funding Source Is Private. Sort of, Benjamin Mueller in The New York Times

Because detective shows and soap operas use this blurry-foreground move so regularly, its sudden ubiquity in the news represents a significant shift in register, or even genre, for journalism. Photojournalism has for decades restricted itself to a stark framing of visual facts, never wishing to compromise its evidentiary role in the narration for a more theatrical one. The best news photos deftly capture the drama with a shutter click, but that is also the abiding rule: it either happens in that click, or it doesn’t make it to print. Framing and depth-of-field are the only things the photographer can deploy in that moment, so that’s why they’re being used together and pushed to extraordinary limits in the rise of the blur.

— Rise of the Blur, Dushko Petrovich in n+1

Indirect election was also crucial to some of the Founders’ faith in the Senate’s ability to act in the public interest-and their decision to vest the Senate with particular powers, including the ‘sole Power’ to conduct impeachment trials. Consider Hamilton’s claim, in ‘Federalist No. 65,’ that only the Senate ‘would be likely to feel confidence enough in its own situation, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an individual accused, and the representatives of the people, his accusers.’ Specifically, he is asserting that unlike their House counterparts (the ‘accusers’ entrusted to render the equivalent of a presidential indictment), individual senators could be expected to issue fair judgments because their selection by fellow political professionals, for relatively long, six-year terms, insulated them from the vicissitudes and foibles of popular opinion.

— This Is Not the Senate the Framers Imagined, Jane Chong in The Atlantic

Functional zero is zero, but - to the imagination, at least - it is also not zero, just like the fear of being buried alive is both 100 percent irrational and also not. Within those narrow gaps (between irrational and rational, functional zero and zero), creative ingenuity - not just neuroses - can thrive. The pursuit of joy, even if that joy begins as fear and takes the form of preparation against an irrational outcome, is a death wish, maybe. Or it’s a life wish. Or there’s no difference. Texture, at a minimum, better distinguishes days spent this way, and that texture becomes the record of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s mind.

— What I Learned in Avalanche School, Heidi Julavits in The New York Times

The experience of reading poetry aloud when you don’t fully understand it is a curious and complicated one. It’s like suddenly discovering that you can play the organ. Rolling swells and peals of sound, powerful rhythms and rich harmonies are at your command; and as you utter them you begin to realise that the sound you’re releasing from the words as you speak is part of the reason they’re there. The sound is part of the meaning and that part only comes alive when you speak it. So at this stage it doesn’t matter that you don’t fully understand everything: you’re already far closer to the poem than someone who sits there in silence looking up meanings and references and making assiduous notes.

— The Sound and the Story: Exploring the World of Paradise Lost, Philip Pullman in The Public Domain Review

In a way, the mere existence of Balanced Rock also seems like a prank, either geological or cosmic. The enormous boulder looks like it had been photoshopped onto the landscape, or photographed mid-roll, or carefully placed by aliens. But it’s no hoax and there’s no sorcery to it. Rather it is a prime example of a whole category of geologic formations called ‘precariously balanced rocks’ -PBRs, for short. They’re exactly what you might expect. ‘It’s a rock balanced on top of another rock,’ says Mark Stirling, who studies PBRs at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

— Why Scientists Fall for Precariously Balanced Rocks in Atlas Obscura