Author Archives: Mike Reeves-McMillan

Feb 07

When a group is only listening to itself, that’s a problem.

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When a group is only listening to itself, that’s a problem.

Via Walter Roberson.

Originally shared by Toronto Star

“They’re playing with different facts, and they think they have the inside scoop on conspiracies,” researcher says.

https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/02/06/trump-supporters-share-more-junk-news-than-all-other-groups-combined-study-finds.html
Feb 04

Via Sarah Rios.

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Via Sarah Rios.

It’s surprising how many problems don’t get solved because of who has them.

Originally shared by Cindy Brown

Men have dominated the entrepreneurial field since, well, basically forever. And that means many of the problems that their companies try to solve are focused on straight, cisgender men, or at best they’re gender-neutral. It makes sense; you can only solve a problem that you know exists. But because other groups, including women, have largely been excluded from those conversations, issues that affect non-dudes have gone ignored.

Even today, women who pitch male-dominated venture capital funds have a hard time being taken seriously. When Janica Alvarez invented a far superior breast pump, she had to bring her husband to pitch meetings because she otherwise faced questions about how she could possibly run a business while raising a family, or got VCs literally telling her the pump was gross. It didn’t seem to matter that this was a solution to a problem that millions of new parents have: breast pumps are terrible. They’ve always been terrible. The technology that Alvarez’s version uses isn’t even all that advanced—the innovation is in bothering to make a female-centric product better.

https://www.popsci.com/heist-tight-engineering-women
Feb 02

Scientific progress goes boink.

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Scientific progress goes boink.

I don’t understand enough quantum physics to make out what the implications are of these discoveries, but hardly anyone does, so I’m sure you could mine them for handwavium.

It might end up resembling the work of Rudy Rucker if you’re not careful, though.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

You Thought Quantum Mechanics Was Weird: Check out Entangled Time http://suhub.co/2GGndlf

Feb 02

I’ve thought for a while that pulsars would make good navigation beacons. And it appears that they do.

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I’ve thought for a while that pulsars would make good navigation beacons. And it appears that they do.

You can still get your ship’s crew lost in space, of course. Just have the pulsar detector break down, or its database get corrupted.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

This ‘Cosmic GPS’ Tech Will Help Us Explore the Furthest Reaches of Space http://suhub.co/2GEtkXx

Feb 01

So it turns out that, if you really understand what the alchemists were doing, they were doing some fairly…

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So it turns out that, if you really understand what the alchemists were doing, they were doing some fairly remarkable stuff.

Their recipes were encoded in symbolism, which makes them a challenge to reconstruct. (I have a Gryphon Clerks novel planned in which the instructions for making a kind of bioengineered polymer are encoded in Elvish poetry.)

Via a private share off G+.

http://wapo.st/2DLrc2e?tid=ss_gp&utm_term=.491d09cc0b0f

Feb 01

My policy is always to be suspicious of dramatic doomsaying.

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My policy is always to be suspicious of dramatic doomsaying.

Originally shared by Jennifer Ouellette

No, We’re Not All Doomed by Earth’s Magnetic Field Flip. A geomagnetic apocalypse may not be on the horizon, but there is some fascinating science behind the doomsday hype. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/earth-magnetic-field-flip-north-south-poles-science/

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/earth-magnetic-field-flip-north-south-poles-science/