Pepper X, developed by the founder of PuckerButt Pepper Company, is now the spiciest pepper in the world, measuring 2.693 million on the Scoville scale. The old record was 1.64 mil. "That scale's logarithmic, so it's more like three times hotter."
Drago Jančar Q & A
At Deutsche Welle Sabine Kieselbach has a Q & A with the Northern Lights author, in Drago Jancar puts Slovenia on the literary map.
Your old phone is safe for longer than you think
Washington Post [free to read]: “…Apple, Samsung and other phone manufacturers keep remotely fixing the security flaws in their phones’ software for years. That keeps your old phone safer from hackers. It isn’t easy to tell exactly how old is too old to be secure. Digital security experts told me that generally, an Android phone is secure to use for four years or more after it was new. An iPhone is secure for seven or eight years or potentially longer. Not everyone wants to hold onto a smartphone for that long.
And the older your phone, the more you may run into problems including apps that stop working as you expect. But if you choose for financial or other reasons to keep your phone for years, most people don’t need to worry. (You should keep your phone software up to date. Read the One Tiny Win section below for details.) And it’s worth considering a used phone if you can’t stomach a $1,000 new one…”
New research shows why hunting for the cheapest plane ticket is a waste of your time
PSYS.org: “Buy your ticket on a Tuesday. Search in your browser’s incognito mode. Use a VPN to pretend you live in Suriname. “There are so many hacks out there for finding cheaper airline tickets,” says Olivia Natan, an assistant professor of marketing at the Haas School of Business.
“But our data shows many of these beliefs are wrong.” With four colleagues—Ali Hortaçsu and Timothy Schwieg from the University of Chicago, Kevin Williams from Yale, and Hayden Parsley from the University of Texas at Austin—Natan looked deeply into the structure and processes behind how pricesare set at a major U.S. airline. The system that she found, which is representative of airlines around the world, was strikingly at odds with what most economists would expect—and most consumers assume.
- The paper, “Organizational Structure and Pricing: Evidence from a Large U.S. Airline” was published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics.
- A collection of “flash philosophy” — “cutting-edge philosophical articles of approximately 2,500 words or less” …and a workshop this Wednesday about writing it
- What is consciousness? Can we test for it? Could AIs ever have it? And if they did? — MIT Technology Review covers what philosophers and scientists have to say about AI consciousness
- “In many cases, the wishes of a group are indeterminate” — C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) and Yascha Mounk discuss cultural appropriation on “Open to Debate”
- “If I could not keep her alive, I could at least keep her cause alive in that book, by making it as good as I could” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) interviewed in The New York Review of Books
- The first prizes in a contest to read the carbonized, unopenable scrolls of an ancient library buried in 79AD by the eruption of Vesuvius, have been awarded — the first word identified appears to mean “purple”
- “A large and important piece of German philosophy’s history remains obscure unless we can come to better appreciate Wolff’s philosophy and the ideas to which it gave rise” — Michael Walschots (Johannes Gutenberg U.) on the significance of Christian Wolff
- “I completed my military service, moved to Jerusalem, started taking philosophy courses in the university… I wanted to move on… to turn my back on my military years. I soon realized that I couldn’t” — “I don’t know if I forgive myself, nor whether I should,” says
