There are many ways to read this map: as a peculiar road map of the United States, a potted history of the same, a metatext of American literature, a guide to American literary genres and their centers of gravity, and more. I will get to at least some of them later, but for now, I want to examine the effect that scholars call broadly “imaginative geography,” more precisely “toponymic capture,” and more elegantly “authorial inscription.” It is the process by which a writer’s vision of a place…
Navigation is easy these days, as we’ve entire complex computerized mapping systems and radio-based positioning systems to find ourselves anywhere on Earth. It might seem simple to use GPS these days, even trivial, but billions of dollars are what it took to make that happen.
Back in the day, navigation was simpler, and cheaper, using a handheld device and natural objects in space instead of artificial satellites with atomic clocks. Let’s learn about the sextant, and how it did its job.
Navigational Tool
A sextant. Note the shades in front of the mirrors to avoid eye damage when viewing bright objects like the Sun, and the micrometer drum for fine adjustment—necessary for achieving high positional accuracy. Credit: Joaquim Alves Gaspar, CC BY 2.5
For most of human history, getting lost at sea was a very real way to die. Coastlines can be followed and landmarks recognised, but once the land drops below the horizon, a crew has little more than dead reckoning to go on. You can estimate of speed, heading and elapsed time, but errors pile up the longer you go without a concrete reference as to where you are. When land is out of sight, the sky can offer that very reference point, but you have to be able to measure it accurately enough.
That’s where the sextant comes in. It’s a deceptively simple instrument that is, paradoxically, somewhat difficult to understand at a glance. It’s little more than a frame, a pair of mirrors and a small telescope, which lets a navigator measure the angle between a celestial body and the horizon to a tiny fraction of a degree. Take that measurement at the right moment, work through a few tables referencing the detected angle and the time of measurement, and you’ve got your position on the globe.…
An artist’s concept depicting a Voyager spacecraft.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Launched nearly 50 years ago in 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 on Wednesday, Nov. 18 will have traveled one light-day from Earth, which is more than 16 billion miles (25.9 billion kilometers). Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, and any light from Earth would take 24 hours to reach the spacecraft. NASA will highlight this historic milestone with two events.
On Tuesday, Nov. 17, NASA invites the world to participate in “Shine Bright for Voyager’s Light-Day” by creating a symbolic wave of golden light encircling the planet after sunset. NASA has created a website that enables smart phones and tablets to flash “VGR”, Voyager’s call sign, in morse code.
For more information about how to participate in “Shine Bright for Voyager Light-Day,” visit:
Everyone is encouraged to capture photos or videos of their light-day signal and share it on social platforms, tagging @NASA.
On Thursday, Nov. 19 at 12 p.m. EST (9 a.m. PST), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California will host a moderated discussion with mission members and NASA leadership about the status of Voyager 1 and 2, the unique science the twin probes continue to gather in interstellar space, and the challenges of keeping the spacecraft operating for so long over such vast distances. A Q&A with media and other audience members will follow. In addition, there also will be a preview of the…
This advice works for crowded online spaces too. I feel like the KDO community guidelines are geared towards creating this type of atmosphere in the comments section here. ↩
When someone says “German techno group”, you probably have a pretty good picture in your mind. MEUTE, on the other hand, is an 11-piece techno marching band that plays electronic music with acoustic instruments: tubas, trombones, drums kits, etc. Reset (above) is a single from their new album, KOSMOS. I love this.
Batteries have a habit of quietly getting worse. Anyone who has nursed an old smartphone through its final years knows the routine—it leaves the house at 100% and is begging for a charger by lunchtime. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common worries about electric cars is what happens to the pack after a few years and a lot of kilometres. Nobody wants to buy a used EV only to discover it can barely make it across town. Fears around battery degradation and high replacement costs were…
Scientists have discovered that gut bacteria can feed on the protective mucus lining your intestines, producing potentially harmful compounds, but fiber helps keep this activity in check. Overlooked proteins in plant foods also help shift gut bacteria toward producing beneficial substances, revealing a surprising new reason plant-based diets may be good for you.
Google is rightfully facing blowback for forcing K-12 schools to enable AI if they wanted to keep using Google search. The company quickly backtracked and decoupled and turned off the services by default, but made it clear search will continue to be just another AI chatbot. This mandate forces an ultimatum on educators: accept generative AI or de-google your school.
Students, teachers, and parents across the U.S. are now years into an argument about how schools should respond to the growth of AI-enabled tools. Google decided to skip this debate and take this choice from schools. In August it activated AI chatbot Gemini for 150 million K-12 students on Google Classroom, leaving educators scrambling to respond. A few months later, Google introduced a new way to turn it off — but now administrators would also be turning off Google search.
Google walked this back somewhat, clarifying that Gemini, Gemini notebook, and Search will have their own controls and will be off by default. But because of Google’s broader approach to force AI on all search users, this change is still an example of a tech monopolist pushing unwanted changes into the classroom.
Tying AI to Search
It’s no secret that the biggest companies in AI are operating at a huge loss, in the hope they can followUber’s enshittification playbook. Offer a cheap convenience at a major loss until old systems atrophy, then flip the script to reduce wages and raise consumer costs—whether that’s paying with cash or with data.
This puts Google in the odd position of an incumbent, with around 90% of search traffic. It needs to not only make good on its own AI investment, but protect its dominance from new AI tools. It’s not just enough to offer its own AI mode, it needs to turn search into AI mode, while engaging in clumsy self-preferencing that is eating its own ad revenue.
Google can and should offer a way to disable AI overviews. Smaller services like DuckDuckGo* and Brave search have simple and persisting AI settings which don’t require login. These services also don't mince words and make a distinction between generated AI summaries, suspected AI results, and the backend use of AI to curate links.
It’s not enough to point to opaque workarounds, either. Adding “-ai” to your Google search will usually remove AI Overview, but so will “-unicorn”. This trick isn’t meant to be an AI off-switch, it’s a quirk of how AI Overview was implemented and can change at any time. These tricks also don’t generalize well to settings for system administrators. Hacks might work for now, but everyone—including administrators—deserve clear set-and-forget controls for the tools they rely on.
Pushing AI on Schools
De-googling your life isn’t easy, and for schools it can be even more difficult. For decades Google has gone after schools to foster life-long Google users—resulting in many institutions being deeply entrenched in its ecosystem despite data privacy concerns. That’s because schools face major switching costs when moving to a competitor. It takes more than flipping a setting—it means a lengthy contract process, staff retraining, and a cumbersome migration of past work.
The difficulty of switching makes granular controls even more essential, particularly for a hot-button issue like generative AI. Few parents would send their kids to AI-driven schools, but they may want their kids to learn tools like search as they exist outside of the classroom. However, many parents and teachers concerned with AI disrupting learning are pushing major school districts to implement temporary AI moratoriums for young students. These pauses are meant to make sure any introduction of AI fits the needs of studentsand is done in a way that actually makes sure educators are prepared.
But in either camp, this is a choice that must be made by schools, not Google. Teachers know more about what their students need than a trillion-dollar tech company, and this expertise should be respected in their own classrooms.
Google’s self-preferencing and desperate attempt to eventually recoup on an AI money pit must be tempered with more fine-tune controls over generative AI. It’s in Google’s own interest to stop abusing its dominance to piss off users, advertisers, and school communities. It’s also Google’s responsibility as an adjudicated monopolist.
*DuckDuckGo is an EFF donor. EFF donors do not influence our agenda or our positions.
She was scared of him but soon loosened the Shakespearean up – then watched him give Star Trek depth, even insisting scenes be rewritten for her. Captain Picard’s right-hand woman salutes her fabulous friend
"A month before Covid hit, my husband died. I was on my own in my house in Los Angeles for a year with just my dogs for company. Patrick was one of the very few people who invited me over for lunch, socially distanced in his garden. It had occurred to him that I was grieving and on my own – and he did something about that. It’s a mark of who he is."
"There was a scene written for Picard and Data, where Picard tells the story of how his family were burned in a fire. Patrick went to the writers and producers and asked if they could rewrite the scene to have me be in it instead of Brent Spiner."
Palm OS, an operating system for a range mobile devices that predated mobile phones, is largely forgotten today. Or at least, that’s what [Aaron Ardiri] thought. That all changed when he was …
A massive study of nearly 486,000 adults found that regularly drinking tea was associated with an 11% lower risk of heart and blood vessel diseases. The lowest risk was linked to drinking roughly six to eight cups per day, with black tea showing more consistent benefits than green tea.
A simple concept from Kansas City is sweeping the country. Planting fruit trees on vacant lots and making the produce free to anyone has cascading positive effects for the community. Now, more than a million people live within walking distance of a Giving Grove orchard.
There's a website you enjoy visiting, but it contains some elements that for whatever reason you don't like. Maybe they're distracting or you just find them ugly. What do you do? You could put up with it, but you can also take matters in your own hands and remove the annoying stuff yourself. I don't know that browsers can do this out of the gate, but there are extensions which can. Here are two I'm familiar with, and one of them you might already have installed anyway.
uBlock Origin
With uBlock Origin, which I can highly recommend anyway unless you love seeing ads, it's actually really easy. I'm doing this in Firefox, I assume it works the same in other browsers which support uBlock Origin.
Let's assume you'd want to remove the Links gif at the top of my weekly linkdumps. In uBlock Origin it's really simple, you go to the site which has the element on it you want to remove and click the extension icon in the browser toolbar.
Then you select the pipette symbol which allows you to pick the element you want to remove, and click the element on the site. A window pops up that tells you what will be removed and you can click preview to see if the effect is the one you want, and if it is, click Create and a filter will be created which removes this element from the website.
That's it, done. The element is gone.
To get rid of the filter, open uBlock Origin again, select the gears symbol and then click the My filters tab. There you can see the filter rule which was just created and you can modify and remove it.
Stylus
Another extension which is more powerful but also more complicated to use is Stylus. This extension allows you to modify any CSS element of a website, giving you total control over the appearance of a site, but also requiring some knowledge about CSS of course.
In order to use Stylus, first you need to identify the CSS class or ID of the element you want to remove. You can either look it up in the site's source code or use the inspect tool of your browser. In the case of the gif on my site, it has the ID linkdumps_gif:
<img class="image" id="linkdumps_gif" alt="an animated 90s style GIF that has the word Links in green font on black background" src="/images/gifs/links.gif">
Knowing this, you can open the Stylus extension from the browser toolbar and click the plus symbol next to the URL, or the URL itself.
This takes you to the extension's page where you can add new CSS rules for the selected website.
Here, some CSS knowledge is needed, but in order to hide an element, it's usually enough to select the element and make it invisible with display:none. In the case of my site, this code snippet will do the trick:
#linkdumps_gif {
display: none;
}
This will hide the element in question. Save, and you're done.
So that's it, two ways to hide unwanted objects on a website. I'm sure there are many more, but these are the ones I know. Hope this is helpful.
