The New York Times has an interesting (if poorly-implemented) widget to show the careers paths of every sitting Congressperson. Good luck getting it to show you yours, though.
The cognition case for giving kids more time to play (even if that comes at the expense of school).
What happens when you try to avoid using any of the major tech companies for a week? Answer: life gets really hard. This was an interesting experiment to read about, but as usual with tech journalists, the author draws the complete opposite conclusion about the economics of the situation.
Speaking of drawing conclusions: Libertarianism.org has a reading list of their favorite criticisms. None of these made my reading list right now, but might at some point down the road.
Commercial Crew schedule slips again, with the SpaceX uncrewed demonstration flight scheduled for 2 March and Boeing expected to launch no earlier than April. The SpaceX date appears to have held through the Flight Readiness Review, however, so this might actually happen in the next fortnight.
More recent downlinks from New Horizons show that 2014 MU69 is not actually a snowman, but rather a pair of pancakes.
After 14 years of operation on the Red Planet, the Opportunity rover is pronounced dead after the final attempt to restore contact fails.
The European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope provides new relative velocity data on the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Based on the latest measurements, astronomers have revised the expected collision time by 600 millions years, which gives us a little longer to procrastinate the problem.
A 2018 paper looks at evidence for and against what they call the Silurian Hypothesis, i.e. that humanity is not the first technological civilization on this planet. The authors look at what evidence our civilization is currently leaving behind, and dig through the geological record for similar signatures. Unsurprisingly, they find little in the way of conclusive evidence, but use the idea as a springboard for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
There's been a lot of buzz about computer-generated faces lately, so it shouldn't be surprising that there's now an online quiz for that. As it turns out, it's not very hard to spot the fake. Among other things, the computer doesn't have very coherent rules about symmetry or what a normal backdrop texture looks like.
Gwern, meanwhile, has been applying the same technique to anime faces. The results range from cosmic horrors to entirely plausible manga characters.
80,000 Hours has an article about how to avoid doing accidental harm when trying to solve hard social and technical problems. I think it extends beyond the effective altruist movement to problem-solving in general.
