Nobody Cares! (Science & Tech Edition)

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

 

[Free]

'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used by Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything

When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there’s a little option there to turn on the “Do Not Track” function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that enabling it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches, or keep Facebook from collecting the addresses of all the places she visits on the internet, or prevent third-party trackers she’s never heard of from following her from site to site. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a quarter of American adults use “Do Not Track” to protect their privacy. (Our own stats at Gizmodo Media Group show that 9% of visitors have it turned on.) We’ve got bad news for those millions of privacy-minded people, though: “Do Not Track” is like spray-on sunscreen, a product that makes you feel safe while doing little to actually protect you.

 

[Isabeau]

Free still has me on ignore.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

So a care package from my mom to my sister in the next city, I'm sending it, I pop it open to pack it better.

Sizes of objects as they actually turned out seemed on average larger, except the cell phone wrist watches. Porn and aging eyes probably dictates screen size. Some of it was pretty close. Except the 2020 Lunar Olympics.

Mostly kid friendly up to the 70s history of space flight with some futurism.

Handing these with pride off to my niece and nephew.

 

[Free]

Apparently Youtube was down for about an hour Tuesday night. Anyone notice?

YouTube is down: Users seeing Error 503 message while trying to upload videos or watch YouTube – live updates - CBS News

 

[Cristiano]

I finally found a use for the smart plug I got on Amazon Prime day for $10.


I bought a small Vornado fan for my office to help circulate air, and I plugged into into the smart plug, so I can say "Alexa turn on fan" and I can also control it from my phone.

https://www.amazon.com/Kasa-Smart-Wi-Fi-Plug-TP-Link/dp/B0178IC734

 

[Free]

Apparently Youtube was down for about an hour Tuesday night. Anyone notice?

Someone must have.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I finally found a use for the smart plug I got on Amazon Prime day for $10.


I bought a small Vornado fan for my office to help circulate air, and I plugged into into the smart plug, so I can say "Alexa turn on fan" and I can also control it from my phone.

https://www.amazon.com/Kasa-Smart-Wi-Fi-Plug-TP-Link/dp/B0178IC734

Can Alexa be set up so I could clap on, clap off?

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

See, a president Trump is gonna help us live forever.

 

[Free]

 

[Free]

An anonymous 4chan post could help solve a 25-year-old math mystery

That is not a sentence construction I ever expected to read.

 

[danielravennest]

Osiris-REX probe closing in on asteroid Bennu

It was 3000 km from the 0.5 km asteroid when the photo was taken on Oct 23rd, and is currently 1600 km away. The pictures should improve a lot in the coming days. Like the Hayabusa mission, this one will grab a sample and eventually bring it back to Earth.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

A 6.8 earthquake registered an hour ago in the Ionian Sea off Greece, appears to have generated a small tsunami.

 

[Free]

Plastic found in the poop of eight people from eight different countries

A presentation at a gastroenterology conference in Vienna this week reported the preliminary results of a pilot study looking at fecal samples, finding nine different kinds of microplastics in the samples they analyzed. The news has attracted a lot of media attention, but the study is so small that it’s worth viewing it cautiously instead of drawing solid conclusions from it.

Concern about plastic in the human food supply has been a hot topic for some time, with tiny particles from broken-down plastics being found in food, drinks, and even the air. If we’re taking plastic in on one end, and we can't digest it, it’s expected and logical that we’d see it on the other end, too. But expectation isn’t the same thing as actual evidence, and this study is the first to present evidence of those microplastics in the human gut.

OK, but how did they do the science...

Gastroenterologist Philipp Schwabl and his colleagues asked their participants to keep a food diary for a week before packaging up their poop in a plastic-free sample kit and shipping it to Vienna.

 

[Free]

How China complicates Apple’s chest-thumping about privacy

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Gmail

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Does anyone actually enter complete questions into search engines when looking for information? I'm curious.

I mean....I've always done keyword or exact phrase searches only. Like for instance, if I wanted to know the population size of the city of Houston, I wouldn't type "How many people live in the city of Houston?" into the search bar, I would enter "Houston population size". Because I know that it's a search engine and it functions by using search terms, so adding all those extra words that the engine will either parse into different terms or simply ignore anyway is pointless time-wasting.

Exact phrases works the same way. If I want to know the name of the song, I don't type "what's the name of that Madonna song where she mentions a blue bird?", I'm going to type in "Madonna" and a short excerpt of lyrics that sounds to me to be especially unique to that song.

But once in a while I see references to people asking complete questions of a search engine, as if they're speaking to a person. Sometimes I even see jokes at the expense of people who use keywords and keyphrases only, that seem to imply that's silly or not the way you're "supposed to be" doing these things. But the idea of typing out "Who was the 39th President of the United States?" when you could just type "39th US president" and get the exact same answer seems bizarre to me.

 

[Free]

But the idea of typing out "Who was the 39th President of the United States?" when you could just type "39th US president" and get the exact same answer seems bizarre to me.

Why?

I bet there are things you perform in ways online that even more net savvy folk find bizarre, since they know the shortcuts and you don't. So what?

 

[Govi]

Lately, using assistants like Siri and Cortana, I've taken to using full questions in whatever search engine's query bar. I get better -- more specific -- results.

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