One of the other attendees of Tomcon was ‘Q’, who is currently working at an undisclosed media company, doing undisclosed stuff. I had brought my gaming computer and HTC Vive VR headset because, if you haven’t seen Google Maps VR you really should, if you can.
Trips to Tom L.’s are always interesting. If you recall 2 years ago, at the last TomCon, we did an evening trip to Yerkes Observatory, after stuffing ourselves with a massive amount of deep-dish pizza. [stderr]
This is one picture from the Saturn-V that I forgot to post. It’s worth it in its own right, in my opinion.
NASA’s done a good job producing a sort of “space disneyland” – probably for the usual reasons: it’s necessary to attract kids’ attention. It drives me a bit nuts when I see things being dumbed down for kids because their parents can’t handle it.
One of my favorite podcasts is the In Our Time BBC podcast. It’s Melvyn Bragg questioning a truly amazing collection of experts on a very wide range of topics, and having tea.
This is probably old news, but I’m fascinated.
Here’s another one of those internet things like the blue/gold dress photo. [stderr] And it appears that neuroscientists have a theory for how it works.
Eagerly, I pre-ordered Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight In Chernobyl [wc] which arrived last Friday. I’ll write a review of it in time but spoiler: it’s good. But he mentioned something, and jumped past it, and it immediately made me grab my ${internet_device} and start searching.
This is the sort of thing that ought to result in careers and reputations going up in smoke, and maybe a few class action lawsuits, but that probably won’t happen. Besides, it’s thoroughly too late by now. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.
Corporatism favors the rights of corporations ahead of those of their customers; right now we’re in the middle of a complex shouting-match regarding what companies like Facebook can decide to provide to marketing partners; are we trusting them too much with our data? Are they going to handle it responsibly? What makes people imagine that companies are not going to immediately have a strategy meeting and ask, “what is the worst thing we can do with our customer data? Because: let’s do that!”