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I won a lifetime supply of calendars from Calendaria about five years ago. Since then, each December, they send me the *worst* calendar ever. It has become something quite funny. The most recent was a calendar focused on brooms/mops. Why such a thing would even exist is beyond me, but hell if it isn't funny. JamesTheJerk , Behnam Norouzi / unsplash (not the actual photo) Report Not me but my roommate won a lifetime supply of dilly bars from a Dairy Queen. Got a box a week and eventually got to…

Community classroom, Bonsaaso, Ghana. Credit: Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world," said South African leader Nelson Mandela. That was in 1990, before climate change came onto most people's radar. Can we apply Mandela's prescription to climate, and if so, what are the best ways? …

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Winter is… maybe coming again? Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, recently broke their silence on the possibility of a Jon Snow spin-off series, leaving us yearning for more adventures beyond the Wall. The epic HBO saga went for an eight-season run from 2011 to 2019. It had many characters, and one of the main protagonists was Kit Harington's Jon Snow. Jon initially seeks escape from his past. However, he matures as a leader, rising through the ranks and defying expectations. The fifth season…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Patents and the protection of inventor rights have occupied a key place in American law and policy since the earliest days of the country. When the United States Constitution was ratified in 1788, it included what's now known as the Intellectual Property Clause, and for centuries the ostensible driver of patent law has been to foster innovation. But what happens when inequities in patent law…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A new Roundtable discussion in the journal Health Equity explores the results of a poll conducted by the National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE), called the "Heart of America Annual Survey." The survey found that more than 80% of respondents want a national leader that unifies rather than divides us, suggesting that there is a readiness in the country to put polarization and division…

Even though 2023 presented us with some quite high-grossing movies—the so-called “Barbenheimer” and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, for instance—not everything people watched over the past year was equally attention-worthy. Ask anyone who has sat down in front of a screen at least a few times and they will line them up for you, from the one they liked the most to the one they did the least, or maybe even found quite disappointing.Members of the ‘Movies’ subreddit recently discussed disappointing works of cinema after the…

Though they’re wildly different games on the surface, Alan Wake 2 and Spider-Man 2 are sequels representing massive achievements for their respective studios. In an IGN interview, Remedy’s Sam Lake and Insomniac’s John McAdam discuss some of the intricacies of game development, and how they dealt with having two protagonists. Alan Wake 2‘s story is split between Alan Wake the writer, and Saga Anderson the FBI agent who has been dragged into a twisted tale. In Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker’s back but he shares the spotlight…

Last month, I took an extended break. In a bid to keep my robotics newsletter Actuator (subscribe here) up and running, however, I reached out to some of the biggest names in the industry. I asked people from CMU, UC Berkeley, Meta, NVIDIA, Boston Dynamics and the Toyota Research Institute the same six questions, covering topics like generative AI, the humanoid form factor, home robots and more. You’ll find all of the answers broken up by question below. You would be hard pressed to find a more comprehensive…

The Scarlet Opera don’t let gender define them. The five-member rock band spoke to Rolling Stone for the On Your Radar video series to discuss a special celebrity fan, dive into their recent released “That Kind of Woman,” and share their dream collaborations. The Scarlet Opera first felt successful, bass player Daniel Zuker says, after selling out the West Hollywood rock club Troubadour, with no songs releases. Frontman Luka Bazulka says that Neil Patrick Harris happened to be a fan of their music and after a…