Society

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is an emergency stockpile of petroleum maintained by the United States Department of Energy (DOE). It is the largest publicly known emergency supply in the world; its underground tanks in Louisiana and Texas have capacity for 714 million barrels (113,500,000 m3). The United States started the petroleum reserve in 1975 to mitigate future supply disruptions as part of the international Agreement on an International Energy Program, after oil supplies were interrupted during the 1973–1974 oil embargo.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds from around the world, conserved in gene banks. This provides security of the world's food supply against the loss of seeds in genebanks due to mismanagement, accident, equipment failures, funding cuts, war, sabotage, disease, and natural disasters. The Seed Vault is managed under terms spelled out in a tripartite agreement among the Norwegian government, the Crop Trust, and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen).

Social murder (German: sozialer Mord) is a concept used to describe an unnatural death that purportedly occurs due to social, political, or economic oppression.

Propaganda of the deed is specific political direct action meant to be exemplary to others and serve as a catalyst for revolution.

I started to write about prediction markets in 1988, and not until 1999 about using conditional markets to make org decisions.

You don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. First, allow me to share my credentials: ▪️ I met my now-husband on Twitter. At our wedding, half the toasts mentioned me tweeting. I’m not particularly proud of this (what a sad thing to be known to be obsessed with) but I’m mentioning it for cred. ▪️ […]

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

“The victims of History are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners or memory are also: we live as foreigners, as translators.”

Say Nothing and a history of hunger strikes

With fasting at an all-time high in popularity, here is an enlightening exploration into the history, science, and philosophy behind the practice—e...

A lack of coverage

There’s quite a few rights you give up by purchasing a digital copy of your favorite game, movie, or album! On Digital Rights Bytes we outline the differences between owning physical and digital

Outside his family., friends, and close colleagues, not many tears are being shed over the murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson.

The hero worship of the family of American royalty has a dark side: a tendency toward conspiracism that fits with the MAGA movement.

Undocumented orphaned wells pose hazards to both the environment and the climate. Scientists are building modern tools to help locate, assess, and pave the way for ultimately plugging these forgotten relics.

Hannah Byrne joined Facebook to combat far-right extremism. She’s now convinced the tech giant can’t be trusted with such power.

A CSRDA Discussion Paper (Long-term Consequences of Early Career Disadvantages on Fertility: Evidence from Japan by Manting Chen) finds that men in Japan who start their careers in non-standard employment, such as temporary or contract work, face a major disadvantage when it comes to getting married and having children later in life compared to those who land stable jobs right out of school.

Creating a better digital version

The Phoebus cartel engineered a shorter-lived lightbulb and gave birth to planned obsolescence

This year I took a sabbatical, recorded a podcast with Freakonomics, designed and shipped a tiny modular synthesiser, and learned many learnings. Tom Whitwell designs open source music electronics as…

The new law guarantees fundamental rights for sex workers, including the ability to refuse clients, set the conditions of an act, and stop an act at any moment.

I’ve been focused on cultural drift for about nine months now, and the probability estimates in my last post make this a good time to take stock.

Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talking about in the next salon in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School…

The semiconductor chips coming out of a nondescript fabricator in Youngwood used to be so sensitive that soldiers would rather destroy the computer system...

I met some of my closest friends through multiplayer games. Then a strange happening turned everyone (literally) speechless.

With revenue down for the second year in a row, Sonos needs to balance its books. Could a move that’s become familiar in the hardware industry help?