- Quantum leaps (Economist) "Quantum mechanics—a theory of the behavior at the atomic level put together in the early 20th century—has a well-earned reputation for weirdness. That is because the world as humanity sees it is not, in fact, how the world works. Quantum mechanics replaced wholesale the centuries-old notion of a clockwork, deterministic universe with a reality that deals in probabilities rather than certainties—one where the very act of measurement affects what is measured. Along with that upheaval came a few truly mind-bending implications, such as the fact that particles are fundamentally neither here nor there but, until pinned down, both here and there at the same time: they are in a 'superposition' of here-there-ness. The theory also suggested that particles can be spookily linked: do something to one and the change is felt instantaneously by the other, even across vast reaches of space. This 'entanglement' confounded even the theory’s originators. It is exactly these effects that show such promise now: the techniques that were refined in a bid to learn more about the quantum world are now being harnessed to put it to good use. Gizmos that exploit superposition and entanglement can vastly outperform existing ones—and accomplish things once thought to be impossible."
- Quantum Cryptography: A Boon for Security (National Review) "A metaphor helps here. Think of the standard Internet server as the equivalent of a telephone landline; a hacker can tap it like an eavesdropper who taps the wire to listen in on a conversation. With quantum cryptography, the intrusion of another listener snaps the cable. The sender and receiver know at once that the connection has been severed, and why. Hacking has become an exercise in futility; sender and receiver are able to communicate in confidence, knowing that their connection defies any intrusion from unwanted guests."
ENTERTAINMENT:
- Max Martin - world exclusive interview (Storytelling) "Back in the day, pop songs were typically crafted by two people; one person writing the music and another penning the lyrics. Today, focus has shifted from melody & lyrics to tracks & hooks. The sound itself, the production, is of such great importance that it has become an integrated part of the composition. Contemporary pop songs are often created by four to five co-composers."
HEALTH CARE:
- 7 Reasons Why Obamacare 2.0 Is All But Guaranteed to Impose Crushing Costs on Voters, Hurt Trump’s Base, And Hand Power Back to the Democrats (Breitbart) "1) The bill’s provisions increase healthcare costs for Trump voters in critical states. 2) Meanwhile, the bill is “a gift to illegal aliens,” as conservative author Daniel Horowitz writes. 3) Obamacare 2.0 will be labeled as “Trumpcare,” and Democrats and their media allies will highlight every hard case to attack Republicans for hurting the poor and elderly. 4) Republicans kicked things off with horrific messaging. 5) The arbitrary and crushing penalty for not enrolling during the randomly-selected period will hurt financially struggling voters already fighting to stay afloat. 6) This bill is going to unleash the kind of political fury on Republicans that will elect Elizabeth Warren in 2020. 7) It destroys political capital desperately needed for the rest of Trump’s first term, particularly pro-American immigration reform."
- Quantum Cryptography: A Boon for Security (National Review) "A metaphor helps here. Think of the standard Internet server as the equivalent of a telephone landline; a hacker can tap it like an eavesdropper who taps the wire to listen in on a conversation. With quantum cryptography, the intrusion of another listener snaps the cable. The sender and receiver know at once that the connection has been severed, and why. Hacking has become an exercise in futility; sender and receiver are able to communicate in confidence, knowing that their connection defies any intrusion from unwanted guests."
ENTERTAINMENT:
- Max Martin - world exclusive interview (Storytelling) "Back in the day, pop songs were typically crafted by two people; one person writing the music and another penning the lyrics. Today, focus has shifted from melody & lyrics to tracks & hooks. The sound itself, the production, is of such great importance that it has become an integrated part of the composition. Contemporary pop songs are often created by four to five co-composers."
HEALTH CARE:
- 7 Reasons Why Obamacare 2.0 Is All But Guaranteed to Impose Crushing Costs on Voters, Hurt Trump’s Base, And Hand Power Back to the Democrats (Breitbart) "1) The bill’s provisions increase healthcare costs for Trump voters in critical states. 2) Meanwhile, the bill is “a gift to illegal aliens,” as conservative author Daniel Horowitz writes. 3) Obamacare 2.0 will be labeled as “Trumpcare,” and Democrats and their media allies will highlight every hard case to attack Republicans for hurting the poor and elderly. 4) Republicans kicked things off with horrific messaging. 5) The arbitrary and crushing penalty for not enrolling during the randomly-selected period will hurt financially struggling voters already fighting to stay afloat. 6) This bill is going to unleash the kind of political fury on Republicans that will elect Elizabeth Warren in 2020. 7) It destroys political capital desperately needed for the rest of Trump’s first term, particularly pro-American immigration reform."
From Huffington Post via Breitbart
- Deadly fungal infection that doctors have been fearing now reported in U.S. (WaPo) "The fungus, a strain of a kind of yeast known as Candida auris, has been reported in a dozen countries on five continents starting in 2009, where it was first found in an ear infection in a patient in Japan. Since then, the fungus has been reported in Colombia, India, Israel, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, Venezuela and the United Kingdom. Unlike garden variety yeast infections, this one causes serious bloodstream infections, spreads easily from person to person in health-care settings, and survives for months on skin and for weeks on bed rails, chairs and other hospital equipment."
LONG READS:
- Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War (New Yorker) "The 2016 Presidential campaign in the United States was of keen interest to Putin. He loathed Obama, who had applied economic sanctions against Putin’s cronies after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine. Clinton, in Putin’s view, was worse—the embodiment of the liberal interventionist strain of U.S. foreign policy, more hawkish than Obama, and an obstacle to ending sanctions and reëstablishing Russian geopolitical influence. At the same time, Putin deftly flattered Trump, who was uncommonly positive in his statements about Putin’s strength and effectiveness as a leader."
NEWS:
- Is Trump the New Nixon? (Foreign Policy) "So is it 1973 all over again? ...there are four reasons why I fear the drama of 2017 is worse. First, while Trump shares many Nixonian tendencies — contempt for a critical press, a penchant for deep-state conspiracies, fears of lurking enemies, and dark insecurities — the biggest difference is the public way these are manifesting. Second, the Trump administration is far weaker than the Nixon team. Third, the Congress of 2017 is very different than 1973, especially among Republicans. And fourth, today’s geopolitics make Trump’s self-created crisis far more worrying than that of 1973.
- Down the conspiracy rabbit hole (WaPo) "It’s unquiet out there. North Korea keeps testing missiles as practice for attacking U.S. bases in Japan. Meanwhile, we are scrambling to install an antimissile shield in South Korea as early as next month. Fuses are burning. When the detonations begin, we’d better not be in the rabbit hole."
- Intellipedia Is Wikipedia for Spies, But Could Have Been So Much More (Wired) "Intellipedia helped the intelligence community catch up to Web 2.0, but still has far to go before it lives up to its original promise."
POLITICS:
- Inside the Democrats' Plan to Fight Trump (Rolling Stone) "Something clicked for Democrats in Congress around the country as they joined the spontaneous airport protests and led demonstrations in opposition to Trump's immigration order. Their tenor changed. They stopped mourning the election results. For the first time in the Trump era, Democrats had found their voice. Provided they can keep their nerve, Democrats are now eyeing how to translate their opposition into electoral success in 2018. The Democrats I interviewed laid out a two-pronged plan – still in the works – for gaining seats next year: Damage Trump in the eyes of his supporters, and drive a wedge between Trump and the Republicans on Capitol Hill."
SCIENCE:
- A Radical Vision of the Universe Returns to Electrify Physics (Wired) "Scientists since Democritus had taken a reductionist approach to understanding the universe, viewing everything in it as being built from some kind of fundamental stuff that cannot be further explained. But Chew’s vision of a self-determining universe required that all particles be equally composite and fundamental. He conjectured that each particle is composed of other particles, and those others are held together by exchanging the first particle in a process that conveys a force. Thus, particles’ properties are generated by self-consistent feedback loops. Particles, Chew said, 'pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.'"
- The Fight to Legalize a Machine That Melts Flesh From Bone (Wired) "Liquefying a body is a chemical reaction involving water, heat, and some sort of alkaline agent—potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide are popular choices. In the end, just bones remain—plus any pacemakers, orthopedic implants, and detritus from plastic surgery. 'You see fake fingernails, glass eyes, dental fillings, mercury, and gold, all that stuff can be recycled,' says Fisher. The bones themselves are pristine, if a bit brittle. These get passed along to a machine called a cremulator, which pulverizes the bone into an ashy powder, which gets passed along to the dead’s family. This is similar to how cremation by fire works, except the bony remains are quite charred by the time they come out of the kiln. Plus, the fire doesn’t make them quite as brittle, so they don’t pulverize to as fine a powder as does the chemical method. What of the flesh? It’s true, it all goes down the drain."
TECHNOLOGY:
- Google’s Untrendy Play to Make the Blockchain Actually Useful (Wired) "DeepMind is building an auditing system for healthcare data. That may not sound sexy, but it matters. As more and more medical data goes digital, the system would ensure that as a hospital shares patient records, they stay private, accurate, and tamper-free. DeepMind has joined with Britain’s National Health Service to create machine learning services that can identify diseases and illness in medial scans and other health records. For such a system to work, hospitals will need to share their records with the Google Lab—and Google will need to reassure the world that it respects patient privacy."
- Silicon Valley’s Mega Investor Tells All (Ozy) "In 20 years, driverless cars will have had a massive impact that nobody can even predict. With parking garages not being needed and huge swaths of real estate now becoming available, they could solve the catastrophic housing crisis in the Bay Area. I think self-driving cars could be a huge contribution to the solution, as well as to the problems of congestion and pollution."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- In blow to U.S., federal court rules the Snuggie is a blanket (Chicago Tribune) "The case might seem strange — why does the government care about classifying Snuggies anyway? But due to variations in tariffs the decision is likely to end up costing the government big and saving the company a bundle. In the United States, the tariff on imported blankets is 8.5 percent, whereas the tariff on imported 'pullover apparel' is significantly higher at 14.9 percent."
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- Google’s Untrendy Play to Make the Blockchain Actually Useful (Wired) "DeepMind is building an auditing system for healthcare data. That may not sound sexy, but it matters. As more and more medical data goes digital, the system would ensure that as a hospital shares patient records, they stay private, accurate, and tamper-free. DeepMind has joined with Britain’s National Health Service to create machine learning services that can identify diseases and illness in medial scans and other health records. For such a system to work, hospitals will need to share their records with the Google Lab—and Google will need to reassure the world that it respects patient privacy."
- Silicon Valley’s Mega Investor Tells All (Ozy) "In 20 years, driverless cars will have had a massive impact that nobody can even predict. With parking garages not being needed and huge swaths of real estate now becoming available, they could solve the catastrophic housing crisis in the Bay Area. I think self-driving cars could be a huge contribution to the solution, as well as to the problems of congestion and pollution."
BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:
- In blow to U.S., federal court rules the Snuggie is a blanket (Chicago Tribune) "The case might seem strange — why does the government care about classifying Snuggies anyway? But due to variations in tariffs the decision is likely to end up costing the government big and saving the company a bundle. In the United States, the tariff on imported blankets is 8.5 percent, whereas the tariff on imported 'pullover apparel' is significantly higher at 14.9 percent."
Sign up for email distribution of the Day's Most Compelling News below or by visiting Top of the News
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