Author: administración

In May 2017, an NSA contractor named Reality Winner mailed a printed classified document to a news outlet, and federal agents identified her within days because the yellow tracking dots on the page named the exact printer in her office and the minute she had pressed print.

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Reality Winner was 25 years old, a contractor at an NSA facility in Augusta, Georgia, when she folded a five-page classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 election, slipped it into an envelope, and mailed it to The Intercept in May 2017. She was arrested on June 3, less than a week after the outlet contacted the government to verify the document. The thing that gave her away was not a fingerprint or a forwarded email or a leaked source. It was a constellation of pale yellow dots, almost invisible against the white paper, that her office printer had…

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When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.

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In 1925, a British graduate student at Harvard named Cecilia Payne handed in a doctoral thesis that quietly upended astronomy. By comparing the spectral lines of stars against laboratory measurements of how atoms absorb light at different temperatures, she calculated that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, with everything else — iron, calcium, magnesium, the heavy elements astronomers had assumed dominated stellar interiors — amounting to a rounding error. The conclusion contradicted the consensus of every senior astronomer alive. The Sun, the textbooks said, had roughly the same composition as Earth. Iron core, rocky chemistry, a…

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Tristan Harris, Google’s former design ethicist, told the US Senate that the pull-to-refresh gesture on nearly every app works like the lever of a Las Vegas slot machine, and he has long warned that we now reach for our phones around 150 times a day without ever calling it gambling

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Tristan Harris sat in front of the US Senate Commerce Committee and told a room of senators that the small downward tug people make on Instagram, Twitter, and Gmail every few minutes was not an accident of interface design. It worked, he said, like the lever of a slot machine, keeping people pulling even when nothing was there. Harris had spent years inside Google as a design ethicist before quitting to start the Center for Humane Technology. The comparison sounds like hyperbole until the numbers land. By his own long-standing estimate, the average person reaches for their phone around 150…

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The colour magenta does not exist anywhere in the spectrum of visible light, and your brain manufactures it on the spot whenever red and blue cones fire together, inventing a hue to fill a gap that physics never bothered to provide.

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Stare at a rainbow and try to find magenta. It will not be there. The visible spectrum runs from roughly 700 nanometre red at one end to about 380 nanometre violet at the other, with orange, yellow, green, blue and indigo sliding between them in a continuous band first split out by Isaac Newton with a prism in 1666. Magenta — the hot pink of bougainvillea petals, the M in CMYK printer ink, the top stripe of the bisexual pride flag — has no wavelength. It is not a colour of light. It is a colour the brain invents, in…

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