Author: administración

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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In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe

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Bruniquel Cave preserves two low rings of broken stalagmites 336 metres from the entrance, in a chamber so far beyond daylight that the Neanderthals who built them had to carry fire deep into the dark. The structures were dated in 2016 to about 176,500 years ago, with a margin of roughly 2,100 years, making them among the oldest well-dated human constructions ever found. A chamber sealed until 1990 Bruniquel Cave sits in the Tarn-et-Garonne region of southwestern France, above the Aveyron gorges near the commune of Bruniquel. Its entrance had been naturally sealed during the Pleistocene, and the site remained…

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Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use

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Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, and the age written into the system was older still: 70. That number was not a warm Victorian gesture toward rest. It was a political calculation made inside a young German Empire where socialist parties were gaining votes, industrial workers were organizing, and Bismarck had already tried repression before he tried insurance. The pension was real. It was also narrow, modest, and late in life. Germany’s old-age social insurance program became the first of its kind at national scale in 1889, after…

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