GLITCHET

"A full-blown war with North Korea wouldn’t be as bad as you think. It would be much, much worse." Now that's a headline that fits with my aesthetic! According to an expert, there's at least a 10% chance of nuclear war with North Korea and a 20-30% chance of "a conventional conflict that could kill a million people or more." The author compares the White House's belief in its ability to "handle" North Korea and similar sunny attitudes toward the war in Iraq. Within is a discussion of: Kim Jong Un and NK's ability--and incentives--to wage nuclear war on South Korea, not even as a last result, but early and opportunistically; an indoctrinated NK citizenry and military, who would be willing to fight to the death for a government they have been brainwashed into believing is godly; the scale of ground and air warfare needed to disable NK's missile battery (and NK's potential counterattack of deadly nerve agents like sarin and "VX"); and a whole lot more. The tl;dr? In a direct conflict with NK, massive death is likely unavoidable.

Let's look at something nice now! Here's a bunch of nice art instead.

Oh, America. The lottery winner hadn't been able to afford to go to a doctor; he was self-employed and had no health insurance. Once he won the lottery, he went to the doctor, found out he had stage four lung cancer of both the brain and the lung, and then died 23 days after winning the lottery.

One of the authors intentionally smartified her home in order to see just how much it would spy on her, connecting everything she could to the internet--"an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid’s toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame, a sex toy, and even my bed." She also teamed up with a colleague to build a special monitor-monitor router to spy on the devices spying on her, in order to analyze and view what data an entire smart home can leak. But the main thing she found out was just how aggravating it is to live in a smart home, with 14 different apps, power strips and outlet expanders, an infuriating amount of integration work to be done, and overall an incredibly janky experience. And on the analytics side, while much of the specifics of the data was encrypted, the metadata of when what device sent what information contains more than enough to figure out someone's hobbies, routines, and habits in detail. A good read for some funny (and terrifying) details about the effects of having surveillance in your own home, and an extremely lonely smart coffee maker.

A genetic mutation only 25 years ago has resulted in an entirely new species of crayfish that has an extra copy of chromosomes. The female-only species can lay eggs for itself, dividing embryos and producing clones of itself. Not just that: male slough crayfish can mate with them, but they can't actually father any children. How's that for a political statement for ya? Owners of these crayfish start with one, and within a year have hundreds. They also spread themselves rapidly, even walking on land to find new sources of water. Within, more interesting musings on why animals have sex as opposed to just cloning themselves.