The Ultimate First World Problem

Your fancy toilet can be hacked. This appears to result entirely from the failure of the manufacturer to take any precautions against hacking, perhaps unable to imagine the temptations of toilet hacking.

In The Cool v. Creepy War Over New Technology,

This lands in the cool side, but only just.

Oh This Modern Life

When sitting at my computer at home, I'm surrounded by my iPad, my iPhone, my Kindle and, of course, my computer (two screens, no waiting). When an email arrives, it's like high noon in a clock shop.

Word of the Day

Today's word is Cisgender, the opposite of transgender, defined as "types of gender identity where an individual's self-perception of their gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth", which hints at the problem.

We Interupt this Blog Vacation...

For reasons that will be obvious to longtime readers (if there's anyone out there still).

Evolution May Be More Random Than Previously Believed

Some ecologists say the theory needs an update. They’ve proposed a new dynamic driving the emergence of new species, one that doesn’t involve adaptations or survival of the fittest.

Give evolution enough time and space, they say, and new species can just happen. Speciation might not only be an evolutionary consequence of fitness differences and natural selection, but a property intrinsic to evolution, just as all matter has gravity.

For reasons that remain unclear, they don't seem to be calling it the Cohen Theory of Evolution.