And so at long last, we reach US Election Day 2016, when a reckoning has finally come for the American political system - the candidates perfectly set up as the establishment facing the insurgents, the know-nothing Donald Trump squaring off against the know-it-all Hillary Clinton. How did we get like this? How did we get from the point where once upon a time, a candidate that was even threatened with being revealed to be cheating on his wife, would step back, stand down, or resign altogether than face the music, to the point where we’re seeing a candidate standing despite those accusations and worse being thrown around, and still he appears to be as close as a 3% gap? ...

Google’s relaxing a previous barrier between DoubleClick, their online ad division that controls 75% of the market, and the rest of Google’s data that can track you directly tied to your Google account, as reported by ProPublica. What does this mean? Well, up until now, you could have a DoubleClick tracking cookie and it would make ads follow you around the web - those creepy ads on random sites that somehow knew what you searched for on eBay 15 minutes ago - but it wouldn’t necessarily be tied into browsing activity elsewhere. ...

These photos of NASA robots and vehicles in a minimalist cleanroom style is just gorgeous and perfect Couldn’t ask for better. These are fascinating and beautiful.

This post on Stratechery is focused on the emergence of wearables, particularly with the new Snapchat Spectacles, but its opening makes a brilliant point about why the iPhone defined the modern smartphone - it was all about timing it right: Think about everything that happened between 1992 and 2007 that, at least at first glance, didn’t seem to have anything to do with smartphones: The personal computer moved out of the office and into the home The world wide web was invented and an entire ecosystem was built from scratch Personal electronics proliferated: while by 1992 most people had or used calculators and Walkmans, the 90s saw the introduction of PDAs and digital cameras; the 00s brought handheld GPS devices and digital music players The reason why we consider 2007 as the start of the smartphone era is that while there were plenty of smartphones released before then… it was the iPhone that, thanks to its breakthrough user interface and ahead-of-its-time hardware, was able to take advantage of all these developments. ...

Free diving under ice lakes: https://youtu.be/leqyKxbOxTA What an amazing world under there. That’s still planet Earth.