Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
The fight for net neutrality continues:
Today, I am calling on my fellow founders and investors (and anyone who loves the Internet) to join me in fighting to protect net neutrality. Internet freedom activists have organized a day of mass action to protect net neutrality on Wednesday, September 10th. On that day, every large company, every startup, and anyone with a blog or website should use tools available here (or create tools of their own) to organize their users to become an army of citizen-lobbyists. The internet needs you.
And if the phrase ‘net neutrality’ bores you, let John Oliver explain why it’s actually hugely important:
Has Apple’s new watch crossed a line? Time investigates:
Technology keeps getting more and more personal. First “personal computers,” which sat on your desk, gave way to laptops, which sat in a rather more intimate position. Now laptops are giving way to tablets and phones, which nestle in your hand and slip into your pocket. And early next year, the Apple Watch will wrap around quite a few wrists, which it will tap gently to signal that a friend is calling or a message has arrived.
You may be a better person in the morning—morally speaking.
If you’re a night owl, you’re probably grouchy if you’re awake at 6:30 a.m. Now, research shows that you’re also more likely to cheat at that hour. Likewise, early birds face the same dilemma at midnight.
And food may help you refine your morality:
I will welcome almost anything that stands a chance of waking my students from that cold slumber of vulgarity in which so many seem to be lost. Since eating is a pleasure that even the basest among us can appreciate, and since food is a necessity that no one can avoid for long, it may be that gardens can serve as promising lifelines for rescuing the spiritually moribund.
German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg passed away on September 5. John McClean at the Australian Broadcast Corporation remembers the monumental thinker:
Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the great theologians of the second half of the twenty-first century, died in Munich over the weekend. Pannenberg belonged to that generation who came of age in Germany amid the cultural and political ruins of the Second World War. He was born into a rather irreligious family in 1928 in Stettin. They moved to Berlin in 1942, where they were nearly victims of an Allied bombing.
You think baseball is dying? Craig Calcaterra at NBC Sports says otherwise:
Baseball is no longer The National Pastime. Of this, there can be no doubt. Indeed, one of the sport’s greatest authorities noted it in pretty stark terms: “Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down, or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face.”
A genetic scientist’s discovery actually led his parents to divorce:
I’m a stem cell and reproductive biologist. I fell in love with biology when I was in high school. It was the realization that every cell in my body has the same genome and DNA, but each cell is different. A stomach cell is not a brain cell is not a skin cell. But they’re reading from the same book of instructions. With 23andMe, you get your personal genome book, your story. Unless you have an identical twin somewhere, that genetic makeup is unique to you.
Jeff Henry makes some freakin’ cool water slides:
Waterslide designers compete in a parallel-universe version of The Right Stuff, vying for height and speed records because — this can be the only reason — it seems like a really awesome thing to do. Of these men, Jeff Henry is the most brilliant. He has the ability to make humans not only go down waterslides but up them, in the manner previously possible only on roller coasters. More than one of his employees compares him to Steve Jobs.
What David Foster Wallace misunderstood about John Updike at New Republic:
Beribboned as a chief of staff, prolific as a Mongol prince—beloved, ripened, rich, at rest—John Updike died in hospice near his home in coastal Massachusetts on January 27, 2009. Some nineteen years before, near the end of the Rabbit tetralogy, the work on which his reputation will unquestionably rest, he had his hero muse about an author, recently deceased, who had “joined Roy Orbison and Bart Giamatti in that beyond where some celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn expand like balloons and become gods but where most shrivel and shrink into yellowing obituaries.”
The Internet back in 1993:
Found on Mental Floss. Video by The Computer Chronicals.