That bar of soap you’re so rigorously scrubbing your hands with multiple times a day is one of the most ancient consumer products you use, with one caveat: A lot of modern soap isn’t soap at all.
https://thewirecutter.com/blog/history-of-soap/

Things can’t stay as they are, but the prospect of doing something about it is hardly appealing. Nevertheless, the only way things are going to get better is to conduct controlled, careful migrations to modern soft- and hardware.
https://www.howtogeek.com/667596/what-is-cobol-and-why-do-so-many-institutions-rely-on-it/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-comic-strip-tour-of-the-wild-world-of-pandemic-modeling/

"In short, when someone tells you that you are a dirty communist for saying landlords contribute nothing and merely drain society, remind them that the idea came first from Adam Smith."
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/337

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/334

https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_webb_where_are_all_the_aliens

This is great stuff, particularly in the last few minutes.

Can you spot a liar? We all know people who think they can, and very often they claim to be able to do so by reading "body language." Clearing one’s throat, touching one’s mouth, crossing one’s arms, looking away: these and other such gestures, they say, indicate on the part of the speaker a certain distance from the truth. In the WIRED "Tradecraft" video above, however former FBI special agent Joe Navarro more than once pronounces ideas about such physical lie indicators "nonsense." And having spent 25 years working to identify people presenting themselves falsely to the world — "my job was to catch spies," he says — he should know, at the very least, what isn’t a tell.
http://www.openculture.com/2020/01/can-you-spot-liars-through-their-body-language.html

https://tcf.org/content/report/dear-colleges-take-control-online-courses/?agreed=1

WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW

• Building on The Century Foundation’s earlier research, this report presents new data and analysis on the state of public–private partnerships in today’s online higher education landscape, along with what schools can do to protect themselves and their students from the predatory behavior that pervades it.
• Universities contract with private, for-profit online program managers (OPMs) to develop, deliver, and recruit for their online degree programs. In some cases, the universities hand over 40 to 80 percent of the tuition revenue to the contracted company.
• Some universities allow computer coding “bootcamps,” a popular form of online program, to operate under the brand name of the university even though they are completely run by an outside company—and on terms more typical of predatory for-profit schools.
• Most university–OPM contracts tie colleges’ hands for a long period, preventing them from innovating their programs or responding to student needs or changes in the labor market.
• Colleges can protect themselves and their students by contracting out selectively, and by retaining control over tuition price-setting and financial aid, recruiting and admission, program and institutional integrity, and ultimately, their brand.

Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s “in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.

A human being’s very sense of self is intimately tied up with his or her identity group’s status and beliefs. Unsurprisingly, then, people respond automatically and defensively to information that threatens their ideological worldview. We respond with rationalization and selective assessment of evidence – that is, we engage in “confirmation bias,” giving credit to expert testimony we like and find reasons to reject the rest.

https://theconversation.com/humans-are-hardwired-to-dismiss-facts-that-dont-fit-their-worldview-127168

If you were to go as far out into space as you can imagine, what would you encounter? Would there be a limit to how far you could go, or could you travel a limitless distance? Would you eventually return to your starting point, or would you continue to traverse space that you had never encountered before? In other words, does the Universe have an edge, and if so, where is it?

Believe it or not, there are actually three different ways to think about this question, and each one has a different answer.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/01/21/how-far-is-it-to-the-edge-of-the-universe/#2c6c6c8155a3