Just like it says, Popcorn Shorts is about the kind of things we think are really interesting, but don’t really need a large article to explain them. From the sublime to the ridiculous, check in here for crunchy bits of info you’ll love to munch. By the way, much (but not necessarily all) of our delicious Popcorn comes from articles we’ve posted on our Facebook page. If you’re on Facebook, please stop by and “Like” us and we’ll keep a fairly-constant-but-not-frequent-enough-to-be-annoying stream of these coming to your virtual door!
The dumbing down of Italy… uh, America
Vapid popular media can enable the worst forms of populist politics, and that’s more than an assumption… it’s backed up with data. This story speaks directly to America’s situation today but the role of our country is played by Italy, Donald Trump is played by Sylvio Berlusconi, PBS/NPR are portrayed by RAI, the characters of FOX News and Sinclair Broadcasting are combined into the character of Mediaset for dramatic clarity, and the browbeaten citizens of America are brilliantly portrayed by the browbeaten citizens of Italy. In the 1980s, unabashedly unsophisticated Mediaset spread across Italy, buying up local channels and replacing RAI with cartoons, sports, soap operas, movies and other light entertainment. By 1990, 49 out of 50 Italians could watch Mediaset, half the country having gained access in just five years. This allowed Italian economists to compare early-Mediaset towns with equivalent late-Mediaset towns, and thus calculate how a society’s politics can change with low-quality information….
You can be hacked by the SOUND of your typing
What if scammers could learn your password, not from a massive cyberattack or taking control of your device, but from listening in as you type? That’s the startling premise of a recent study by researchers at Cambridge University and Sweden’s Linkoping University, who were able to glean passwords by deciphering the sound waves generated by fingers tapping on smartphone touch screens. According to the study, malicious actors can decode what a person is typing by accessing a smartphone’s microphone. “We showed that the attack can successfully recover PIN codes, individual letters and whole words,” the researchers wrote. “A passive, sound-based attack could be executed if a person installs an app infected with such malware…”
MOON TRIVIA to celebrate Apollo’s 50th anniversary
No one was more excited than we were about the 50th anniversary of the Apollo mission to the Moon. We were glued (if one can be intermittently glued) to the real-time replay of the mission, teary-eyed throughout. But now Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins are safe at home and we’re left with the afterglow. No problem! Let’s keep the celebration going with the FUN of the moon from Messy Nessy Chic. Check out their Moon Trivia to learn how NASA taped over the original mission footage, find out who the only person buried on the moon is, learn about Luna’s human poop problem, see the Customs report Apollo had to file on their return, and of course, much, much, more.
STOP THE PRESSES! We have a last-minute addition to our Moon Trivia… this article from BBC, Apollo in 50 Numbers. How many cases of flatulence on the way to the Moon? Find out here!
Lessons from three mis-matched Ghosts of History.
This is a story about what we’ve learned this month from the ghostly voices of History. In our Facebook ramblings we ran across three bits of rhetoric from three people who are about as radically divergent as anyone could imagine… W.E.B. DuBois, Erma Bombeck, and Richard Nixon. Speaking to different audiences, in different times, and with different motives, all three said things that were painfully resonant with America’s situation today, at least to us. We ‘memed’ the words of Nixon and Bombeck (below), but the depth of DuBois couldn’t be distilled. You should take the time to read Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson in it’s entirety, but we’ve included one searing paragraph for you below…
Excerpt from “Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson”, by W.E.B. DuBois, September 1913
“The only time when the Negro problem is insoluble is when men insist on settling it wrong by asking absolutely contradictory things. You cannot make 10,000,000 people at one and the same time servile and dignified, docile and self-reliant, servants and independent leaders, segregated and yet part of the industrial organism, disfranchised and citizens of a democracy, ignorant and intelligent. This is impossible and the impossibility is not factitious; it is in the very nature of things.”
“On the other hand, a determination on the part of intelligent and decent Americans to see that no man is denied a reasonable chance for life, liberty, and happiness simply because of the color of his skin is a simple, sane, and practical solution of the race problem in this land.”
