Machine Driven Drug Development - Can machines be trained to synthesize drugs just as efficiently as they were taught to play chess? That question is more complicated than it seems.

Get Yourself An RSS Reader - The best thing about RSS is that you choose what you read. No algorithmic surfacing of stuff you might care about. You just select the sites you want to follow, and you can scan the headlines in chronological order. I maybe have one too many feeds I track, but that's why I make these posts every day. Mac users should check out my guide to Feedly clients.

Like Steampunk, But With More Fire - 99% Invisible has an episode devoted to the era of the Airship. They cover the accidents that ended the period, and wonder if they will make a comeback.

In California, Everything Causes Cancer - In an attempt to make sure that cancer warning labels have zero efficacy, coffee now carries a cancer warning. Does the science support that? Turns out like many of the things California warns causes cancer, the science used to justify it is weak. It's understandable that people worry about carcinogens they don't know about, but being overly broad in your warning causes more harm than good.

Schadenfreude, Bad Book Edition - To celebrate Sean Penn’s glorious attempt at becoming a novelist, Electric Literature rounds up bad reviews of celebrity reviews gone past.

Does That Make Fugazi X-Factor? - Dangerous Minds collects a series of comic covers that reimagines classic punks as super heroes. While I would read the shit out of a Joey Ramone as Spider Man comic, I imagine the Black Flag comic would be Greg Ginn acting like Tony Stark all the time. (Though in the cinematic universe terms that makes Henry Rollins Captain America).

Archeology From A Living City - Digging through the trash of the dead is how we learned about the past. NYC is old enough that digging through its trash can yield surprising information.

The Zero Carbon Energy Economy - In a sign that resistance to climate change is a cultural reflex in isolated ideological corners, Shell releases their plans for a world for Zero Carbon Emissions. Well, zero net. This isn't going to win any Greenpeace awards but shows even oil companies are thinking about how we move forward.

I Love The 80’s Spielberg Edition - Loder sums up Ready Player One: Is there any nugget of '80s cultural detritus that the filmmakers were unable to cram into this picture? Just as I was wondering that, somebody up on screen shouted, "It's fuckin' Chucky!" Long after he stopped telling us about dead rock stars Kurt Loder became a film critic. He has a keen insight and can easily surmise where a film fits in the culture.