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Kanye West's Apple Store "Keynote" Shows a Man Who Needs Some Serious Help

Jeff Gamet ·

Kanye West climbed on top of a product display table in the Georgetown Apple store on Thursday so he could deliver a “keynote” to shoppers. Apple didn’t invite him into the store to speak or climb on furniture, although he was apparently quite the spectacle. I said it before, and now I’m putting the call out again: Can someone get this man some help?

Cool Stuff Found

BostonDynamics's Atlas Robot Can Now Use Parkour Tactics (to Hunt Us Down)

Bryan Chaffin ·

I both love and am terrified by the astounding work BostonDynamics is doing with its future masters-of-us-all. The company has a new video our showing its Atlas robot on a parkour outing, something they will no doubt find useful when they turn on us at some point in the not-too-distant future. OK, I mostly kid, but seriously: watching this video is both amazing and weirdly creepy (and scary). The way Atlas uses its arms to balance and help lift itself…it’s so human-like. BostonDynamics, by the by, is the company that makes dogbots that can open doors, another ability they will no doubt find useful.

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Plucky Google Reaches for the Golden Ring With Call Screen

John Martellaro ·

You have to hand it to Google. The company has a certain spirit of AI inventiveness, even if the result isn’t always iron-clad consumer ready.  In this case, it’s the recently announced Call Screen service for Pixel phones that puts an AI between the Pixel user and the telemarketers & robocalls.  Read about it in the link below. This may not do amazing things for Pixel sales, and it may still have kinks to work out, but it sets a bar and whets our appetite for what Apple could do when it’s in top gear. Alas, Siri, cannot do this. Yet.

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Why Do Many Fantasy Books Feature Academia?

Andrew Orr ·

Jason Kehe writes about an interesting trope in fantasy books: wizard schools. Specifically, orphans who go to wizard school, meet friends along the way, and finally defeat a villain.

Authors change; the story stays the same. In the darkness a child is born. The child suffers, but he has mysterious power. Posthaste, destiny leads the child to the same place it herds all the courageous orphan-protagonists of speculative fiction: a storied and exclusive institution of magical learning, where he unnerves the faculty, demonstrates arrogance, and forms lasting friendships on his way to vanquishing evil.