Dissolving the Dead · thewalrus.ca
DALE HILTON can show you fear in a bagful of dust: 160 pounds of once-living human, pressure-cooked, baked, and pulverized into soft white powder fine enough to sprinkle over French toast. The ground bones sit in clear plastic on a counter, next to a pacemaker, a false hip, and a pair of breast implants extracted from some of the eighty bodies Hilton has disintegrated at his bio-cremation facility in Smiths Falls, Ontario, an hour’s drive southwest of Ottawa. “It’s a lovely product,” he says, looking proudly at his handiwork.

The City States of Europe | Big Think
“The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city,” writes Parag Khanna. The author of several books on global strategy, Khanna argues that (some) cities, as islands of good governance in an increasingly unstable world, will become the cornerstone of a new world order.  That new world order won’t be a “global village” of nation states, for globalisation is corroding national sovereignty. Rather, it will be a loose network of semi-independent city states, perhaps resembling the Hanseatic League and other medieval trading alliances.

Who Killed James I? | History Today
The accusation that James I was murdered by his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, may have been a false one but it was widely believed and helped to justify the execution of Charles I. Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell explain.

Twitter Has Lost More Than $2 Billion in 10 Years
When Twitter went public back in 2013, it was an unprofitable company. More than two years later, that hasn’t changed. In fact, the company revealed in its annual 10-K filed Feb. 29 that it has lost more than $2 billion in total since launching a decade ago.

BBC – Earth – How our ancestors drilled rotten teeth
Long before humans invented writing, the wheel and civilisation, they learned how to drill rotten teeth to relieve the pain of tooth decay

re:Work
Practices, research, and ideas from Google and other organizations to put people first.

Hackathon Be Gone
Last weekend I attended the MHacks: Refactor hackathon on behalf of my company. I acted as a representative of my company as well as a mentor for the hackers. I saw a lot of amazing projects and helped a lot of students. The energy of the students and their output was phenomenal. Needless to say, the entire experience was rewarding. However, the more of these events I attend, the more disgusted I become with the process.

New Korean War Will Lead US to Final Ruin
A touch-and-go situation is now prevailing in the Korean peninsula due to the confrontational hysteria of the US imperialist aggression forces that have deployed in south Korea their special operation troops from all arms and services. Under this grave situation the Supreme Headquarters of the Korean People’s Army announced a crucial statement carrying the fixed will of all servicepersons and civilians in the DPRK to bring the US imperialist aggressors to the final doom. The statement turned the whole country all at once into a scene of towering hatred toward the aggressors.

A Visual Look at 2 Million Chess Games
We’ll take a look at more than 2 million games, taken from the MillionBase PGN database. I ignored any Chess960 games contained, but in total there are 2,197,113 games. I was interested to see what kind of visualizations I can do, and what patterns would be revealed by considering so many games. It was the biggest collection of games I could find, spanning games from 1801 up to 2013, and players with ratings between 215 (wow!) to 2861 (I wonder who that is?). So I think it’s a pretty good representation of chess games all around.