| In this edition: an obligatory but interesting Pokemon Go reference, a new book on cybernetics, the eBook plateau, human prehistory, and a trip to Tajikistan. 1. At least by some accounts, Ingress—the progenitor of Pokemon Go—is a better place for women than many other online spaces. Why? "Many women told me their Ingress-related experiences have been positive and free of sex-based harassment. Like me, many have encountered the occasional insulting remark — particularly in the in-game communication channels — but otherwise feel they’re treated as equals. Many women have become leaders in different regions through organizing events, farms and communities and orchestrating players for larger operations." 2. An excellent book review of Thomas Rid's new work on cybernetics: Rise of the Machines. "Rid is especially good on the interface between weird science and popular culture, giving us everything from Arthur C. Clarke quoting Wiener in the pages of Playboy to a spread in Life magazine with a pinup model luxuriating in the mechanical arms of General Electric’s 80-ton 'Electric Beetle,' a device manufactured at the same upstate New York factory that (as it happens) Kurt Vonnegut visited to write his breakthrough first novel, Player Piano (1952), set in a dystopian mechanized society extrapolated from then-current trends in workplace automation. This is not art imitating life so much as strange loops of attraction and repulsion, running from Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the 1920 Czech play that bequeathed us the word robot) to, of course, The Terminator, the blockbuster franchise whose third installment gives the book its title. (Rid deliciously quotes Manfred Clynes, the researcher who created the term cyborg: 'Schwarzenegger playing this,' Clynes said unironically, 'dehumanized the concept completely.')" 3. Huh. eBook sales continue to fall. "eBooks: After peaking in 2013 at $3.24 billion, eBook revenue declined to $3.20 billion in 2014 and again in 2015 by 11.3% to $2.84 billion. Unit sales also declined by 9.7%, with eBooks now making up 17.3% of the trade book market." 4. A fascinating hodgepodge of interesting ideas on what geonomic studies are telling us about human ancestry. "The evidence which is coming back is that pre-modern populations exhibited a great deal of genetic differentiation over even small distances, and, that differentiation could persist for thousands of years. Between group proportions of variation on the order of 10% of the total variance, what you see between Europeans and Han Chinese, were not atypical for nearby peoples, even though one migrant between them per generation would have eliminated that difference in short order." 5. Jan Chipchase travels through "Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan’s GBAO region and China’s western provinces" and returns with 61 observations. "32. The most undervalued object on a long distance Chinese train journey is a power extension cable. 33. People wearing fake Supreme are way more interesting than those that wear the real deal. 34. An iPhone box full of fungus caterpillar in Kham Tibet sold wholesale, is worth more than a fully specced iPhone. It’s worth 10x at retail in 1st/2nd Tier China. It is a better aphrodisiac too. On Fusion: The strange story of the man whose troll friends ensure he dies in one major international tragedy after another. 1. medium.com/@beth_weingarner 2. warontherocks.com | @evansryan202 3. publishers.org 4. unz.com | @ewancallaway 5. medium.com/todays-office | @solarconstant Subscribe to The Newsletter Society Extrapolated from Then-Current Trends in Workplace Automation | 