Adorable cat builds mini igloo.

Another thought piece about the state of jobs in the modern economy, this one from the Harvard Business Review and intersecting with the idea of the end of growth and also our discussions of Ellul’s concept of Technique.

See this item in the New York Times, “A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck.”

Here are the questions that are fair game for the midterm exam!

Apropos our ongoing discussion of autonomous vehicles, the world has now seen the first fender bender in which a self-driving car was at fault. Luckily, the Google car in question was going two miles per hour.

Human technology has transformed the world so dramatically that some say we are now in a new epoch, the anthropocene.

Relevant to our discussions of culture lag, surveillance, and privacy.

Breaking news and our topic of the week to boot: “Apple vows to resist FBI demand to crack iPhone linked to San Bernardino attacks.”

An interesting disconnect: Americans claim they want privacy, but then act as if they don’t.

This segment of the NPR podcast Invisibilia discusses the first traffic cameras and a guy who since way back in the 1990s has been wearing a computer to record everything he does.

Last month, the city of Round Rock gave up on its red light cameras, because they weren’t generating the hoped for profits.

Old news: N.S.A. devises radio pathway into computers.

And this NPR story about drones that can take pictures of whole urban areas, once a second every second, for six hours at a stretch.

Here’s an English translation of the Encyclopedie. Take a look at this entry for “woman.”