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The We-Are-All-Going-To-Die Edition Saturday, May 28, 2016

Study Linking Tumors In Rats To Cellphones Raises A Host Of Questions, by Andrew Pollack, New York Times

Oddly enough, the incidence of tumors in females was minimal, barely different from the control group. It is not clear why the results would vary between the sexes, which is one reason some experts are questioning the findings.

Even for males, the differences between particular groups of rats and the control group were not statistically significant. Another anomaly was that the rats exposed to the radiation lived longer on the whole than animals in the control group. And schwannomas can occur all over the body, not just the heart, but the study did not find increased rates in other organs.

Buying An iPhone

How Many Hours Does An iPhone Cost?, by Dan Bilefsky, New York Times

The average Londoner would have to work 41.2 hours to earn enough to buy an iPhone 6, while a New Yorker can buy it in just 24, according to the UBS study. That’s because wages lag farther behind the staggeringly high cost of living in London than in New York; London doesn’t even crack the top 10 cities for average gross earnings

Apple Expands iPhone Trade Up Program To France, Italy, And Spain, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

Apple today expanded its "Trade Up with Installments" program for iPhone to France, Italy, and Spain, enabling customers to trade in an eligible older-generation iPhone, Android, or Windows Phone smartphone and put the value of that device towards a new iPhone based on a 24-month payment plan.

Stuff

AirPort Extreme And Time Capsule Out Of Stock At U.S. Apple Stores, by Joe Rossignol, MacRumors

Apple may be complying with an FCC deadline of June 2, 2016 related to router software security rules gradually phased in since 2014, which would explain why the stock outage is limited to U.S. stores.

The Roll Review: iPhone App Takes Intelligent Charge Of Your Camera Roll, by Jackie Dove, Macworld

The Roll is designed to save you time and effort by automating the curation and organization of all the photos in your Camera Roll (The Roll—get it?), from scanning and tagging to quantitative quality ranking. The Roll offers a helping hand in deciding which ones to keep and ditch.

6 Road-trip Apps To Make The Miles Fly By, by Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press

Hitting the road this summer? Forget Yelp and those hotel booking apps -- they're useful, but boring. Instead, pack along these apps to liven things up along the way. You might even learn something.

Develop

Pimp My Code, Book 2: Swift And Dynamism, by Wil Shipley

There may be other use cases for lots of dynamic features, but honestly target/action is the only time I ever even think about them any more. Other forms of dynamic calls in Objective-C were pretty much obsolesced years ago, when ARC came along and the compiler was all, "Hey, you can't pass arbitrary C types to methods I can't analyze, because I don't know if I need to retain them or not!"

So if you want to blame anything, blame ARC, not Swift. It's still Lattner's bailiwick, so, you know, you don't even have to change who you're mad at.

Notes

Brilliant! This Zipper Warns You When Your Fly Is Down, by Mark Wilson, Fast Company

What does it do? The only thing that really matters in the day-to-day world of fashion: It texts you if your fly is down.

Bottom of the Page

So, what did I learn today?

One: Doing good science is difficult.

Two: Creating a good programming language is difficult.

Three: There is a "Extended Dance Mix" version of David Bowie's Underground on Apple Music.

That's all.

~

Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow, if I'm not dead from cancer.