A testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource.
It’s basically the only place on the internet that doesn’t function as a confirmation bias machine. Wikipedia is one of the few platforms online where tremendous computing power isn’t being deployed in the service of telling you exactly what you want to hear.
As varieties of truth go, facts are fragile. Unlike axioms and mathematical proofs that can be derived by anyone at any time, there is nothing necessary about the fact, to use Arendt’s example, that German troops crossed the border with Belgium on the night of August 4th, 1914, and not some other border at some other time. Like all facts, this one is established through witnesses, testimony, documents, and collective agreement about what counts as evidence — it is political, and as the propaganda machines of the 20th century showed, political power is perfectly capable of destroying it. Furthermore, they will always be tempted to, because facts represent a sort of rival power, a constraint and limit “hated by tyrants who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize,” and at risk in democracies, where they are suspiciously impervious to public opinion.
Facts, in other words, don’t care about your feelings. “Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness,” Arendt wrote.
Heart rate is one of the most basic and important indicators of health, providing a snapshot into a person’s physical activity, stress and anxiety, hydration level, and more.
Traditionally, measuring heart rate requires some sort of wearable device, whether that be a smart watch or hospital-grade machinery. But new research from engineers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows how the signal from a household WiFi device can be used for this crucial health monitoring with state-of-the-art accuracy—without the need for a wearable.