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This thin under-pillow speaker helped me fall asleep without earbuds

I’ve struggled with insomnia since I was very young. Like many chronic overthinkers, I tend to fall asleep best when my mind is occupied by something else, such as podcasts, YouTube compilations, or my personal favorite: rain sounds. But earbuds can be uncomfortable, and playing audio out loud isn’t exactly considerate when I’m staying at […]
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Echo Isle is a pint-sized adventure inspired by classic Zelda

Echo Isle is heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda, and it's not afraid to show it: The retro graphics bear a striking resemblance to Link's Awakening, the main character wears a blue tunic and wields a sword, and he navigates dungeons to collect items and keys to fight bosses and gather magical MacGuffins. But where Echo Isle shines is how it takes the best parts of a Zelda adventure and shrinks them down to their essence - I finished the game in a little more than an hour.

The game starts with the main character falling from the sky onto Echo Isle, an island protected by a magical lighthouse that has mysteriously gone dark. While you d …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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South Wales Police Shelves Anti-Islam β€œHostility” Recording Plans After Legal Challenge Threat

South Wales Police has shelved plans to record incidents of "anti-Muslim hostility" after the Free Speech Union threatened a judicial review – calling it a de facto blasphemy law.

The post South Wales Police Shelves Anti-Islam β€œHostility” Recording Plans After Legal Challenge Threat appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.

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Grifters, cynics, and true believers: The family tree of vaccine opponents

Stanley Plotkin, 93, was instrumental in developing a number of vaccines over the course of his career. He recently said that he’s β€œbeginning to regret having lived so longβ€”because we’re going downhill.” How could we possibly have gotten here?

Maybe we’ve always been here. It turns out that the anti-vaccine arguments currently flooding the Internet have been around for as long as vaccines have. In his new book A Pox on Fools, Thomas Levenson breaks them down into three categories, as made clear in the book’s subtitle: β€œThe True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines.” The accusations these people levy against vaccines can just as easily be used to categorize the arguments themselves: They are wrong, they are bad, and they are intolerable.

Wrong

As Levenson tells it, in the early 18th century, a couple of forward-thinking Westerners learned about inoculations against smallpox from Ottoman women and an enslaved African. At that point, infectious disease was by far the leading cause of death, as it had been forever. In the 19th century, roughly 40 percent of babies died of infection before they turned 5.

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