Lizzie Wade:

Inside the cloud that is perpetually draped over the small town of San Juan Yaee, Oaxaca, Raúl Hernández Santiago crouches down on the roof of the town hall and starts drilling. Men wearing rain gear of various impermeabilities cluster above him, holding a 4-meter-tall tower in place. Braided wires trail from four small circles welded near its midpoint; eventually those will be bolted or tied down in order to hold the tower steady during the frequent storms that roll through this part of Mexico’s Sierra de Juárez mountains. They don’t want it falling over every time it rains. Ninety thousand of the town’s pesos—a bit over $6,000—are invested in the equipment lashed to the top of the tower, in a town where many residents get by on subsistence agriculture.
 
 The tower—which Hernández, Yaee’s blacksmith, welded together out of scrap metal just a few hours earlier—is the backbone of Yaee’s first cellular network. The 90,000 pesos come in the form of two antennas and an open-source base station from a Canadian company called NuRAN. Once Hernández and company get the tower installed and the network online, Yaee’s 500 citizens will, for the first time, be able to make cell phone calls from home, and for cheaper rates than almost anywhere else in Mexico.

Evgeny Morozov:

It is the continent’s favourite hobby, and even the European Parliament cannot resist: having a pop at the world’s biggest search engine. In a recent and largely symbolic vote, representatives urged that Google search should be separated from its other services — demanding, in essence, that the company be broken up.
 This would benefit Google’s detractors but not, alas, European citizens. Search, like the social networking sector dominated by Facebook, appears to be a natural monopoly. The more Google knows about each query — who is making it, where and why — the more relevant its results become. A company that has organised, say, 90 per cent of the world’s information would naturally do better than a company holding just one-tenth of that information.
 But search is only a part of Google’s sprawling portfolio. Smart thermostats and self-driving cars are information businesses, too. Both draw on Google’s bottomless reservoirs of data, sensors such as those embedded in hardware, and algorithms. All feed off each other.

Tap or click on the above image, then pan in any direction.

A stunning sunset scene with God’s rainbow above the clearning storm.

Tap or click on the above image, then pan in any direction.

Campeche is among the New York Times’ “52 Places to Go in 2015“. It is well worth a visit.

Cliff Christl:

I attended the Ice Bowl as a 20-year-old college student and have my ticket stub to prove it. I sat in Section 18, Row 13, Seat 15, or at about the 40-yard line directly behind the Packers’ bench on the north half of the stadium. The price of my ticket was $12, and I dressed warmly enough that I don’t remember leaving my seat at halftime or at any point during the game.
 
 Sure it was cold. The temperature at kickoff was minus-13 degrees and the wind chill was minus-46. But at least it wasn’t Siberia, or what people around the NFL called Green Bay, B.L., Before Lombardi.
 
 Today, those of us who sat through the Ice Bowl have become targets of another slight. Tell someone you went to the game and they want to give you a lie detector test.

Nico Sell:

You’ve claimed that privacy is the new fame. Can you explain that?
 
 It’s now so difficult to be private that it will be the new state everyone strives for. But I don’t think we have to convince people of the need for privacy, it’ll just happen naturally… [just as] fashion is always going from skinny jeans to bell-bottoms and back again. The generation below always over-corrects to the one before, and you can already see this happening.
 
 You’ve created a messaging app, Wickr, that allows people to message each other in a completely secure, private way. A lot of people would say they’ve got nothing to hide, so why bother?
 
 We’re just trying to be the number one messenger in the world. I think privacy and security are reasons why our users will stay with us because there is no way that your information can ever be used, viewed or kept. The difference between us and what the big companies are doing is that they are encrypting messages between a device and their servers, whereas we are doing it device to device. So, we don’t know who our users are, who they’re talking to or what they’re saying. We can’t hand that information over: we don’t have it.

Chip Walter:

Hidden by a rock slide for 22,000 years, the cave came to light in December 1994, when three spelunkers named Eliette Brunel, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet scrambled through a narrow crevice in a cliff and dropped into the dark entry. Since then, what is now known as the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc has been ferociously protected by the French Ministry of Culture. We are among the rare few who have been allowed to make the same journey the ancient artists did. The age of these drawings makes youngsters of Egypt’s storied pyramids, yet every charcoal stroke, every splash of ocher looks as fresh as yesterday. Their beauty whipsaws your sense of time. One moment you are anchored in the present, observing coolly. The next you are seeing the paintings as if all other art—all civilization—has yet to exist.

Michael Snyder:

1. Liquid Gold
 
 It was morning, ebb tide, when our launch slid up to the shore—shiny and metallic and unstable as mercury—and stuck its nose resolutely into the mud. Felt clouds sulked overhead, temporary protection from the blazing April sun. The honey collectors hopped one by one down onto the shore, which swallowed them up to their calves before releasing a thick, flatulent squelch.
 
 Zahangir, short, dark, and strong, with a deep scar across his left cheek, trudged up the bank and into the forest first. Then came Abdul Roshid, who had organized the group; Aliur Rahman, scholarly and wispy with wire-framed glasses and a scraggly goatee sprouting from his narrow chin; Abdul Joleel, practically silent for three days running; Haleem, whose voluptuous lips seemed almost indecent in his otherwise spare and angular face; Nurul Islam, compact and smiling and warm; Kholil, a big man with a penchant for big stories; and Aminool, Nurul Islam’s nephew, the youngest in the group, who spent the day hacking absently at the underbrush with a small machete (they call it a daa in Bengali) and looking after me with mute, gesticulatory enthusiasm.

Reminds me of my great uncle, who long harvested honey.

Heather Somerville:

Silicon Valley is pushing its way into every stage of the food-growing process, from tech tycoons buying up farmland to startups selling robots that work the fields to hackathons dedicated to building the next farming app.
 
 “The food sector is wasteful and inefficient,” said Ali Partovi, a Bay Area investor with large stakes in sustainable agriculture startups. “Silicon Valley has a hubris that says, ‘That’s stupid. Let’s change it.’?”
 
 The booming activity around the so-called ag-tech sector has led experts to predict that its growth, in terms of the number of new startups and venture-capital investments, will in another five or so years outpace today’s hottest technologies.

Lee Rainie & Janna Anderson:

The terms of citizenship and social life are rapidly changing in the digital age. No issue highlights this any better than privacy, always a fluid and context-situated concept and more so now as the boundary between being private and being public is shifting. “We have seen the emergence of publicy as the default modality, with privacy declining,” wrote Stowe Boyd, the lead researcher for GigaOm Research in his response in this study. “In order to ‘exist’ online, you have to publish things to be shared, and that has to be done in open, public spaces.” If not, people have a lesser chance to enrich friendships, find or grow communities, learn new things, and act as economic agents online.