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"That's not sharing, that's selling."
The Case Against Sharing:
"The sharing economy’s success is inextricably tied to the economic recession, making new American poverty palatable. It’s disaster capitalism. 'Sharing' companies are not embarrassed by this — it appears to be a point of pride."
Doooooorrrrroooooothyyyyy Gaaaaaaaallllllle!
The Sad, Century-Long History of Terrible Wizard of Oz Movies. Would you like an exhaustive list? Sure you would...
The 2014 Hugo Nominees
The finalists for the 2014 Hugo Awards and finalists for the 1939 Retrospective Hugo Awards have been announced in advance of LonCon3, the 2014 WorldCon of Science Fiction.
Hugo Voters packet: threat or menace?
But from a method of creating a more informed electorate, the voter packet has come to be seen as a goody bag. Does anyone think that the thousand new Worldcon members who joined after the nominations were announced did so because of a genuine interest in the award? A sizable percentage of them, at least, probably did so in order to get free ebook copies of the entire Wheel of Time series for a mere $50.Science fiction critic Abigail Nussbaum talks about the expectations the Hugo Awards Voters packet sets for the awards themselves (And also why calling people entitled for being disappointed Orbit didn't include its nominations is wrong).
War fatigue
The young men and women enlisting in the armed forces now were in pre-school on 9/11. "As a nation we have internalized our longest military conflict; it has suffused the social, political, and cultural body. The war is not something the nation is doing; it's simply something that is." Vox on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from Jessica Lynch to Bowe Bergdahl.
How Mistakes Can Save Lives
What hospitals can learn from flight safety measures.
After his wife died due to a mistake during a very simple procedure, Martin Bromiley decided to use his pilot experience to examine how such mistakes can be avoided in the future. It involves changing the whole hierarchy of the hospital environment.
"Perhaps in American cinema, women have typically been reduced to types like mom, girlfriend, or victim. But in the Y.A. books of our youth, they are far more complex, and more thoroughly drawn."
'The Atlantic Wire' kicks off its new YA For Grownups series with The Greatest Girl Characters of Young Adult Literature.
Jedi is not the 2nd most popular religion in any state? How disapointing
The second-largest religion in each state
Christianity is by far the largest religion in the United States; more than three-quarters of Americans identify as Christians. A little more than half of us identify as Protestants, about 23 percent as Catholic and about 2 percent as Mormon. But what about the rest of us?
Christianity is by far the largest religion in the United States; more than three-quarters of Americans identify as Christians. A little more than half of us identify as Protestants, about 23 percent as Catholic and about 2 percent as Mormon. But what about the rest of us?
Journey to the Bottom of the (Cold War) Sea and Back
Submarine causalities are tragedies of war that are not always directly associated with combat. Systems failures at sea are often mysterious, with evidence and remains disappearing to all but the deepest diving vehicles. This was no different in the Cold War, with non-combat losses from the US and the Soviet Fleets. In that era of nuclear secrets, both those of nuclear-powered submarines and nuclear weapons, learning about the enemy's technology was paramount. Such an opportunity came to the US with the sinking of K-129, a Golf Class II Soviet submarine that went down with 98 men on board. The recovery took over six year, involved the possible payback of Howard Hughes, a videotaped formal sea burial that was eventually copied and given to then-President Boris Yeltsin, and decades of CIA secrecy.
Solve for (D)emocracy
This programmer thinks he's solved the gerrymandering problem.
Gerrymandering has been discussed on the blue many times. But with very little eye towards solving the problem. A programmer named Brian Olsen has come up with the idea of mapping districts using compactness. It's fun! Check your state!.
Elmer and Gertrude? They are likely pretty old.
The median living Brittany is 23 years old.
Nate Silver (and Allison McCann) perform some pretty impressive data wrangling and graphical analysis on the age of living Americans with a given name.
goodbye bob
Bob Hoskins, legendary British actor, has died aged 71. He is perhaps best known for his roles in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (clip), Hook (clip), Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday, where he delivered one of the best movie endings ever.
We can't all be Tommy Wiseau
"I've watched a lot of terrible films over the years... And even by these standards, Driscoll's output is atrocious. But whereas directors like [German] Uwe Boll will happily revel in a 'worst film director ever' title, Richard has absolutely no sense of humour about it. He genuinely thinks he’s creating art." --- This is the story of British actor/director Richard Driscoll, his 2012 film "Eldorado" and how it all landed him in jail.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Curious Alice is a 1971 anti-drug film produced by the National Institute for Mental Health.
Meant to reach children 8-10 years old, the film didn't really get it's intended message across. You can read more about it at the National Archives.
The Google Archipelago
Google has been in Ireland since 2003, and some former Google employees and contractors with significant experience at the company say that Google’s reputation as a great employer is undeserved. Permanent staff are well taken care of, they say, but even many permanent staff are overqualified, overworked, and perform relatively menial tasks. In addition, entire layers of hidden contractors and temporary workers do much of the work without the benefits or opportunities accorded permanent staff.
FaceocculousRift
Mark Zuckerberg buys Occulus Rift
the darling of 3D VR gaming (previously: 1, 2) for about $2B. Given that the Oculus Rift was poised to be a major breakthrough for gaming, getting acquired by a advertising company social network has sent The Internet into a collective freakout.
Who cleans the toilets in Galt’s Gulch?
"I’m just trying to color a sketch of how hard a problem practical logistics are. Supply chains are really, really tricky, and it would be quite a trick to sign up for them without entraining a bunch of stuff to do with credit supply, labor and safety laws, and so on. That bureaucracy is sometimes bad, sometimes unnecessary and corrupt, but it’s also what makes it work. The real world is not a packet network – physical objects come with complex and inseparable contexts, and they are produced by a huuuge machine full of flywheels with unfathomable inertia." -- Charlie Lloyd writes about living on a small island, seasteading and how independent you can really be in the modern world.
The Voluntarism Fantasy
Mike Konczal, for Democracy Journal: The Voluntarism Fantasy
This is the weirdest job interview you've ever heard of.
The Ask A Manager advice blog received an e-mail asking if the interview shenanigans the poster had just gone through were a good way to find a candidate.
Then it got worse. As advice blogger Allison Green continued to correspond with the letter writer, the letter writer proceeded to tell her about the final interview process, in which 20 candidates had to spend all day and night interviewing.
"Scams don't work if the victim knows what the hustler is trying to do."
Dark Patterns is a term used to describe web design that intentionally exploits specific aspects of the users psychology to drive them into making certain kinds of decisions. [an update to this fantastic previously]
Play! OR ELSE.
"But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry." Mandatory fun, the drudgery of child's play, and the American trend toward rejuveniliaztion are among the topics touched on in "Play, Dammit."
Pixel and Dimed
When I come across the task, "Proposal Flash Mob in Central Park,” I know immediately that I am exactly the wrong person for the job. The training video opens in a mirrored dance studio, with a man in a tight-fitting black t-shirt. "Please make sure you are familiar with this choreography before you commit to that rehearsal so we don't have to waste any time,” he explains in a high-pitched voice before counting out about three minutes of what looks to me like complex choreography. During slow claps at baseball games, I'm the fan who claps on the wrong beat. A real rabbit might have a better chance of learning this dance."A journalist's month-long experiment with the gig economy.
NSA's MYSTIC and RETRO
New Snowden disclosures:
"The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place."
Heal yourself, Skeletor
Daily affirmations from Skeletor (SLTumblr) Skeletor is....LOVE!
The End is Nigh
"Heaven Is a Place on Planet X"
by Desirina Boskovich. "Break! Break! Break!" by Charlie Jane Anders. "System Reset" by Tobias Buckell. These three short stories are from The End is Nigh anthology, the first volume of The Apocalypse Triptych, three anthologies of stories about life just before, during, and after the apocalypse. "Post-apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that have already burned. Apocalyptic fiction is about worlds that are burning. The End is Nigh is about the match."
Goodbye to all this.
The Guardian has an article
describing an upcoming study, funded by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and written by a team headed by Safa Motesharrei at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), discussing the prospect that "global industrial civilization could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution".
he's the sort of genius who's not very good at boiling a kettle
Are the robots about to rise? Ray thinks so...
Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find... And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI"... Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning. And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet.In late 2012, Ray became Google's new Director of Engineering, empowering him with extraordinary resources and latitude.
ATTENTION HUMAN MALES
Stacey Nightmare is a completely normal human woman who vines under the name Stacey Nightmare for no reason at all. She enjoys fitness and music. She has a pet spider named Gretchen. She lives in Brooklyn. [[Everything nsfw]]
In war, not everyone is a soldier.
The generic war game has come under fire from many sides, prompting more thoughtful games, such as the recent Spec Ops: The Line (previously) and others. However, short of post-apocalyptic zombie-type games, no one has thought to make a game about the civilians - survivors living in the cities that other people battle over. Until now.
In This War of Mine, the focus is shifted away from military operations portrayed in most games. Instead, it is a dark survival game where players control a group of civilians trying to stay alive in a besieged city. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, offering players time to craft, trade, upgrade their shelter, feed and cure their people. At night they must scavenge nearby areas in search for food, medicines, weapons and other useful items. This War of Mine was inspired by real-life events and delivers a message. "This can happen in your city, in your country."
It's unknown whether these homebrewers went for insanely hoppy IPAs too
"As an important part of daily nourishment, women had always produced beer at home and for their own household. However, in Holland from the beginning of the thirteenth century beer production for the general market commenced. In the developing cities more and more labour was divided among specialised craftsmen. Professional breweries were established and the beer industry became a serious trade." -- female brewers in Holland and England, a paper by Marjolien van Dekken looking at how the brewery industry changed in Early Modern Times from largely homebrewed and controlled by women to a more large scale and male dominated industry.
The Cost of Kale: How Foodie Trends Can Hurt Low-Income Families
"If you want to be cosmopolitan, you’ll buy star anise, kimchi, and coconut oil. If you want to prevent cancer, buy collard greens, blueberries, and omega-3 eggs. If you want to eat food free of pesticides and high fructose corn syrup, buy organic meat, flour, and dairy. Compound all of these seemingly innocuous exercises in American Dreaming with diet fads like “clean” eating, Westernized veganism, or the paleo diet, and you’ll get a supermarket full of people staring at labels, searching the copy for proof of ideological and medical purity. I need to buy this if I want to be good, if I really want to take care of myself and my family. As it turns out, this moralistic way of framing choice is extremely profitable for food processors, restaurants, and produce retailers: we’ve been effectively held captive by our own consciences."(slBitchMagazine)
plant sex in silico
Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie
- "The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren't genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn't mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark's division is drawing on Monsanto's accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor."
London Calling
Britain will betray the United States and Ukraine to keep laundering dirty Russian money.
"The city has changed. The buses are still dirty, the people are still passive-aggressive, but something about London has changed. You can see signs of it everywhere. The townhouses in the capital’s poshest districts are empty; they have been sold to Russian oligarchs and Qatari princes."
Trigger warnings needed in classroom?
Literature courses often examine works with grotesque, disturbing and gruesome imagery within their narratives. For instance ... “Mrs. Dalloway” paints a disturbing narrative that examines the suicidal inclinations and post-traumatic experiences of an English war veteran.
By creating trigger warnings for their students, professors can help to create a safe space for their students
The "trigger warning" has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped?
The "trigger warning" has spread from blogs to college classes. Can it be stopped?
"It's... dumb luck that we haven't had an accidental nuclear detonation"
Command and Control is a new book by Eric Schlosser about nuclear weapons mishaps, with a focus on the Damascus Accident. You can read an excerpt at Mother Jones,
an op-ed adapted from the text at Politico, or a different op-ed at The Guardian. The book has been positively reviewed by The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. Schlosser has been interviewed by Steve Roberts on The Diane Rehm Show, Amy Goodman, Michael Mechanic at Mother Jones, and Ryan Devereaux at Rolling Stone.
Ageism in the tech industry?
Vivek Wadhwa's article about hiring in the tech industry makes some startling assertions.
I thought I’d moved beyond my days of Panicking in Northeast Iowan Malls
"Girls who wanted to be my friend wanted to help me get better at being a girl. Like a Bridget Jones-esque makeover montage, I let them burn my forehead with curling irons, poke me in the eyes with eyeliner pencils, and look me up and down in dressing rooms. I was so thrilled for the friendships I was convinced I enjoyed the forehead burning (my same friend, always burning me in the same place, before every quarterly Junior High dance, as reliable as the changing of the seasons). What began in early adolescence– genuine friendships forged through drag-like gender performance– continued well into adulthood." -- Molly Knefel writes about growing up gender nonconforming.
The dangers of A/B testing
A/B testing has become a familiar term for most people running web sites, especially e-commerce sites. Unfortunately, most A/B test results are illusory (PDF, 312 kB). Here's how not to run an A/B test. Do use this sample size calculator or this weird trick.
Featuring the "Barship Enterprise"
Meet New Orleans' only official Sci-Fi and Fantasy themed parade krewe: Chewbacchus.
Growing Up in a Cocoon
In an ongoing revisionist history effort, Southern schools and churches in the United States still pretend the Civil War wasn't about slavery.
Demolishing Great War Haigiography
"Nevertheless, one lands the real killer blow against the rather silly ‘what if’ justification for the 'just' Great War by looking at its actual results. The militarist German-dominated Europe envisaged in the counter factual just mentioned would have been worse than the one that did actually eventuate, worse than fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, the Great Depression, the influenza epidemic … how, exactly? Surely a war allegedly fought to prevent one particular outcome but which, even when won, at the cost of millions of dead, produced an even worse situation is the very definition of pointless slaughter." -- In the wake of the Michael Gove led attack on the socalled "Blackadder view" of the First World War as a pointless slaughter, historian Guy Halsall does his best to pour cold war on their idea of WWI as a just war.