boredguy8

salon.com used to have T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" but the web page that references the audio (http://www.salon.com/2000/10/05/eliot/) no longer has a link to the audio. One of those sad losses to website redesign, I assume.

It was a pleasant reading and of my favorite things to listen to from time to time...I post the comment hoping someone can help me find the link somewhere. So far, I've not had luck.

Why do you have blind spots in the first place?

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/how-to-adjust-your-mirr...

"The paper advocates adjusting the mirrors so far outward that the viewing angle of the side mirrors just overlaps that of the cabin’s rearview mirror." I've been driving this way for a long time, and it's great. You can already see behind you: you don't need 2 more mirrors showing you the same thing.

[edit: content removed as the site is back up]

HNed, it appears.

Google's Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

But that depends on who you think Kickstarter is ultimately serving. I'm pretty sure Kickstarter cares more about the funders than the products that get displayed. This seems patently true, though obviously they need some people to post projects. But the number of people looking for money is always going to be non-trivial.

Second, if that is the thesis, it's silly. We learn more from success than from failure http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/successes-0729.html; http://hbr.org/2010/01/success-gets-into-your-head-and-chang.... And you can see all the successful projects you want.

As a consumer of Kickstarter projects, I don't see why I care that they hide their unfunded (I wouldn't call them 'failed') projects. I can't contribute to them AND those projects don't hurt me anyway: if they don't get funding, I don't lose money.

I much rather wish there were a way to know what percentage of funded projects fail to deliver their product. Are some categories more risky than others? Would there be a class action if, say, the Pebble folks just walk away with their 10 million dollars?

There are more subtle ways of gaming ruining your life, as well: slowly losing the drive to do anything more than what's necessary to pay the cable bill, rent, and the gaming subscription. Slowly the only friends you have are people you know from your guild. When the only source & output of creativity and energy are all wrapped up in playing a video game.

I've also seen people similarly consumed by pornography, alcohol, gambling, day trading, and I'm sure other things I can't think of now. Pot. I think any of those things can have their place, but please maintain connection to people who can and will say something if you start going overboard.

For instance, I'm in a pretty good place right now and still gave parental control to a friend for the D3 release, just in case. Six hours a week is arguably still too much, but seems reasonable to me, and they won't budge because A) I asked them not to; B) they care. That I've hit that limit is a good sign that I may not be as well off as I thought I was ;)

Take care of each other, and yourself.

Inter-rater reliability is super important for tests like this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability The gist is: you can't simply mark one person as "asian" and assume that categorization is correct. In that respect, the data would reveal more about the person sorting the photos than it would reveal about the perceptions of those that are rating the photos.

Second, there is a huge problem with causality here. So for instance, the author writes: "Be Asian if you want to appear smart; Latino if you want to appear extroverted." The problem is that there is a methodological flaw. On the first photo I saw on judge.me, I was presented with this image: http://images.judg.me/82e7fcbd988dbdcac0d00bd53fb93e96.jpg This would appear to me to be a latino or hispanic male at a party. I'm highly inclined to rate them highly on the extrovert scale: they're at a party. But that doesn't indicate stereotypically latino or hispanic features indicate extroversion. It could be that people with stereotypically latino or hispanic features were more likely to upload photos in which the image portrayed a more stereotypically extroverted activity.

Third, it appears that users can upload a photo to the site and see their feedback from votes. It seems highly possible that users self-select a photo that will best affirm the image of themselves they wish to cultivate. In that respect, there's both a huge confirmation bias and huge self-selection bias. If I want to think of myself as an academic, I'll upload a picture of me at my desk studying and watch the "intellectual" ratings pour in. Then I can feel assured that other people perceive me the way I want to be perceived. Additionally, if one wants to conform to social expectations (and things like Asch's line test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments indicate conformity is common), this data might really be nothing more than showing the degree to which people post photos affirming their conformity to their social expectations (i.e. 'smart' ethnicities posting 'smart-looking' photos) and be saying nothing at all about how people actually perceive ethic cues.

There are huge methodological concerns for this 'study'. Instead, the revelation of this data might actually be the insight that "pictures of yourself at social events makes you look more social." Taking much of anything at all away from this data set would be rather unwise.

GW2 is probably an attempt at that, but the problem with "work smarter" is the Internet.

I remember the early, early days of EverQuest. I had little directional notes and constantly referenced the map that came with the game. Then EQAtlast came out with beautiful hand-drawn maps and key NPCs. Then things like Illia's Bestiary, &c, continued to lower the bar of entry. MMOs have been democratized, and it makes "work smarter" much harder.

The closest you can probably get to "work smarter" is "work skilled". And there are gamers who pursue that route. For instance, Skunkworks was a guild that was 81st in the US to kill Heroic Lich King. This was on an 8 hour a week raid schedule (compared to 'hardcore' guilds that raided 2-3 times that long, in a week). So there's definitely skill there. But those are the exception rather than the norm.

I would add to the list: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/02/the_decline_effect_is...

The main point: Psychology is not "science" in the same way F=ma is science. It's a model.

The secondary point:

  When the article then goes on to describe the breakdown of this 
  sweeping generalization in studies after 1994 (on other species), 
  it attributes that to the Decline Effect.  It's not.  When you 
  look at the studies together, what you should have inferred is 
  "symmetry is an associated  factor in mate selection by females 
  in only some species and not others and more research is need to 
  explain why."  Instead, the article attributes its inability to 
  summarize the variety and complexity of nature in a 140 character 
  Twitter message to an underlying failure in the 500-year-old 
  guiding principle of science."

This story is about what you do after you have a product. It presupposes the product then identifies ways to market to a very specific audience. In that respect, the article seems spot-on.

Be aware that in a felony plea bargain, you may forever be forfeiting your right to vote. 1 in 40 people in the United States are not allowed to vote because they have lost, either for forever, while in prison, while on parole, or while on probation, their right to vote. Fourteen states (AL, AZ, DE, FL, IA, KY, MD, MS, NE, NV, TN, VA, WA, and WY) eliminate voting for any felony conviction for life. In 31 states, you can't vote while on probation. Only 15 states allow you to vote while on parole. Only Maine and Vermont allow you to vote while a prisoner.

The most comprehensive study on the issue that I'm aware of is still the 1998 Sentencing Project / Human Rights Watch study, but The Sentencing Project provides attention to disenfranchisement issues on their blog.

'98 report: http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/File/FVR/fd_losingthevo...

Voting rights blog: http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=133

"'There were 90 markers on her face, and an equivalent amount on her body,' said Cage. 'She delivered the performance in one take.'"

Neal Stephenson, popularizer/coiner of the term "avatar" to refer to online bodies, seems to have nailed this one, too. Can we just start calling them "'sites" now?

  Fred Epidermis had put the stage into Constellation Mode. Miranda was looking at
  a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white 
  light. Taken together, they formed a sort of three-dimensional constellation of 
  Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the 'sites that 
  had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not 
  shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network— a new 
  bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph, and vascular 
  systems.

  ... 
 
  Outside, Fred Epidermis was wielding the editing controls, zooming in on her 
  face, which was dense as a galactic core. By comparison, her arms and legs were 
  wispy nebulas and the back of her head nearly invisible, with a grand total of 
  maybe a hundred 'sites placed around her scalp like the vertices of a geodesic 
  dome. The eyes were empty holes, except (she imagined) when she closed her eyes. 
  Just to check it out, she winked into the mediatron. The 'sites on her eyelids 
  were dense as grass blades on a putting green, but accordioned together except 
  when the lid expanded over the eye.

Perhaps the only thing he got "wrong" was that we might not need a stage. A kinect-like system might be enough to monitor and render the shifting systems from your very own living room.

Yes, this seems like the angel-investing version of "RTFM", which is reasonable in some situations.

Real hackers use butterflies: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/real_programmers.png

Why would I go to Facebook to interact with a store when I can go to, you know, the store's site to interact with the store?

Facebook could, I imagine, be a powerful online store for people who don't otherwise have storefronts, but people who think I'm going to go to FB to shop online at Macy's are probably the same people who thought I'd go to Second Life to shop online at Macy's.

Is anyone else as impressed as I am that Teller remembered the name of an up-and-coming magician they met after a show more than a year earlier? And that he referenced the 'inside joke' with no prompting?

Also, I think folks are missing what seems to me to be the key takeaway: "And if I'm good, it's because I should be a film editor. Bach should have written opera or plays. But instead, he worked in eighteenth-century counterpoint." He's taking something that's well understood in one area and bringing it to an area where that thing is not understood. Sometimes people call that a 'distinctive'. Sometimes it's a 'paradigm shift'. Teller could have been an average film editor, or he could take ideas from film and bring them to magic.

The Encarta and (I believe) World Book entries on "Fractal" were written by Benoit Mandelbrot. It's actually quite common for experts to write entries for an encyclopedia.

Is systemic exclusion of men from technology an endemic problem and I missed it? Are men commonly characterized by their physical attractiveness and marital status? It's appropriate to give attention to a widespread and often unacknowledged problem while not giving the same attention to statistical noise.

This exists in more than just the startup world. I was in a meeting today where a technology leader said, "Let's have X take the meeting notes, she's a woman." This person also had her administrative account set to a pathologically trivializing username.

I think the term "microaggression" gets overused, but the story referenced in the article says that what's important about the person is her gender, attractiveness, and marital status. To the point that her "lucky" spouse deserves special recognition. What?!

The period is 2997, so set precision to 2997 if you want to see the repeat. Also, "998" doesn't appear 'in sequence' (it obviously appears as 97[9 98]0 981).

"I don’t get how this is hard to understand."

Because the 'other side' doesn't understand why you think they have to make it easy for you to buy Harry Potter 7.1 and if they don't, why you think you get to circumvent their processes.

You wanted to give them money on your terms. They want you to give them money on their terms. I think that sums it up.

My post is hardly pedantic fact checking. The intro talks about how many consider Assange a "megalomaniac" and he seems bewildered by the suggestion. My point clearly suggests that thinking 2/3rds of the time people talk about rape they're talking about you suggests an over-inflated sense of self-importance. (Also, for what it's worth: roughly 90% of what he says can't be fact checked. One thing that is close to verifiable is demonstrably false, though twelvechairs offers an explanation that's closer to his made-up numbers. That's pretty central to the topic of Assange, though I leave that as an implication for the reader.)

A great interview. But as I read it, one section jumped out as verifiably odd.

  Back when we last did a survey, in February, there were a total of 33 million
  references on the Internet to the word "rape" in any context, from Helen of Troy
  to the Congo. If you search for "rape" and my name, there were just over 20
  million. In other words, perceptively, two-thirds of all rapes that have ever
  happened anywhere in the world, ever, have something to do with me.

Obviously, "back when we last did a survey" means anything done now "doesn't count", but: Googling "rape" returns 226M pages. Googling "'Julian Assange' 'rape'" returns 4.2M pages. Still an interestingly high number ("'Kobe Bryant' 'rape'" returns 1.6M pages; "'Roman Polanski' 'rape'" is 4.5M), but not the two-thirds number he uses. I think that's what feeds the "ego" accusations.

Trips - http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/trips_e.htm

Trips -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agreement_on_Trade-Related_Aspe...

WIPO - http://www.wipo.int/copyright/en/

WIPO - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Org...

Very interesting to see Darrell Issa (R - CA) as a sponsor on this bill, given how eloquently he's spoken out against SOPA in the Judiciary Committee. Here's the copy of the email I just sent his office: I'll try and contact his office by phone tomorrow.

  Hello,

  It's been with great pleasure that I've been able to watch Representa-
  tive Issa speak out against SOPA in the Judiciary.

  However, I'm concerned at seeing him offer "H.R.3699 -- Research Works
  Act" as such an act is a major blow to scientific openness.

  As you may well be aware, in many nations it's a requirement that re-
  search receiving federal funds (i.e. research at taxpayer expense) be 
  made available for free to the public. The recent policy proposal by 
  the NIH would move the US towards a similarly open policy and would 
  help foster the openness of research that made this country such a 
  leader in science and technology for so long.

  Unfortunately, companies like Elsevier have increasingly treated pub-
  lishing as a private cash cow, banking (in part) on the burgeoning 
  costs of a university education to widen its coffers. The journals 
  published by Elsevier cost colleges and universities millions of 
  dollars each year and burden students with growing debt (and for 
  others, preclude the possibility of higher education at all).

  I ask that Representative Issa revisit his stand on this issue. 
  Thank you.

You're missing the point. "Growth of the language" wasn't the problem for spell-check, it was the size of the language combined with limited space. Computational breakthroughs solved that problem. The parent to my post implied that solving the 'space' problem in a different way (i.e. by having more space) somehow harmed software engineering, which it hasn't. Ergo, the suggestion that the web is outpacing computing and bandwidth all the more supports my point, since that problem will be persistent.

There are always questions on the edge of computational complexity. In 30 years: "Indexing all of the individual web pages in the world used to be a tough challenge. Network speeds were in the hundreds of megabits, and..."

I understand what you're saying. I hope you understand my point isn't, "This needs to be more like pop music." It's rather the simple point that this is perfectly fine amateur music, but not much more than that. Drawing any broader conclusions about the viability of direct-to-consumer sales of media content is inappropriate with this experiment.

I don't think it worked for Louis CK simply because he's popular. It worked because he's a great performer. And I hope this doesn't come across as too harsh, but the out-of-tune moments, like "find" at about :47 into "When I Find Claire" are why it's tough for other people to do the same.

Louis CK put out a $200k production at $5 / pop, not including editing time (since he edited it himself). This is not the musical equivalent of a $200k production.

I hope your dad makes a few bucks because it's important to support local artists, but this isn't particularly well produced, so comparing this with Louis CK's production isn't going to safely lead to general conclusions about the approach to sales.

When you drive, your goals and the goals of everyone else on the road are roughly aligned insofar as you all want to travel from one place to another place quickly and safely. There are pretty rough consequences for those whose goals aren't similarly aligned. So yes, you could be killed by someone else driving drunk, but it's relatively unlikely.

Google's goals and mine aren't aligned at all, except instrumentally. So Google cares about my privacy up to and until it costs them less to not care than to care.

I'm fully in the Google camp, but let's be honest about the fact that we've made a deal with some supernatural being. We just hope it turns out not to be the devil.