February 2012
5 posts
9 tags
Bioconservatives vs. Bioprogressives →
By Ronald Bailey
“Equality is a political, not a biological concept,” Moreno correctly responds. Fukuyama is wrong when he asserts that equality rests on biological facts. Instead, the ideal of political equality arose from the Enlightenment’s insistence that since no one has access to absolute truth, no one has a moral right to impose his values and beliefs on others. In any case, there is...
4 tags
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Free will and politics →
By M.S.
I’m going to have a very hard time condensing what I mean here into a paragraph at the end of a blog post, but roughly: we assign responsibility for desired public outcomes to decision-making units that communicate well internally and have internally shared interests in that outcome. So in general, it makes a lot of sense to make individuals responsible for themselves: modules...
4 tags
Drinking Games →
By Malcolm Gladwell
In other words, the frat boys drinking in a bar on a Friday night don’t have to be loud and rowdy. They are responding to the signals sent by their immediate environment—by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the dimmed light, by the countless movies and television shows and general cultural expectations that say that young men in a bar with pulsing music on a...
4 tags
The Ballad of Mark Zuckerberg →
By Megan Garber
No wonder why Facebook came to be the $5 billion IPO.
January 2012
10 posts
3 tags
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Schlep Blindness →
By Paul Graham
Graham on schlep blindness or tendency for people to avoid ideas that require a lot of “tedious, unpleasant task” to implement and execute:
The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe’s idea. For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of...
4 tags
Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante? →
By Arthur S. Brisbane
As an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news reporters do the same?
My answer is a resounding yes. Striking for balance and neutrality for the sake of them is neither balanced nor neutral. Like Dante has said, “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain...
9 tags
Is (new) Apple TV really a television?
Let me preface this with a few bullet points.
By Apple TV, I mean the new unannounced Apple TV people are talking about. Not the Apple TV puck.
By television, I mean a conventional television most of us have in our homes.
Although people are spending more time in front of TVs, even more people are starting to spend more time in front of computers. With the introduction of iPhone and iPad,...
6 tags
‘Five Years Ahead’ →
By John Gruber
I’m not saying the original 2007 iPhone is a better overall device today than the Lumia or Galaxy. It has very little RAM and a much slower processor and you can feel it. But there are aspects of the original iPhone software — animation, scrolling, touch-tracking — that remain superior to any competition. Was everything about the original iPhone five years ahead of the...
4 tags
How to Get a Nuclear Bomb →
By William Langewiesche
Continuing with his story of the NPT, he said, “Even as the U.S. and Russia offered our nuclear umbrellas, everyone understood that the weapons could never be used, because of retaliation. For us they were not wealth—they were a burden. At the same time, nuclear technology was becoming even cheaper, more efficient, and it became available to many countries. It became a...
4 tags
To Know, but Not Understand →
By David Weinberger
Models this complex — whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic — often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be...
6 tags
The Mathematics of Lego →
By Samuel Arbesman
This curve demonstrates that as the number of pieces in a set grows, so do the number of piece types. However, the number of piece types grows sublinearly: while a larger set uses more piece types, as sets becomes larger, they use progressively fewer additional piece types (so larger sets actually use fewer types per piece). This is similar to other sublinear curves, where...
December 2011
6 posts
5 tags
How to Free North Korea →
By Adrian Hong
This much is clear: North Korea will fall. It is simply a question of when and how. But it is far better to have a coordinated, controlled landing, at the time of one’s choosing, instead of waiting for the worst to happen at any moment. And a reunified, free Korea can be a powerful force for good in the world, and a potent economic engine.
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S03E01 Inertia
I learned that motivation is like activation energy. Once you apply the initial energy into the task (which is the hardest part), everything else just follows effortlessly.
For example, waking up is hardest when you first wake up. But once you resist the initial temptation to go back to sleep and walk into the bathroom, you’re no longer sleepy.
Same with reading. I don’t have to...
“The real negative consequence from the Scopes Trial was the birth of the media...”
– Gray Macklin
November 2011
5 posts
“Overall, I think it’s a good time to have a girl in the 21st century...”
– Louis C.K., on girls
4 tags
Have PhD, will govern →
America and Europe share a common problem: the economic and financial crisis has discredited mainstream politicians. The right is popularly seen as the party of the rich, too close to unpopular bankers, and responsible for the financial deregulation of the 1980s which, on some accounts, was the source of all the trouble. But the left, which might have expected to have benefited from a capitalist...
4 tags
You must lead an extremely boring life if all you do on tumblr is reblog.
October 2011
13 posts
The Consequentialist →
By Ryan Lizza
There is so much more complexity to the White House politics than I previously thought. Obama often gets this rep that he’s “soft” on issues but it’s the nature of the White House and the situation in the Middle East that force him to play the hands that he’s given. And what are the hands he’s given?
One reaction among liberals to the Bush years...
BAROQUE.ME →
By Alexander Chen
I was so blown away the first time I watched it. And as if the creator had read my mind, he even wrote up some details about the project.
WatchSquarespace 6
What a great UI.
Facebook’s Design Strategy: A Status Update →
By Reena Jana
“In 2005, we decided to create a photo product that we called Photos. Other people at the time were using names like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, right? Very niche-y,” [Christopher Cox, VP of products] says. “Instead, we use common words. We recede into the background. We design a place where there aren’t new objects to trip over. Photos are photos. Chat is chat. Groups are groups....
“…mainly because her legs were so breathtaking that we were staring a them...”
– Bill Simmons, on Kate Bosworth, from The Book of Basketball
Steve Yegge's Google Platform Rant
Made me realize just how little I understand about the web.
I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I’ve been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies — an impression that has been reinforced almost daily — is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it’s a sweeping...
7 tags
WatchTribute to Steve Jobs on The Colbert Report
Of all the tributes, this moved me the most.
You Love Your iPhone. Literally. →
By Martin Lindstrom
Of course I love my iPhone. It always has something interesting to show me, it never judges me, it does what I ask it to do and it does them unconditionally, expecting nothing in return. How could you not love it?
September 2011
16 posts
"Algorithm" is Not a Four-Letter Word →
By Jamis Buck
I suggest you go to at least slide 40. He includes maze generation slides and they are incredible.
Coaching a Surgeon: What Makes Top Performer... →
By Atul Gawande
The gist of the article is this: when you have a coach that can point out areas to improve, you can break the performance “plateau” you normally reach after a while.
I read this last night and kept it on the back of my mind. Who knew, after just one day, the lesson from the article would singlehandedly change my life, at least on the basketball court.
Today, after an...
“You know those movie scenes where a male character dies in a hospital bed and...”
– Bill Simmons, on Patrick Ewing, from The Book of Basketball
“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with nonanswers. It’s a sort of crime...”
– Richard Dawkins
The special trick that helps identify dodgy stats →
By Ben Goldacre
Why I love stats:
Government figures are subjected to various audits already, of course, but alongside checking that things marry up with one another, forensic statisticians also have ways of spotting suspicious patterns in the raw numbers, and thus estimating the chances that figures from a set of accounts have been tampered with. One of the cleverest tools is something called...
The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense... →
By Alexis Madrigal
Madrigal talks about how Hmong people’s “powerful cultural belief in night spirits” killed them. They believed in the supposed evils of sleep paralysis so strongly that when they experienced the paralysis, otherwise known as “‘out of sequence’REM state,” they literally died of fear. Fascinating.
Another facet of the article about the...
In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This... →
By Steve Lohr
“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an eight-yard touchdown to make the score 44-3 … . ”
Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this...
Is That Your True Rejection →
By Eliezer Yudkowsky
It’s a rather convoluted argument about his rationale for libertarianism (not to be confused with Libertarianism portrayed in mass media) but I found this part particularly interesting:
There’s a technique we use in our local rationalist cluster called “Is That Your True Rejection?”, and it works like this: Before you stake your argument on a point, ask yourself in...
“[When] I hear pro surfer Kelly Slater, I expect to see a gorgeous, toned woman...”
– Get Out of My Face