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When she returns to a population center larger than Seneca, Nebraska, maybe she won't need the gun so much.

The largest regulating influence on physical confrontation is the social environment. On average, woman slightly outperform men in best exploiting their social environment.

Bottom line: step away from the bathroom scale, and consider some of the other crucial factors.

QUICKSAND?!? Ah, those were the days.

The limits of such a network are the humans you need to monitor it, classify behaviors and follow individuals as they move around.

Not true.

Eye in the Sky — June 2015
Update: Eye In the Sky — September 2016

These are brilliant episodes (almost on par with French Guy Ramen Noodle Mass Production).

The Panopticon in retrospective mode is crime investigation on steroids, almost certainly consuming fewer human resources per kingpin dethroned than traditional flatfeet. So efficient, it's scary.

Though you may still have a point if one factors in a 1000% enforcement escalation (surely all those cameras justify a 10× lip stiffening).

The limits of such a network are the humans you need to monitor it, classify behaviors and follow individuals as they move around.

Not true.

Eye in the Sky — June 2015
Update: Eye In the Sky — September 2016

These are brilliant episodes (almost on par with French Guy Ramen Noodle Mass Production).

The Panopticon in retrospective mode is crime investigation on steroids, almost certainly consuming fewer human resources per kingpin dethroned than traditional flatfeet. So efficient, it's scary.

Though you may still have a point if one factors in a 1000% enforcement escalation (surely all those cameras justify a 10× lip stiffening).

I'm surprised this hasn't been mentioned; just last week RadioLab/NPR ran a segment on this subject.

"As part of the decades-long Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, Gallo found himself asking the study's aging doctor-subjects questions about death. Their answers, it turns out, don't sync up with the answers most of us give."

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Water above the freezing point would not explain the hole, it would merely *describe* it.

And I'm not convinced that it would even be that meaningful. For instance, it is completely possible for water temperature to be below the freezing point without freezing, especially in an environment where there is no major weather fluctuations and no major animal activity. Temperature itself does not automatically trigger the transition.

See this explanation from Wikipedia:

The melting point of water at 1 atmosphere of pressure is very close to 0 C (32 F, 273.15 K), and in the presence of nucleating substances the freezing point of water is close to the melting point, but in the absence of nucleators water can super cool to 40 C (40 F, 233 K) before freezing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There is a famous (alleged) case of flash freeze that happened in Russia during WWII: horses found in the bottom of a frozen lake. Someone made a demonstration, see:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Bringing Gamma Back

The guest, Li-Huei Tsai, director of some august learning and memory institute at MIT, eventually confesses that transfer from mice models to humans in this line or research has about a 1% success rate.

It's a great episode.

Memories retrieved in mutant 'Alzheimer's' mice — 16 March 2016

An excellent podcast from radiolab about CRISPR:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

One more thing about the money angle.

Over the years, I've listened to most of the EconTalk back catalog. I agree with Russ Roberts about 60% of the time, yet I have some pretty strong disagreements in the other 40%.

Part of his standard spiel about diminishing the role of government in all practical venues is his model of private charity. I just found this now, but it turns out he's actually written a paper on the subject:

A Positive Model of Private Charity and Public Transfers

The whole point of relying less on government to adjudicate public life is that every side of the argument can stump up their own pocket books, as they see fit as private citizens. My own gut instinct is that this would devolve into an extremely capricious network of civic concern and attention, by the standard mechanism of charismatic megafauna getting all the grease.

So if these protesters (or some subset thereof) turn out to have deep pockets behind them, that actually means, in certain well-established strands of orthodox libertarian theory, that they are in good standing with the giant neoliberal program of dragging big government into a small bathtub, and it would be entirely their own business how they raise their protest stake. Because under Libertarianism, all dollars are created equal, and from this assumption (and possibly also God) unencumbered moral equilibrium shall automatically flow.

Nevertheless, suck-and-blow types somehow always seem to show up with a steady supply of nefarious labels concerning the hidden ka-ching. The standard smoke machine demands this narrative. (Business As Usual wouldn't much mind if the protesters did conform to their established narrative lot of being eternally impoverished and poorly organized, so it wins either way.)

I actually prefer government as a player in many issues, because it aims (until corrupted) to be somewhat transparent (no-one ever accused government of getting anything exactly right, which I regard as a false standard, because no-one ever accused any human system of getting anything exactly right, modulo "law of the jungle, the losers can suck it"; government is simply better at counting up losers than most private-sector alternatives).

I guess many people out there figure that if America went much further toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum, we'd all be united in the Church of the Profit Motive, and this kind of dispute simply wouldn't transpire among gentlemen, and we would not be constantly up to our ankles in dark money vs. deep money shit storms. Well, I'm not personally signing up to test drive that experimental fork in the road. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly work. The world is a complicated place. But I'd rather not risk my own skin to that experiment.

Constructive public discourse is fragile. This one thing, for sure, we all know.

Seneca, Nebraska — 12 October 2016

Back in 2014 the town of Seneca, Nebraska was deeply divided. How divided? They were so fed up with each other that some citizens began circulating a petition that proposed a radical solution. If a majority wanted to they'd self-destruct, end the town, and wipe their community off the map.

Bike shed? Or canary in the coal mine?

In this instance, it's hard to say. The politics of division have this strange, new, frightening face.

Placebo doesn't improve your shooting/aiming skills.
Nor driving skills.

For anyone who has *not* been following crispr/gene drives over the last couple years, RL has a really good overview(podcast) of it.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

I'm not into genetics at all, but this is a REALLY interesting story.

+1 for Radiolab. The best explanation I've come up with for it so far is that it's a variety series of incredibly well-produced audio micro-documentaries. I listened to one on a whim (Bigger than Bacon, which was about the mystery of a crackling sound one of their reporters used to hear at boat dock near their house) and was immediately hooked. It finds the perfect balance between being educational and entertaining.

I also love their More Perfect podcast. It's worth a listen for anyone who wishes they knew more about the US Supreme Court but doesn't actually want to devote any time to the subject. They manage to find the human interest side to each story and present them in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, despite the fact that in most of the cases I knew how the cases would turn out.

As for my complete list and why I like them, it's pretty short:
- Accidental Tech Podcast - Three guys talking about tech and cars. They play well off each other and, between the three, usually have some decent insight into the tech community and how it interacts with a mostly inscrutable company (i.e. Apple).

- Radiolab - See above

- Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - See above

- Serial - Everyone and their grandma listens to this one, so it needs no explanation

- Under the Radar - Two guys talking iOS development. I'm not in the space, but it's always under 30 minutes, they stay on topic, and they frequently provide a veteran's perspective that runs contrary to what an outsider like me might think makes sense, so I find it to be a decent listen. Others will likely find it boring.

I'm also going to give the just-begun The Important Thing a shot in the next few days, since the guy doing it writes a frequently-insightful blog that I really enjoy reading and is typically really good on the other podcasts I've heard him on. I expect it'll become part of my usual group of podcasts, but I can't yet offer that recommendation.

+1 for Radiolab. The best explanation I've come up with for it so far is that it's a variety series of incredibly well-produced audio micro-documentaries. I listened to one on a whim (Bigger than Bacon, which was about the mystery of a crackling sound one of their reporters used to hear at boat dock near their house) and was immediately hooked. It finds the perfect balance between being educational and entertaining.

I also love their More Perfect podcast. It's worth a listen for anyone who wishes they knew more about the US Supreme Court but doesn't actually want to devote any time to the subject. They manage to find the human interest side to each story and present them in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat, despite the fact that in most of the cases I knew how the cases would turn out.

As for my complete list and why I like them, it's pretty short:
- Accidental Tech Podcast - Three guys talking about tech and cars. They play well off each other and, between the three, usually have some decent insight into the tech community and how it interacts with a mostly inscrutable company (i.e. Apple).

- Radiolab - See above

- Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - See above

- Serial - Everyone and their grandma listens to this one, so it needs no explanation

- Under the Radar - Two guys talking iOS development. I'm not in the space, but it's always under 30 minutes, they stay on topic, and they frequently provide a veteran's perspective that runs contrary to what an outsider like me might think makes sense, so I find it to be a decent listen. Others will likely find it boring.

I'm also going to give the just-begun The Important Thing a shot in the next few days, since the guy doing it writes a frequently-insightful blog that I really enjoy reading and is typically really good on the other podcasts I've heard him on. I expect it'll become part of my usual group of podcasts, but I can't yet offer that recommendation.

Daily as I make and eat breakfast, workout and shower:

1. NPR Hourly News Summary

2. Marketplace Tech by American Public Media (APM)

3. The Writer’s Almanac

4. NPR Story of the Day

Weekly on my 30 plus minute commute each way:

1. The Moth Podcast

2. StoryCorps

3. Two Guys On Your Head

4. RadioLab

5. This American Life

6. Risk!

7. Improv Nerd

8. On Being

When they have shows:

1. Serial

2. Codebreakers

2. NPR Technology Podcast

For sure RadioLab. I listen to The Daily Tech News Show for some extended commentary on the day's tech news. I'm a board gamer and listen to The Dice Tower and The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast. If you're interested in hearing about the business of board games, Board Games Insider is a great resource.

Honorable mention to This American Life. If you haven't listened to the "Squirrel Cop" episode, here ya go, and you're welcome!
https://www.thisamericanlife.o...

I'm in the process of building my own tDCS device right now. I bought the components last Saturday and built the circuit on Sunday; on Monday I built the electrodes and on Tuesday I started using it (still on the breadboard). The circuit is pretty simple, just a voltage regulator and a few pots and resistors (there are many ways to do it, this approach just happens to use a voltage regulator). There is no way a 9V battery running through this circuit could generate the hundreds of milliamperes necessary to kill, or the dozens necessary to cause harm. When resistors fail, they tend to result in an open circuit -- zero current.

My circuit currently uses two potentiometers to ramp up the current to the desired level. Even with both of them wide open, the current is only 2.4mA, which is well within the safe range. (The recommended standard is to operate between 0.5mA and 2.0mA, but an order of magnitude above that is when you start to approach hazardous levels.) And of course, I run the it through a multimeter, so I always know the output of the circuit -- before, during, and after I put on the electrodes.

I first heard about tDCS in an episode of RadioLab last summer, which gives a pretty good intro to the topic. I finally got around to actually doing it last weekend.

Thus far, my experience has been entirely positive. The only glitch was yesterday when an "intermittency" developed in my electrode cable, which resulted in some phosphene flashes (due to an alligator clip + stranded wire). So I skipped my tDCS session today, and instead used the time to build the "finished" electrode cable, with soldered joints. That problem will not recur.

On the positive side, it seems to be having the desired effect. I became interested in tDCS because I have a "condition" which results in a lot of "unwanted thoughts" -- and I have noticed a remarkable decline in the frequency of these episodes.

You can naysay all you want from your armchair, but I'm actually doing this, and it works.

For more info on safety issues check out the /r/tDCS sub-reddit's FAQ.

Credit where it's due, of course. But also, of interest, Heimlich was quite unethical about some of his other "medical" endeavours. see malariotherapy http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Radiolab did an episode about Patient Zero http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

At leat I found it interesting

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Eye in the Sky

Another Big Brother tool for China and Russia to use to continue stamping on a human face, forever. No more "imagine" needed.

This was covered in RadioLab's recent podcast episode "Eye in the Sky," about Ross McNutt's company Persistent Surveillance Systems, and how the police in Baltimore didn't have to get permission from the city's mayor in order to operate. http://www.radiolab.org/story/eye-sky/

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
There's a stream link at the top. If you want to save the mp3 for later, open in vlc and find the source url in 'codec info'.

Tl;dr version- This type of surveillance is mind-bogglingly useful in very high-crime areas, but if abused will quickly degrade into the worst 1984 scenario I can imagine.
For now I'm not too worried unless the system scales down to fit easily on a drone or something. Modern aircraft are still at least possible to spot visually or on low-end radar.

Can neither confirm nor deny

There's a great Radiolab episode about the sorts of capabilities these planes can have. Essentially, they're doing pre-emptive surveillance - they take high-resolution snapshots every second, so when there's a crime of some sort reported (e.g. a robbery, a drive-by, a getaway vehicle), they can follow the cars involved backwards in time to see where they started out, or where they went afterwards.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Listen to the RadioLab podcast:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91721-oops/

In particular the first segment: "Be Careful What You Plan For".

The Unibomber had his personality fried by the US government. If I had been tortured like that I am sure I would be just as asocial as Ted.

The whole story has implications for all the other torture done by the US Goverment in the "War on Terrorism".

Before people scream MUH TINFOIL HATTERS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

(First story)

It is pretty likely that he was a subject of MKUltra.

You have no idea the Orwellian things coming down the pike.

It's an old one (2007), but incredibly interesting and relevant to TFA... http://www.radiolab.org/story/... . The specifically cover a certain drug that they can give a person to prevent memories from forming as well as 'dulling' existing memories. It's fascinating to me, how so little we know about our own brain.

RadioLab covered this in two stories (that I'm aware of)
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

You and RadioLab both missed something about those pictures. Those 300-800lb fish in the oldest 2-3 pics? 100% illegal to harvest and hang on a board for a picture or to even remove from the water in the case of the Goliath Grouper. Those fish are not extinct. They are not all gone. People catch them and dive with them all the time. What you see in those pictures on RL is a transition to smaller and smaller species, which coincidentally taste better to most people.

Bottom line is politicians think just like you and RadioLabs. In the US, the bigger fish species are overprotected and damn near impossible to catch and show off because they're either illegal to ever harvest or the window to harvest them is tiny. But don't fear, NOAA's ultimate goal is 100% catch and release. They want to discourage fishing entirely. Well, except for the commercially licensed that have bribed them.

Additionally, the smaller fish of the species are protected by minimum size limits, to prevent exactly what you think is happening to genetic diversity. The "tall" genes are passed on just fine. Records for various species are still being set. And those fish with "short" genes get removed from the population as well. I've caught and kept 30"+ Red Snapper (16" minimum recreational limit where I fish), tons of 22" Vermilion Snapper (10" minimum), and multiple 20"+ Gray Triggerfish (14" minimum) just last year. I also kept 24" red snapper and 12-14" vermilion.

We target larger fish of some species precisely because of small quantity limits. If I can only keep 1 or 2 of a particular species, you better believe I want all I catch to be as big as possible. Fish with a 10 per person limit like vermilion or flounder? I'll keep a smaller one if it's still big enough to have a filet. You want people to target smaller fish of a given species? Remove the regulations. My conservation behavior is modified to act badly (but still within the boundaries of the law) due to regulations. When you're (as a group) spending $2k in fuel alone over a week's worth of trips, you have to push the regulations to the limit to make it worth it.

But continue to listen to people like NOAA, who just last year released no less than 3 "we don't know what the fuck we're doing" official statements in the form of emergency closures. Apparently they couldn't foresee the numbers they were going to make up.

I don't know - maybe the fish have gone on a diet and just getting smaller - so we have to catch more of them. :-P

RadioLab covered this in two stories (that I'm aware of)
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

This second one is really interesting (which I can't find the link for - it was a story on a another blog that RL linked to) - how to make bigger fish. Since we catch big fish - natural selection says "you get big - you die soon" - therefore smaller fish reproducing most. So if we want bigger fish - catch the smallish (or medium) sized ones - and let big fish get away. Now - are these fish that could have grown big or fish with "small" genes. Selection is now narrow - there are no Big fish to offer more diversity.

Right now only the "short" genes are reproducing well. Fish that have "tall" genes don't have enough offspring.

So it isn't just overfishing. It is overfishing of the wrong kinds of fish.

Radiolab also did a netcast on this.

This Radiolab episode follows a ransomware victim through the tricky process of paying off the criminals and getting her files back.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

New radiolap is about this
http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
last antibiotics that got into market developed resistance in 2 years, so commercial companies don't want to deal with this

otoh at least this podcast gives hope (similar to article) that we just have to rotate the antibiotics we have :)

It's more than simple signs. There's a Radiolab episode of the effects of laughing where they interview people who are hired to laugh in a studio audience.

CRISPR

Your body stores genetic signatures of bad bugs in your immunity DNA, and, well, have a listen.

Actually C14 skyrocketted with atomic tests, so much so they've been able to map how long the average cell lives based on the year-to-year curve (!) Then in the 1960s, above ground testing was banned, and levels are returing to normal.

Science has about 10 or so years to figure out the rest of it before the deltas are so small as to be useless, in studying cell age.

There is a whole Radiolab about it.

There is also a great RadioLab podcast about Dr. Sacks. He was a regular contributor to the show, and they offered a farewell remembrance of/to him this past spring. The remembrance is the last half of the podcast and starts at about 31:34 if you want to skip to that.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Your continued contributions to the world will be greatly missed by all who knew you, and those of us who had only heard you. Rest well, good sir.

This is nothing. Listen to this Radiolab episode.

Great example of our technology out-pacing our wisdom. What many people label "lying" is actually misremembering. Our biological memory-retrieval systems are extremely bad. Every time you remember something, your brain is rewriting the memory, meaning the more you remember an event the more your brain distorts it.

This happens over and over again in our courts, people honestly remember things completely wrong and we call them liars. The film "Rosemary's Baby" is based on a true story of ritualistic child abuse, except the "real" story was entirely implanted in the minds of everyone involved by psychologists. Even the accused were convinced they were guilty. It's absurdly easy for a psychologist to implant false memories of our childhoods in experiments.

The wording in this post unnerves me. The older I get and the more digital the world becomes, the more I learn that I misremember 60% of what has happened in my life. If technology is used to prosecute anyone who makes a statement that contradicts hard factual data, then many innocent people will be prosecuted. We need our scientific wisdom to catch up to our cognitive biases.

Reminds me of David Cope and EMI

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

"David Cope, the composer and professor at UC Santa Cruz, who cured his artist’s block by writing a computer program to do the dirtywork for him. His program, named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), deconstructs the works of great composers, finding patterns within the voice leading of their compositions, and then creates brand new compositions based on the patterns she finds."

Here's a recent Radiolab on CRISPR

> ... CPR has a success rate of ... 6%

For what it's worth, CPR is a last ditch procedure, only recommended when the patient is otherwise effectively dead. You're improving a 0% survival to a 6% one.

Upon "survival", with a 50 % chance being a veggie. Have you ever seen a brain dead human on live support, maybe a loved one?
The convulsions, twitching, empty eyes, nobody home?
By my papers, very bad odds ending up like that and doctors being in the business opt out to almost 100 %:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
http://www.wnyc.org/i/raw/1/Ga...
Give me pain relieve, all else sucks!
http://www.cepamerica.com/news...

By default in US, CPR will happen unless you have two documents on your body, preferable on your chest:
- Advanced Directive for Surgical/Medical Treatment (Living Will)
- Patient's or Authorized Agent's Directive to Withhold CPR
(may differ from state to state)

If you have to take off, and you will - at least, do it in dignity and at your own terms!

So you know shit about CPR, the results of it and the working of respirators. Why should we listen to you?

Sure - a "We" person, how cute - here you go, Mr. or Ms. "We":

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
in there:

A chart of doctor responses from the Precursors Study:
http://www.wnyc.org/i/raw/1/Ga...

and from there:

http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/20...
Now we see a huge Japanese study of more than 400,000 people who experienced out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, published in the JAMA on March 21, 2012. Approximately 18% of those who were administered CPR and epinephrine did achieve spontaneous circulation but fewer than 5% survived 1 month and fewer than 2% survived 1 month with good or moderate cerebral performance.

Maybe you are watching too much TV?

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/...

keep trying...

As someone who has been dumbfounded by this since he first went to Japan as an exchange student over 20 years ago, I have a theory why this may have happened. It is hypothesized that the color Blue was one of the last colors for people to discover/appreciate enough to assign it a name (Radiolab has a great show on this). Accordingly, "Ao" was assigned "green" first but as the concept of "Blue" started to materialize, "Midori" became the new "Green" so that "Ao" could start covering things that were "Blue." That would explain why phrased implying youth ("He is still Green", etc. . .) use the character for "Ao," as they are old phrases that would have been invented before the concept of "Blue" came along.

Of course, since the characters for these words came from China, there probably is a significant Chinese factor to this story (I remember speaking to a Chinese lady who thought that Chinese language influence had been responsible for this nuance in Japanese). Perhaps someone with more experience with Chinese can try to fill in this part.

Radio Lab did an interesting show on Fritz Haber -- his work resulted in commercial fertilizer without which we'd probably have five or six billion fewer people on the planet because you can't mine guano forever at a rate faster than it is replaced, but he also pioneered one of the most gruesome weapons out there. It's a very strange tale.

Radio Lab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Commercial fertilizer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

Guano: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

There was a RadioLab podcast on this very subject about ten months ago: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

The prevailing wisdom seems to be that the ecosystem will not take a huge hit. I believe the quote was something like, "It will just be like Los Angeles is all the time". The best they could come up with was that it could allow some better predators to thrive, but they seemed pretty unsure.

However, I do agree that people tend to underestimate these sorts of impacts. More ethanol use == more dying people in Africa, for example. At least someone figured out before Bill Gates implemented his idea of using barges to steer hurricanes away from the SE and Caribbean that it would have apparently caused famine in the UK...

There was a recent Radiolab about this general technique, that's totally worth listening to: http://www.radiolab.org/story/...
(It's also a lot better-written than the summary.)

The idea is that by applying DC voltages to different parts of your skull, you can affect how your brain works. The theory is that the current passing across part of your brain changes how your brain learns from mistakes, messing with the pattern-acquisition feedback. In the story, they specifically concentrated on a woman training in a sniper video game, who was having to identify attackers vs. civilians, and how much it changed her ability to do that, but they also discussed a big underground scene of people trying this out at home for other purposes or just to learn about what happens. They were moving the contact patches around and then trying things to see what they were or weren't good at. One guy doing this found a spot that left him largely blind for several hours afterwards, so it's not all roses, but the people trying language acquisition and finding it much easier both to acquire and, later, post-treatment, to recall, new languages, really got me interested.

That, and the fact that he is not obtaining or even seeking to obtain congressional authority to do so, unlike his predecessor.

In a large part, that was because with all of the post 9/11 hoo-ha, there was an "Authorization for Use of Military Force" that was worded broadly enough that it has basically served as a legal foundation for pretty much indefinite military action. Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... for the text and http://www.radiolab.org/story/... for a rundown of how it's been used.

The real trouble is that the office President has too much power these days, and the military has too much influence in how the US acts.

Human nature? Yes. People naturally tune out to the horrible and try to move on.

RadioLab had a nice piece on the topic called "In The Dust Of This Planet"

http://www.radiolab.org/story/...

Physicist Brian Greene discusses it on RadioLab here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/....