Most of the stuff I read is of the form of 15-30 page articles in The Atlantic or The Economist.
The Economist doesn't publish 30-page articles, though I know what you mean. Sometimes a feature topic is fairly bulky.
I read roughly one heavy, non-fiction book a week from the local library. If a book doesn't force me to slow my reading speed down to Big Think, I soon toss it aside.
Chapter one, paragraph one of Tim O'Reilly's What's the Future (2017):
In the media, I'm often pegged as a futurist, I don't think of myself that way. I think of myself as a mapmaker. I draw a map of the present that makes it easier to see the possibilities of the future. Maps aren't just representations of physical locations and routes. They are any system that helps us see where we are and where we are trying to go. One of my favorite quotes is from Edwin Schlossberg: "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." This book is a map.
I'm sure as hell not fully adjusting my giant mental map of reality at 1000 words/minute. I can cruise along at 600 WPM on fairly heavy material and not miss the arrival of something worth reading properly. Once good fortune arrives, then my preferred reading speed is 200 WPM at 200% comprehension, or 100 WPM at 300% comprehension (the one true goal of reading is to comprehend more than the writer delivered; all of the best writers have a giant multiplier effect).
If the purpose of writing is to create a context in which the reader can think, then reading is the process of fully entering into that context with your own mind. This simply can not be done at 1000 WPM. That's the reading speed of a future Jeopardy champion. (There's a damn good reason why IBM's robot has already won.)
While some may claim prodigious speed reading skills, these claims typically don't hold up when put to the test.
Investigations show that these individuals generally already know a lot about the topic or content of what they have supposedly speed-read.
Without such knowledge, they often don't remember much of what they've read and aren't able to answer substantive questions about the text.
That one guy from my high school who could achieve 85% comprehension at 1000 WPM was pretty much a know-it-all to begin with (actual rocket-scientist father, older brother 1600 SAT score & Caltech admission). He was mainly just slotting minor facts into a large, shallow matrix of what he already knew. What a great use of time.
By far the largest multiplier on my own reading efficiency is careful selection of source materials, and curating reading contexts where the different books and articles read in the same week spark off each other in interesting and useful ways (sometimes grouping like with like, other times grouping polar opposites).
My gut estimate is that I read about 150,000 words per day of organized language (a metric which excludes most Slashdot story submissions, and most recipe websites). That works out to about four hours at my standard reconnaissance speed of 600 WPM.
I probably have my eyes oriented toward text for twelve hours on any busy day, or about 3500 hours per year (since I turned ten). Let's just call it 150,000 hours, which works out to perhaps 5 billion total words impinging on my consciousness in some small way.
Thus I have mastered the skill of reading at 100 WPM with 300% comprehension.
Final thought:
If a website tells you that something was posted "11 months ago" it's pretty much guaranteeing that the content is not worth revisiting 11 months hence.
The recent shift from absolution time (e.g. "January 2016") to relative time (e.g. "two years ago") correlates with fly-by-night reading skills.
Agreed. Established companies will never cannibalise their cash cows. Its a lot of friction that CEOs just don't need in thier life. Why take risks when the cash is rolling in? Human nature.
"Human nature" is putting forward the tripe you just posted.
Think for half a second. Google has a 730B market cap. That's a mighty large aggregation of stakeholders.
Does it really make sense to have behemoths dabbling in high risk activities? Is Google going to make the star employee of some highly successful high-risk offshoot project a billionaire, while compensating the rest of their staff as usual? I'm sure that won't have any internal political repercussions...
On 26 January 2014, Google announced the company had acquired DeepMind for $500 million.
Best of many worlds. The smart, ambitious people get the big payola, behemoth gets the shiny new technology, no large, increasingly conservative stakeholders are unduly agitated.
Hello, world! Turns out that rational behaviour's dearth is greatly exaggerated.
Check your smartphone time while riding a motorcycle at 80.:) You wanted a new one anyway...
Yeah, I can legally and safely glance at my Pebble watch while driving.
Those who don't see the advantage of a Smartwatch either don't drive, or never passed a reflective surface they couldn't improve.
As it happens, I don't even have Bluetooth running any more, to increase my battery life. I depend on it now mainly as a pill reminder. Wrist vibration has proven itself to be the signal I'm least likely to miss. My watch only ever alerts me now for one reason: take that damn time-sensitive pill! (But I can still manage to tune it out if I'm in the middle of composing an especially long sentence.) This is also why I prize battery life over any other function (one recharge cycle per week is vaguely tolerable).
The reality is we live in a dystopian idiocracy. The reason the world is so corrupt is because the vast majority of the public falls for the lies of the rich and powerful and their corporations and vote against their own interests.
100 million ad and brand impressions eventually add up to real stupidity (7,000 ad impressions/day * 40 years).
This is not even counting the full IQ point per minute that decays into radioactive sludge by attending—be it ever so slightly—to trite pleasantries exchanged between the anchor desk and the weather personality.
Ever since I filtered most of that crap out of my life, I haven't felt overloaded in the least.
Having flexible standards based on how confident the student is when they start the course is utter nonsense. It's great if a student massively improves their understanding of the subject but if they fail to show that they understand the material in the course then they still need to fail because otherwise you are just setting them up to fail in subsequent courses which rely on them understanding the material in an intro course at a certain level.
This whole prerequisite thing is a giant edifice of institutional convenience.
I was highly accelerated coming out of high school. I had a fistful of glowing test scores and competition results in math and physics, top AP scores in biology and chemistry, and I was no slouch at the softer or more subjectively creative subjects either (though I never had the specific work ethic to succeed at mastering a foreign language, linguistics would up as a major focus of my professional life).
By the end of second year I had flunked out of a double major in mathematics and computer science due to a severe sleep disorder (medical science caught up twenty years later, and then it took me about a decade to best apply this new learning, so my sleep disorder has recently been reclassified as a solved problem).
Well, now I want to dive headlong into machine learning (linguistics again), but I've got a big hole in my education surrounding third and fourth year applied mathematics. I'm just a wee bit weak on my trig identities and related problem set arts, and it's often a challenge for me to work the standard problems from scratch.
So here I am reviewing in my mid-fifties what would have been basically a minor challenge if I had better had my metabolic shit together on the first pass.
What I soon discovered is that conceptually I lack for nothing. The one somewhat non-traditional year I did complete of advanced-stream mathematics coursework tended to focus on the formal equivalence of limit superior/limit inferior to the more common epsilon/delta construct (by which point—if you have any natural intuition—measure theory amounts to a common-sense extrapolation). Mainly I just lack for a layer of finger skills to work the actual problems. The notation of linear algebra slowed me down for a couple of weeks before this became comfortable again (though I still don't read this nearly as smoothly as APL, in which I was once quite proficient).
I find this interesting, so on the side I'm reading about mathematical pedagogy, and I finally found some exposition about why it matters to master those confounded trig identities.
At a certain point, as a card-carrying member of the machine learning research tribe, one needs to have a certain outback survival mentality, whereby one can easily derive most of the elementary results from a quick pencil and paper exercise.
For me, from where I now stand, such an exercise would not be "quick" (though with great effort, possible in most cases).
It's an institutional presumption of mathematical pedagogy that this skillset needs to be relentlessly driven into the fingertips by many, many manual problem sets.
The more rarefied claim here was that failing to have these patterns embedded into your fingertips, a working mathematician will suffer from weak intuition in many formal settings; that these finger skills amount to an indispensable form of pattern recognition, which one can not otherwise supplant.
As an institutional precept, I can't argue against this. As a person rudely rejected from the standard path by a balky metabolism, I can advance a strong special-case argument that this is complete bull pucky.
I didn't cease to think mathematically just because my formal education rudely ejected its crankshaft. I've been thinking deeply about gradient and curvature for most of my adult life (specifically, the unholy marriage of curvature to the asymptotic equipa
"I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts," said Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) in a recent ad announcing her run for Senate.
Planned Parenthood was in the business of giving American's the tools to exercise their legal rights at their own discretion.
Such research is legal, and researchers say it is helpful in developing treatments for diseases like HIV and Parkinson's disease.
Very few people feel good about abortion. The difference is that some people put a higher priority on the outcome of parenthood.
When today's overstretched, unprepared single mother at age seventeen turns into tomorrow's crack ho at age twenty-three (by then with three children), it only serves to perpetuate the cycle of human misery. I'm in favour of a future where all parenthood is planned parenthood, entered into by young adults fully prepared to be overwhelmed by the responsibility of the whole thing. Which I believe is inevitable, if arriving on a very slow train.
In Canada, the Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. : The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created for the purpose of removing children from the influence of their own culture and assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, about 30%, or roughly 150,000, of Indigenous children were placed in residential schools nationally. : At least 6,000 of these students are estimated to have died while residents.
But, hey, let's get all hot and bothered about abortion instead, because we sleep soundly enough while feeling a little bit bad about the abuse of Indigenous children.
Blackburn didn't think twice about portraying the use of foetal tissue by scientists devoted to the cure of Parkinson's disease as a macabre, immoral market in tiny human giblets.
I'm sure she'll bring this same tact and discretion to the net neutrality debate. Oh, yippee. (When a Democrat says something equally ripe, it's usually about how some chosen Wall St insiders are the only people qualified to fix the financial sector's abuses—a proposition greeted with feeble Republican dissent, if any.)
The residential school system harmed Indigenous children significantly by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse, and forcibly enfranchising them. Disconnected from their families and culture and forced to speak English or French, students who attended the residential school system often graduated unable to fit into either their communities or Canadian society. It ultimately proved successful in disrupting the transmission of Indigenous practices and beliefs across generations. The legacy of the system has been linked to an increased prevalence of post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide, which persist within Indigenous communities.
Right, if we just ban abortion, all the problems are gone now—for a sufficiently large value of small, clueless, slumbering mind.
Yes, the pressures in public economics are long established and well understood, but how the individuals choose to comport themselves within this framework still admits to egregious yodelling and jungle vines.
Market baskets inherently evolve over time. By any measure, our chosen basket is richer than ever before.
There is some scope for people to complain that they don't like the new basket, and would rather have had the old basket.
But usually 1% of basket remorse is hand in glove with 99% availability bias: the simple failure to recall all the annoyances of yesteryear in glorious Technicolor.
Film studios could not purchase Technicolor cameras, only rent them for their productions, complete with camera technicians and a "color supervisor" to ensure sets, costumes and makeup didn't push beyond the limitations of the system. Often on many early productions, the supervisor was Natalie Kalmus, ex-wife of Herbert Kalmus and part owner of the company.
Directors had great difficulty with her; Vincente Minnelli said, "I couldn't do anything right in Mrs. Kalmus's eyes."
It's a Wonderful Life was wonderful mainly because they colorized it, keeping themselves far, far away from Mrs. Kalmus.
Originally a catalog model, then an art student, Kalmus made sure that costumes, sets and lighting were adjusted for the camera's sensitivities. Her services were contractually part of Technicolor's services. In her attempts to keep colors from being rendered improperly onscreen, she was accused of going to the other extreme of mildness.
She wrote: "A super-abundance of color is unnatural, and has a most unpleasant effect not only upon the eye itself, but upon the mind as well." She recommended "the judicious use of neutrals" as a "foil for color" in order to lend "power and interest to the touches of color in a scene."
Producer David O. Selznick complained in a memo during the making of Gone with the Wind:
[The] technicolor experts have been up to their old tricks of putting all sorts of obstacles in the way of real beauty.... We should have learned by now to take with a pound of salt much of what is said to us by the technicolor experts.... I have tried for three years now to hammer into this organization that the technicolor experts are for the purpose of guiding us technically on the [film] stock and not for the purpose of dominating the creative side of our pictures as to sets, costumes, or anything else....
If we are not going to go in for lovely combinations of set and costume and really take advantage of the full variety of colors available to us, we might just as well have made the picture in black and white. It would be a sad thing indeed if a great artist had all violent colors taken off his palette for fear that he would use them so clashingly as to make a beautiful painting impossible.
I, for one, welcome our evolving market basket's Natalie Kalmus removal tool.
Median without knowing, min, max and average is a meaningless number.
You are delusional if you think the mean of a distribution is more inherently meaningful than the median.
Mathematically, the mean is far more tractable, not having the step behaviour of the median, so it certainly gets used more in equations (while spawning a small statistical cottage industry concerning the best way to handle distributional outliers).
The median is inherently immune to outliers, which is especially handy in making normative comparisons, where the value put forward as the "norm" has actually been experienced by a large, interior slice of the people being compared. min/max are pretty much always outliers. Least robust statistic ever invented (though often useful for sizing statistical visualizations).
Five-number summary is a good compromise: three normative values in the middle (including the median) plus the outlier brackets on either side (min/max).
Not that the mean is not even in here (though it does bound the mean from above and below; the mean of these bounds is fair estimate of the summary mean, and works to ((q0+q4)*1+(q1+q2+q3)*2)/8).
If your distribution happens to be somewhat symmetric around the mean, it's probably a damn fine estimate of the mean.
And if you distribution isn't somewhat symmetric around the mean, why are you using the mean in the first place? That's what all the statistical schnooks love about the mean: it walks around in broad daylight with a baby bulge, and barely any hapless, innumerate schlep notices.
I basically knew where this was going—at the franchise level—the moment Rey had the telepathic dream sequence after first touching Luke's light saber (the whole point of which was to be profoundly pointless and thereby encourage mass Stockholm-syndrome cud chewing) and I haven't given a shit about the rest of that movie, about this movie, or about the next movie ever since, though I do find it amusing to check in on how others are reacting to the Disney Matrix.
Almost every big movie these days is a pastiche of three or more genres (sometimes obviously so, other times mildly concealed).
I was watching the commentary track for Russian Ark last night, and at one point the cameraman panics and tells the guy beside him "I can't do it", because he's got such a bad groin spasm that he worries he'll become crippled permanently. (The entire movie is a single 90-minute take, with a very heavy Steadicam.) But then he sees the 300 actors in period costumes all in perfect position through the next door and he gets a shot of adrenaline and heroically makes it to minute 84. Cut! This breaks a tension so thick that 1000 actors and 1000 assembled extras almost begin to cry.
Well, that lightsaber dream sequence was the screenwriting team confessing "we can't do it"—noooooo!—about finding a principled way to combine all the necessary genres together in the mandatory Disney stew pot.
Yeah, in some ways. It's an artificial distinction but I think quite a useful one. If every novelist comes with some genius and some talent, it's the genius bit that gets weaker. Genius being that sort of God-given quality of perception and articulacy. Talent is technique, and that gets stronger. So a lot of stuff that you used to have to think about when you were younger about pacing and modulation and what goes where, it's very interesting just to look at novelists to see how they get their characters across town. It's very onerous business, getting your characters across town, how you do it reveals technique, and someone like Nabokov, who has a lot of genius and a lot of talent is wonderful—they're suddenly across town and either the journey was very interesting in itself, or they're just across town. It's very unlaborious. That's technique. So your genius, which is the slightly wild, pyrotechnic art of what you do gets weaker, but you get people across town more efficiently than you used to.
Fuck no, not onerous at all, not after The Great Force Vending Machine in the Sky pukes out, faster than light, lady-in-waiting telepathic midichlorians (of course, this minor capability would have barely figured in the outcome until movie number eight).
This study is beneath notice, but I do have one thing to add.
In The Baroque Cycle Stephenson satirizes the myopic culture of Versailles. The higher up one goes in status, the smaller the tea leaf microscope required.
While a few of the noblemen (and women) are relative dunderheads, there's no shortage of nested-plot mastermind decoders.
Studies of adolescent culture have determined that the kids with the highest social status experience the most severe anxiety about committing a social blunder.
Just like Versailles.
(Also, remember that result next time you chuckle mindlessly about scientists doing a study which only managed to confirm the patently obvious.)
The Fonz might seem cool to those around him, but deep down he's mainly driven by hair gel OCD.
Creation of $300B in bitcoin won't help the world to feed one more mouth.
Do you know what is really weird? A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist writes a book with no endorsements.
One such book is Pay Any Price by James Risen (2014).
His thesis—which he introduces through the least straight-line narrative he could reasonably concoct—is that after the Iraqi treasury was looted of a billion dollars (valueless paper, further despoiled with Saddam's portrait) by his son, Qusay, the American government became terrified about their ability to feed the liberated Iraqi population, and so came up with a scheme to ship some $12 billion in $100 U.S. bills from East Rutherford to Baghdad (filling five expensive transports with this worthless paper in the process).
Wouldn't you know it, this whole enterprise involved shockingly lax controls, and there were 35 convictions back in America after the fact for excessively tasting largess (accounting for but a pittance of funds which disappeared into the liquidity void).
People act on their expectations of the future, and the behaviour is sometimes strikingly different if the expectation is one where "worthless" paper (or a similarly serviceable proxy) is in short supply. The value of trade that hasn't happened yet is not so easy to dissect from the system of trade as you would pretend to make it.
So, no, your currency won't make a fish out of water, but it might serve to distribute an actual fish into the mouth that most benefits.
If the U.S. government had shunted $12 billion in abstract currency to Baghdad, fewer people would have found themselves thumbing through big wads of $100 bills, and more of it would have disappeared to an even blacker final destination.
Apparently, operation currency lift also involved twenty-seven 747 cargo planes of freshly printed dinars.
I have formed no fixed idea about this book from the one chapter that I've read so far. Most of the sources are unnamed, there is no scholarly end-matter, just an afterword about how the author has become a persona non grata of the U.S. intelligence establishment, and the odd tidbit of redemption:
"The only evidence in the record that Montgomery points to which might create a genuine issue of fact are his own, vague representations that the technology worked," the 74-page opinion states.
In 2011, the Department of Justice invoked the state-secrets doctrine to keep details of the government's deal with Montgomery under wraps in a separate lawsuit in Nevada.
Montgomery cites the purported classification of the information as a reason to withhold production.
Judge Contreras said that he has "serious reason to doubt that the software is, in fact, classified," but that its purported sensitivity is irrelevant Montgomery's case.
"Whether because the information is classified or because Montgomery gave it away to the government without retaining a copy, the simple fact is that the software, and therefore any ability to confirm whether or not it works, is absent from the record," he wrote.
Vapour all the way down. Hard to assess. Very much like the topic at hand.
Attractive margins come and go. Get your ideal wind-farm location while supplies last!
By the way, the correct measure is delivered wattage, after subtracting out transmission loss. How much is your transmission loss? Well, that depends on the flow patterns of the existing grid. Ideally you would add the new generation source, subtract out the displaced generation sources, then calculate the marginal delivery loss in the system as a whole, to isolate the marginal term associated with one project.
Unfortunately, ideal sucks ass. This calculation is not even transitive.
If you take the current grid, then add source A (computing A's marginal loss contribution), then add source B (computing A's marginal loss contribution) you get different answers than if you added B and A in the reverse order (yet both systems started and ended in the same place).
However, being on the whole lazy bastards, we don't normally calculate this, we let the price signal act as a working proxy. And what happens when price acts as a proxy is that A and B do complex calculations about when to best bring their projects online (typically a race, but sometimes a zugzwang) , to best capture (and crystallise contractually) their marginal contribution.
The price signal is thus nearly impossible to decode, because equilibrium price is but one modulation (not realized until the least-viable project is completed). Meanwhile the timing modulation is often large and volatile.
We're so programmed to believe in technological inevitability after 50 years of Moore's elevator. But wind farms are heavily coupled into geography, climate, human demographics, smelting, and the dirty mining of rare earths, any one of which can put a real crimp into happy extrapolations.
[*] Contemplate—if you are brave—the least-viable rare-earth pit mine.
One turbine won't cause anything measurable, 1000 probably not as well. 1,000,000 you might see something.
It's just another thermal current in a massive system, this one from the outback to the urban canyons. Large cities already generate their own micro-climates due to concentrated heat outflux.
The effect on the other end will be a hundred times more dilute, because the collection side is vast and diffuse (and cities have an additional heat term from fossil fuels, as well as their exhaust).
Anyone involved in risk management snickers constantly (in a morbid way) over the incredible statistical innumeracy of the human species. We're like the teenage girl who should be spending 99 hours practicing her dance moves and 1 hour selecting her nail polish, but seems to randomly get it the other way around every second recital.
Meso-climactic impact of wind farms at scale is about three orders of magnitude down from human impacts that deserve our limited, collective, direct attention.
Corporations have always wanted to provide a superior grade of service to people of means and influence.
Now they can: they can judge your means by how you dress (all those security cameras need to pay for themselves), and your influence by the number and reach of your followers.
You can bet some company is already offering up a service to instantly assess any given Twitter user's suasion score. Even better, those with low suasion scores who get routed to the cheap and disgusting call center will remain as bitter as ever, but who can they tell?
I foresee that many people in America of low disposable income might try to travel somewhere a few times on the tubular cattle car, have a sequence of mediocre experiences with car rental companies, restaurants, hotels, and attractions, then decide that travelling is a shitty way to spend what little money they have, resulting in a large, home-body underclass who's understanding of the world is filtered through the all-seeing eye of Fox News (or its less geriatric, post-boomer replacement).
Travel was always a high carbon activity (doomed to be yanked away from the underclass at petroleum plateau), but the upside (while it lasted as a universal aspiration) was a more reasonable public discourse about world affairs.
Electricity grids are stacks of eggs balanced on their point. A single snow event taking out a single line in the US took out millions of people for days, in a very populated and "modern" area.
The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage that occurred throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and the Canadian province of Ontario on 14 August 2003, around 16:00 EDT.
Most did not get their power back until two days later. In other areas it took nearly a week or two for power to be restored. At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast Blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in Ontario and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.
The blackout's primary cause was a programming error or "bug" in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy Corporation, an Akron, Ohio-based company.
The lack of an alarm left operators unaware of the need to re-distribute power after overloaded transmission lines hit unpruned foliage, triggering a "race condition" in the energy management system software, a bug affecting the order of operations in the system.
What would have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into massive widespread distress on the electric grid.
The northeast blackout of 1965 was a significant disruption in the supply of electricity on 9 November 1965, affecting parts of Ontario and nearby American states.
Over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles were left without electricity for up to 13 hours.
The cause of the failure was the setting of a protective relay on one of the transmission lines from the Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Power Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario, near Niagara Falls.
The safety relay was set to trip if other protective equipment deeper within the Ontario Hydro system failed to operate properly.
So those aren't the droids I was looking for, in my quest to determine if your definition of "modern" was sufficiently modern.
That's enough bandwidth growth to support a personal productivity panopticon, where everything you do is summarized and assessed by Santa's little HR elves.
But I get it. You've wedged a wooden shoe into your PPP link, and the pan-optical future has not yet arrived at your particular below C-level employment backwater.
Dutch proverb: a swelling ocean which does not go through the dike will ultimately go over the dike—in one giant Nike offshoring swoosh.
I've already had Facebook posts where I included a link marked as Spam. One of them was Ben Thompson's excellent Stratechery article on Net Neutrality, to a thread discussing Net Neutrality. Maybe I said something offensive like "This article is worth reading."
This is the exact definition of one of Taleb's long-tailed distributions: in which having avoiding finding myself in this particular pickle (by never signing up in the first place) gives me such massive glee as to outweigh the entire aggregate cost to my social life pertaining to my being an old stick-in-the-mud refusnik.
Just what the doctor ordered: yet another way to second guess my best impulses for the rest of my natural born days.
If Facebook actually gave a shit, there would be a 'challenge' button. Then all your friends would get your post, with a voting form underneath:
Facebook's algorithm rated this post as spam, which david.emery challenged.
[_] Facebook's algorithm is full of shit [_] david.emery is full of shit
If you win enough challenges, you become eligible for an auto-challenge:
Facebook's algorithm rated this post as spam, but what do we know? Every time we rate one of david.emery's posts as spam, he challenges us and we lose, so you've received this post by default.
[_] Facebook's algorithm is still as full of shit as it always has been [_] david.emery is losing his golden touch
But obviously this is not a form of engagement that Facebook wishes to cultivate.
The right place to ask is at the end of the video, or a text box that comes up after the video ends.
The wrong tone is to whimper "please subscribe, or kittens will die, and Pinocchio will never turn into a real boy".
The right use of the "dislike" button is any video that basically tells you how you're going to feel before you get there, e.g. "Hitchens demolishes $some_religious_faggot".
(Yes, I wrote that sentence to court some heavy dislike action.)
The right use of the "despise" button is any video that does the aforementioned in ALL CAPS.
The source of the recommendation (not a ban) was from senior career administrators at CDC itself (not the Trump Administration)...
If your job is at stake either way, there's far less practical difference than your comment suggests. On the second point, it defies comprehension that you've never heard of a political sock puppet.
Aside from getting those two facts 100% wrong, the only nugget of truth in the headline was that it involved the CDC.
When a puppet's lips move, which is more factual observation: the plastic lips, or the live hand rammed up the puppet's ass?
Narrowly, the lips—if narrow floats your boat.
Both versions map equally well onto "Orwellian-quadrant, career-threatening heat blunderbussed down from on high"—an implied headline extremely hard to dismiss out of hand within a thousand yards of Sam Clovis, or several other equally competent nominations (Matthew Petersen, Blackwater cum Academi's progenitor's evil actual sister), because there's no way to nominate these Ignatius Reilly's of de-operationalization without actively despising the agency's prior mandate.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the secret of Burton snatch? — 2016
In related news, isn't it amazing how anger and jealousy are human universals that transcend all categories and social boundaries?
Please identify yourself by taking this short quiz.
Current social order:
[_] like
[_] dislike
Thank you, that's all I needed to know.
The Economist doesn't publish 30-page articles, though I know what you mean. Sometimes a feature topic is fairly bulky.
I read roughly one heavy, non-fiction book a week from the local library. If a book doesn't force me to slow my reading speed down to Big Think, I soon toss it aside.
Chapter one, paragraph one of Tim O'Reilly's What's the Future (2017):
I'm sure as hell not fully adjusting my giant mental map of reality at 1000 words/minute. I can cruise along at 600 WPM on fairly heavy material and not miss the arrival of something worth reading properly. Once good fortune arrives, then my preferred reading speed is 200 WPM at 200% comprehension, or 100 WPM at 300% comprehension (the one true goal of reading is to comprehend more than the writer delivered; all of the best writers have a giant multiplier effect).
If the purpose of writing is to create a context in which the reader can think, then reading is the process of fully entering into that context with your own mind. This simply can not be done at 1000 WPM. That's the reading speed of a future Jeopardy champion. (There's a damn good reason why IBM's robot has already won.)
Speed Reading Promises Are Too Good to Be True, Scientists Find — January 2016
That one guy from my high school who could achieve 85% comprehension at 1000 WPM was pretty much a know-it-all to begin with (actual rocket-scientist father, older brother 1600 SAT score & Caltech admission). He was mainly just slotting minor facts into a large, shallow matrix of what he already knew. What a great use of time.
By far the largest multiplier on my own reading efficiency is careful selection of source materials, and curating reading contexts where the different books and articles read in the same week spark off each other in interesting and useful ways (sometimes grouping like with like, other times grouping polar opposites).
My gut estimate is that I read about 150,000 words per day of organized language (a metric which excludes most Slashdot story submissions, and most recipe websites). That works out to about four hours at my standard reconnaissance speed of 600 WPM.
I probably have my eyes oriented toward text for twelve hours on any busy day, or about 3500 hours per year (since I turned ten). Let's just call it 150,000 hours, which works out to perhaps 5 billion total words impinging on my consciousness in some small way.
Thus I have mastered the skill of reading at 100 WPM with 300% comprehension.
Final thought:
If a website tells you that something was posted "11 months ago" it's pretty much guaranteeing that the content is not worth revisiting 11 months hence.
The recent shift from absolution time (e.g. "January 2016") to relative time (e.g. "two years ago") correlates with fly-by-night reading skills.
"Human nature" is putting forward the tripe you just posted.
Think for half a second. Google has a 730B market cap. That's a mighty large aggregation of stakeholders.
Efficient frontier
Does it really make sense to have behemoths dabbling in high risk activities? Is Google going to make the star employee of some highly successful high-risk offshoot project a billionaire, while compensating the rest of their staff as usual? I'm sure that won't have any internal political repercussions ...
So how is it done at this scale?
DeepMind
Best of many worlds. The smart, ambitious people get the big payola, behemoth gets the shiny new technology, no large, increasingly conservative stakeholders are unduly agitated.
Hello, world! Turns out that rational behaviour's dearth is greatly exaggerated.
Don't worry, it won't. Under prevailing ideology, any form of token competition constitutes a sufficiently free market.
Yeah, I can legally and safely glance at my Pebble watch while driving.
Those who don't see the advantage of a Smartwatch either don't drive, or never passed a reflective surface they couldn't improve.
As it happens, I don't even have Bluetooth running any more, to increase my battery life. I depend on it now mainly as a pill reminder. Wrist vibration has proven itself to be the signal I'm least likely to miss. My watch only ever alerts me now for one reason: take that damn time-sensitive pill! (But I can still manage to tune it out if I'm in the middle of composing an especially long sentence.) This is also why I prize battery life over any other function (one recharge cycle per week is vaguely tolerable).
100 million ad and brand impressions eventually add up to real stupidity (7,000 ad impressions/day * 40 years).
This is not even counting the full IQ point per minute that decays into radioactive sludge by attending—be it ever so slightly—to trite pleasantries exchanged between the anchor desk and the weather personality.
Ever since I filtered most of that crap out of my life, I haven't felt overloaded in the least.
Huh, this highly recycled hummingbird feather got moderated as insightful.
My mission here will be complete and I can die happy if only I can now figure out how to moderate a moderation point as +1 QED.
This whole prerequisite thing is a giant edifice of institutional convenience.
I was highly accelerated coming out of high school. I had a fistful of glowing test scores and competition results in math and physics, top AP scores in biology and chemistry, and I was no slouch at the softer or more subjectively creative subjects either (though I never had the specific work ethic to succeed at mastering a foreign language, linguistics would up as a major focus of my professional life).
By the end of second year I had flunked out of a double major in mathematics and computer science due to a severe sleep disorder (medical science caught up twenty years later, and then it took me about a decade to best apply this new learning, so my sleep disorder has recently been reclassified as a solved problem).
Well, now I want to dive headlong into machine learning (linguistics again), but I've got a big hole in my education surrounding third and fourth year applied mathematics. I'm just a wee bit weak on my trig identities and related problem set arts, and it's often a challenge for me to work the standard problems from scratch.
So here I am reviewing in my mid-fifties what would have been basically a minor challenge if I had better had my metabolic shit together on the first pass.
What I soon discovered is that conceptually I lack for nothing. The one somewhat non-traditional year I did complete of advanced-stream mathematics coursework tended to focus on the formal equivalence of limit superior/limit inferior to the more common epsilon/delta construct (by which point—if you have any natural intuition—measure theory amounts to a common-sense extrapolation). Mainly I just lack for a layer of finger skills to work the actual problems. The notation of linear algebra slowed me down for a couple of weeks before this became comfortable again (though I still don't read this nearly as smoothly as APL, in which I was once quite proficient).
I find this interesting, so on the side I'm reading about mathematical pedagogy, and I finally found some exposition about why it matters to master those confounded trig identities.
At a certain point, as a card-carrying member of the machine learning research tribe, one needs to have a certain outback survival mentality, whereby one can easily derive most of the elementary results from a quick pencil and paper exercise.
For me, from where I now stand, such an exercise would not be "quick" (though with great effort, possible in most cases).
It's an institutional presumption of mathematical pedagogy that this skillset needs to be relentlessly driven into the fingertips by many, many manual problem sets.
The more rarefied claim here was that failing to have these patterns embedded into your fingertips, a working mathematician will suffer from weak intuition in many formal settings; that these finger skills amount to an indispensable form of pattern recognition, which one can not otherwise supplant.
As an institutional precept, I can't argue against this. As a person rudely rejected from the standard path by a balky metabolism, I can advance a strong special-case argument that this is complete bull pucky.
I didn't cease to think mathematically just because my formal education rudely ejected its crankshaft. I've been thinking deeply about gradient and curvature for most of my adult life (specifically, the unholy marriage of curvature to the asymptotic equipa
s/though/threw
Can't recall the last time I made that typo. It's not even on my standard finger-fuckup shit list.
Too bad Marsha through a giant bloody wrench into your equivalence argument.
Twitter's ban on Marsha Blackburn's ad mentioning "baby body parts," explained
Planned Parenthood was in the business of giving American's the tools to exercise their legal rights at their own discretion.
Very few people feel good about abortion. The difference is that some people put a higher priority on the outcome of parenthood.
When today's overstretched, unprepared single mother at age seventeen turns into tomorrow's crack ho at age twenty-three (by then with three children), it only serves to perpetuate the cycle of human misery. I'm in favour of a future where all parenthood is planned parenthood, entered into by young adults fully prepared to be overwhelmed by the responsibility of the whole thing. Which I believe is inevitable, if arriving on a very slow train.
Canadian Indian residential school system
But, hey, let's get all hot and bothered about abortion instead, because we sleep soundly enough while feeling a little bit bad about the abuse of Indigenous children.
Blackburn didn't think twice about portraying the use of foetal tissue by scientists devoted to the cure of Parkinson's disease as a macabre, immoral market in tiny human giblets.
I'm sure she'll bring this same tact and discretion to the net neutrality debate. Oh, yippee. (When a Democrat says something equally ripe, it's usually about how some chosen Wall St insiders are the only people qualified to fix the financial sector's abuses—a proposition greeted with feeble Republican dissent, if any.)
Right, if we just ban abortion, all the problems are gone now—for a sufficiently large value of small, clueless, slumbering mind.
Yes, the pressures in public economics are long established and well understood, but how the individuals choose to comport themselves within this framework still admits to egregious yodelling and jungle vines.
Market basket
Market baskets inherently evolve over time. By any measure, our chosen basket is richer than ever before.
There is some scope for people to complain that they don't like the new basket, and would rather have had the old basket.
But usually 1% of basket remorse is hand in glove with 99% availability bias: the simple failure to recall all the annoyances of yesteryear in glorious Technicolor.
It's a Wonderful Life was wonderful mainly because they colorized it, keeping themselves far, far away from Mrs. Kalmus.
Producer David O. Selznick complained in a memo during the making of Gone with the Wind:
I, for one, welcome our evolving market basket's Natalie Kalmus removal tool.
You are delusional if you think the mean of a distribution is more inherently meaningful than the median.
Mathematically, the mean is far more tractable, not having the step behaviour of the median, so it certainly gets used more in equations (while spawning a small statistical cottage industry concerning the best way to handle distributional outliers).
The median is inherently immune to outliers, which is especially handy in making normative comparisons, where the value put forward as the "norm" has actually been experienced by a large, interior slice of the people being compared. min/max are pretty much always outliers. Least robust statistic ever invented (though often useful for sizing statistical visualizations).
Five-number summary is a good compromise: three normative values in the middle (including the median) plus the outlier brackets on either side (min/max).
Not that the mean is not even in here (though it does bound the mean from above and below; the mean of these bounds is fair estimate of the summary mean, and works to ((q0+q4)*1+(q1+q2+q3)*2)/8).
If your distribution happens to be somewhat symmetric around the mean, it's probably a damn fine estimate of the mean.
And if you distribution isn't somewhat symmetric around the mean, why are you using the mean in the first place? That's what all the statistical schnooks love about the mean: it walks around in broad daylight with a baby bulge, and barely any hapless, innumerate schlep notices.
Betteridge's law of headlines
Should headlines beginning with the word "should" be also included?
Appropriate stock answer:
Yes, of course, if there's still enough room on your stone tablet.
I basically knew where this was going—at the franchise level—the moment Rey had the telepathic dream sequence after first touching Luke's light saber (the whole point of which was to be profoundly pointless and thereby encourage mass Stockholm-syndrome cud chewing) and I haven't given a shit about the rest of that movie, about this movie, or about the next movie ever since, though I do find it amusing to check in on how others are reacting to the Disney Matrix.
Almost every big movie these days is a pastiche of three or more genres (sometimes obviously so, other times mildly concealed).
I was watching the commentary track for Russian Ark last night, and at one point the cameraman panics and tells the guy beside him "I can't do it", because he's got such a bad groin spasm that he worries he'll become crippled permanently. (The entire movie is a single 90-minute take, with a very heavy Steadicam.) But then he sees the 300 actors in period costumes all in perfect position through the next door and he gets a shot of adrenaline and heroically makes it to minute 84. Cut! This breaks a tension so thick that 1000 actors and 1000 assembled extras almost begin to cry.
Well, that lightsaber dream sequence was the screenwriting team confessing "we can't do it"—noooooo!—about finding a principled way to combine all the necessary genres together in the mandatory Disney stew pot.
Fuck it, we'll use telepathy.
A conversation with Martin Amis — 2 December 2016
Does writing get any easier?
Fuck no, not onerous at all, not after The Great Force Vending Machine in the Sky pukes out, faster than light, lady-in-waiting telepathic midichlorians (of course, this minor capability would have barely figured in the outcome until movie number eight).
This study is beneath notice, but I do have one thing to add.
In The Baroque Cycle Stephenson satirizes the myopic culture of Versailles. The higher up one goes in status, the smaller the tea leaf microscope required.
While a few of the noblemen (and women) are relative dunderheads, there's no shortage of nested-plot mastermind decoders.
Studies of adolescent culture have determined that the kids with the highest social status experience the most severe anxiety about committing a social blunder.
Just like Versailles.
(Also, remember that result next time you chuckle mindlessly about scientists doing a study which only managed to confirm the patently obvious.)
The Fonz might seem cool to those around him, but deep down he's mainly driven by hair gel OCD.
Do you know what is really weird? A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist writes a book with no endorsements.
One such book is Pay Any Price by James Risen (2014).
His thesis—which he introduces through the least straight-line narrative he could reasonably concoct—is that after the Iraqi treasury was looted of a billion dollars (valueless paper, further despoiled with Saddam's portrait) by his son, Qusay, the American government became terrified about their ability to feed the liberated Iraqi population, and so came up with a scheme to ship some $12 billion in $100 U.S. bills from East Rutherford to Baghdad (filling five expensive transports with this worthless paper in the process).
Wouldn't you know it, this whole enterprise involved shockingly lax controls, and there were 35 convictions back in America after the fact for excessively tasting largess (accounting for but a pittance of funds which disappeared into the liquidity void).
People act on their expectations of the future, and the behaviour is sometimes strikingly different if the expectation is one where "worthless" paper (or a similarly serviceable proxy) is in short supply. The value of trade that hasn't happened yet is not so easy to dissect from the system of trade as you would pretend to make it.
So, no, your currency won't make a fish out of water, but it might serve to distribute an actual fish into the mouth that most benefits.
If the U.S. government had shunted $12 billion in abstract currency to Baghdad, fewer people would have found themselves thumbing through big wads of $100 bills, and more of it would have disappeared to an even blacker final destination.
Apparently, operation currency lift also involved twenty-seven 747 cargo planes of freshly printed dinars.
I have formed no fixed idea about this book from the one chapter that I've read so far. Most of the sources are unnamed, there is no scholarly end-matter, just an afterword about how the author has become a persona non grata of the U.S. intelligence establishment, and the odd tidbit of redemption:
Risen Cleared on Labeling CIA Contractor a 'Con Artist' — 2016
Vapour all the way down. Hard to assess. Very much like the topic at hand.
Attractive margins come and go. Get your ideal wind-farm location while supplies last!
By the way, the correct measure is delivered wattage, after subtracting out transmission loss. How much is your transmission loss? Well, that depends on the flow patterns of the existing grid. Ideally you would add the new generation source, subtract out the displaced generation sources, then calculate the marginal delivery loss in the system as a whole, to isolate the marginal term associated with one project.
Unfortunately, ideal sucks ass. This calculation is not even transitive.
If you take the current grid, then add source A (computing A's marginal loss contribution), then add source B (computing A's marginal loss contribution) you get different answers than if you added B and A in the reverse order (yet both systems started and ended in the same place).
However, being on the whole lazy bastards, we don't normally calculate this, we let the price signal act as a working proxy. And what happens when price acts as a proxy is that A and B do complex calculations about when to best bring their projects online (typically a race, but sometimes a zugzwang) , to best capture (and crystallise contractually) their marginal contribution.
The price signal is thus nearly impossible to decode, because equilibrium price is but one modulation (not realized until the least-viable project is completed). Meanwhile the timing modulation is often large and volatile.
We're so programmed to believe in technological inevitability after 50 years of Moore's elevator. But wind farms are heavily coupled into geography, climate, human demographics, smelting, and the dirty mining of rare earths, any one of which can put a real crimp into happy extrapolations.
[*] Contemplate—if you are brave—the least-viable rare-earth pit mine.
It's just another thermal current in a massive system, this one from the outback to the urban canyons. Large cities already generate their own micro-climates due to concentrated heat outflux.
The effect on the other end will be a hundred times more dilute, because the collection side is vast and diffuse (and cities have an additional heat term from fossil fuels, as well as their exhaust).
Anyone involved in risk management snickers constantly (in a morbid way) over the incredible statistical innumeracy of the human species. We're like the teenage girl who should be spending 99 hours practicing her dance moves and 1 hour selecting her nail polish, but seems to randomly get it the other way around every second recital.
Meso-climactic impact of wind farms at scale is about three orders of magnitude down from human impacts that deserve our limited, collective, direct attention.
Corporations have always wanted to provide a superior grade of service to people of means and influence.
Now they can: they can judge your means by how you dress (all those security cameras need to pay for themselves), and your influence by the number and reach of your followers.
You can bet some company is already offering up a service to instantly assess any given Twitter user's suasion score. Even better, those with low suasion scores who get routed to the cheap and disgusting call center will remain as bitter as ever, but who can they tell?
I foresee that many people in America of low disposable income might try to travel somewhere a few times on the tubular cattle car, have a sequence of mediocre experiences with car rental companies, restaurants, hotels, and attractions, then decide that travelling is a shitty way to spend what little money they have, resulting in a large, home-body underclass who's understanding of the world is filtered through the all-seeing eye of Fox News (or its less geriatric, post-boomer replacement).
Travel was always a high carbon activity (doomed to be yanked away from the underclass at petroleum plateau), but the upside (while it lasted as a universal aspiration) was a more reasonable public discourse about world affairs.
Why so oblique?
Northeast blackout of 2003
Northeast blackout of 1965
So those aren't the droids I was looking for, in my quest to determine if your definition of "modern" was sufficiently modern.
Have you taken a good look at optics lately?
New optical fibres for high-capacity optical communications — 2016
That's enough bandwidth growth to support a personal productivity panopticon, where everything you do is summarized and assessed by Santa's little HR elves.
But I get it. You've wedged a wooden shoe into your PPP link, and the pan-optical future has not yet arrived at your particular below C-level employment backwater.
Dutch proverb: a swelling ocean which does not go through the dike will ultimately go over the dike—in one giant Nike offshoring swoosh.
This is the exact definition of one of Taleb's long-tailed distributions: in which having avoiding finding myself in this particular pickle (by never signing up in the first place) gives me such massive glee as to outweigh the entire aggregate cost to my social life pertaining to my being an old stick-in-the-mud refusnik.
Just what the doctor ordered: yet another way to second guess my best impulses for the rest of my natural born days.
If Facebook actually gave a shit, there would be a 'challenge' button. Then all your friends would get your post, with a voting form underneath:
If you win enough challenges, you become eligible for an auto-challenge:
But obviously this is not a form of engagement that Facebook wishes to cultivate.
The right place to ask is at the end of the video, or a text box that comes up after the video ends.
The wrong tone is to whimper "please subscribe, or kittens will die, and Pinocchio will never turn into a real boy".
The right use of the "dislike" button is any video that basically tells you how you're going to feel before you get there, e.g. "Hitchens demolishes $some_religious_faggot".
(Yes, I wrote that sentence to court some heavy dislike action.)
The right use of the "despise" button is any video that does the aforementioned in ALL CAPS.
If your job is at stake either way, there's far less practical difference than your comment suggests. On the second point, it defies comprehension that you've never heard of a political sock puppet.
When a puppet's lips move, which is more factual observation: the plastic lips, or the live hand rammed up the puppet's ass?
Narrowly, the lips—if narrow floats your boat.
Both versions map equally well onto "Orwellian-quadrant, career-threatening heat blunderbussed down from on high"—an implied headline extremely hard to dismiss out of hand within a thousand yards of Sam Clovis, or several other equally competent nominations (Matthew Petersen, Blackwater cum Academi's progenitor's evil actual sister), because there's no way to nominate these Ignatius Reilly's of de-operationalization without actively despising the agency's prior mandate.