Alright y’all.
I see stuff like this:
And (tongue very in cheek, but still sorta eerie), I start thinking of this:
“Beginner’s luck!”
Read MoreSome Pulp
Not new as far as the internet is concerned, but incredible, regardless:
Read MoreHey gang. You might notice something different about the title syntax of this SiMH post. If so, that’s great, and I hope you take advantage of your situation. You might even consider trying something similar yourself someday. I think that’d be real cool. If you’re confused, ask a buddy.
I’ve been really enjoying these guys over the past few weeks. I think they sound like a mix between the Fleet Foxes and some Caribbean band that I’ve never heard of. When I listen to their music, I get the feeling that, in the future, when I revisit these albums, I’m going to be reminded of my current life state–my neighborhood in the fall, the current state of my relationships, watching Friday Night Lights for the first time–and I get all sentimental and excited. I hope they can offer you a similar experience. Enjoy, friend:
If you fall in love, you can pick up their two EPs at their website: http://lordhuron.com/
Read MoreFirst off, sup Juice, it has been a while since we last talked. Did you lose some weight? Been hittin’ the gym? Either way, you’re looking good.
I know it’s somewhat rude to just jump into a rant after having not spoke in so long, but there’s something I have to get off my chestacles.
It is something that has become my bête noire for the last couple of days, something that fills me with almost seething rage. This “it” I refer to is none other than the concept (and practice) of Daylight Saving Time.
Want to know why? I bet you do, but it’s not going to reveal itself until after the metaphorical “jump”, so make with it already.
Read MoreCool article about the rise of public radio in recent years, thanks to a reinvention of the medium by shows like This American life, Radiolab, and Sound Opinions:
I talked recently with Robert Krulwich, who first joined the NPR network just a few years after All Things Considered went on the air in the Nixon era and now cohosts the public radio program Radiolab, and he remembers those days as filled with invention:
“Radio was dead—it was top 40. All the smarties were at the Times or The Washington Post, or if you didn’t want to be Woodward and Bernstein you went to work for Walter Cronkite at the Tiffany network. This group of nutty people wandered in and said, let’s do radio. We’ll reinvent it. Jump thirty-five or forty years ahead and where is Walter Cronkite? What happened to The Washington Post? And guess what, the nutty radio people have suddenly emerged as the focus for a huge audience. And now they have a little of the swagger of the Timesmen.”
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/all-programs-considered/?page=1
Read MoreThe light on the floor of my room was doing cool things when I woke up this morning, due to a slight breeze sneaking its way through my open window and past my curtains. I grabbed my iPhone and took a few short clips. I hoped to capture the moment of opening my eyes from sleep, not yet ready to move, and watching the light dance on my floor on this crisp Fall Saturday morning. As a video, it’s not much, but it was a nice way to start my day, so I thought I would share it with you all.
Happy Fall.
Read MorePretty impressive stuff. Whole lotta’ potential with this tech.
Read MoreGoogle is making cars that can drive themselves in urban environments; traffic, highways, intersections, stop signs, etc. The future is going to be so awesome.
Adam, I thought you might like this:
Maker Profile – Kinetic Wave Sculptures on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.
Read MoreIt’s apparently somewhat a la mode in blogging circles to snicker and make fun of people who like food and buy organic fruits and vegetables from farmer’s markets. As a person who does this, I take these criticisms in stride, realizing that spending half your day traveling to 3, sometimes 4, different places to buy your food probably isn’t high on most people’s lists, but this Adam Ozimek post about frozen vegetables is absolutely absurd:
Are future blue collar workers really going to take the time to grow themselves vegetable gardens in window boxes outside their apartments? A lot of working people, like Megan McArdle and Matt Yglesias, frequently don’t have time for fresh vegetables. Like Matt, many people have to teach themselves late in life how to make quick delicious snacks out of frozen vegetables. This would be a much more valuable lesson for poor kids then how to select the freshest kale at your local organic farmers market, or even more ridiculously, how to grow your own …
If you can get kids to eat and prefer frozen vegetables then you’ve got a sustainable improvement in diet and nutrition. If you get them to like fresh organic vegetables they’ve grown in the garden or bought at the farmers market, then you’ve temporarily instilled in them the tastes of upper middle class people with enough time and money on their hands for such luxuries.
The first thing I’ll point out is how incredibly ironic it is that this person (and others) think that vegetables (!) are a luxury item that only upper middle class yuppies can afford. This would be news to our ancestors, who survived almost entirely on grains and vegetables, with meat being served on special occasions. This would also be news to most Chinese people, seeing as the majority of their diet is fresh vegetables. We all know that China is the upper-middle class yuppie capitol of Earth.
Furthermore, the condescension towards “blue collar” workers is outrageous. As if these “workers” simply can’t be bothered to go shopping at grocery stores. Or that they simply don’t have the time to actually feed themselves. Or that it’s just ridiculous that they could even think of having a *gasp* garden! I mean, two urban, young bloggers who work 70 hours a week don’t have time for fresh vegetables, so that means all “workers” can’t possibly have the time.
As for kids and vegetables, I have a long-held theory that most kids don’t like vegetables because they are prepared very poorly. Ever had frozen spinach? Kinda sucks. Same goes for frozen green beans. But fresh sauteed spinach with garlic? That’s good. Roasted green beans tossed with butter and thyme? Delicious.
Both of these things take 15 minutes or less, and taste significantly better than their frozen counterparts. So here’s my counter thesis to Adam Ozimek’s idiotic thought: If you get kids to eat frozen vegetables, they may end up thinking that all vegetables taste like garbage and eliminate them from their diet permanently. If you get them to like fresh vegetables prepared simply, they’ll end up loving vegetables as much as a McDonald’s double cheeseburger.
On a much broader note, I do think that the Slow Food movement has some serious image problems. This class-based fight seems to come up often, whether in the form of frozen vegetables, organic vegetable nutritional content, or shopping at Whole Foods. To me the whole point of the movement is not these specific pieces, but a more holistic approach to food and feeding yourself. It’s about taking back ownership of your diet and proving that you can make wholesome food that tastes great, and is good for your health and the environment at the same time. Somewhere along the way this got lost (or misinterpreted).
Read MoreNate Silver wrote a really excellent article yesterday on confidence intervals, and it really describes very well a pet issue of mine: probabilities and our brains. Probabilities play a very large role in our decision making processes and are specifically very important when performing risk assessments, but I think, as humans, we are naturally ill-equipped to handle probabilities in a meaningful and precise way.
Nate writes:
With due respect to our reader, Skeptical Sam, I’m not sure that people’s intuitions are all that good when it comes to estimating confidence intervals. Most people probably know, almost to the minute, how long their commutes to work take them on average. But if I asked you to tell me how often your commute takes 10 minutes longer than average — something that requires some version of a confidence interval — you’d have to think about that a little bit, and you might wind up being pretty far off. Calculating the average amount you expect your family to spend on groceries in a month, likewise, is easier than estimating the risk of some catastrophic event that will cause you to go bankrupt.
[...]
Finally, there’s some evidence from behavioral economics that human beings are bad at estimating probabilities out at the tail ends of the bell curve. We’re pretty decent at telling a favorite from an underdog, but we’re not so good at telling an 8:1 underdog from an 80:1 underdog or an 8,000:1 underdog, even though those are huge differences statistically.
All of these are good reasons not to trust your gut.
This also reminds me of an excellent Radiolab episode on a similar topic: Stochasticity.
I think the only real way to combat the counter-intuitive nature of these concepts is more education, and I think there’s some very real opportunities to beef up high school math curricula when it comes to probabilities. I remember spending a very short amount of time on the subject, and it being particularly uninteresting (red and blue marbles…). I think a larger amount of time spent on particularly the larger concepts of what probabilities actually mean would make for a more informed populace.
Read MoreFrom ESPN
Read MoreJACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville Jaguars receiver Kassim Osgood leapt out a second-floor window to escape a gun-wielding man who attacked him and a 19-year-old woman.
According to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, the armed intruder exchanged gunfire with his ex-girlfriend, Mackenzie Rae Putnal, after putting a gun to her head on Monday night.
Police say Osgood, 30, sustained some minor bruises during the attack and while fleeing.
Coach Jack Del Rio says, “He’s fine. I’m aware of it. I really can’t comment on that whole deal. He’s doing OK.”
Police say Julian Armond Bartletto, 20, of Jacksonville, was arrested on charges of aggravated battery, false imprisonment, armed robbery, burglary and violation of an injunction. He’s being held without bond at the Duval County Jail.
I think Jonathon Chait makes a really good point here:
Now, most elite Republicans understand that the red meat fed to the base isn’t exactly right. It’s useful to scare the daylights out of the activists, but writers for the Standard and the Journal editorial page understand that “freedom,” as most people understand the term, is not really at risk. They understand as well that politics is a little more complicated than “if Republicans stay true to conservatism, they cannot lose.”
But the conservative base is not in on the joke. And so Republican elites found themselves with just a few frantic days to undo the toxic and intoxicating effects of 20 months of relentless propaganda. Vote for the man who compromised with evil! The true conservative can’t always win! They couldn’t do it.
I won’t say that the Republican base strategy has been a total failure. But it is nice to see it blow up in the face of the establishment from time to time.
He’s a little more happy about this whole Christine O’Donnell scenario than I am, but I think this is important, and it reminds me of something President Obama said a while back when he visited the House Republicans at their retreat.
So all I’m saying is, we’ve got to close the gap a little bit between the rhetoric and the reality. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to agree on everything, whether it’s on health care or energy or what have you, but if the way these issues are being presented by the Republicans is that this is some wild-eyed plot to impose huge government in every aspect of our lives, what happens is you guys then don’t have a lot of room to negotiate with me.
I mean, the fact of the matter is, is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, this guy is doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.
And I would just say that we have to think about tone. It’s not just on your side, by the way — it’s on our side, as well. This is part of what’s happened in our politics, where we demonize the other side so much that when it comes to actually getting things done, it becomes tough to do.
I think people generally underestimate the effect of conservative hyperbolic rhetoric. It’s nice to sit over here on the left and think that every Republican in the Senate genuinely believes the crap coming out of Fox News, but the fact is that not all of them do. I’m sure there are several Republicans who would love to compromise on legislation but are boxed in by this rhetoric. And it’s not just Republicans either. I’m sure that this also effects conservative Democrats like Ben Nelson too.
People have to realize that the vast majority of people don’t pay attention. For those that do, a majority of them are watching Fox News, and are exposed to this hyperbole all day long, and it’s poisonous. It stifles rational debate and fosters gridlock.
There’s a part of me that wants the Republicans to win the House so that they have to lay in the bed they made. How can you pass a bill without compromising with the enemy? But the other part of me knows how irresponsible the GOP can be and I can’t eliminate the possibility of utter gridlock on Capitol Hill.
One thing is for certain. If the GOP wants to create any public policy in the near future, it will either have to tone down the rhetoric, or control the entire government.
For America’s sake, I hope it’s the former.
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