Kickin’ it old school

I’m loving this song

(NSFW)

Funny stuff

The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

From Landing to Liftoff

Time-lapse photography of the preparation process for the Space Shuttle. Pretty amazing little video.

QOTD

“Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world; knowing theyre going to light the bottom–and doesnt get a little worried–does not fully understand the situation.”

–John Young, after being asked if he was worried about making the first Space Shuttle flight STS-1.

(via Starts With A Bang.)

Seems fair…

The Yanks’ top four starting pitchers — Burnett, Sabathia, Andy Pettitte and Javier Vazquez — are earning a combined $63 million this year. That’s nearly twice the Pittsburgh Pirates’ entire payroll

via The 50 highest-earning American athletes

Two quotations about Facebook

Facebook’s popularity is based on the reality that human beings are social creatures. Staying connected with people we know is innate to us. But maintaining separate social groups that we don’t want to clash is also innate.

via The Five Stages of Facebook Grief

In some ways, it’s a good thing. Maybe we’d all be a little better off if we could provide a more unified persona to the world. It would be bad if we simply became more private and less authentic, but what if we all just relaxed a little bit about the social norms that cause us to shield big and real parts of ourselves.

It’s interesting to note which groups we want to self-censor for. Our parents’ generation, our workplaces, religious groups. Maybe it’s good for everybody if those groups are forced to confront a more accurate picture of our lives.

via callmejay on MeFi

Obviously I agree with the latter idea, since my entire online persona is tied back to my real name. My website links to my CV right next to my twitter feed filled with snark. In short, I’ve decided that I won’t apologize for who I am.

As a final thought: the world is headed towards a point where everyone has embarrassing pictures online. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as a world where no one does.

What the weather feels like this week

Chocolate Bunny from Lernert & Sander on Vimeo.

Sigh…

phd comic parking

Yep, I was at work today and had that exact thought.

TurtleCam

Muppet Madness

Cookie Monster

Here’s hoping your weekend made you this happy.

First Chess, now Jeopardy!

Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.

With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall.

The New York Times profiles IBM’s Watson. It’s both a look at how far AI systems have come, and how far they still have to go. I’d be really interested in reading more about the underlying algorithms.

The risk of terrorism

The risk of being killed by a terrorist is about the same as the risk of being killed by our microwave or laundry machine:

As can be seen, annual terrorism fatality risks, particularly for areas outside of war zones, are less than one in one million and therefore generally lie within the range regulators deem safe or acceptable, requiring no further regulations, particularly those likely to be expensive. They are similar to the risks of using home appliances (200 deaths per year in the United States) or of commercial aviation (103 deaths per year). Compared with dying at the hands of a terrorist, Americans are twice as likely to perish in a natural disaster and nearly a thousand times more likely to be killed in some type of accident. The same general conclusion holds when the full damage inflicted by terrorists — not only the loss of life but direct and indirect economic costs — is aggregated. As a hazard, terrorism, at least outside of war zones, does not inflict enough damage to justify substantially increasing expenditures to deal with it.

Hardly Existential | Foreign Affairs, via Bruce Schneier

QOTD

I have a very small anon presence on the Web. Mostly because I believe that if you aren’t willing to stake your real life reputation on what you say on the Web, then what you say is likely to be too superfluous to advance the conversation. Not always, just mostly.

via Anonymous Ask MetaFilter, we need to talk | MetaTalk.

Obama v Wall Street

“They’re not accustomed to being engaged in politics this way,” says a private-equity investor. “Their skin isn’t toughened. They actually take [the attacks by Obama] personally. This is a profession with a lot of smart people, but who aren’t necessarily terribly introspective. They think they actually deserve to make all this money. So any attack on their livelihood is, ahem, unpleasant.”

Obama Is From Mars, Wall Street Is From Venus

The iPhone model is all wrong

The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of “content” isn’t just that they can get it for free, though: it’s that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too

– Cory Doctorow, on why the iPad won’t save traditional media.

He also tears down the walled garden model that Apple is banking so heavily on. Really, this is just AOL all over again. Yes, the iPhone and iPad are popular devices, because they’re the first ones on the scene. Ultimately, though, people aren’t going to accept crippled devices that only run what Apple says they can run. The reason the PC and the Internet have been so disruptive, and such fertile ground for new forms of expression is the lack of restrictions on what you can build.

It’s worth reading Doctorow’s take on the whole thing.

Finally, a horoscope I can get behind

Aries: The stars would love nothing more than to reveal your future this week, but unfortunately, they’re just large luminous balls of plasma held together by gravity in space.

via The Onion

QOTD

Some of the right wing blogs are saying that this starts a slippery slope to a single payer system, and the end of the HMO industry as we know it.

God, they’re optimistic.

via mccarty.tim

Linkdump for February 10th through March 14th

QOTD

The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

– from “The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” by Neal Stephenson

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