May 27, 2018
Most scientists today live in cities and have little direct experience with wild plants and animals, and most biology textbooks now focus more on molecules, cells and internal anatomy than on the diversity and habits of species. It has even become fashionable among some educators to belittle the teaching of natural history and scientific facts that can be “regurgitated” on tests in favor of theoretical concepts. And we should call these people “goddamn idiots” and then fire them.
‘It’s worse than murder’: how rural America became a hospital desert. Profit over people. Or wildlife. Or sense. Or living. It’s the American way.
Convincing You That Nothing Better Is Possible. The Dems also make these same arguments. (Of course, they are also just slightly nicer conservatives.)
May 26, 2018
The Trouble With the Memphis Airport: No Crowds. Like most things in society, we are doing air travel all wrong as we worship the “free” market.
Markets have a magical, quasi-mystical status within mainstream economics. They are both the original starting-point and far-reaching conclusion of mainstream economic theory. Modern economic theory is as much religion as anything scientific. Mathing it up only makes this more the case.
May 25, 2018
Almost a quarter of the world’s population will be obese by 2045. New research using WHO data says 1 in 8 people will have type 2 diabetes unless more countries take action. Holy fuck. FA and HAES types should be held criminally negligent, along with fast food companies.
Command-line Tools can be 235x Faster than your Hadoop Cluster. Distributed and clustering is worthless (actually harmful) 90% of the time, but don’t it sound cool on a resume!
Mugshots.com Operators Arrested For Letting Money Influence Editorial Decisions. These guys are scumbags, but the charges against them seem to be utter crap, and could be used against nearly anyone. If we jailed scumbags for being scummy, about half of America would be in jail.
After Evergreen. These days, the left is mainly good at ridiculous witch hunts and peddling calumny and conspiracy but little else. Very sad to see.
YouTube Is Messing With the Order of Videos In Some User Feeds. One of the reasons I never subscribe to things like this is that I know they will eventually fuck it up just this way.
U.S. Life Expectancy Will Likely Decline For Third Straight Year. As Hillary Clinton said, America is already great.
May 24, 2018
Here’s the shape of a 21st century I don’t want to see. Unfortunately it looks like it’s the one we’re going to get, unless we’re very lucky. I’d guess 2.5 – 5 billion excess deaths by 2100, many due to nuclear war essentially caused by climate change.
Advocates for open borders rely on a series of fallacies. They are unquestioned in the major news media, but easily debunked. “Open borders” is just another moronic utopian project doomed to utter failure like all utopian projects.
America’s Brand of Capitalism Is Incompatible With Democracy. That’s just the way the “centrists” like it.
Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists. Shocking no one…well, at least no one with a brain.
Hackers infect 500,000 consumer routers all over the world with malware. VPNFilter can survive reboots and contains destructive “kill” function. Surprise this hasn’t happened sooner as most consumer routers are about as secure as a refrigerator.
Neuroscience Critics Learn How Brain Waves Link to Speech. Strict reductionism in science is (mostly) at a dead end, though it’ll take ~25 years for most scientists to realize this.
May 23, 2018
The square President. Nixon, if he’d been as “cool” as Obama, could’ve gotten away with so much more (Watergate included).
May 22, 2018
Natural language processing is actually a technique aimed at dumbing down computers to the point where they’re able to converse with us. Yep. Voice garbage makes both computers and humans worse. It’s a dead end.
Ignore the hype over big tech. Its products are mostly useless. Agreed. Once the well of government research ran out, big tech was lost.
The recent mass shootings in the US all have one thing in common: misogyny. Plenty of misogyny in the rest of the world, but no other developed nation that worships firearms.
May 21, 2018
May 20, 2018
Resentment of Crazy-Rich Americans Isn’t Just Envy. People are bothered by a sense that the system is rigged and unfair. People are rightly disturbed by the reality of the situation.
40 Cellphone-Tracking Devices Discovered Throughout Washington. Am sure every major city has dozens if not hundreds of these. They are cheap and effective, so of course they do.
May 19, 2018
May 18, 2018
Community Colleges and how easy it is to make fun of someone else. Community colleges provide a better actual education than the vast majority of four-year universities.
Almost half of US families can’t afford basics like rent and food. That’s ok, they can eat FREEDOM and live in LIBERTY.
Yes, Neoliberalism Is a Thing. Don’t Let Economists Tell You Otherwise. Economists like to use the colossally stupid Cosma Shalizi-like argument that if you can’t point to something labeled “neoliberalism” somewhere, that it doesn’t exist.