Epicene Cyborg

What happens to police departments that collect more fines? They solve fewer crimes.

When Do We Have Empathy for the Mentally Ill?

The Robots Can’t Stop Us Repeating the Mistakes of 2008. Quite the opposite, really. Now you can repeat the mistakes much faster and far stupider.

Millennials Are Flocking To Cheap Rust Belt Cities.

The Great Mortality.

Yes, Government Creates Wealth.

Attempted rape isn’t boys will be boys. It’s criminals will be criminals.

Goldman Warns Of A Default Wave As $1.3 Trillion In Debt Is Set To Mature.

What are public lands?

Why a Hawk Is a Hummingbird’s Best Friend.

Do we now live in such unforgiving times that one problematic essay (or interview) guillotines a job? Yes. I consider shutting down all my blogs every day.

The Most Dangerous Place to Bicycle in America. No surprise, it’s Florida. I’ve personally known three people killed by cars in Florida, and I don’t know many people.

Does Implicit Bias Predict Dictator Giving? Implicit bias tests appear to be pure garbage and tell us basically nothing.

Mate Preferences and Their Behavioral Manifestations.

New Bill Will Put an End to the Out-of-Network ER Scam.

Fighting Back Against GMO Pseudoscience.

Missing the Dark Satanic Mills.

Sexism, Rape Myths and Feminist Identification Explain Gender Differences in Attitudes Toward the #metoo Social Media Campaign in Two Countries.

Four maps show how electricity generation has changed in the US.

It sounds like Apple’s original content is going to be really, really bad.

These Are the Economies With the Most (and Least) Efficient Health Care. It only surprises me there are any places worse than the US. (My boss’s wife was recently denied an MRI by her health insurer that was recommended by her primary care physician.)

We have a system that doesn’t allow for the admission of error when we make errors in our zeal to feel safer.

Rich people are to blame for the rise of Lyme disease.

The Most Promising Migraine Drug in Years Is Being Held Hostage by Our Healthcare Dystopia.

Military Worship Hurts U.S. Democracy.

Here’s your paycheck, but you gotta pay us before you can have it.

LA’s richest neighborhoods have vaccination rates lower than the poorest parts of Africa.

In reality, the US political system is like the unplugged video game remote that kids give their baby brother so he stops whining that he wants a turn to play.

Kavanaugh’s Lesson For Democrats Is That It’s Always Worth A Fight. In this case, they are fighting accidentally, so I am not sure it’s a lesson that will actually be learned.

What’s the Maximum Gravity We Could Survive?

Anthony Bourdain vs. the Tyranny of Wellness.

youtube-dl.

Why I’m done with Chrome. There is no usable browser any more. Not a single one.

Faster. Slower. How We Walk Depends on Who We Walk With, and Where We Live.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the 2007-09 financial crisis is how little understanding there is of what actually occurred.

Cornell University’s “world-renowned eating behavior expert,” Brian Wansink, has resigned following the news, per Vox, that 13 of Wansink’s studies “have now been retracted, including the six pulled from [the Journal of the American Medical Association] Wednesday.

Splurge on a Lower License-Plate Number.D rivers obsessively seek tags with fewer digits, bidding up prices as high as $675,000; ‘something people fight over a lot’. Some people have far too much money.

Low-carb diets are all a scam — and science proves it. The truth is that quality, not carbs, should be your main focus if you want to eat for a long and healthy life.

Is there an emerging political gulf between the generations? Quiggin has always been very wrong, just in ways he didn’t understand. Now he’s just really, really wrong, but knows it (a little).

How Puberty Kills Girls’ Confidence.

Applicant Who Actually Faced Punishment For Sexual Assault Clearly Not Yale Material.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Growth Rate.

Ancient Megadrought Causes Present-Day Drama. We’re living in the Meghalayan Age. But a scientific scuffle has broken out over what marks the beginning of this new geologic time period.

Two Japanese robots are now happily hopping on an asteroid. Why do robots get to have all the fun?

The intersectionality that American leftists increasingly advocate has a narrowing, not broadening effect. Here’s the salient bottom line: Follow this out, and it may lead to the collapse of the left, not its elevation.

Their minds are so twisted by racism and xenophobia that they can’t understand how global capitalism, the graduated phase-out of national sovereignty, the privatization of virtually everything, the debt-enslavement of nearly everyone, and the replacement of their so-called “cultures” with an ubiquitous, smiley-faced, gender-neutral, non-oppressive, corporate-friendly, Disney simulation of culture are actually wonderfully progressive steps forward on the road to a more peaceful, less offensive world. This is a great piece.

Our age of horror. In this febrile cultural moment filled with fear of the Other, horror has achieved the status of true art. Seasons 3-5 of The Walking Dead is some of the best TV ever made.

Why every social media site is a dumpster fire. Tribalism makes these platforms easy targets for con artists.

Anonymous stock-market manipulators behind $20B+ of “mispricing” can be tracked by their writing styles.

Debt Is a Powder Keg and Rising Interest Rates Are Matches. Different this time is not.

Yes, Virginia, There Is a Crisis. Once upon a time in southwest Virginia, coal barons took the region’s wealth. Now, opioids sap its will.

Firefox continues to send telemetry to Mozilla even when explicitly disabled.

Why We Must Save the Endangered Species Act from the Trump Administration.

Apple Will Judge Call, Email Activity To Assign Users a ‘Trust Score.’ Fuck Apple. Fuck Google. Fuck them all.

FCC angers cities and towns with $2 billion giveaway to wireless carriers.

Intestines modify their cellular structure in response to diet.

A ProPublica analysis found that black people and Native Americans are under-represented in clinical trials of new drugs, even when the treatment is aimed at a type of cancer that disproportionately affects them.

Glass Insects Small Enough to Balance on the Tip of Your Finger by Wesley Fleming.

The Dangers of DNA Testing. In a new study, 74 out of 108 crime laboratories implicated an innocent person in a hypothetical bank robbery.

Bummer about your medical emergency, but your claim is denied because you didn’t call in advance.

Karl Marx and the case of the never-ending theft.

Causal understanding is not necessary for the improvement of culturally evolving technology.

Saturated fat does not clog the arteries: coronary heart disease is a chronic inflammatory condition, the risk of which can be effectively reduced from healthy lifestyle intervention.

Aeolian mode.

Why The Couch Often Kills Your Gym Routine: Humans Simply ‘Hardwired’ For Laziness, Study Finds. It took becoming a paratrooper to overcome my innate laziness. Do not recommend.

Conspiracy Theories: Evolved Functions and Psychological Mechanisms. I am not sure I buy this, but it is interesting.

Major Antarctic ice sheet shrank when it wasn’t much warmer than now.

High contamination possibility here.

Termites Are Actually Shrunken Cockroaches. Wood you believe it?

The problem with essays like this one, and with so much other social commentary these days, is that it posits social behavior as endlessly mutable and thus perfectable. More is hardwired than nearly anyone wants to admit OR is only alterable with near-total cultural, social, and environmental change (that is, not likely).

Norbert’s gambit.

The Racism v. Economics Debate Again. Political scientist Tom Ferguson is well along on a granular analysis of voters who flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump. The data overwhelmingly show it was economic issues that led to the change. Shocking no one except those who don’t care one whit about truth (centrists).

A line of Colorados from the Equator to the North Pole using the Mercator projection.

It’s easy to ridicule the Chinese but how many people right over here can’t wait until everybody is assigned a scorecard with a list of transgressions against speech codes and “murderous thoughts”? She’s absolutely right. That will be de facto here, if not de jure, soon enough.

Louisiana Pipeline Protesters Charged with Felonies.

NASA’s TESS Space Telescope Has Spotted Its First Exoplanet.

Why We Should Lower the Voting Age in America. And lower the age to be president to 30, and bar anyone older than 65.

Mark Zuckerberg Profile Reveals Origins of Facebook (FB) Problems.

You’ll miss Trump one day. His successor (even if not his immediate successor) will be worse. Bet on it.

Oldest-known aquatic reptiles probably spent time on land.

Quantum observers with knowledge of quantum mechanics break reality.

Canon Fodder.

The Earliest Hominins: Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, and Ardipithecus.

The Unequal Distribution of Catastrophe in North Carolina.

How Birds Survived the Asteroid Impact That Wiped Out the Dinosaurs.

DNA Analysis Reveals a Genus of Plants Hiding in Plain Sight.

The Great Chinese Art Heist.

Software disenchantment.

The Fall of Men Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.

Frankfurt kitchen.

Short Selling Is a Tough Business.

Exactly How Many Women Does a Guy Have to Attack Before You Conclude He’s Got Problems With Women?

The ‘Me Too’ Movement Hits McDonald’s. I am pleasantly surprised that the movement is helping more than already-rich white women. Did not expect this.

The Rise and Demise of RSS. Most of the best of the web is dead and dying. Corporate facsimiles remain, useful only to simpletons, beneficial to no one.

The Office That Became a Circus of Barking Dogs. “Bring your pet to work” might seem like a great company perk. But it can tear workplaces apart. Bring your dog to work, see me eating it for lunch later.

Cleansing thermonuclear fire.

IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands. IBM, HP and others have been doing this for years.

Study: people tend to cluster into four distinct personality “types.”

My research shows that when people feel threatened they want ‘tighter’ social norms, with profound consequences for politics.

Throughout the mess, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury had been permitting the largest banks in the country to funnel as much cash as they wanted to their shareholders ― even as it became clear those same banks could not pay their debts. Lehman itself had increased its dividend and announced a $100 million stock buyback at the beginning of 2008.

Archives