Science & Religion:
[S1] Looking for alien life in unexpected places.
[S2] Funny letters to God.
[S3] Nate Silver explains, statistically, why your relationship is failing. Remember, to doubt him is to hate science.
Entertainment:
[E1] In retrospect, Captain Power kind of sucked. I had one and remember the disappointment when the screen did not respond to what I was doing. Didn’t stop me from playing it, though. The cartoon was tons better than the actual show, though. Anyhow, it’s coming back!
[E2] Video games at ballpark urinals? Brilliant!
[E3] Music piracy is falling. I mention this because I have commented that the music industry has done everything asked of them (free streaming, paid streaming, DRM-free files, etc.) and the continuation of privacy undercuts arguments that the piracy is caused by intransigent content-owners. Another argument, that artists don’t make significant money off music sales, appears to be wrong. Meanwhile, cracking down on illegal movie downloads appears to boost legal movie downloads.
[E4] Why was the government of the 50’s so eager to believe that comic books were being used to manipulate minds? Experience.
[E5] The best movie sets ever made.
[E6] Hogwards, LEGO-style.
Health:
[H1] There’s an interesting battle brewing in Britain over midwifery.
[H2] The disturbing world of sleep-eating disorders.
Technology:
[T1] LibreOffice is making inroads, but OpenOffice is still winning. Still waiting to see what they do with the IBM/Symphony code before I make a decision.
[T2] Is the future of smartphone screens sapphire? Vertu uses sapphire, but they charge thousands of dollars for their phones. The sapphire screens only cost $30 or so, which to me would absolutely be worth it.
[T3] Will we have a supercomputer in every living room? Absolutely not. It’s absurd. Super-computers will go in a closet somewhere.
World:
[W1] Solar power in Germany may be taking over, in a way that’s not totally good.
[W2] A thing in Japan.
[W3] America really is exceptional.
Psychology:
[P1] This is why more Republicans who believe in gay marriage need to come out in favor of it. And why we should encourage those who do.
[P2] I’ve commented to my wife that she should never expect me to admit that I am wrong in the course of a debate or disagreement. But that, if I am clearly wrong, I will resign myself to it after mulling it over. Apparently, I’m not alone.
[P3] Keiran Healy and LA Paul explain that there really is no way to know if parenting is right for you until it’s too late.
Business:
[B1] Well, that’s one way to change the name of your company against your will.
[B2] Is the future of showroom exploitation prevention a cover charge? (via Kazzy)
[B3] Is the housing bubble back? Here’s a look at the last housing bubble, wherein one of the problems was… the mortgage sellers believe in what they were selling.
[B4] Employers may finally be lowering their standards. This, however, may not be a good thing. I don’t think I buy the logic.
[B5] I happen to think that a la carte cable would be bad for the consumer. But I don’t think the current state of affairs is great, either.
Crime:
[C1] Sometimes, just sometimes, the media doesn’t understand how the law (in this case, crime sentencing) works.
[C2] In the same way that I don’t think having the government take care of my health care gives the government a right to make health choices for me, I am wary of police protection allowing a government to dictate how a burger joint is run.
[C3] Six military fakes that fooled everyone (for a time).
[E2] Video games at ballpark urinals? Brilliant!
Talk about dongle jokes. Also joystick.
[E5] No mention at all of Rear Window. Set designers, architects, producers, directors, and cinematographers from every studio in the industry, including from the New York studios, all tried to get on set to see how Hitchcock and crew massively created the courtyard of the complex. It was the talk of the town for years afterwards and is still studied today as an example for set construction.
Myself, I’m more interested in sets that mostly never existed except as paint-on-glass or pixels. Hitchcock was a big user of matte paintings. Most of the paint-on-glass mattes disappeared forever, even during the filming of the movies, when the paint was scraped off so the glass could be reused. This picture shows the set sans matte and the finished image for one shot from Torn Curtain.
Wow. What a difference! In a sense, sort of like green screens and digital backdrops in use today, don’t you think?
Hard to believe that the first blue screen compositing was done in The Thief of Bagdad in 1940 (won the special effects Oscar). I like pictures like this one that show the matte painter at work. This one is nice because you can see the irregular area (in black) where the actors will be visible through the glass.
W1 Yeah, it would be horrendous if the power companies that have made billions polluting the earth took a financial hit from solar. And I don’t think the Germans had a “national freak-out” over Fukushima as much as a national realization that nukes are dangerous.
As dangerous as global warming? Because it’s leading to an uptick in coal production. The problem with the solar part is that it’s soaking up other renewable initiatives. Solar only provides 20% of Germany’s renewables, which is only 22% of Germany’s total electricity. Despite enormous subsidies that provide undue favor to some residents over others.
(I can go with coal because I don’t think we’re actually going to do much about global warming. I can go with nuclear. I have yet to be remotely convinced that we are seriously going to be able to do without both.)
Eventually, we’ll have to do without both. We have 200 years of nuclear at Current Rates. Quadruple it, and we’re down to 50 years.
Solar is fucking fantastic when you’re using it passively to warm up water. Wind’s also really useful. But once they get the kinks out of geothermal, we’ll be able to slash our energy usage
We’ll see. I am personally a skeptic on our ability to make meaningful changes in environmental output, but relatively optimistic on our ability to harness energy without regard for the environment (which, at the end of the day, we truly lack).
You’ll lose the southwest that way. Probably also England/Ireland.
But I’m not betting we fix global warming in the short term.
Possibly the Mountain West, too, where I live! The city I’m from could end up under water.
None of this will change a thing, with regard to our commitment to the environment, or lack thereof, if it comes down to it.
And you wonder why I’m living in Pittsburgh.
Long term decisions should be based on your long term predictions.
And 10-20 years is a long time…
Pittsburgh I can understand. Very affordable! It’s those other eastern places.
(Says the guy who is moving east. Says also the guy who is trying to scrape his jaw off the floor after looking at real estate prices.)
Will, Are you trying to say that homo sapiens aren’t changing the environment?
Not saying that at all, Dexter. I’m saying that we’re not going to make meaningful changes in output. Meaning, what we’re doing, I don’t think we’re going to stop. Not in any meaningful way.
Meaning, what we’re doing, I don’t think we’re going to stop.
This. China and India alone now account for more than half of global coal consumption. They’re trying to lift on the order of another 1.5B peasants out of poverty. That requires prodigious amounts of electricity. There is no near-term alternative to coal for them.
You’ll lose the southwest that way.
“Lose” covers a lot of ground. Certainly things will be different. Certain stupid choices — like growing irrigated cotton in the Arizona desert — will get undone. But there are interesting unknowns about things like overall precipitation. Here’s a graph that shows Phoenix’s annual precipitation pattern. The big hump in the middle is the North American Monsoon. No one has any real idea what climate change is going to do to the NAM. It might be reduced. Or it might become considerably stronger. Its behavior is based on things that happen on a smaller scale than the current computer models can handle. But there’s no question that the NAM delivers a lot of collectable water to parts of the Southwest.
In 2011, the summer Great Plains high pressure system set up in a slightly different location and the NAM pattern changed. Texas got a crushing drought. Denver, OTOH, got what was probably the wettest July in the 25 years I’ve lived here — it rained (afternoon or evening thunderstorms) at my house for 14 days in a row. The most interesting thing about that wet July in Denver is that up and down the Front Range — where most of the people live — cities’ water consumption was 30-50% below average. We waste a staggering amount of water growing non-native plants here, and grass in particular.
Mike,
I don’t doubt we’ll keep Vegas and the other oases, at least in one shape or form. But the southwest is on the edge of things as it is. Not where I’d wanna invest.
Solar photovoltaic has the advantage that people can start home-retrofit businesses just by going to the large solar power installations in the middle of the night with a screwdriver and a pair of dykes to transfer the means of production to their suburban retrofit customers, who can then turn around and sell the power from the utility’s stolen panels back to the utility at subsidized rates.
You can’t do that with wind power or solar thermal unless you can afford to rent a large crane and risk many hours on-site to carry out the theft.
*grits teeth* top psychology journals… are all in the west? how… very convenient.
I somehow doubt this is the case, as I hear that Japan does some really good research.
[W3] America is exceptional
Should probably be relabeled as [P4] Why almost everything learned from psychology studies was wrong.
Not wrong at all, just not applicable outside the US.
W3 is truly a mindblowing article, in my opinion. I didn’t do it justice with my blurb, but I could think of no way to do it justice, so I just focused on a favorite topic of mine: American exceptionalism.
W1 typifies #slatepitches.
W3 demonstrates that we can’t assume that our perceptions mach other people’s, while in P1 David Frum makes fun of political scientists for doing research instead of just using their “common sense”.
“The disturbing world of sleep-eating disorders.”
Add “poop” in there and you’ve described Mayonnaise’s life… and, yes, I mean doing all three at once.
“I’ve commented to my wife that she should never expect me to admit that I am wrong in the course of a debate or disagreement. But that, if I am clearly wrong, I will resign myself to it after mulling it over. Apparently, I’m not alone.”
Same here. I reason that I can only be wrong if I convince myself I am wrong… no one else can do that. Which still means I’m sort of right. So I’m not actually wrong.
[T1] I quit using OpenOffice some years back and went to LibreOffice: it’s simpler, smaller and produces everything I need. I tend to issue PDF documents and LibreOffice does a beautiful job of generating them. LibreOffice came with my development OS, (Fedora) and is evolving nicely.
When I’m collaborating, Google Docs is great.
I am waiting to find out what code from IBM Symphony OpenOffice incorporates. If that doesn’t impress me, I’ll probably stick with Libre.
Either that I will likely end up using whichever one makes it easier to contribute my QA talents to.