Other on Flying Upside Down

Data Falsificada - Data Colada

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 01:46:36 +0000

Great series of articles, love the forensic analysis but also the insight into the types of tests/validation that researchers should apply to their data to check it’s ‘sanity’

a four-part series detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino

Data Falsificada (Part 1)

Data Falsificada (Part 2)

Data Falsificada (Part 3)

Data Falsificada (Part 4)

Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky’s Arrest Won’t Fix Crypto — Wired

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 18:47:41 +0000

…some in the industry fear the attitudes that created the conditions for the rapid growth and dramatic collapse of Celsius and FTX are still prevalent and that the industry remains vulnerable to influential individuals who are able to portray themselves as revolutionaries and pioneers.

…

The crypto industry “has an enormous attack vector for intelligent sociopaths,” says Travis Kling, cofounder of hedge fund Ikigai Asset Management.

…

Others have been left with an uncomfortable sense that crypto has not yet managed to clear its decks of bad actors and that, should another hype cycle arrive, the conditions that bred the likes of Celsius and FTX could recur. In short, that lessons have not necessarily been learned.

Bill Maher Didn’t Change. He’s Always Been a Cringe Centrist. — The Daily Beast

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 02:50:35 +0000

They parlay their audience’s understandable distaste for “wokeness” and censoriousness into support for a fundamentally reactionary ideology—one that frames existing social inequalities not as a result of contingent historical developments that could be undone at a later stage of history, but as part of an unchanging natural order.

Via The Daily Beast

USB-C hubs and my slow descent into madness - Dennis Schubert

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 17:50:19 +0000

Really interesting post. I really appreciate the work that Dennis put into pulling these things apart and doing the investigation to find the original OEMs.

He confirmed what I’ve suspected for a while – that all the USB C hubs are utter crap. I learned that the hard way after multiple crapped out on me in various ways.

It’s a shame to read that Anker is also just white labeling their products. I’ve had good luck with them and it sounds like “luck” was probably the only factor :)

COVID Is More Like Smoking Than the Flu - The Atlantic

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 17:56:03 +0000

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu. And yet this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person. Noymer, of UC Irvine, said that the effects of endemic COVID, even in the context of persistent gaps in vaccination, would hardly be noticeable. Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

‘I Honestly Don’t Trust Many People at Boeing’: A Broken Culture Exposed - The New York Times

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 05:02:30 +0000

For generations, Boeing represented the pinnacle of American engineering. It helped win World War II, land men on the moon, build Air Force One and make commercial air travel ubiquitous, even glamorous. But the newly released messages portray a company that appears to have lost its way.

Once relentlessly focused on safety and engineering, Boeing employees are shown obsessing over the bottom line. Though Boeing is one of the American government’s biggest contractors, the F.A.A. was viewed as a roadblock to commercial goals that would “impede progress” when it tried to “get in the way.”

My Semester With the Snowflakes - GEN

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 18:22:46 +0000

One young woman made a very big impact on me. She approached me after class one day and said, “I am really glad I can be here at Yale and be in class with you. My grandfather came to Yale and when WWII started, he left for the Navy and flew planes in the Pacific theater. After he came home, he came back to Yale, but he couldn’t finish. He locked himself in his room and drank and eventually had to leave, so I feel like I am helping him finish here at Yale and I’m doing it with a veteran, you.” …. According to the Urban Dictionary, a “snowflake” is a “term for someone that thinks they are unique and special, but really are not. It gained popularity after the movie Fight Club …. Let me assure you, I have not met one kid who fits that description. None of the kids I’ve met seem to think that they are “special” any more than any other 18–22-year-old. These kids work their assess off.

Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher - The New York Times

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 17:50:52 +0000

Special Operator Miller said that when the platoon commander, Lt. Jacob Portier, told the SEALs to gather over the corpse for photos, he did not feel he could refuse. The photos, included in the evidence obtained by The Times, show Chief Gallagher, surrounded by other SEALs, clutching the dead captive’s hair; in one photo, he holds a custom-made hunting knife.

via Anguish and Anger From the Navy SEALs Who Turned In Edward Gallagher - The New York Times

Opinion | Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy - The New York Times

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 05:06:59 +0000

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Squirrels Speak Bird

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 03:21:12 +0000

Squirrels are what Keith Tarvin, a biologist at Oberlin College and Conservatory in Ohio who led the study, calls “public information exploiters,” meaning they often take cues from other prey animals nearby. They’re not the only ones that do this. Early animal behavior studies have shown that birds, mammals, and even fish and lizards can recognize the alarm signals of other species that share similar geographic locations and predators. Within the bird family, a nuthatch may tune into the high-pitched call of a chick-a-dee, which might also be paying attention to the panicked tweet of a tufted titmice.

WeWork could be one of the worst IPOs in 2019

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 03:30:35 +0000

WeWork’s business, essentially, aims to capture the spread between long-term and short-term rental costs. Landlords want stability and guaranteed cash flows, so they’re willing to lease office space at lower rates if a tenant is willing to make a long-term commitment, as WeWork does. Companies, on the other hand, want the flexibility of short-term leases that allow them to quickly grow, shrink, or move their office space in response to personnel needs. As a result, they’re willing to pay higher rents for this flexibility.

From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the shape of cities has been defined by the technologies that allow commuters to get to work in about 30 minutes.

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 02:58:38 +0000

In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day.

This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land is governed by its accessibility—which is to say, by the reasonable speed of transport to reach it.

Uber tries to reassure customers that it takes safety seriously, following NYTimes book excerpt

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 04:02:48 +0000

The email was clearly meant to reassure riders, some of whom might be absorbing negative press about Uber and wondering if it cares about them at all. But not everyone follows Uber as closely as industry watchers in Silicon Valley, and either way, what the email mostly accomplishes is to remind customers that riding in an Uber involves life-and-death risk.

A Boeing code leak exposes security flaws deep in a 787’s guts | Ars Technica

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 21:36:09 +0000

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Savage points in particular to a vulnerability Santamarta highlighted in a version of the embedded operating system VxWorks, in this case customized for Boeing by Honeywell. Santamarta found that when an application asks to write to the underlying computer’s memory, the tailored operating system doesn’t properly check that it’s not instead overwriting the kernel, the most sensitive core of the operating system. Combined with several application-level bugs Santamarta found, that so-called parameter-check privilege escalation vulnerability represents a serious flaw, Savage argues, made more serious by the notion that VxWorks likely runs in many other components on the plane that might have the same bug.

The 18-month fence hop, the six-day chair, and why video games are so hard to make - Polygon

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 19:38:29 +0000

“Early on, we designed some glassware, but then we were having trouble seeing what the glass looked like because everything is so transparent,” Pascual says. “We needed [to] up the poly count on it to even be able to see the type of material, or the type of rendering or shading we had.”

“Yeah,” Krankel says, “it’s one of those things where we started and you spend all this time having, like, a fluid simulation in a goblet that’s flying around, and you’re like, ‘This looks so badass’ totally out of context. And then you look at it in the game, you’re like, ‘A, I don’t see any of this, B, our performance is taking a giant hit. What’s a better, more effective way to do it?’”

Thu, 23 May 2019 18:26:29 +0000

Lame title but interesting article.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

New secret-spilling flaw affects almost every Intel chip since 2011

Thu, 16 May 2019 00:46:15 +0000

Security researchers have found a new class of vulnerabilities in Intel chips which, if exploited, can be used to steal sensitive information directly from the processor., The bugs are reminiscent of Meltdown and Spectre , which exploited a weakness in speculative execution, an important part of how modern processors work.

So, their “old” processors get slower and slower due to patches for massive security bugs?

Why would you buy an Intel processor again?

Macintosh API Comes To Linux, Android

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 04:07:12 +0000

Wine for 68k Mac binaries :)

Unlike DOS, early versions of Windows, and most *nixes, the classic Mac operating system is weird. Contained in the ROM are subroutines to draw windows, pop up dialog boxes, and other various tasks purely related to the UI. On other systems, this would be separate from the BIOS, but in your Mac from the 80s, everything is baked into the ROM and hidden deep in the operating system.

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:26:23 +0000

“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages. … But the documents, as well as interviews with about 50 former employees of Facebook and its corporate partners, reveal that Facebook allowed certain companies access to data despite those protections…In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses…The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.” www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html

Having The Security Rug Pulled Out From Under You - Akamai Security Intelligence and Threat Research Blog

Sat, 20 Oct 2018 05:09:11 +0000

via Having The Security Rug Pulled Out From Under You - Akamai Security Intelligence and Threat Research Blog

First time growing... :)

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 03:45:24 +0000

Strain: “Cancer’s nightmare”

~4 weeks after starting 12/12 light.

‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 08:09:02 +0000

BAKERSFIELD, CA—In the hours following a violent rampage in California in which a lone attacker killed six individuals, including himself, citizens living in the only country where this kind of mass killing routinely occurs reportedly concluded Thursday that there was no way to prevent the massacre from taking place.… Read more…

Source: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Science Shows Green Lasers Might Be More Than You Bargained For | Hackaday

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 23:57:13 +0000

Holy crap - green lasers emitting half (or less) of their power on the invisible IR spectrum.

Like a purpose built blinding device. (emphasis mine)

He explains that the paradox of an ostensibly monochromatic source emitting two distinct wavelengths comes from the IR laser at the heart of the diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) laser inside the pointer. The process is only about 48% efficient, meaning that IR leaks out along with the green light. The better quality DPSS laser pointers include a quality IR filter to remove it; cheaper ones often fail to include this essential safety feature.

God's Lonely Programmer - Motherboard

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 15:05:51 +0000

RIP Terry Davis

The words pour out on TempleOS.org, a torrent of verified random numbers, news links, YouTube videos, and scriptural exegesis. It’s the dense work of a single, restless mind writing ceaselessly without an audience.

After two months of emails and phone conversations, I know more than when I began; specifically, I’ve accumulated more raw data, more facts about his life and experience. But I suspect I’ve only sketched a shadow. The full reality remains unreachable, an irreducible mystery.

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:02:08 +0000

Oliver later testified that he fired at the car because he saw it creeping toward his partner, Officer Tyler Gross, and he believed Gross’s life was in danger. Gross, however, testified that he didn’t fear for his life.

And body cam footage contradicted Oliver’s account. When he opened fire, the vehicle was driving away from him.

news.vice.com/en_us/article/ne5p9g/former-texas-cop-who-shot-and-killed-a-black-teen-leaving-a-party-found-guilty-of-murder

Tue, 28 Aug 2018 23:59:56 +0000

At that point, the hacker said, they requested the user credentials by sending the ID to the company servers with a web request that returned usernames and passwords in plaintext. With a script to automate that process, L.M. said he harvested all the customers’ credentials.

motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mb4y5x/thetruthspy-spyware-domestic-abusers-hacked-data-breach

In Ruling Against Trump, Judge Defines Anticorruption Clauses in Constitution for First Time - The New York Times

Thu, 26 Jul 2018 02:56:59 +0000

“Sole or substantial ownership of a business that receives hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year in revenue from one of its hotel properties where foreign and domestic governments are known to stay (often with the express purpose of cultivating the president’s good graces) most definitely raises the potential for undue influence, and would be well within the contemplation of the clauses,”

via In Ruling Against Trump, Judge Defines Anticorruption Clauses in Constitution for First Time - The New York Times

Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies? - Motherboard

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 02:17:38 +0000

In neural machine translation, the system is trained with large numbers of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another, to create a model for moving between the two. But when it’s fed nonsense inputs, Rush said, the system can “hallucinate” bizarre outputs—not unlike the way Google’s DeepDream identifies and accentuates patterns in images.

“The models are black-boxes, that are learned from as many training instances that you can find,” Rush said. “The vast majority of these will look like human language, and when you give it a new one it is trained to produce something, at all costs, that also looks like human language. However if you give it something very different, the best translation will be something still fluent, but not at all connected to the input.”

[E-Meter Teardown] The Mark-Super-7 Quantum E-Meter (PWJ104) - YouTube

Sun, 22 Jul 2018 23:58:22 +0000

\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGBPn9arfVo\

via The Mark-Super-7 Quantum E-Meter (PWJ104) - YouTube

Sat, 21 Jul 2018 20:49:16 +0000

Intelligence officials are growing concerned that Mr. Trump cherry-picks their findings to reinforce decisions he has already made, several administration officials said in interviews.

NO WAI

Lets Talk About [386/486/586] Intel CPUs

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 04:05:20 +0000

Interesting read :)

Let’s talk about the Intel Overdrive chips.

Specifically, the 486 ones (there were pentium ones later)So back in the 90s, computers were really expensive. you didn’t want to upgrade to a whole new computer to be able to use new processors, right? thus: the Intel Overdrive!

via Lets Talk About Intel CPUs -

The Inside Story of Texas Instruments’ Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor - IEEE Spectrum

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 04:38:29 +0000

Interesting read

Indeed, some who know the history assert that the Intel 8088 was the worst among several possible 16-bit microprocessors of the day.

It was not. There was a serious alternative that was worse. I know because I was in charge of the organization within Texas Instruments that developed it: the TMS9900. Although this dog of a chip went on to be used in the world’s first 16-bit home computer, you’ve probably never heard of it. As they say, history is written by the winners.

Techmoan - Techmoan - Cronixie - The eye-catching edge-lit clock kit

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 01:07:27 +0000

It’s beautiful!!!

\https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miqN2gR1Zns&w=854&h=480\

via Techmoan - Techmoan - Cronixie - The eye-catching edge-lit clock kit

1980s HBR: Why Japanese Factories Work

Fri, 27 Apr 2018 03:11:50 +0000

As a U.S. manufacturing manager pointed out, “U.S. managers analyze, rationalize, and agonize until their office walls are covered with paper before committing to a piece of equipment requiring an investment of $500,000—and therefore an annual depreciation charge of $50,000. Yet the process of evaluating and making recommendations regarding the training, compensation, and career path of a $50,000 a year (including benefits) engineer typically requires one-half of a piece of paper, reluctantly prepared in one-half hour once a year!” This difference in priorities is puzzling, particularly when one recognizes that a machine is simply the embodiment of an engineer’s skill.

Ad Scammers Need Suckers, and Facebook Helps Find Them - Bloomberg

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 02:32:56 +0000

Affiliates once had to guess what kind of person might fall for their unsophisticated cons, targeting ads by age, geography, or interests. Now Facebook does that work for them. The social network tracks who clicks on the ad and who buys the pills, then starts targeting others whom its algorithm thinks are likely to buy. Affiliates describe watching their ad campaigns lose money for a few days as Facebook gathers data through trial and error, then seeing the sales take off exponentially. “They go out and find the morons for me,” I was told by an affiliate who sells deceptively priced skin-care creams with fake endorsements…

Why Does "=" Mean Assignment? • Hillel Wayne

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 02:13:06 +0000

via Why Does “=” Mean Assignment? • Hillel Wayne

Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Slate Star Codex

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 15:09:07 +0000

Alcoholics Anonymous: Much More Than You Wanted To Know | Slate Star Codex

I love this blog. :) Extra points for introducing me to the Dodo Bird Verdict:

Everybody has won, and all must have prizes

A Narcissist's Prayer

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 17:57:38 +0000

That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, that’s not a big deal. And if it is, that’s not my fault. And if it was, I didn’t mean it. And if I did…

You deserved it.

how true this is…

Opinion | The Conspiracy Theory That Says Trump Is a Genius - The New York Times

Sat, 07 Apr 2018 00:16:53 +0000

…QAnon was born last October, when someone claiming to have “Q” level security clearance started a cryptic thread on 4chan, the online message board and troll playground. It was titled, “The Calm Before the Storm,” a phrase Trump had recently used. Q posted hints, some in the form of questions, ostensibly meant to help clued-in Trump supporters understand what was really going on in Washington beneath the facade of chaos and incompetence. (“What is military intelligence? Why go around the 3 letter agencies?”)

No, Panera Bread Doesn’t Take Security Seriously – PB – Medium

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 23:52:50 +0000

Ood! Though I have to say the Krebs tweets at the end are gold :)

tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary preferences, username, phone number, birthday and last four… — Read on medium.com/@djhoulihan/no-panera-bread-doesnt-take-security-seriously-bf078027f815

Game Boy Knock-Offs: A History of Portable Copycats

Sun, 01 Apr 2018 19:29:52 +0000

…a knockoff is clearly trying to confuse the market into thinking it’s something more popular, often using off-the-shelf parts, while cutting corners on the design of the product. Basically, it’s a product that succeeds because an unobservant parent or loved one doesn’t know the difference.

(emphasis mine)

Love this blog!

via Game Boy Knock-Offs: A History of Portable Copycats

Now would be a good time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign | TechCrunch

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 05:26:51 +0000

…[It] was the success of his own vision that demonstrated the limits of that vision.

via Now would be a good time for Mark Zuckerberg to resign | TechCrunch

Dr. Hallowell on ‘Take Your Pills’ Netflix Documentary « Dr Hallowell ADHD and mental and cognitive health

Sat, 24 Mar 2018 03:45:51 +0000

this well meaning documentary meant to alert you to the dangers of stimulant medications used to treat ADHD misses the mark. It doesn’t include any perspective on what medications can do when they’re prescribed and used properly.

First off, I haven’t watched this particular documentary.

But it’s not surprising -___-

via Dr. Hallowell on ‘Take Your Pills’ Netflix Documentary « Dr Hallowell ADHD and mental and cognitive health

Kevin’s Week in Tech: Theranos, Fraud and the Failure to Fail - The New York Times

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 05:37:34 +0000

Instead, according to the complaint, she constructed an elaborate fiction that she would spend the rest of her tenure trying to keep alive, and that would lead her down the path to this week’s charges. In other words, Holmes’s mistake was that she refused to do what so many other entrepreneurs do every day, and come to terms with failure.

Also, the actual complaint from the SEC is a great read. What a train wreck :/

Practically-A-Book Review: Luna Whitepaper | Slate Star Codex

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 06:40:35 +0000

So the most interesting and distinguishing feature of Luna, at least to start with, might not be the tokens, or the incentives, or the machine learning. It might be that it’s a place you can go to meet the sort of people who want to date on the blockchain. I could make a lot of cheap jokes here, but whatever weird hyperplanes through categoryspace further the difficult and desperate project of human-seeking-human are good and worthwhile in my book. I hope that lots of libertarian women find lots of security-conscious men and make lots of beautiful, high-price-volatility babies.

JST Is Not A Connector | Hackaday

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 05:05:05 +0000

And when you’ve made your choice, be specific in your project documentation. There’s no need to make somebody else (possibly your future self) go through the process of guessing which connector type you used.

This is even more important for component vendors. Even though internet specifications are generally poor, that’s no excuse to be lazy. Customers need to know the specific connector to interface with your product.

via JST Is Not A Connector | Hackaday

How Tide Detergent Became a Drug Currency -- New York Magazine

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 05:56:21 +0000

The world is a blizzard place.

Despite its popularity, Tide is not a big moneymaker for stores. P&G’s proprietary surfactants and enzymes are relatively expensive to produce, notes Bill Schmitz, a Deutsche Bank analyst, so Tide’s wholesale cost is steep. Only so much of that can be passed on to customers. “It’s so tight,” says Schmitz of the profit margin. In general, a retailer clears just a few percentage points on a Tide purchase. A store that charges $19.99 for a 150-ounce bottle might claim $2 in profit. But if it buys stolen bottles for $5, that jumps to $15.

There Once Was an IC Dedicated to Blinking an LED — Hackaday

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 07:55:09 +0000

Why on earth might a reborn LM3909 be of interest to him, you ask? Well, he wasn’t able to make a 555 flash the LED from a coin cell, and a friend mentioned this chip which piqued his interest. The internal schematic is in the data sheet (found in the files section of his project), so he was able to implement it relatively easily using common parts. It still requires an external capacitor just like the original, but there is space on-board should you wish to put it there.

Ghost in the machine: a BBC Micro on an FPGA – Machina Speculatrix

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 16:36:04 +0000

Interesting post – and I have a new thing to add to my list, Pmod modules.

The BlackIce board has female sockets that support Digilent Pmod modules, so adding VGA display and PS/2 keyboard sockets was as easy as buying a couple of cheap modules and plugging in.

via Ghost in the machine: a BBC Micro on an FPGA – Machina Speculatrix

agentpanda comments on What buzzword do people need to stop using?

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 15:50:59 +0000

In my field they all mean something. I find people who dislike this sort of ‘corporate’ language generally don’t have experience in trying to parse technical subjects to the business side of the office, or parsing business back to the IT crowd.

I have to say that after working a corporate job for a little over a year now I would have to agree. The buzzwords make my eyes roll every time, and it’s fun to joke about with the developers, but sometimes they are the only tool to get the job done. (that is if you have other things to do besides describe the complete architecture of your app)

Maddox - Shitty inventions that everybody loves.

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 04:11:27 +0000

Forgot about Maddox! I used to love this stuff back when I was like ~16, read it again and still great!

The flexible straw, for example, was invented by a guy who saw his daughter struggling to drink a milkshake at the counter of a restaurant.1 Instead of, say, asking his The innovation nobody needs or wants. daughter to pick up the drink, he went home and made a shitty invention instead. These straws were invented for a child who was too lazy to pick up her drink, by an adult who didn’t have the foresight to ask for a smaller cup for the child. And now I’m relegated to using these drippy pieces of shit forever.

LOL

Tue, 19 Dec 2017 21:38:19 +0000

“Strzalkowski has a lot to say about the way the game was marketed in the United States: how the bizarre scratch and sniff cards included with the strategy guide may have turned off consumers, but little to say in the way of gameplay mechanics or particular characters from the game that spoke to him in a way that might help explain his obsession, with one exception.”

Via: http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/huge-earthbound-fan-excited-play-first-time/

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 19:21:55 +0000

[gallery ]

The 13th century ties that explain why Batman lives in Gotham City

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 15:41:38 +0000

If one link in that chain had broken, through 13th-century legend, to 16th-century insult book, to 19th-century writer, to 20th-century phone book flip, if one of those small events hadn’t happened, Batman would live somewhere else.

Source: Tom Scott, Batman’s Village of Fools: Gotham, England

HP Printer Remote Code Execution

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 05:24:52 +0000

Man - I’m such a sucker for these long, detailed reverse engineering/security posts.

This one does not disappoint!

The video is full of not-so-subtle hints that HP’s printers are secure and buying a non-HP printer is bordering on criminally negligent. For example, the opening sequence, white text on black background states “There are hundreds of millions of business printers in the world. Less than 2% of them are secure”. From here, the “Wolf” executes a series of unlikely attacks that leverage the insecure printers to own the companies network and sensitive data, with the obvious implication being that HP printers would not be vulnerable to these attacks.

Did the Soviet Union have a "middle class" like the West? If yes, then how well did they live and did they support Socialism? : AskHistorians

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 01:25:02 +0000

I have to admit I knew very little about Marxism going into this comment thread – this person’s comment blew my mind a little bit.

When you consider this as a background for what ‘class’ means, the whole idea of class based on income amount risks scrambling and obfuscating everybody’s relationship to the means of production in society. Marx would think that even when people make pretty different amounts of money, the pressures and stresses from society they experience are a lot more similar within each class section. For example when Donald Trump went bankrupt he had negative money, negative income, but that didn’t make him suddenly a lumpen, or a prole, there was still something categorically different about his life which income figures wouldn’t catch. I remember his daughter once saying to her that during that time he pointed to a homeless man and said ‘that man has billions of dollars more than I do’, and while that technically might be true, it’s also importantly not.

The Fairness Principle: How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 06:19:51 +0000

Man, I love this blog - always seems to make me see a problem I’m facing from a different angle.

The sole incentive they are biased towards is their own self-preservation, which is equivalent to the preservation of the entire group. They cannot stereotype any particular group as they could be members of it. They lack commitment to their prior selves as they do not know who they are."

When considering whether we should endorse a proposed law or policy, we can ask: if I did not know if this would affect me or not, would I still support it

Gang Stalking

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 01:47:31 +0000

I always find these looks ing mental illness issues interesting. something that especially stuck with me was the psychologist talking about – I forgot how he phrashed it – like mindsets - basically, if you go around the world with the basic assumption that “there are peoplea actively spying on me and I have to be careful” then every little blip will confirm that.

that on it’s own wasn’t particularly grounbreaking, but it just struck me beceause lately I feel like I’ve been stuck in a mindest where everyone is out to get me or…I dont know, pin me down. Based on past experiences, my body and brain seem to just go down the same path, with similar confirmation bias.

Seth Godin: Imposter Syndrome

Sat, 04 Nov 2017 04:45:15 +0000

How could it be any other way? The odds that a pure meritocracy chose you and you alone to inhabit your spot on the ladder is worthy of Dunning-Kruger status. You’ve been getting lucky breaks for a long time. We all have.

Source: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2017/10/imposter-syndrome.html

How To Bend PVC The Nice Way

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 01:55:44 +0000

This is cool!

PVC pipe is a valuable material to the backyard hacker. It’s cheap, readily available, and comes in a range of different sizes. However, what do you do if you need to bend it? The typical approach would be to grab a heat gun or blowtorch, warm it up, and go from there.

Source: How To Bend PVC The Nice Way

Timberline Lodge

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 05:32:59 +0000

This is a beautiful lodge - definitely worth the visit.

My fiancé and I spent some time just wandering around the inside. We were in a bit of a rush so we couldn’t grab drinks/food. Definitely a nice place to sit and have a drink.

Thanks to the lovely blogger below for reminding me :)

I enjoy taking tour groups to Timberline Lodge situated at nearly 6000′ elevation on the south flank of Mt. Hood. About 60 miles east of Portland, this National Historic Monument is within the Mt. Hood National Forest in Clackamas County, Oregon. Constructed from 1936 to 1938 by the Works Progress Administration, it was built and furnished […]

Cat Communication

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 03:10:36 +0000

Dear god this is the most detailed resource I’ve ever seen on this.

Love the diagrams:

Source: http://messybeast.com/cat_talk2.htm

Unselfish People Are More Likely to Wind Up With Depression

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 15:23:35 +0000

“The implication is that people with depression (or likely to have depression) generally have a “greater empathic concern for others,” in the words of Megan Speer and Mauricio Delgado, psychology researchers from Rutgers University, who penned a related commentary accompanying the study. People with depression just feel bad when others get a shit deal.”

While the outcome seems convenient for me to say “oh wow I just care _so_ much” and that’s why I struggle with depression/anxiety - still interesting thoughts.

[SATIRE] SEGA Announces It Learned Absolutely Nothing From Sonic Mania Success

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 15:18:55 +0000

“Coming off this monumental victory, we are proud to announce our next project is a Shadow the Hedgehog trilogy that features open world gameplay alongside third person shooter elements,” said project lead Takashi Lizuka to a smattering of confused applause. “It will feature a zombie mode and will be entirely motion-controlled.”

LOVE IT! Yet another company that can’t seem to get out of it’s own way LOL

Source: SEGA Announces It Learned Absolutely Nothing From Sonic Mania Success

Batesian Mimicry - Nature is awesome

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 01:56:00 +0000

In the 1850’s, the naturalist Henry Walter Bates found a certain set of butterflies who were clearly not of the same species but whose wings looked almost the same to the naked eye. After thinking it over, Bates eventually figured out what was going on: While the butterflies which were toxic to potential predators (the “models”) were able to operate freely and relatively unmolested, there had also developed a “mimic” population of butterflies which wasn’t toxic at all, yet still went untouched!

Interesting Artwork - Families

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 15:29:58 +0000

Resonated with me - very cute :)

Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/56438245/Parenting-Guide-for-the-Washington-Post

From: http://abduzeedo.com/node/84074