Tuesday, January 31, 2017

WIRED: The Race to Pass Obama’s Last Law and Save Tech in DC


The Race to Pass Obama's Last Law and Save Tech in DC
WIRED

The Talent Act and the Presidential Innovation Fellowship become President Obama's final love letter to technology and technologists. Read the full story


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Rouille: An Essential Topping for Bread | Fresh Tastes | PBS Food

http://www.pbs.org/food/fresh-tastes/rouille-essential-topping-next-slice-bread/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=pbsfood_freshtastes


_- Steve

Friday, January 27, 2017

Torture doesn’t work … except when it does – The XX Committee

https://20committee.com/2012/12/11/torture-doesnt-work-except-when-it-does/amp/


_- Steve

Trump Finds The Weak Spot In Obama’s Protections For Scientists | FiveThirtyEight

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-finds-the-weak-spot-in-obamas-protections-for-scientists/?ex_cid=story-twitter


_- Steve

www.washingtonpost.com: Powerful NSA hacking tools have been revealed online - The Washington Post


Powerful NSA hacking tools have been revealed online - The Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com

Read the full story



_- Steve

The global gag rule is unconstitutional, and John Roberts can explain why.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2017/01/27/the_global_gag_rule_is_unconstitutional_and_john_roberts_can_explain_why.html


_- Steve

The Verge: How an international treaty signed 50 years ago became the backbone for space law


How an international treaty signed 50 years ago became the backbone for space law
The Verge

Happy anniversary, Outer Space Treaty Read the full story


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FBI Releases Preliminary Semiannual Crime Statistics for 2016 — FBI

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-preliminary-semiannual-crime-statistics-for-2016


_- Steve

Exit Polls 2016

http://www.cnn.com/election/results/exit-polls/national/president


_- Steve

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Moving? How to Update Your Voter Registration Information in Every State - Updater Blog

http://www.updater.com/moving-tips/moving-how-to-update-your-voter-registration-information-in-every-state


_- Steve

Anne Applebaum Interview About President Donald Trump - SPIEGEL ONLINE



Applebaum: We can't continue assuming that politics is something which is decided elsewhere by distant leaders in a distant capital. Protest is insufficient too. If people who are willing to put time into demonstrations also prove willing to work on behalf of candidates in local elections -- or to become candidates themselves -- they will achieve far more. If all of this upheaval provokes more involvement, then we have a slim chance of ending up with more vibrant democracies eventually. The alternative, as you've hinted, is that democracy fails altogether.

---Steve

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain - POLITICO Magazine


As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain put it, "The great master fallacy of the human mind is believing too much." False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible. It's little wonder that authoritarian regimes with sophisticated propaganda operations can warp the worldviews of entire populations

_- Steve

Trump’s Lies vs. Your Brain - POLITICO Magazine

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/donald-trump-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658


_- Steve

Philip Roth E-Mails on Trump - The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/philip-roth-e-mails-on-trump

"I was born in 1933," he continued, "the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I've been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English."

_- Steve

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Communications of the ACM: Hans Berliner, Master Chess Player and Programmer, Dies at 87


Hans Berliner, Master Chess Player and Programmer, Dies at 87
Communications of the ACM

A former world champion of correspondence chess who later helped develop game-playing computers, Hans Berliner died on Friday in Riviera Beach, FL, at the age of 87. Read the full story


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The Blank Slateism of the Right | Quillette

http://quillette.com/2017/01/12/the-blank-slateism-of-the-right/


_- Steve

Robert Pinsky’s new poetry collection is considered and timely - LA Times


A politician makes hay in Oklahoma

By saying he doubts Darwin and climate change.
A kayak to Nyack. Home, home on the range.

Elect you, sigh for you, die for you. Our systems fed
By long-dead life that rotted to our sweet crude—

Warmth, movement, light and all our musical racket.
Lipstick traces. How we do. An airplane ticket.

High volume, gasoline roar, an amplified voice
Keening its meaning — will we die of all this?


_- Steve

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

VentureBeat: In a ‘man vs. machine’ poker contest, the machine is winning


In a 'man vs. machine' poker contest, the machine is winning
VentureBeat

A very interesting contest is taking place at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh where four of the world's best poker players are playing against a machine. And as of now anyway, the machine is winning. In this case the machine, named Libratus, is using artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed at nearby Carnegie Mellon University, a hot bed of AI and robotics research. The tournament kicked off Wednesday with odds makers favoring the human players 4 or 5 to 1 over Libratus. "But we ended Read the full story


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_- Steve

How Repealing Portions of the Affordable Care Act Would Affect Health Insurance Coverage and Premiums | Congressional Budget Office

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/52371


_- Steve

Wednesday, January 04, 2017

Why Do Companies Care About Their Stock Prices? | Investopedia

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/020703.asp

Stock market funds us. It provides scrutiny on companies.

_- Steve

Nasa budgets: US spending on space travel since 1958 | Society | theguardian.com

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/feb/01/nasa-budgets-us-spending-space-travel


_- Steve

Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States | Cardiology | JAMA | The JAMA Network

http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2513561


_- Steve

A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity — ScienceDirect

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953616303689?via%3Dihub


_- Steve

Robin Williams


Once the coroner's report was reviewed, a doctor was able to point out to me that there was a high concentration of Lewy bodies within the amygdala. This likely caused the acute paranoia and out-of-character emotional re- sponses he was having. How I wish he could have known why he was struggling, that it was not a weak- ness in his heart, spirit, or character. 





_- Steve

Stanford Magazine - Article. Human brain size 4500

https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=38306


_- Steve

Monday, January 02, 2017

This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson. | The Nation

https://www.thenation.com/article/this-political-theorist-predicted-the-rise-of-trumpism-his-name-was-hunter-s-thompson/


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Why Parenting May Not Matter and Why Most Social Science Research is Probably Wrong | Quillette

http://quillette.com/2015/12/01/why-parenting-may-not-matter-and-why-most-social-science-research-is-probably-wrong/

Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn't appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3 Alternatively, non-biologically related adopted children (who have no genetic commonalities) raised together are utterly dissimilar to each other—despite in many cases having decades of exposure to the same parents and home environments.3
_- Steve

2017 Annual Forecast | Stratfor

https://www.stratfor.com/forecast/2017-annual-forecast?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Keywee&utm_campaign=Article&kwp_0=302023


_- Steve

Top 10 Spy Sleuths in the Literary Game | The Lineup

http://www.the-line-up.com/top-spy-sleuths/


_- Steve

Putin’s Real Long Game - POLITICO Magazine

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/putins-real-long-game-214589


_- Steve

Edge.org

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27169

The lesson is that even though I produce both goods less efficiently than you, we are still both made better off when we specialize in the good for which we have a comparative advantage and then trade. This is an argument for a role for governments in facilitating, rather than inhibiting, specialization and trade.

_- Steve

Edge.org

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known
This leads to a radical idea that I really like: If consciousness is the way that information feels when it's processed in certain ways, then it must be substrate-independent; it's only the structure of the information processing that matters, not the structure of the matter doing the information processing. In other words, consciousness is substrate-independent twice over!

_- Steve

Pasta with Avocado Sauce and Garlic Shrimp | My Colombian Recipes

http://www.mycolombianrecipes.com/pasta-with-avocado-sauce-and-garlic-shrimp


_- Steve

Sunday, January 01, 2017

Linguistic humor

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/daffynitions.html


_- Steve

Edge.org

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known

Consider, for example, attitudes toward income redistribution. If these were based on rational self-interest, anyone earning less than mean income should favor redistribution since they stand to benefit from that policy. Since income inequality skews income distribution rightward, with increasing inequality a larger share of the population has income below the mean and so support for redistribution should rise. Yet, empirically this is not the case. One reason is antisocial preferences. As Ilyana Kuziemko and colleagues found, people exhibit "last place aversion" both in the lab and in everyday social contexts. That is, individuals near the bottom of the income distribution oppose redistribution because they fear it might result in people below them either catching up to them or overtaking them, leaving them at the bottom of the status hierarchy.
_- Steve

Edge.org

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-scientific-term-or%C2%A0concept-ought-to-be-more-widely-known


_- Steve