“future” cops
via Matt Novak
dueling banjos
I need more people to do my things for me.
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) January 30, 2012
my ability to successfully adjust time & microwave power for partially defrosted frozen meals makes me feel like my generation’s julia child
— Sarah Pavis (@spavis) January 30, 2012
Wastelander Panda
A prologue for a developing TV series. I would totally watch this.
Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
Related to stuff we’re talking about.
the most disturbing thing I’ve read today
When things blew up, we didn’t say to ourselves, “maybe it’s not possible to engineer a low-risk 6% annual return on assets” or “maybe it’s not possible for everyone a demographically mature population to expect to spend as much time out of the workforce as in it.” Instead, we search for the fault in the system: were pension fund managers too incompetent? Bankers too greedy and clever about searching for loopholes? Regulators too lax? Did we write the rules governing bank risk capital wrong?
Discovering that we can’t all achieve higher risk-free returns by piling into mortage securities, we do not question the premise that there is some way to achieve attractive risk free returns on a mass scale; instead, we direct the banks to pile into OECD sovereign debt. Having created a bubble in OECD sovereign debt that is about to end disastrously, bankers and regulators are undoubtedly even now searching for a “truly” risk free security that they can use to backstop their deposits.
Let us instead consider the possibility that this thing may not exist. There may be no way for us all to enjoy steady, low-risk capital appreciation, or to exit the workforce whenever work becomes difficult. There may be no way to engineer these possibilities into being.
And that’s counting Cher’s twitter feed.
quote out of context
If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you’re now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.
motorcycle tooth removal
A youngster has his tooth removed via sisterly love, a long piece of dental floss, and a mini motorcycle.
code as a weapon
Gospel Melody Boys
That’s Daddy, third guy from the left. Happy Father’s Day.
Cowboys and Pit Crews
Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School:
You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn’t prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.
Mr. Ghetto – Walmart
I suspect this will be some sort of thing (probably, NSFW).
via @mattthomas
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
Big Fat Gypsy Weddings
I AM THE BEST
(Via lhl)
There are so many essays out there about why dating sucks
One man tries to widen the frame:
There are two types of people in the world. Those melancholy few who take care of business and then there’s everyone else. This is the way it has always been. There are those men and women who own their good decisions and bad decisions and then a vast stupid mob who moo and cluck and turn the blame game into blood sport. But let me address the mob first. You’re unhappy because no one likes to feel like they’re a line item on someone’s life plan list. A “relationship” is not a prize. Not a noun. A relationship is a verb. If you want a relationship, start by being a human being and try to relate to another human being. It’s basically a fulltime job. There is no plan. Love finds you, and either you’re listening or you’re not. This is an immutable fact of nature. The mob, the web, your fears and selfish ambitions are nothing but noise. Turn down the volume. Put your ear to the door. The heart has such a small voice, but it says such wonderful things.
Truth be told, this article reminds me of some advice I received last summer in Deron’s driveway, sitting in his Jeep.
Bold Choices
How well we have loved
Are you hearing this, dear clusterflock? Are you listening to Barack Obama’s speech?
I am as hopeful for our nation as ever in my life.
The City of Wine
In 2005, the winery at Milestii Mici officially claimed the title of largest wine collection in the world. It took Guinness almost a year to consider the application:
The collection comprises 1.5 million bottles. Stretching for 250 kilometres (160 mi), of which only 120 kilometres (75 mi) are currently in use, the Milestii Mici cellar complex is also the largest in the world. Overall, the complex holds nearly 2 million bottles. More than 70% of the stored wines are red, 20% are white and about 10% are dessert ones. The most valuable items of this collection, worth €480 a bottle, were produced in 1973-74; they are now exported only to Japan.
I know where I’ll be heading come nuclear apocalypse.
Saharan Cell Phone Mixtape
Music from Saharan cell phones is a compilation of music shared between cell phone owners in Mali.
Richard Feynman playing bongos
the classroom reinvented
Slate ran a contest to reinvent the American classroom. Greg Stack and Natalia Nesmeainova won with their “Fifth Grade Exploration Studio.” If features an outdoor story circle, a “teacher base” and crops:
headline of the day, II
Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke
homelessness and technology
Being without a home is not that big a deal in today’s world, but having connections to the rest of the world is pretty important.
I’m imagining On the Road with WiFi.
cyber assassins?
In Italy, not too long ago, a mob boss was shot but survived the shooting. That night, while he was in the hospital, the assassins hacked into the hospital computer and changed his medication so that he would be given a lethal injection. He was a dead man a few hours later. They then changed the medication order back to its correct form, after it had been incorrectly administered, to cover their tracks so that the nurse would be blamed for the “accident.”
update: this is probably both old and false. sorry.
A 16-bit arithmetic logic unit (ALU) in Minecraft
That is to say, a working computer built inside a video game. (via techdirt via @onesmallfire)
