Michael Collins

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Back in my day, we only gave corporations 70 percent of our data, and that's the way we liked it!

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I'll just ask my phone how to fix my phone, which... DAMMIT

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Bless you, patreon typo-detection squad.

Funny.



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Apparently some stones are better left unturned.



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I wonder what percentage of my comics are just me scolding my younger self.

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Images: Estately

If you want to buy a house in San Francisco, you better have deep pockets. The median listing price of a detached home in the city is currently $1.15 million dollar according to Zillow (renting isn't much cheaper either, with median rent list price of over $4,000).

But deals can be found, like this house in the Excelsior District, which is currently listed for sale at a mere $499,000. It's a steal, if you're willing to overlook some negatives ... like being completely gutted by a fire, for example.

Take a look at what half-a-million bucks would get you in San Francisco, which Curbed SF identified as the cheapest house for sale in the city right now:

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Maybe this is what they're thinking when they wag their tails.

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Hey geeks of London! Only 100 student tickets remain! Get'em while they're gettable!

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The poopy emoji will be used to tastefully indicate moments of struggle.

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Just 5 days left to get in your BAHFest proposal for our show at MIT!

My sister is eight years older than me. She moved out when I was around 10. That pretty much turned me into an honorary only child after that. As such, as long as I wasn't bothering my parents or causing trouble, I was pretty much left to do as I pleased.



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Hanging items on a nail isn’t hard, but it’s always tough to hang something you can’t see. You need the string to thread the nail, but not the wooden frame itself. You could photocopy a template, but your poster or painting might be too big. A simple fork can make the job easier.

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The post Truth, Independence, and Liberty appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.

Since so many people have a complicated relationship with their boss, it only makes sense to use a boss in a TV sitcom. They can be a caricature of how one sees their boss in real life, as a dictator, a buffoon, an inspiration, and/or a target of cathartic revenge. The best TV bosses are either extreme caricatures or complicated personalities.

For a lot of us who have exhausting and strenuous relationships with a real life boss, watching a memorable TV boss is therapeutic. It might even help us get along better with our own boss because we can always tell ourselves that no matter how bad our particular lot is, at least we don’t have to work with the incompetent fool on our favorite television show. If this sounds like you, then you’ll love this list.

Check out ten memorable bosses from sitcoms at TVOM. Is your favorite on there?

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Someone needs to invent a USB rubber duck that just tells you that you're garbage.

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I will never be able to sleep again.



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STOP READING COMICS AND GO VOTE

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GO VOTE

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The post When you’re new to them. appeared first on Indexed.

Hi-diddly-ho, Nidorino!



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WAIT! The first one isn't true?! Ugh... I've been liking stupid crap that hot women post on the Internet for years now and for absolutely no reason. I call bullshit.



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Now, if we could just get everyone together to agree on a universal standard...

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Captain Marvel has been one of the most-discussed roles in some time. Not just because she’s a great character, but because she’ll be the first female Marvel superhero to have a solo movie. Fans have tossed around dozens of names for the role, and now a true front runner has emerged: Oscar winner Brie Larson.

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On May 27, NASA posted the most detailed photos of Pluto's surface ever taken, an absolutely stunning look at the dwarf planet's mountains, craters, and nitrogen ice plains. This is likely to be the best Pluto close-up we'll have for a long, long time. Check out the video below:

The images were taken by NASA's New Horizons craft on July 14, 2015, as it flew by Pluto. But they're only being publicized now, 10 months later. And that delay has provoked, uh, consternation from one Fox News anchor:

That's a weirdly phrased tweet, but there were good reasons for the delay. First, Pluto is very, very far away. New Horizons was about 3 billion miles from Earth when these photos were taken. It takes a long time to send those images.

Specifically: It takes about 4.5 hours for a signal from the craft to reach Earth traveling at the speed of light. But that's not the only hurdle. The large distance means the signal that reaches us is extremely faint. NASA has to use three 200-foot-wide radio dishes (one each in Australia, California, and Spain) to pick it up.

As such, information from New Horizons gets transmitted at about 1 to 4 kilobits per second — more than 10 times slower than a 56k modem from the 1990s. (The spacecraft's communicating via crappy interplanetary dial-up, basically.) An image that's 1024 pixels wide can take about 42 minutes to come through.

On top of that, New Horizons is doing more than just sending photos. As Joseph Stromberg explained last year, NASA initially had the craft send back a small set of images in July 2015 so that the public could ooh and aah, but then switched over to transmitting scientific data about Pluto's temperature, atmosphere, interactions with the solar wind (the charged plasma released by the sun), and its five moons.

In September, NASA resumed image-transmitting mode, but still warned that it would take 16 months to relay all the images and data it had collected — due to slow transmission speeds. NASA has been steadily releasing images of Pluto ever since.

Now, these particular photos of Pluto were actually downlinked back in December, and the raw images were posted to the internet about a week thereafter. No one really paid attention then, because they were raw images and hard to interpret. It took some time for NASA to process them and make them prettier and more presentable for public consumption. And that's what they did in last week's press release.

In a follow-up tweet, van Susteren explained she was mostly concerned that budget cuts at NASA might have been responsible for the sluggish photo release. Budget constraints are undoubtedly a real issue for space exploration. NASA's $19.3 billion budget — about 0.49 percent of federal outlays — has come in for a number of cuts and snips in recent years, especially the parts devoted to planetary science.

As David W. Brown wrote for Vox, those particular trims will mean far fewer resources for exploring our solar system in the years to come. Right now, for instance, there are no spacecraft in the pipeline to replace New Horizons, which means these images of Pluto are the best we'll see for decades, maybe longer. "One by one over the next three years," Brown wrote, "as missions end and spacecraft die, the outer planets will again go dark."

But as to why these images took so long, well, that's less a budgetary question and more due to the fact that Pluto is very far away.

Further reading:

• Here's a nice overview of New Horizons' components form the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Library. And here's more detail from Maddie Stone on how the craft transmits data to us.
• Read David Brown's piece: "The dark future of American space exploration"

The Martian and Ready Player One are two of the most successful scifi novels of the past few years. Each will be, or has been, turned into a major motion picture, directed by Ridley Scott and Steven Spielberg no less. But The Martian author Andy Weir took their connection one step further.

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We’ve known since last year that BBC America were working on bringing a new version of Douglas Adam’s holistic detective to U.S. shores—but now it’s official: BBC America have announced that they’ve greenlit Dirk Gently for an order of eight episodes.

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Here is a new and interesting paper by Philip Rogaway at UC Davis (pdf), here is the abstract:

Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plea for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.

Recommended, the paper has a good deal of substance, via Vitorino Ramos and Will Wilkinson.

The post But too much makes you unbearable. appeared first on Indexed.

I guess she had just reached her last fuse.



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