Do you ever feel like you're always running into people with your birthday? It might not be you; it might be the date that you were born. Matt Stiles' birthday heat map gives us a picture of which birthdays are the most and least common in the United States.
    
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A reader calling him- or herself “A Merry Clown” left a comment on my previous post which was so wise, I decided it had to be promoted to a post of its own.
Scientific discourse is the art of juggling decorum, truth and humor. A high-wire feat, attempted under imposing shadows cast by giants and above the distraction of merry dancing clowns.
The “appropriate” tone for scientific discourse seems to be:
(a) Cordial. Always credit others for their hard work and good intentions (allow or at least pretend that others are basically well-intentioned, except in rare situations where there is proof of egregious misconduct).
(b) Biting, merciless and hard-nosed on the substantive issues. The truth deserves no less.
Perhaps the harsher (b) is, the gentler and more thorough (a) should be. After-all, human beings are what they are.
Certainly, provided one adequately treads through the niceties in (a), there’s no reason to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings in (b). Anyone who makes scientific claims in a professional or public arena should be prepared to put on their big boy pants or their big girl pants and have their claims face the brutal gauntlet of scientific scrutiny. All attempts should be made to avoid even the appearance that any part of (b) contains personal barbs or insults (unless these barbs happen to be to be hilarious.)
Outside of science the rule is: whoever flings the horseshit the hardest wins.
Essentially, what Shtetl-Optimized readers got to see this past week was me falling off the high wire (with tenure the safety net below? 
). I failed at a purely human level—though admittedly, while attempting a particularly difficult tightrope walk, and while heavily distracted by the taunts of both giants and clowns. I’ve already apologized to Cathy McGeoch for insulting her, but I reiterate my apology now, and I extend the apology to any colleagues at MIT who might have been offended by anything I said. I’ll strive, in future posts, to live up to a higher standard of cordiality, composure, and self-control.
At the scientific level—i.e., at level (b)—I stand by everything I wrote in the previous post and the comments therein.
Brian Eno has released a limited-edition deck of his "Oblique Strategies" cards, for £60. Oblique Strategies is a legendary deck of creative aphorisms and provocations that will make you revisit your assumptions and find new ways through hard problems. I swear by them ("be the first person to not do a thing that no one else has ever thought of not doing before").
Limited to 500 only.
Numbered 1 - 500
Housed in an exclusive burgundy boxThis limited set will include new cards which are unique to this set and will not appear anywhere else. Exclusive to www.enoshop.co.uk
OBLIQUE STRATEGIES (via The Awl) 
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Shortly before his retirement at 60, Tatsuo Horiuchi picked up a copy of Microsoft Excel and started making art with it. His art does not look anything like you'd expect Excel art to look:
Megan Garber at The Atlantic: "An extensive coronal hole rotated toward Earth last week--and astronomers were there to capture it."
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It's no secret that we've loved Mac email client Sparrow since the beginning. Its minimalist design and ability to play so well with Gmail immediately won us over, and we've been singing its praises since it launched. Google acquired Sparrow last year, taking co-founder Dominique Leca with it. We stole a few minutes out of Dom's schedule to find out his favorite gadgets, best workday tunes, and most-loved inspirations.
Location: Paris, France
Current Gig: Product Manager at Google
Current mobile device: iPhone 5
Current computer: MacBook Air 13"
One word that best describes how you work: "Burst"
Spotify, a Big Jambox, and Google Maps.
It's pretty simple—classic sitting desk with my MBA and a pair of cheap headphones.
I'm trying as much as I can to restrict myself from using apps on my phone. I try to stick to the phone, SMS, and Maps app, but it appears it's not that simple.
I don't use any. iPhone's Notes or Mail does the job in case of emergency.
A good book. I highly recommend Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff.
Pictured at left: Dom's iPhone homescreen.
Being annoying. My secret is that I have no social awareness at all.
Spotify playlists from friends. Right now I'm listening to Flavorites from Guillaume Galuz. There's more than 1,500 tracks there and I'm constantly discovering good stuff that I never would have found.
Charlie Sheen.
"Never think you have time."
If you're into software design, watch/read all of Bret Victor's presentations.
Pictured at left: Another of Dom's favorites "gadgets," a 1962 Fender Telecaster Reissue.
The How I Work series asks heroes, experts, and flat-out productive people to share their shortcuts, workspaces, routines, and more. Every Wednesday we'll feature a new guest and the gadgets, apps, tips, and tricks that keep them going. Have someone you want to see featured, or questions you think we should ask? Email Tessa.
This week we’re taking another departure from the ordinarily campy videos featured in the Retrotechtacular section. This time around the video is only two years old, but the subject matter is from the early 1980′s. [David Crane], designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600 gave a talk at the 2011 Game Developer’s Conference. His 38-minute presentation rounds up to a full hour with the Q&A afterwards. It’s a bit dry to start, but he hits his stride about half way through and it’s chock-full of juicy morsels about the way things used to be.
[David] wrote the game for Activision, a company that was started after game designers left Atari having been told they were no more important than assembly line workers that assembled the actual cartridges. We wonder if any heads rolled at Atari once Pitfall had spent 64-weeks as the number one worldwide selling game?
This was a developer’s panel so you can bet the video below digs deep into coding challenges. Frame buffer? No way! The 2600 could only pump out 160 pixels at once; a single TV scan line. The programs were hopelessly synced with the TV refresh rate, and were even limited on how many things could be drawn within a single scan line. For us the most interesting part is near the end when [David] describes how the set of game screens are nothing more than a pseudo-random number generator with a carefully chosen seed. But then again, the recollection of hand optimizating the code to fit a 6k game on a 4k ROM is equally compelling.
If you like this you should take a look at an effort to fix coding glitches in Atari games.
[via Reddit]
Recently installed in New York’s Nolita neighborhood the Free Little Library is a temporary outdoor shelving unit that functions as a free library. The clever design protects the books from the weather while allowing people to duck under a cover to see what’s available. The library was designed by Venezuelan design firm Stereotank as part of a collaboration with the Architectural League of New York and the Pen World Voices Festival who have selected 10 designers to build miniature free libraries in downtown Manhattan through September. Can’t wait to see the rest. (via designboom)
Photographs taken inside musical instruments making them look like large and spacious rooms.
Will 50 Watts
If you didn't follow the trials and tribulations of the Bush Justice Department -- or you did and your memory is fading -- then the significance of President Obama naming James Comey to be FBI director may be lost on you. Comey was one of the good guys in a very dark period for the department and for the country. The complete story of that period still remains unknown, but it began to unravel in part with the U.S. attorney scandal in 2007.
The investigations that followed exposed some of the deep rifts that had developed within the administration over classified counterterrorism activities (in the broadest sense) and perhaps more significantly over the proper role and traditional independence of the Justice Department itself. Things had gone so far off the rails, we learned, that John Ashcroft -- a fierce partisan and loathsome figure to many Democrats -- wound up in the unexpected position of a bulwark against the Bush White House during that first term, when Dick Cheney still held enormous power within the administration.
At a certain point in the mid-oughts, the customs and conventions of democracy were stripped away. The inner workings were laid bare. The exercise of raw power was on full display. Which party you were in, what tribe you belonged to, your policy preferences, all the usual political touchstones receded. What was left was the profound dividing line between those who believed in the rule of law and those who did not. Comey came down on the side of the rule of law.
I offer that as a prelude to the video of Comey's Senate testimony in 2007, describing the night in 2004 when White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales tried to take advantage of a very ill Ashcroft, who was in the ICU at George Washington Hospital. Comey, the No. 2 at DOJ, was acting attorney general. President Bush had dispatched Card and Gonzales to the hospital to get him to reverse a decision that the Justice Department could no longer certify as legal what we now know was a sweeping domestic surveillance program being run the NSA. Alerted by Ashcroft's wife, Comey raced to the hospital, along with FBI Director Robert Mueller -- the man Comey will likely now succeed -- and other top brass in the Justice Department to intercept Card and Gonzales.
It is as riveting as any congressional testimony you'll ever see (thanks to the Washington Post's Paul Kane for the reminder):
When the full story of that period is ultimately declassified, I suspect I'll be deeply troubled by some of the things Comey et. al did approve and sanction. I'm not under any illusion about that. And if you're unhappy with the legal framework for counterterrorism under Obama in all its permutations -- Gitmo, surveillance, drone strikes, etc. -- then Comey doesn't mark a departure from the status quo. Comey and other holdouts within the Bush Justice Department were among the early architects of that legal framework. But at a crucial moment, when the stakes were the highest and it was time to line up for or against the rule of law, Comey stood on the right side.
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If you're outside of Canada, you might not have heard about the expenses scandal rocking the government. A Conservative senator with a reputation as a killer Party fundraiser named Mike Duffy, appointed by the Prime Minister, was caught claiming $90,000 in fraudulent expenses from the government. Before the auditor could conclude a probe into Duffy's actions, Duffy repaid the sum and took the position that he was no longer obliged to cooperate with the audit. Then it emerged that the Prime Minister's chief of staff, Nigel Wright, had written a personal cheque for $90,000 to Duffy, allowing him to escape the probe and to continue to support PM Harper's policies in the Senate.
Now comes this: a grilling of the PM by the leader of the opposition, the NDP's Glen Mulcair. It's a textbook example of how the opposition should call the government to question. As Joey DeVilla puts it:
NDP leader Thomas Mulcair did an excellent job grilling the Prime Minister by dealing with him as one would deal with a petulant adolescent who’s been caught lifting the scotch from the liquor cabinet: ask short, simple questions, and if the answers aren’t satisfactory, ask again. The video below shows the outcome: Mulcair does a killer job as our weaselly Prime Minister dodges, weaves, misdirects, and like that petulant adolescent, wishes he could tell Mommy and Daddy to “eff off”, but for all his vainglorious claims to being the boss of himself, can’t.
In Which Thomas Mulcair Takes the Prime Minister Behind the Shed for a Much-Needed Spanking 
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Yesterday, Anita Sarkeesian unveiled the second episode of her Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games series, which analyzes a variety of tropes that are perceived as sexist in video games. And as it was the case with the premiere of the pilot episode, the feminist author's second vlog post was immediately challenged by her detractors who managed to temporarily take down the video by abusing the "flag as inappropriate" button before it was restored shortly thereafter.
Submitted by: Unknown
A lion and a miniature sausage dog have formed an unlikely friendship after the little dog took the king of the jungle under his wing as a cub.
Bonedigger, a five-year old male lion, and Milo, a seven-year old Dachshund, are so close that Milo helps the lion clean his teeth after dinner.
The 500lbs lion dwarfs little Milo, yet after the dog took the disabled lion into his protection as a cub, Bonedigger has rarely left his side.
The Library Lounge at the B2 Boutique Hotel Zürich is one of those amazing temple-of-books rooms that always make me catch my breath. If I had a teleporter, this is where I'd go every time I felt stressed out. (Except for the wallpaper with the pattern that looks like JPEG artifacts -- that'd have to go).
Library Lounge – B2 Boutique Hotel Zurich (via Attack of the Bonniegrrl) 
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More than 40 years after it was brought back to Earth and accidentally put into storage, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says it has re-discovered Moon dust samples collected by the Apollo 11 crew. But now NASA wants the samples returned, thank you very much.
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Here's a 40-minute video in which Tom Stuart gives a talk summarizing one of the chapters from him new book Understanding Computation, describing the halting state problem and how it relates to bugs, Turing machines, Turing completeness, computability, malware checking for various mobile app stores, and related subjects. The Halting State problem -- which relates to the impossibility of knowing what a program will do with all possible inputs -- is one of the most important and hardest-to-understand ideas in computer science, and Stuart does a fantastic job with it here. You don't need to be a master programmer or a computer science buff to get it, and even if you only absorb 50 percent of it, it's so engagingly presented, and so blazingly relevant to life in the 21st century, that you won't regret it.
At Scottish Ruby Conference 2013 I gave a talk called Impossible Programs, adapted from chapter 8 of Understanding Computation. It’s a talk about programs that are impossible to write in Ruby — it covers undecidability, the halting problem and Rice’s theorem, explained in plain English and illustrated with Ruby code. The slides are available
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I just got back from a ride on a CitiBike, one of NYC's new bikeshare deals.
Executive summary: It works. I felt like I was there on the first day the subway opened in NYC.
However it was not without glitches.
I am a founding member, having paid the $95 annual fee on the first day they were available. I am user number 1411. In theory as long as each trip is 45 minutes or less, I don't have to pay any more money to use bikes. As much as I want.
But how does it work? I looked all over the website. They had instructions for people who were buying day passes or week passes, but no instructions for people who have annual memberships. I figured I'd find out when I got to the bike station.
I went to the kiosk. No instructions for members. They did however suggest you get a membership if you're going to use it a lot. Okay I got one, so what do I do? No clue.
I wasn't going to go home without trying it so I put my credit card in and started the process of buying a daily pass. There are some real usability problems with this system. First, it's very slow. Second, the display is at about belt level for me. Granted I'm tall, but not that tall. Some of the instructions refer to buttons that aren't there. You might guess wrong, as I did. Some user testing could have avoided this.
It was so slow at responding to keystrokes, about midway through the process (I guess) after asking for my phone number and zip code, it just gave up and took me back to the main menu. By then a small crowd had gathered around to find out how it worked. A guy who had done it before showed me that I didn't need to do any of this. There's an unmarked slot where you can insert your keychain card. I did. It took a while for the light to turn from red to green. When it did, I was able to take the bike out of the rack, I adjusted the seat and off I went, south on Broadway toward Times Square.
The bike looks like a klunker, but it rides pretty smooth!
It has three gears, probably not enough, but pretty close to enough.
It's comfortable, more comfortable than my regular ride.
There are flashing red lights on the rear of the bike. (I know this because I saw them on another CitiBike.)
There's no bell. That makes it an illegal bike in NYC, as I understand it. There were many times on my little excursion that I wish I had a bell. Pedestrians in NYC think bike lanes are useful for picnics, baby carriages (with babies in them), hand-holding at arms length. Waiting for red lights. You name it. The cars like to honk when they think you're in their way. It'd be nice to have something to fight back with, even though a bell sounds a little wimpy, it's less likely to get you killed than the typical NYers salute of Fuck You Asshole. :-)
As soon as I entered Times Square proper, I took a right and headed over to Ninth Ave and rode all the way downtown to Bleecker St, where I made a left on 4th St, and dropped the bike off at the stand on 7th Ave. I got a couple of hot dogs at the Papaya Dog on 8th St, and rode the 1 train back uptown.
It was on the subway that I realized that I had just used a new form of city transport, one that's perfectly suited for NY. I encountered a few other riders on my way. There's a Zero Day kind of feel to it. People seem excited. The bikes are nice. And there are enough bike lanes to get around.
Bloomberg is a total 1 percenter, and a real dick about some things, but he got this one right. He will be remembered as a visionary mayor. I believe this is a keeper. Bikes and NY go together.
