Bernie.rihn

"Weedsmith".

Klockars blacksmith shop on Rincon Hill has endured as an obvious contrast of the old San Francisco and the new, a blue-collar relic amid sleek residential towers. But if plans now in the works bear fruit, the two-story wood structure from 1912 will be a symbol of transition all on its own -- from a place where metalwork is forged to a nook where marijuana is consumed.

"Tony's not going to be here forever, and there aren't a line of blacksmiths waiting in line to take over," said Travis Kelly, the grandson of Tony Rosellini, who has operated the blacksmith shop pretty much on his own since 1970. "This way, at least we can preserve the building into the future."

The building is owned by Rosellini's ex-wife, the daughter of Edwin Klockars, who died in 1994 at the age of 96. The family has never had interest in selling despite the offers that routinely come their way.

With his grandmother's blessing, Kelly and investors have filed a proposal with the city to restore the structure and bring it up to code -- no mean feat given the dirt floors in the back and an airy tin roof. The new function would be a cannabis dispensary, for now called "The Weedsmith."

"The old machines, the wide-plank redwood floors, we'd want to keep it all and preserve the atmosphere," said Kelly, 29, an attorney who grew up in Burlingame. "We'd want something high-end, like a Sephora or an Apple Store." [...]

There was a time here when a blacksmith's shop was nothing special, especially in a part of town where small operators were part of the industrial bustle. But Klockars is the only one left, a designated city landmark with 20 stories of condominiums on one side, a massive electrical substation on the other, and a 55-story tower going up across the street.

"It's kind of cold already," Rosellini, 86, said one afternoon last week. "Now it's going to be shady, too."

Rosellini lives in South San Francisco, and most days his exercise consists of long, slow walks at the mall. But he still comes in one or two days a week, firing up the forge and making the hooks used to lift manhole covers, or prongs, or pry bars.

Nothing glamorous.

The affable blacksmith loves to tell how he entered the trade: "I was married to the boss' daughter, I got fired somewhere else, and my wife said, 'You better give Tony a job.'" That was in 1960. A decade late, Edwin Klockars was ready to retire.

"I took over the business," Rosellini said with a laugh, then gestured at the spare tools and dusty keepsakes piled high in every direction. "I never made any money. But all this junk is mine."

Previously.

Calvinist Health Insurance Company Declares All Conditions Pre-Existing

SANFORD, FL -- A newly formed health insurance company owned by a group of devoted Calvinists announced that they will not cover any health condition, since every condition of humankind was pre-existing and established by sovereign God before the foundation of time.

The company, Total Deductibility, states clearly in its bylaws that "pre-existing conditions may not be covered, which include every possible ailment and so-called 'accident,' all of which God foreknew and predestined to occur prior to the existence of the client's policy, and time itself." The firm was thrilled when the new GOP health care law, which drops the requirement to cover some pre-existing conditions, passed the House, according to a company spokesperson.

"We can now reject every single claim, based on its pre-existing status," she told reporters. "Whether or not the client was aware of the condition has no bearing; God sovereignly pre-arranged every condition before the dawn of the universe, and therefore we must refuse all claims based on this truth."

Alex Schaefer set up an easel across the road from a Chase bank and began painting the building in flames. However, before he had finished the police arrived, asked him for his information and if he was planning on actually carrying out an arson attack on the building. Later they turned up on his doorstep asking about his artwork and looking for any signs that he was going to carry through an anarcho-terrorist plot based on his paintings. [...]

Homeland Security considers drawing or photographing "sensitive" locations and buildings is suspicious activity. But my painting protest is different because it's so slow and blatant. I was not "casing" the location. I was standing on the street in full view painting for four hours, talking with people, interacting. I suspect it was someone from the bank that notified authorities that they are "threatened" by my painting. And that was the exact word the police used when first confronting me. Someone was "threatened" by my art and called them.

Once it was sketched out I started immediately with the flames. [...] The reaction of everyone who commented was positive. Thumbs up. [People would say] "They suck." "they screwed my checking account," "my brother's losing his home." I could feel that the image was a catharsis for lots of people. Three hours into it the police came and the rest is history.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

CONTAINERIZATION; Attempting to capture the beauty, mystery and intrigue of shipping containers. 

"We've all created it, everyone with their part contributes feeding this monstrum and what's worse we are feeding it with nothing more than ourselves. Moreover, we take care of it and don't take notice it's slowly gnawing the flesh of our limbs away."

Poppy's internet presence can be traced back to a YouTube video upload on November 4, 2014 which features her eating cotton candy. Today, this account is populated with hundreds of absurdist videos like the one above, the vast majority of which feature Poppy in a featureless space, posing existential questions over an ethereal soundtrack. The content of these short videos varies widely: there are two videos that are just 50 minutes of Poppy reading the Bible, a video of Poppy showing her viewers how to load a pistol (this video has since been removed), a video in which she shills for Tide detergent, and another where she talks about browsing /b/, an image board on 4chan.

But if you have the patience to work your way through all the videos on this channel, certain trends start to emerge. The most obvious is Poppy's fixation with the internet and social media culture, which she claims to love. But far more interesting is the general tone of the videos, which have gotten progressively darker over the last two years. Poppy's early videos feature a bright-eyed young girl clearly enamored with her glamorous pop lifestyle and her fans. Yet Poppy's character soon changes -- she begins posing increasingly dark questions ("Do you know what's happening? Have they told you? What rhymes with breath?"), talks about running away and wanting to disappear, references secrets that her "handlers" won't let her tell her viewers, and suggests that she is being controlled by a vague "they" from whom she cannot escape.

Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes."

However well-intentioned, this talk assumes that Trump is prepared to find common ground with his many opponents, respect the institutions of government, and repudiate almost everything he has stood for during the campaign. In short, it is treating him as a "normal" politician. [...]

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. [...] He is probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat -- and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin's Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

• Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler's anti-Semitism was all posture. [...]

• Rule #2: Do not be taken in by small signs of normality. [...] Confronted with political volatility, the markets become suckers for calming rhetoric from authority figures. So do people. Panic can be neutralized by falsely reassuring words [...]

• Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century's accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy. [...]

• Rule #4: Be outraged. If you follow Rule #1 and believe what the autocrat-elect is saying, you will not be surprised. But in the face of the impulse to normalize, it is essential to maintain one's capacity for shock. This will lead people to call you unreasonable and hysterical, and to accuse you of overreacting. It is no fun to be the only hysterical person in the room. Prepare yourself. [...]

• Rule #5: Don't make compromises. Like Ted Cruz, who made the journey from calling Trump "utterly amoral" and a "pathological liar" to endorsing him in late September to praising his win as an "amazing victory for the American worker," Republican politicians have fallen into line. Conservative pundits who broke ranks during the campaign will return to the fold. Democrats in Congress will begin to make the case for cooperation, for the sake of getting anything done -- or at least, they will say, minimizing the damage. [...]

Previously.

So that's great news.

In the middle of a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County police department to take her social media accounts offline, police have said.

Baltimore County police officers shot and killed Gaines on Monday after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her five-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant on charges stemming from a 10 March traffic stop including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Gaines was using social media to broadcast the standoff, which began when officers showed up on Monday morning to serve a warrant. Police officials asked Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to suspend Gaines' accounts through what police called a "law enforcement portal", a part of the site open to certified law enforcement agencies.

At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her.

Previously, previously.

Watch as a honey badger uses everything at his disposal (rocks, mud, trees, tunnels) to escape a supposedly unescapable enclosure. I was aware honey badgers don't give a shit, but I didn't know they were so clever.

List of people known as the Hairy

The Hairy is an epithet applied to:

• John the Hairy, a 16th-century holy fool (yurodivy) of the Russian Orthodox Church

• Wilfred the Hairy (died 897), Count of Urgell, Cerdanya, Barcelona, Girona, Besalú, and Ausona

See also

List of people known as the Bald

The list of people known as the Bald is somewhat more complete, at twelve entries, only one of which is fictional. But how is it that neither one has an "In popular culture" or "In anime" section? Please get on that.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

How the Soviet Union Spied on the US Embassy for 7 Years

The Soviets would sit outside the embassy, either in another building or in a van. From this remote location they would aim a radio transmitter at the great seal. The bug inside would receive this signal and transmit voices in the room on a second, higher frequency. It did all of this with no standard internal components. No resistors, no tubes, no traditional capacitors, or the like. There were capacitive properties to the mechanism. For instance, a capacitor is formed between the diaphragm and the tuning peg of the device.

Receive tuning (if it can be called such) was achieved by the precisely cut antenna. The RF carrier transmitted by the Russians would be received at the antenna and travel into the body of the device which was a resonant cavity. That resonant chamber was capacatively coupled to the thin conductive diaphragm which formed the microphone.

Sound waves would cause the diaphragm to move, which would vary the capacitance between the body and diaphragm, forming a condenser microphone. It is important to note that the bug didn't transmit and receive on the same frequency. According to Peter Wright, the excitation frequency used by the Russians was actually 800 MHz. The cavity would resonate at a multiple of this base frequency, producing the 1.6 GHz output seen by Bezjian.

Previously, previously, previously.

This is pretty amazing, and it just keeps going and going...

Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait with Small Monkey and Trucker’s Cap, 1945

Study shows that banning bottled water on campuses just makes students switch to bottled soda, with obvious detrimental consequences to health and no decrease in bottle waste.

Pakistan’s transgender tax collectors.

A couple of posts ago, I mocked the Muslim activist who claimed Mossad broke into his house and stole one of his shoes to creep him out. Jonathan Zhou corrects me and points out that this sort of thing is actually a known intelligence agency tactic.

A systematic review of all 55 medical conditions whose risks vary with your month of birth.

Popehat does some very impressive investigative reporting into the government trying to make a (literal) federal case out of random libertarian blog commenters criticizing a judge at Reason.com. A pretty good example of the abuses of power possible if laws about Internet threats are made too strict. Followups here, here, and here.

Probiotics watch: maybe eating fermented food decreases social anxiety?

Nevada enacts comprehensive school choice law. The experiment has begun.

Life imitating JRPGs – mysterious “time crystals” may hold the secret to outlasting entropy. No word on whether you have to get all seven, or whether they are hidden in temples themed around the seven elements. Some people on Tumblr try to help me understand the implications.

A while ago, I was getting the impression that the Mexican drug cartels were unstoppable and the Mexican government was too corrupt to be able to do anything about them. Now the cartels are almost all defeated or in retreat. What happened?

Long ago I reviewed a book claiming the future was glia. Now some scientists are proposing that maybe SSRIs work by affecting glial cells.

American Hippopotamus describes the 1910s plan by two larger-than-life Boer War guerilla-assassins to “turn American into a nation of hippo ranchers”. The story alone would be worth your time even if it wasn’t well-written, but it happens to be very possibly the best-written article I have ever read. Long, but also available on Kindle if wanted.

Program that teaches college women how to avoid rape may cut risk of rape in half as per new study.

This article on whether the US could replicate Scandinavia’s low poverty rate is interesting throughout, but what makes it for me is the claim that Swedes in the US have the same poverty rate as Swedes in Sweden [edit: possibly this is false?]. How much should we make of this?

Not only are we living in the future, but it’s exactly the future Philip K Dick told us to expect: “Abortion drone” to make first flight into Poland

The mysterious resemblance between the ancient Numenorean calendar and the French revolutionary calendar (h/t an-animal-imagined-by-poe)

I’d always heard the story “Iceland rejected fiscal austerity and did everything exactly the way the left wanted and did great.” Scott Sumner and Tyler Cowen say that actually Iceland had lots and lots of austerity.

I think it’s probably time to stop bothering Rachel Dolezal. She seems like a good example of a person who’s not hurting anyone, has some really weird problems she needs to sort out, but because she doesn’t fall into a designated “here are people we have agreed it’s not okay to mock” category we are mocking her. The psychoanalyst in me wants to say this is some kind of displacement where people who are upset they can’t get away with making fun of real black people suddenly see an apparent black person (and NAACP leader, no less!) lose their magical protection and become a valid target, and are now channeling years of pent-up rage at her. Anyway, not totally related, but an explanation of why this is not a good analogy for transgender.

Article originally reported as “no gender gap in tech salaries” gives a more nuanced description of their result. Summary: true based on sample of equally qualified people one year after graduation; no evidence whether or not it’s true in other situations. This article is also good example of “if you have data supporting a controversial point, ignorant people on Twitter will throw out some terms that sound statistics-y and bad, like ‘confounding’ or ‘cherry-picking’, then say you have now been debunked.”

Doctors with the highest ratings on those rate-your-doctor sites may deliver worse care than less-well-rated docs. Maybe you get higher ratings by giving patients what they want, which is usually amphetamines, narcotics, antibiotics, and unnecessary tests.

The time Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an article about Lord Byron’s divorce so controversial it caused a third of The Atlantic’s readership to cancel their subscriptions.

Alyssa Vance writes on Facebook about Ivy League colleges’ sketchy methods of soliciting alumni donations.

In a study of 20,000 people, an uncommon allele of the MAO-A gene may cause a sevenfold increased risk of violent criminal behavior, making it probably the strongest gene-crime link to date.

Previously on SSC links: if robots are taking our jobs, how come productivity numbers aren’t increasing? Now: okay, productivity numbers are increasing, but the robots still don’t seem to be taking our jobs.

A man angry at the German government for falsely imprisoning him is adopting a thousand children in order to make them German citizens and do his part to strain the welfare state. Apparently everything legally checks out and no one can stop him. Open borders advocates take note. [edit: old story, loophole since possibly closed?]

Anti-science-denial group Committee for Skeptical Inquiry wants to make a $25,000 bet with the global warming doubters at the Heartland Institute about future climate trends. While I totally approve of this strategy (“A bet is a tax on bullshit” – Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan), the exact terms seem kind of dumb – AFAIK, Heartland doesn’t believe that the Earth is not getting warmer, just that it’s not necessarily human-caused. Betting on next year’s temperature does nothing to settle that.

In the last links post, I mentioned a study that tried to use transgender people to test the sources of the gender gap. A new study from Brazil tries to do the same with race – Brazilians are frequently very multiracial, and different companies might classify the same employee differently. The study tries to match that with salaries – does a boss who thinks of an employee as white pay them more than their boss next year who thinks of them as black? They conclude that 40% of racial income gaps can be explained in that way, though of course it sounds like Brazil’s racial situation is different enough from America’s that it might not generalize.

Nothing sophisticated or intellectual about this one – just trucks driving off aircraft carriers. Wheeeee!

Some linguists talk of “the Anglic languages”, a language family including English and some of its weirder relatives and descendants that have evolved to the point of mutual intelligibility. You’ve probably heard of Scots, ie “the reason you can’t understand Robert Burns”. But did you know about Forth and Bargy?

Google’s neural nets can now amplify images without human guidance. And by amplify, they mean add shoggoths (warning: shoggoth). Also, this seems way too much like the visual effects of LSD to be a coincidence, and I look forward to neuroscientists explaining the exact connection.

A mildly interesting Wall Street Journal article on how jobs are staying open longer because employers can’t find qualified candidates also contains some surprising information – 5% of job interviews include an IQ test, and almost 20% include a personality test. I’m not sure how that meshes with our recent discussion of Griggs vs. US. I’m starting to think the importance of this case is overblown – the actual ruling specifically banned assessing qualifications based on IQ tests or on degree completion. Everyone does the latter, so why are we so sure this case is restricting people from doing the former?

Obvious once I heard it but something I never thought about it before – the Statue of Liberty is green because all old tarnished copper is green. When it was first built, it was, well, copper-colored. When it tarnished the government was supposed to raise money to fix it, but never got around to it. Now it’s impossible for me not to find the idea of the Statue of Liberty being green kind of hilarious.

California college professors told they can be disciplined or fired for committing “microaggressions” including “describing America as a melting pot” or saying that “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”. Assumed this was some kind of total fake, did some digging, still seems legit, but if anyone can find otherwise I will correct myself with apologies and relief. At least every time I see this sort of thing it’s in universities, suggesting the contagion is somewhat contained. [edit: a claim that this doesn’t matter much]

We already know that many medical studies and many psychological studies fail to replicate. What about economics studies? The necessary work is still being done, but the recent progress report suggests that about 66% of replication attempts completely fail to replicate the original finding, with another 12% partly failing to replicate and only 22% replicating completely. Possibly an argument for privileging theory more in the interminable Econ Theory Versus Empiricism Wars?

Contrary to some reports, nationwide gun violence and nationwide violence against police do not seem to have spiked after the latest round of police brutality stories and race riots.

This wins my prize for real case most like the sort of weird murder mysteries you see in books: A man is found dead in the desert with an obvious fatal gunshot wound. He has no enemies but recently suffered a major financial setback; everyone suspects he committed suicide and only wanted it to look like murder. However, this ruse is very convincing; no gun is found anywhere nearby. How did he shoot himself?

How long can a con man with no soccer talent whatsoever play soccer at the professional level before anybody catches on? How about twenty years?

IQ researcher, Ian Deary collaborator, and SSC victim Dr. Stuart Ritchie has written an introductory book on IQ and intelligence studies that looks pretty good. Not sure if the ambiguity of meaning in the subtitle is a horrible mistake or 100% deliberate.

Dogs’ reaction to magic tricks (EDIT: more at original source)

Automated theorem provers and the changing foundations of mathematics (does not require much math knowledge to read).

New American Statistical Association ‘premium’ membership plan will permit members to reject null hypotheses at alpha values > 0.05. Actually, the whole site is pretty good.

Some opponents of open borders argue that a lot of Third World countries (eg Afghanistan, Somalia) are kind of terrible, and worry that if we import many of their citizens here, then they might bring whatever factors made their country terrible to the First World and make our countries terrible. The open borders movement presents the start of a counterargument.

Canada passes a law saying they must eliminate one old regulation for every new regulation adopted. I didn’t realize libertarianism had a win condition, but I think Canada just reached it. Will be very interesting to watch.

National Review columnists debate the real primary contenders this election: Cthulhu versus the Sweet Meteor of Death.

Remember, “non-shared environment” doesn’t necessarily mean “sociology stuff” – Toddler temperament could be influenced by different types of gut bacteria.

Citizens of Baltimore living in (more) terror (than usual) as murders and all other types of crime skyrocket after Freddie Gray riots. Seems to be caused by the police not doing much policing. Dueling talking points are “recent media feeding frenzy has left police so scared of racism accusations that they won’t touch any majority-black area” versus “police are acting like toddlers and saying ‘well, if we can’t do policing with racism and brutality, then we’re just not going to do any policing at all, SO THERE”.

Old question “why does evolution allow homosexuality to exist when it decreases reproduction?” seems to have been solved, at least in fruit flies: the female relatives of gayer fruit flies have more children. Same thing appears to be true in humans. Unclear if lesbianism has a similar aetiology.

“Translating Finnegan’s Wake into Chinese” sounds like a bad joke or possibly a metaphor for life. It’s actually an unexpected bestseller.

If you’re not familiar with the Albion’s Seed hypothesis, Charles Murray does a decent job explaining it here, plus discussion of America’s multicultural past and future.

BoingBoing: Why Rickrolling Is Sexist

When I wrote a post calling the education system kind of useless (no, not that one, the other one) the first comment was Buck asking why developed countries with lots of education seemed to do better than developed countries with little education. A new study provides an answer: not because of education, because that seems to have no effect.

A novel but fascinating way of investigating gender discrimination in pay: do male-to-female transgender people take a pay cut? Do female-to-male transgender people get a pay raise? Obviously there’s a lot of trouble in adjusting for the effect of transgender itself on pay, but the study finds a 20% pay cut for M->Fs and a 10% pay raise (nonsignificant) for F->M, and concludes that this seems is likely more gender-related than transition-related. Probably should add this to my list of good social justice studies to replace some of the others that keep dropping like flies.

This is the most “we are living in the grim cyberpunk future” story I have ever seen: Russian billboard advertising contraband changes to a more innocuous advertisement when its computer vision system spots a police officer.

Back when I was writing about AI scientists who worried about AI risk, I somehow missed this great interview with Stuart Russell.

A mile-long machine is going to be deployed to the Tsushima Strait to clean it of floating garbage. If it works, there are plans to dispatch 1000 km (!) worth to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But actual ocean-garbage-ologists say it will never work and might be counterproductive.

Fake-Etymologies.com

Does Zoloft treat Ebola? Scientists decide to throw every existing drug at the Ebola virus to see if just by coincidence some of them work just by coincidence, and get some weird positives. But given how many drugs psychiatry has borrowed from infectious diseases, it’s about time we started giving some back.

The most important thing I’ve gotten out of this FIFA scandal is that being a complete loon is apparently no barrier to holding a very high position in the world’s most influential sporting body. Upon being arrested, vice-president Jack Warner promised: “Not even death will stop the avalanche that is coming” he said. “The die is cast. There can be no turning back. Let the chips fall where they fall.” About soccer negotiations. This is the same guy who cited the Onion article.

Latest hullaballoo: Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”) was invited to give a presentation on his new computer system Urbit to the Strange Loop tech conference. Then some of his ideological enemies (actually literal Communists) found out, objected to his political views, and he got banned from the conference. Article here, Hacker News thread here, impressively prescient Moldbug post here, demonstration of inevitable Streisand Effect here. I did consider not linking this since it’s so obviously toxoplasma, but I was convinced to do so by this letter where the conference organizer states he’s never read any Moldbug himself, but decided to cave to the ban request because otherwise politics overshadow the conference, which was supposed to be about tech. This kind of crystallizes a pattern I’ve been noticing recently where some social justice activists use a tactic along the lines of “Nice institution youse gots here, shame if somebody were to politicize it”. I sympathize with the desire to give into that to avoid trouble, but I think maybe the only way to avoid enshrining that kind of heckler’s veto always working is to make it clear that the choice to give in will also be politicized. Maybe if organizers know that banning all insufficiently-leftist-people and not banning all insufficiently-leftist-people will both result in politicization and Internet firestorms, they’ll say “screw it” and just follow their principles.

Is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy For Depression Losing Its Efficacy? New meta-analysis across almost 40 years shows that “effects of CBT have declined linearly and steadily since its introduction” with high significance consistent across multiple different measurement modalities. Study theorizes that maybe therapy is getting worse as a lot of people who aren’t very good at it or don’t stick to the evidence-based principles jump on the CBT bandwagon. Also suggests maybe as it becomes less “the exciting new thing” there’s decreased placebo effect. I would add a possibility that CBT ideas have become so prevalent in our society already that there might be less left to teach, and that as depression diagnoses have skyrocketed we may be sending a different population to therapy (eg people who are less severely depressed and therefore can’t be helped as much). Somebody should also try to unify this result with the finding that antidepressant drug efficacy has been declining over the same period. There’s something very important hidden here, but I’m not totally sure what it is.

Dalai Lama says is considering reincarnating as a ‘mischievous blonde woman’.

The economics of art museums. The first half of this article is a terrible ramble that demonstrates some, uh, creative understanding of economics. The second half is much better, and describes the economic forces that lead most art museums to keep most of their art in basements where no one can see it forever, even though selling the tiniest fraction of that could allow them to (for example) make admission free forever.

We already sort of knew that exposure to cat parasite toxoplasma was a risk factor for schizophrenia. Now researchers take the next step and find that children in cat-owning families are at higher risk of schizophrenia across multiple different studies. Odds ratio not on abstract, but it’s about 1.5.

Technocracy Inc was a pro-technocracy movement of the 1930s which had over half a million members, who “painted their cars Official Technocracy Gray, wore a uniform consisting of a gray double-breasted suit, and saluted [leader] Scott when they encountered him in person. At their most extreme, some members replaced their names with numbers, such as 1x1809x56.”

CuddleBids is…I should probably avoid saying “Uber for cuddle prostitution”, but I’m not sure there’s another equally concise way to describe it. Notable as example of the kind of website I hate, with all the information carefully hidden away where it can’t interfere with the sleek design. Other than that I so in favor.

Cool graphs on my Twitter feed: effect sizes of preschool interventions (low and dropping), funnel plot of preschool interventions, not very encouraging at all. Poor sociology. There’s always time to get into the gut-bacteria-studying business.

Cute confirmation bias experiment: when an education plan was pitched as “the Democrats’ education plan”, Democrats supported it 75%-17%, and Republicans opposed it 13%-78%. When the exact same plan was pitched as “the Republicans’ education plan”, Democrats opposed it 80%-12% and Republicans supported it 70%-10%.

The first review of this light fixture.

“Crash blossoms” are complicated ambiguous headlines, like “Screenwriter Reveals He Tried To Commit Suicide During Awards Ceremony”. Language Log has nine whole pages of crash blossoms.

Goat, motherfucker, do you speak it! (more…)

"I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world."
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned

Riding with the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset

There has been a lot of online comment recently about a dataset released by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission. It contains details about every taxi ride (yellow cabs) in New York in 2013, including the pickup and drop off times, locations, fare and tip amounts, as well as anonymized (hashed) versions of the taxi's license and medallion numbers. It was obtained via a FOIL request earlier this year and has been making waves in the hacker community ever since.

The release of this data in this unalloyed format raises several privacy concerns. The most well-documented of these deals with the hash function used to "anonymize" the license and medallion numbers. A bit of lateral thinking from one civic hacker and the data was completely de-anonymized. This data can now be used to calculate, for example, any driver's annual income. More disquieting, though, in my opinion, is the privacy risk to passengers. With only a small amount of auxiliary knowledge, using this dataset an attacker could identify where an individual went, how much they paid, weekly habits, etc. I will demonstrate how easy this is to do in the following section.

tl/dr: Jessica Alba didn't tip.

Previously, previously, previously.

HealthKit Constants Reference:

• HKBodyTemperatureSensorLocationRectum

  The temperature was taken in the rectum.

  Available in iOS 8.0 and later.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.