Bastiaan.van.der.peet
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Friday Cephalopod: Looking for love
February 18-26 is going to be Octopus Week at the Seattle Aquarium (unlike Chez Myers, where every day is Octopus Day, in spite of our lack of cephalopods in the neighborhood…OK, point goes to the aquarium for actually hosting octopusses).
One of the big events leading up to Octopus Week will be Valentine’s Day, when romance might slither into the tank.
Watch live to see if romance blossoms between our male and female giant Pacific octopuses, Pancake and Raspberry, when they meet for the very first time on Valentine’s Day. Aquarium biologists will set the mood with decorative hearts, roses and romantic music at the Octopus exhibit. Will her three hearts skip a beat? Will he wrap his eight arms around her? Join us to find out!
Come on, give the kids a little privacy, for Cthulhu’s sake!
Facebook has become a scourge on the world
People are starting to wake up to the fact that as Facebook made changes to monetize social interactions, they have royally screwed up and instead incentivized lies. The NY Times reports on the fake news sites that have been blossoming all over the place. It’s crystal clear what drives them: money.
Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from America’s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar.
“I don’t know why, but it did not work,” said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real — and completely fake — news in a stew of anti-Clinton fervor.
More than 6,000 miles away in Vancouver, a Canadian who runs a satirical website, John Egan, had made a similar observation. Mr. Egan’s site, The Burrard Street Journal, offers sendups of the news, not fake news, and he is not trying to fool anyone. But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a “gold mine.” His traffic soared and his work, notably a story that President Obama would move to Canada if Mr. Trump won, was plundered by Mr. Latsabidze and other internet entrepreneurs for their own websites.
“It’s all Trump,” Mr. Egan said by telephone. “People go nuts for it.”
These guys have discovered that peddling bullshit to the gullible is profitable. There are no checks on them at all; in particular, they seem to be completely unhindered by scruples. We have a name for such people: con artists.
NPR also has a story on fake news sites. This phony is painfully disingenuous.
And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn’t give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.
However, Coler insists this is not about money. It’s about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was “correct.”
Oh, he’s so altruistic — he’s just trying to do good and expose the fake news industry, while profiting mightily from it and not doing a goddamn thing to expose it at all. He did nothing to point out the fraudulence of his stories or to reveal the extent of their spread, waiting instead for a conventional news source to call attention to what he’d been doing.
Another thing in that NYT story, another false excuse I’ve lost patience for. It’s “satire”.
“I don’t call it fake news; I call it satire,” he said. He avoids sex and violence because they violate Facebook rules, he said, but he sees nothing wrong otherwise with providing readers with what they want.
NO IT’S NOT. Here’s a basic dictionary definition of satire.
the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
Note the key phrase up there: you’re supposed to use it to “expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices”. Cheerleading for the alt-right or Donald Trump doesn’t count; like that Coler asshole, it only counts as satire if you’re using it to rebuke ideas you find disagreeable. They aren’t. They’re using lies to promote views they agree with or find profitable.
And how can lies be profitable? Blame Facebook. Here’s the story of a fellow who got banned from Facebook for criticizing the alt-right.
As I noted the last time this happened, unfortunately this is the risk you take when you sign on to Facebook and other social media sites. You don’t control the platform. Hell, you can’t even talk to the those who run the platform. And the size of it makes any attempt at real-time moderation by the platform managers a complete joke. Neither Facebook nor Twitter has made any real effort to prevent harassment, bullying, or any of the other more unfortunate aspects of social media. And Facebook has made no effort whatsoever to prevent abuse of their system and they’ve made it impossible for the victims to do anything about it. They are in fact complicit and they are very likely to become more so in the future.
My ban from the platform is the result of Facebook’s lousy architecture, which lets bullies and harassers abuse Facebook’s automated system – a system that was supposedly put in place to make Facebook safer – and I have absolutely no recourse for protest or appeal.
Let’s be honest here. Facebook and Twitter have no motivation to clean up their act: that they are paying out ad revenue to neo-Nazi propaganda is a consequence of the fact that that crap is popular. Rejecting bullying or fascism does not make them money, while providing an outlet for them does.
And now I’m torn. I feel like I should shut down my facebook account, but a) I use it for the good stuff it provides as a social medium to keep in touch with my scattered family, and b) if all the liberals leave, it will become an even worse playground for trolls and scum. What are you all going to do?
Do Blood Glucose Levels Affect Hunger and Satiety?
It sounds pretty reasonable-- in fact, so reasonable that it's commonly stated as fact in popular media and in casual conversation. This idea is so deeply ingrained in the popular psyche that people often say "I have low blood sugar" instead of "I'm hungry" or "I'm tired". But this hypothesis has a big problem: despite extensive research, it hasn't been clearly supported. I've written about this issue before (1).
A new study offers a straightforward test of the hypothesis, and once again finds it lacking.
The study
Read more »
Home-brew Vibration Cleaner leaves your SLA Prints Squeaky-Clean
If you’ve had the chance to add a Form 1+ 3D printer to your basement, you might find the post-print cleaning step a bit tedious. (A 20-minute alcohol bath? Outrageous!) Fortunately, for the impatient, [ChristopherBarr] has developed the perfect solution: a post-print agitator that cuts the time in-and-out-of the bath from 20 minutes to about two.
[ChristopherBarr’s] build is the right conglomerate of parts we’d expect when keeping the price down for this hack. He’s combined a palm sander, a couple pints of urethane expanding foam, and two loaf pans into one agitating mechanism that he’s dubbed “the Loafinator.” With the urethane expanding foam, [ChristopherBarr] achieved a near-perfect fit of the sander inside the loaf pan, now that the foam has filled in the remaining contours to hold the sander in place. Best of all, the sander hasn’t been sacrificed for this build; instead, the foam holder was assembled in three stages and isolated from the sander with a layer of plastic wrap to enable later extraction.
[ChristopherBarr’s] simple, yet practical, hack serves as an excellent solution to a number of hobbyists looking to “get things agitated.” While his device is able to polish off the uncured resin from his resin prints much faster than the conventional approach, we’d imagine that a similar build could greatly expedite the PCB etching process in a muriatic-acid or ferric-chloride based PCB etching procedure–far more quickly than our previous automated solution. The time-saving comes at a price; however. Once you’ve installed your very own Loafinator alongside your printer, expect a few nosy neighbors to start asking for visits to check out your new motorboat.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks, tool hacks
