gdenning

I convinced a client to upgrade the computers we were using for software development. Maybe this article will help you convince your manager to do the same! Old Computers When I started at the client, we were using standard issued corporate Dell laptops. Specifically, we had Dell Latitude E6520 laptops. According to a review on […]

An angry man by the name of Jared stopped by the blog the other day and left this beauty of a comment on my old A/C article:

 

Now, my first inclination was probably the same as yours – a deep sigh as you pull on the 20 ounce XL bloxing gloves and prepare to Deliver some Education yet again. But if you set aside the facts and just look at the feeling behind these words, I’m right there with Jared. He and I are not so different after all. If I were to paraphrase a little:

 

In fact, defiance and standing up for your own freedom while rejecting the influence of invaders is a natural human instinct. It has been pretty useful to us in the past, and it can still come in handy today if you use that rage for a good cause.

Unfortunately for our defiant friend, the substance of the argument doesn’t stand up quite as well as the emotion. And a good chunk of our society’s self-imposed hardships come from falling into the same basic trap: becoming so convinced that you are right, that you block yourself from ever learning anything.

Looking at this example specifically, we start with a guy rightfully seeking happiness. But in doing so, he seems to have snarled in the idea of comfort and convenience as being part of happiness. Both old philosophy and modern science have shown that this is counterproductive: voluntary discomfort and mastery of hardship are far more powerful life boosters than avoidance. Even Jared has probably noticed that kicking the ass of a daunting challenge is more satisfying than having all of life’s luxuries flow in through an IV needle and then back out through the catheter and the bedpan. The key is in what challenges you choose to embrace: I suggest as many as you can handle. Especially those dished out by Mother Nature herself.

Then there’s the rest of those factual errors. Lowering your dependence on climate control and other electrical extravagances isn’t about saving 50 bucks. It’s more like $100 per month, which compounds rapidly into $17,300 every ten years. And that 17 grand doesn’t have to go into your gas tank and out through the exhaust pipe. Instead, it could buy portions of businesses and thus become an army of employees that work for you for a lifetime. That’s a solid start at becoming a millionaire, which is something best done ten bucks at a time.

Then his argument goes on to reinforce my point perfectly with the generalization about climate change. Here our man has singlehandedly outfoxed the world’s scientific community and declared the last few decades of their research to be incorrect. The incredible irony is that he confuses climate science with a government plot to control society, when it’s actually quite clearly documented that the opposite is true: climate change doubt is a strategic misinformation campaign designed to control voters to rally continued support for the fossil fuel industry. The doubt is most prevalent in countries where the industry has close ties to the political system and the campaign has been well-funded.

For the past 20 years or so, I have watched with wonder from the sidelines as this societal experiment raged, because I’m shocked that it actually worked so well. Why is our species so easily duped by such transparent (and centuries-old) methods of tomfoolery? How are the morally good air-conditioning lovers of Alabama converted into campaigners against science itself (and unwittingly against their own best economic interests)? How has science become a political issue, with liberals and scientists being branded together as out-of-touch elites, and a certain 50% of Real Americans united in a mistrust of the whole field?

Let’s clear this all up right now and get one thing straight:

Science is not about ideology, or trying to cover the truth, or trying to manipulate people. That is what politics are generally about, and Science is exactly the opposite of that.

Science is all about looking for evidence through experimentation, and forever questioning itself and refusing to simply repeat dogma. By refusing to cling to existing assumptions about what “The Truth” is, Science gets us forever incrementally closer to understanding what is really going on in our world.

In other words, Science is the method that we have developed to protect us from our own tendency to cling to incorrect assumptions forever.

Luckily for all of us, we don’t have to get into the bullshit national debates about the current political hot topics (which politicians are using to control you). Instead, you can apply the principles of science to improve your own life right now.

How to Get Rich through Scientific Living

1. Understand more about yourself as the Human Animal, so you can work around your own mental weaknesses.

At the core, you were “built” for exactly one reason: to produce as many healthy babies as possible. Every finger and toe, emotion and follicle of your being has been optimized for this purpose. If you have other goals, like deeper life satisfaction or getting out of debt, you need to learn to override some of your default programming. Learning about how we are all Predictably Irrational is the key to this.

The moment you think you are a perfectly rational being is the moment you stop being able to think critically (and the moment you become easy for others to manipulate). A study of your own species by learning some basic psychology and behavioral economics is the best bit of education you can get.

2. Understand the difference between correlation and causation, and the value of the double blind test.

When society falls for massive misinformation, it is often because of our tendency to latch on to simple patterns and fall into the herd mentality. “I always win at Roulette when I wear my bright red shirt”, or “these $59.00 Chi Energy Alignment Pills always make me have a better day”, or “Buying this more expensive wine will provide me with a happier life” are common blunders that could be avoided if we were all better at conducting semi-controlled experiments upon ourselves. And fear of doing something differently from everyone else tends to lead us all into group mediocrity, even while stepping out and doing things in your own better way is much more likely to earn you attention, respect, and greater success.

3. Instead of fighting the gifts of Science, embrace them and use them to live a better life.

Climate change skeptics aren’t really uncomfortable with the science, they are uncomfortable with the implication that their fossil-fuel dependent lifestyle is immoral and endangered. This is an incurable condition that will lead to lifelong unhappiness, because the science is not going away.

Try as you might, you are not going to out-science the scientists by reading “skeptic” websites and repeating their memes. You’d need to practice in the field for many years to make even a small new discovery, and yet the “armchair” climate scientists are fond of grabbing each news story and squawking about how the deep ocean results prove this or disprove that.

Don’t waste your time. The real scientists will just keep collecting evidence until you’re the last one standing on the shore insisting the world is flat and those sailing ships are falling off of a giant waterfall at the edge of the horizon.

Instead, I prefer to learn more about the science by letting the specialists do their work for me while sit back and read the summaries as they come in. I then have my own time free to decide what it all means to me, and how to best deal with reality. I too wish that the world wasn’t warming so quickly, but there’s a happier way to deal with it than angry denial.  I can choose to lead a happy and engaged life in my own community and consume a bit less stuff. More money, better health and closer friendships: No loss there.

Sometimes you may still choose to blatantly burn plenty of fossil fuels despite a full knowledge and acceptance of the results. I’ve been known to drive across the country, hop on a jet, or even eat a steak. But I get to do it with the understanding that it is a tradeoff, instead of hiding behind a plastic shield of wimpy denial. The extra bonus is that understanding some of the workings of our environment has greatly reduced my craving for BMWs, which has saved me at least $250,000 so far. It also brings me great optimism – I think the world’s transition away from sloppy and expensive fossil fuels is the biggest business opportunity we have yet stumbled across. The progress and prosperity involved will keep the stock market and the economy booming for more than the rest of my lifetime.

Although I now have this blog to share my own ideas about better living, its effects are obviously very finite. But there’s no need to fret about what the rest of the world is doing, because that is outside of my circle of control. Worrying is 100% counterproductive, and it was psychological studies that helped figure out that very principle.

Science is bound to deliver news that is sometimes convenient (the news that sex is very good for your health, for example), and sometimes less so (that fossil fuels and alcohol are not). But knowledge is power, and power means the opportunity to make the best of your own life, which includes dominating on the financial side of things, as well as just the ability to go to bed with a broad smile on your face each night.

Science is the way you get knowledge – nothing more, and nothing less. You’re free to fight it at your own peril, but I’ll be hanging out here in my own Life Laboratory keeping the grand experiment going as long as possible.

 

Further Reading: An earlier MMM Classic called Safety is an Expensive Illusion digs into some more examples of how scientific thinking about everyday life decisions and risk can lead to huge profits.

I wrote a comic about Japanese Honeybees and how they combat Japanese Giant Hornets.

View

Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post.

We've been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back. As we got closer to being ready for public feedback, we emailed John on August 19th with a link to the Standard Markdown spec, asking him for his feedback. Since John MacFarlane was the primary author of most of the work, we suggested that he be the one to reach out.

We then waited two weeks for a response.

There was no response, so we assumed that John Gruber was either OK with the project (and its name), or didn't care. So we proceeded.

There was lots of internal discussion about what to name our project. Strict Markdown? XMarkdown? Markdown Pro? Markdown Super Hyper Turbo Pro Alpha Diamond Edition?

As we were finalizing the name, we noticed on this podcast, at 1:15 …

… that John seemed OK with the name "GitHub Flavored Markdown". So I originally wrote the blog post and the homepage using that terminology – "Standard Flavored Markdown" – and even kept that as the title of the blog post to signify our intent. We were building Yet Another Flavor of Markdown, one designed to remove ambiguity by specifying a standard, while preserving as much as possible the spirit of Markdown and compatibility with existing documents.

Before we went live, I asked for feedback internally, and one of the bits of feedback I got was that it was inconsistent to say Standard Flavored Markdown on the homepage and blog when the spec says Standard Markdown throughout. So I changed them to match Standard Markdown, and that's what we launched with.

It was a bit of a surprise to get an email last night, addressed to both me and John MacFarlane, from John Gruber indicating that the name Standard Markdown was "infuriating".

I'm sorry the name is so infuriating. I assure you that we did not choose the name to make you, or anyone else, angry. We were simply trying to pick a name that correctly and accurately reflected our goal – to build an unambiguous flavor of Markdown. If the name we chose made inappropriate overtures about Standard Markdown being anything more than a highly specified flavor of Markdown, I apologize. Standard does have certain particular computer science meanings, as in IETF Standard, ECMA Standard. That was not our intent, it was more of an aspirational element of "what if, together, we could eventually..". What can I say? We're programmers. We name things literally. And naming is hard.

John Gruber was also very upset, and I think rightfully so, that the word Markdown was not capitalized throughout the spec. This was an oversight on our part – and also my fault because I did notice Markdown wasn't capitalized as I copied snippets of the spec to the homepage and blog post, and I definitely thought it was odd, too. You'll note that I took care to manually capitalize Markdown in the parts of the spec I copied to the blog post and home page – but I neglected to mention this to John MacFarlane as I should have. We corrected this immediately when it was brought to our attention.

John then made three requests:

1. Rename the project.

2. Shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain, and don't redirect it.

3. Apologize.

All fair. Happy to do all of those things.

Starting with the name. In his email John graciously indicated that he would "probably" approve a name like "Strict Markdown" or "Pedantic Markdown". Given the very public earlier miscommunication about naming, that consideration is appreciated.

We replied with the following suggestions:

• Compatible Markdown
• Regular Markdown
• Community Markdown
• Common Markdown
• Uniform Markdown
• Vanilla Markdown

We haven't heard back after replying last night, and I'm not sure we ever will, so in the interest of moving ahead and avoiding conflict, we're immediately renaming the project to Common Markdown.

We hope that is an acceptable name; it was independently suggested to us several times in several different feedback areas. The intention is to avoid any unwanted overtones of ownership; we have only ever wanted to be Yet Another Flavor of Markdown.

1. The project name change is already in progress.

2. This is our public apology.

3. I'll shut down the standardmarkdown.com domain as soon as I can, probably by tomorrow.

John, we deeply apologize for the miscommunication. It's our fault, and we want to fix it. But even though we made mistakes, I hope it is clear that everything we've done, we did solely out of a shared love of Markdown (and its simple, unencumbered old-school ASCII origins), and the desire to ensure the success of Markdown as a stable format for future generations.

Edit: after a long and thoughtful email from John Gruber – which is greatly appreciated – he indicated that no form of the word "Markdown" is acceptable to him in this case. We are now using the name CommonMark.

[advertisement] Stack Overflow Careers matches the best developers (you!) with the best employers. You can search our job listings or create a profile and even let employers find you.

View

Comments

Google's Chromecast streaming stick has been out for the better part of eight months, but only in the US. The company is changing that today by selling it in 11 additional countries, including Canada, the UK, and much of Europe. Google says it's got localized local video apps ready for some of those places, like offering a BBC iPlayer app in the UK, France TV Pluzz and SFR TV in France, and Watchever for Chromecast users in Germany. Additional apps will also be on the way through the Google Cast SDK, which became available to developers last month.

Continue reading…

by Daniel Jacobson, Ruslan Meshenberg, Matt McCarthy and Leslie Posada

At Netflix, we pride ourselves in creating a culture of innovation and experimentation. We are constantly running A/B tests on virtually every enhancement to the Netflix experience. There are other ways in which we instill this culture within Netflix, including internal events such as Netflix Hack Day, which was held last week. For Hack Day, our primary goal is to provide a fun, experimental, and creative outlet for our engineers. If something interesting and potentially useful comes from it, that is fine, but the real motivation is fun. With that spirit in mind, most teams started hacking on Thursday morning, hacked through the night, and they wrapped up by Friday morning to present a demo to their peers.

It is not unusual for us to see a lot of really good ideas come from Hack Day, but last week we saw some really spectacular work. The hackers generated a wide range of ideas on just about anything, including ideas to improve developer productivity, ways to help troubleshooting, funky data visualizations, and of course a diversity of product feature ideas. These ideas get categorized, then to determine the winner for each category the audience of Netflix employees rated each hack, in true Netflix fashion, on a 5-star scale.

The following are some examples of our favorite hacks and/or videos to give you a taste. Most of these hacks and videos were conceived of and produced in about 24 hours. We should also note that, while we think these hacks are very cool and fun, they may never become part of the Netflix product, internal infrastructure, or be used beyond Hack Day. We are surfacing them here publicly to share the spirit of the Netflix Hack Day.

Netflix Beam
by Sassda Chap


Radial
by Jia Pu, Aaron Tull, George Campbell


Custom Playlists
by Marco Vinicius Caldiera, Ian Kirk, Adam Excelsior Butterworth, Glenn Cho


Sleep Tracking with Fitbit
by Sam Horner, Rachel Nordman, Arlene Aficial, Sam Park, Bogdan Ciuca


Pin Protected Profiles
by Mike Kim, Dianne Marsh, Nick Ryabov


Here are some images from the event:


Thanks to all of the hackers and we look forward to the next one. If you are interested in being a part of our next Hack Day, let us know!

Also, we will be hosting our next Open Source meetup at Netflix HQ in Los Gatos on March 12th at 6:30pm. If you are interested, please sign up while there are still slots.

A Cleveland woman has apologized after her scathing e-mail to a bright-eyed job seeker who dared to contact her on LinkedIn went viral. Kelly Blazek, who runs a job bank and calls herself a “passionate advocate” for people looking for work, went to town on 26-year-old Diana Mekota who attempted to subscribe to her job-listings email and connect with her on LinkedIn, CNN reports. “Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky,” Blazek wrote, “Wow, I cannot wait to let every 26-year old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job.” “I suggest you join the other Job Bank in town,” she wrote to the young woman who was just moving to Cleveland. “Oh wait– there isn’t one.” She ended with a graceful, “you’re welcome for your humility lesson of the year,” before signing off “don’t ever contact me again.” You can read the full letter here.  Madeleine Albright once said there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women, and in Blazek’s case, hell is social media. Mekota posted the letter online, and it quickly went viral, prompting Blazek to make a public apology to the Cleveland Plain Dealer as well as a personal apology to Mekota Tuesday. #CLE is amazing, thank you all! Would like to let you know Kelly Blazek has sent a very nice apology email, for which I thank her.— Diana Mekota (@PettieBettie) February 25, 2014 [CNN] Correction 6:21 PM ET: An earlier version of this story referenced Cincinnati; the correct city should be Cleveland.

Comments

We are thrilled to announce that we are rolling out Premium accounts for The Old Reader. Since taking over the application in August we’ve made tremendous strides to improve the dependability and speed of the application. We’ve also begun the process of building and releasing heavily requested features and have worked diligently on user support. We believe The Old Reader is now truly a world-class application!

Our next goal is to ensure the long term financial viability of The Old Reader. Hosting, development, and support are not inexpensive and while it’s never been our goal to get rich off of this application, long term sustainability and growth will require revenue. So we explored several models for generating revenues including a premium offering and advertising. In the end, we’d like to avoid advertising as we feel it’s too invasive and runs counter to our strong belief in the open web. So we started working on a premium offering that would allow 90% of our users to continue on with a free account that is largely unchanged from what they are using today.

What will you get with The Old Reader Premium?
- Full-text search
- Faster feed refresh times
- Up to 500 Subscriptions
- 6 months of post storage
- Instapaper and Readability integration
- Early access to new features

What will it cost?
The Old Reader Premium will cost $3/month or $30/year. However, for the next 2 weeks (or up to 5,000 accounts) we’ll be offering the service for $2/month or $20/year and we will lock you into that price for a minimum of the next 2 years. This is our way of saying thanks to our existing users and hopefully getting the Premium service off to a great start.

Do I have to upgrade?
No! 90% of our users can continue on for free just as they are today. However, users with more than 100 feeds will need to upgrade to premium. Otherwise, all functionality will remain available to free accounts. We also offer a 2 week trial period for the premium service and will even allow that trial period to get extended for those still interested in moving to Premium.

We hope you are as excited about TOR Premium as we are. It’s a great value for a service that we know our users will love. Thanks for continuing to support us and thanks for using The Old Reader!

(NSFW: Language) Andre Hyland’s short film tells the tale of a man and his quest for a funnel for his broken down car, as his entire monologue plays out via his cell phone. Made the Official Selection list for the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

• Link

PC gamers don’t have GTA Online yet, but they do have Mod DB’s 2013 mod of the year. JC2-MP is a free fan-made Steam add-on for Just Cause 2. It lets thousands of players battle, race and more in the game’s open world.

• Hat Tip
• Link
• Link 2
• Price: Free

Comments

Jean-Louis Nguyen created another compilation clip celebrating the triumphs, tragedies, and most significant moments of the past year. It’s not as slick as Google’s clip, but more emotional, and much more comprehensive. Full list of clips here.

• Link

Screen Junkies brought in a physician for their expert medical advice on what fates John McClane would have suffered if Die Hard realistically portrayed his injuries on screen – and how many lives he would have needed to survive.

• Hat Tip
• Link

Christopher Nolan has up to now been pretty dependable for delivering epic storytelling. His next release, Interstellar, teases at reaching those heights again. The trailer, released today, doesn't show much in the way of the film's plot, but it at least shows where star Matthew McConaughey is headed — space. Here's to hoping next November feels as grand as this trailer does.

Update: The post has been updated to reflect that the movie will be released in November.

Continue reading…

In this mashup Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise sing “Let it Snow!” “Make it Snow!”

Comments

Comments

Not since the days of MySpace has it been stylish to embed auto-playing music into your website, yet today, the web is still a very noisy place. Between YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and Vevo, we're bound to have a handful of audio and video tabs open at any given time, and it's not always clear which tab sound is coming from. In the latest beta version of Chrome, Google has made a useful tweak to help users identify noisy tabs. You'll now find a speaker icon next to the name of any tab playing audio, so you can easily find the disturber of the peace. Further, you'll also see corresponding icons on tabs using your webcam, or tabs you're casting to a Google Chromecast.

Continue reading…

Six years after a previous effort was derailed by a financial dispute, The Princess Bride is once again headed for the stage. Disney Theatrical Productions said today that is collaborating with William Goldman, author of the fairy tale that became a beloved 1987 movie, on a new stage production. No timeline for the production has been announced, and at this point it has not decided whether the play will be a musical or not. But The Hollywood Reporter speculates that it will, given Disney's long history with stage musicals.

The comic love story traces the romance of Princess Buttercup and the farm boy Westley, who (spoiler!) transcends his humble origins to inherit the mantle of Dread Pirate Roberts and rescue his kidnapped sweetheart. A...

Continue reading…

Jon Swartz, reporting for USA Today:

Engineers are at a premium, yet Lenovo landed a new product engineer and celebrity pitchman when it inked a partnership with Ashton Kutcher on Tuesday night.

“It’s somewhat of a dual role,” Kutcher told USA Today in a phone interview hours before a live-streaming broadcast to announce his appointment and the introduction of the PC maker’s Yoga Tablet. Shortly after the event, Kutcher was scheduled to fly to China to meet with Lenovo engineers and executives.

Like my pal Mike Monteiro quipped last night, “What’s particularly sad about this is Lenovo thinks they hired Steve Jobs.”

Meet the Robocoin: the world's first bitcoin ATM. It went live last night, after an afternoon of tinkering and testing at the downtown cafe that's now its home.

This book can be classified under either non-fiction or horror depending on the person reading it. Simon Rich and Farley Katz outline the realities of married life in The Married Kama Sutra: The World’s Least Erotic Sex Manual.

• Hat Tip
• Link
• Price: ~$12

The well–known six degrees of separation theory is a rule for the interconnected, globalized age we live in. It states that everyone is connected to each other through others they know by, at most, six rounds of introductions (some sillier versions require that actor Kevin Bacon is a step in the chain).

Because of Facebook, the world is getting even smaller than we've realized. Researchers studying connectedness on social networks have now proposed that "the average number of acquaintances separating any two people no matter who they are . . . is not six but 3.9."

The average number of acquaintances separating any two people no matter who they are . . . is not six but 3.9.

Eman Yasser Daraghmi and Shyan–Ming Yuan, of the National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, created a database on Facebook that included 950 million people, The Pacific Standard reports. After eliminating duplicate and fake accounts as well as celebrities, the researchers used advanced statistical methods to calculate how far everyone was spread out on the network.

What's even more exciting is that the "four degrees of separation" rule is that this number included people who are in rare or very specialized professions, who might have a more tight–knit or smaller network. If you work in a more common profession, like teaching or medicine, the degrees of connectedness between you and everyone else is probably even less––an average of 3.2.

If the new theory, published in Computers in Human Behavior, holds, this would be only the latest evolution of the idea of the "small world problem." The ideal that we're all interconnected was first proposed in 1929 by a Hungarian author, and was popularized around the number six by sociologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, and later by various movies, such as Six Degrees of Separation starring Will Smith.

While we're on the topic of giving modern updates to the six degrees idea, I'll propose a new game, an alternative to the "Bacon number"––since, if we're being honest, Kevin Bacon's biggest celebrity moments are long behind us.

After polling coworkers, we've come up with "four degrees of James Franco." He's got that same ubiquitous and sexy, but slightly generic appeal. Got other suggestions? Feel free to leave them in the comments.

Honest Trailers ignores the fact that people become immersed in a film’s story and applies a healthy dose of logic and reality to see what should be otherwise bleeding obvious.

Here’s their take on Pacific Rim.

Three high school buddies from a tiny Canadian town say that they will flip the switch on the world's first bitcoin ATM next week. It will operate near the entrance of a downtown Vancouver coffee house.

Patent Pending offers up this musical suggestion that a certain plummer may want to rethink his life.

Patent Pending – Hey Mario (BRAND NEW SONG!!!) via Topless Robot

Royce Hutain aka Dopplerizer aka Visual Burrito decided to give his 22-month-old daughter a treat for Halloween, and made her this LED-covered costume that makes her look like a walking stick figure. More of his LED suits here.

• Hat Tip
• Link