firehose

ORLANDO, FL—In today’s fast-paced corporate world, it sometimes seems as if the moral fabric of our society has been stretched beyond recognition in the name of so-called social progress.

Originally spotted on Reddit, the map above depicts Ravka, “a fantasy Russia of samovars and horse-drawn sleighs” in which “a breed of magician-scientist-soldiers [wield] tangible powers in the service of the realm.” If this sounds intriguing, you’re in luck: you can read about all of it in author Leigh Bardugo‘s young-adult fantasy novel Shadow and Bone, as I plan to do. An expanded map from Bardugo’s follow-up, Siege and Storm, appears at the end of this post. Both are by illustrator Keith Thompson.

Ravka:

From Siege and Storm:

  

This image shows fewer than 400 of the 1600+ dire wolf skulls found in the La Brea Tar Pits — natural seepages of asphalt that trapped thousands upon thousands of animals over centuries.

Both boys and girls can get cancer from HPV.

This week there has been a number of positive announcements about RSS readers on the web and iOS.

Go ahead and take a few minutes to read through the articles on Rumproarius for some ideas on why RSS is a good market to be in right now.

Yesterday came news of Reeder's plans to support new syncing services as well as Feedly's inclusive roadmap plans. From some recent back and forth on Twitter, it also sounds like Mr. Reader will get some Feedly action.¹

I prefer the traditional folder list of feeds rather than the visually accosting "newspaper" metaphor provided by services like Feedly or Flipboard.

Indeed, these are promising collaborations. Multiple API's with multiple apps means better options for customers. In this case, Google is actually innovating by quitting.

I do hope we see some equivalent innovation on the feed traffic measurement end. Most of the revenue on the web is still generated by ads that require those measurements. There's some great sites that would not exist today without ad revenue. Wouldn't it be great if there was a way for a writer to provide that information without thinking about it or even looking at it?

I think 2013 is already showing some great promise for those of us that love and depend on feed aggregators.

This is the best way to visit a russian police station. We wouldn't recommend going in person.

A 9-year-old boy fought back against two robbers who broke into his family's home on Monday. Not only did he fight back, he won.

heyitsmylife:

nicely done

Arab News

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants no organ-eating rebels at peace talks Herald Sun RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin, known for his black humour, has said he hoped that Syria's opposition will not send organ-eating rebels to proposed peace talks. Speaking to an EU-Russia summit, Mr Putin described seeing televised footage in which ... Syrian S-300 Missile Contracts Not Yet Fulfilled – PutinRIA Novosti Putin's Syria policy all about oil: KasparovArab News Syria Tops Russia-EU Summit AgendaVoice of America Fox News -The Guardian -Newsday all 263 news articles »

	rachel shared this story from Shakesville:
	evolutionary psychology tends to be a synonym for asinine bigotry, part 3,493

---

[Content Note: Fat hatred; disablist slur.]


Wow. WOW. Wow.

Miller, who is an evolutionary psychology professor with a permanent position at the University of New Mexico currently visiting at NYU, deleted the tweet and offered "sincere apologies to all for that idiotic, impulsive, and badly judged tweet." He further noted

that, "obviously my previous tweet does not represent the selection policies of any university, or my own selection criteria." But it's not obvious. Miller has sat on admissions committees before, his CV states. Now he's expressed this apparently serious, if better-left-private, non-academic criteria for accepting or rejecting people. And his peers are calling foul.

Additionally, Chris Chambers, with the School of Psychology at Cardiff University, has written a letter to the departmental chair at UNM's department of psychology asking for accountability and a response to Miller's bigotry.

In the coverage of this fat-hating, scientifically inaccurate, harmful mess, I've seen a lot of variations on calling out Miller for hitting out the send button impulsively or failing to properly censor himself. But the problem isn't that Miller broadcast this bigotry in a public venue. The problem is that he holds this bigoted view at all.

[H/T to Kristen Fuchsia.]

At 15:30:08 UTC on Sun, 4 December 292,277,026,596^[16][17] 64-bit versions of the Unix time stamp will cease to work, as it will overflow the largest value that can be held in a signed 64-bit number. For these systems, the next second will once again be incorrectly indicated as Thursday, 1 January 1970 at 00:00:00. This is not anticipated to pose a problem, however, as this is considerably longer than the time it would take the Sun to theoretically expand to a red giant and swallow the earth.

Link

niknak79:

Burn

Few people know of William Shatner's personal campaign to get kids interested in reading. The actor read the classic children's book Where the Wild Things Are to a group of kids at the recent Denver Comic Con; if he embellished the tale a bit, what of it? A book is merely a doorway to imagination, while Shatner's imagination is a doorway to truth, insanity, and god knows what else. The choice is pretty obvious.

Read more...

The invention of Google Glass promised an exciting, undiscovered frontier of interactivity with everything but other human beings, your environment, and anything else that’s boring. Like so many modern devices, it mostly promised interactivity with yourself: The solace of shunning everyone by wearing an off-putting visor over your eyes enabling you to have more time alone with the Internet; the freedom of no longer having to use your hands to type enabling you to innovate all-new paradigms of masturbating. The future looked bright—not that you could see it behind the porn video in your eye, because you were busy masturbating.

Unfortunately, Google has taken one look at this cold, isolated existence populated by self-absorbed cyborgs, pleasuring themselves with constant immersion in social media and really, really close-up pictures of naked people, and decided to do something about that last part. The company has now officially banned all sexually ...

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Citation (April 11, 1945–August 8, 1970) was the eighth American Triple Crown winner, and one of three major North American Thoroughbreds (along with Cigar and Zenyatta) to win at least 16 consecutive races in major stakes race competition.^{[citation needed]}

Link (Via, @0xabad1dea)

Racial disparities in marijuana arrests are getting worse MSNBC (In this photo provided by the New York City Police Department, an NYPD lieutenant walks through plants at a large indoor marijuana growing operation in New York, Tuesday, Jan. 31, 2011. (AP Photo/NYPD)). A sprawling new report from the American Civil ... ACLU Marijuana Report Finds That Someone Was Arrested For Pot Every 41 ...Huffington Post Pot arrests more likely for blacksWBOC TV 16 New ACLU Report Finds Overwhelming Racial Bias in Marijuana ArrestsAmerican Civil Liberties Union News and Information The Providence Journal all 133 news articles »

Philly.com

A Navy SEAL's biggest secret: Life as a transgender USA TODAY Former team members praise Beck's courage to come out after 20 years. Warrior Princess. The cover of 'Warrior Princess,' published by Advance Press, is the memoir of a U.S. Navy SEAL coming out transgender (Photo: Advance Press). In the super-secret ... Kristin Beck, Transgender Navy SEAL, Comes Out In New BookHuffington Post Former Navy Seal Reveals Transgender IdentityABC News Transgender Navy SEAL comes out in new memoir 'Warrior Princess'New York Daily News Advocate.com -Telegraph.co.uk -University Herald all 64 news articles »

At least. :)

Imagine you are the Royal Physician in England some time during the 14th century. The prince is sick, and you’ve been summoned to help. You call in two experts for advice. The first says: “Use leeches to suck out the evil humors.” The second says “No, you must bleed him to get the evil humors out.” They start to argue, insulting each other in nasty epistles. “Leech guy is secretly working for the French!” alleges Bleeding Guy. “Bleeding Guy just wants the prince to die because the prince wanted higher taxes on the nobles!” Leech Guy fires back.

What’s the right move? Well, in an ideal world, you would go and get 999 patients who have illnesses similar to the prince’s and give them all a variety of household substances, such as bread mold. Then you would take careful note of who died and use statistical analysis to figure out which household substances cured disease. Thus, you would discover penicillin and invent modern medicine.

Sadly, this is not what you do, because a) if you proposed it, you would be led off to the dungeons and beheaded b) it’s the 14th century and you have no concept of the scientific method and c) you don’t really have the right tools for that experiment, anyway. Instead, it’s bleeding or leeches. So you take your best guess and you pray you’re right.

The economic situation we find ourselves in today is a little bit like the example above. Everyone knows that it’s a bad thing when factories sit gathering dust and potential workers sit idle on their couches. But the best “experts” that we have—academic economists—are in generally ill repute. Surveys have shown that the public has very little confidence in their predictions. They argue bitterly on op-ed pages and can’t seem to agree on the most basic issues. And of course, the recent high-profile debunking of the “90 percent debt-to-GDP danger zone”—a talking point created by the famous economist duo of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, and used by many Republican supporters of austerity—did nothing to help economists’ reputations.

So are we making a mistake putting our faith in economics? Are economists themselves just charlatans, to be scorned as medieval cranks? Or for all their flaws, are they really the best experts we have? I don’t have a definitive answer, just like there is no good answer to the problem of the Royal Physician. But having gone through an economics PhD, I do know a few things that I think the public should realize about the field.

To start, we need to talk briefly about what it is economic theorists do. Essentially, they make models, which are mathematical tools that are supposed to describe how the economy functions. The problem is that economists haven’t really built a model of the whole economy that works. A lot of smart people have spent a lot of time creating tools with names like “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium.” But as of this moment, those models can’t really forecast the economy like our meteorologists can forecast the weather. Furthermore, they contain a lot of obviously wrong assumptions. To give just one example, many of the models stipulate that companies are only allowed to change their prices at random times! Crazy, right? Economists include things like that to make the models easier to use, and they hope that those zany assumptions are actually decent approximations to the way the world really works. But even with these kludges in place, none of the existing models can do much to predict the economy.

Theory isn’t the only problem. Economists don’t really have good enough data to understand how the economy works, either. With chemistry or biology, you can put things in a lab and test them out with controlled experiments. With microeconomics—the study of specific markets—you can do something similar; for example, the auctions that Google uses to sell online ads were developed by microeconomists. But with macroeconomics—the study of the economy as a whole — you can’t put countries and entire economies in a lab; all you can do is sit there and watch history go by, and try to deduce some patterns. But often enough, those patterns vanish just as soon as you think you’ve found one.

Just as it doesn’t have their caliber of data, macroeconomics also lacks the kind of scientific culture enjoyed by biology and chemistry. In the hard sciences, models are built to explain data; that’s their only purpose. But in econ, models are often used simply as storytelling devices to explain an idea about how the world might work.

The best economists are well aware of their ignorance. During his recent graduation speech at Princeton, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke half-joked to the crowd that “Economics is a highly sophisticated field of thought that is superb at explaining to policymakers precisely why the choices they made in the past were wrong. About the future, not so much.” Greg Mankiw, one of the world’s most famous macroeconomists (and my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor) put the sentiment this way in a 2011 New York Times column:

After more than a quarter-century as a professional economist, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about the economy. Indeed, the area of economics where I have devoted most of my energy and attention—the ups and downs of the business cycle—is where I find myself most often confronting important questions without obvious answers…

What all this means is that when an economist tells you something that is based on a theory or a model, you should be very, very skeptical. And the more complicated the theory or model is, the more you should be suspicious. For example, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, Stanford economist John Taylor called for fiscal austerity, and justified his recommendation by saying it came from a “modern macroeconomic model.” I looked through that model and found a lot of assumptions that a lot of other economists would disagree with. But the average Wall Street Journal reader would have no way of knowing that. So beware of economists bearing fancy models.

If economists ever do succeed in developing formal models that work better, then we’ll be able to go to them with questions (like “Should the Fed print more money?”) and simply trust their expert advice. But until that day, all economists can really give us is intuition, suggestions, and ideas. Like the Royal Physician, each of us then has to decide for him/herself what we think is the best medicine.

So when you listen to economists, the key is to try to understand why they think what they think. For example, Paul Krugman thinks that monetary policy doesn’t work well in a depression, because nominal interest rates can’t go below zero, and because the Fed is not always good at convincing people that it will allow inflation in the future. Robert Barro thinks that fiscal policy doesn’t work, because people anticipate the future taxes needed to pay for today’s stimulus, and reduce their consumption today in order to save up to pay those future taxes. Most people can understand these basic ideas, and decide for themselves which they think are plausible, and which they think are unrealistic.

Economists have another virtue, in that they’re very good at pointing out each other’s logical errors. On the whole, economists are very smart, perceptive people. Like everyone else, they are liable to overstate their confidence and rely too much on their own unproven theories (not everyone is as skeptical and self-questioning as Greg Mankiw). But when they do this, other economists usually catch them! So in order to avoid believing too much in the confident-sounding pontifications of one economist, you should listen to economists on the other side of the issue.

Finally, though mainstream economists may not have it all figured out, they are far better than most of the groups who lurk outside the mainstream. For example, spend an afternoon reading the ideas of so-called “Austrian” economists, who believe that we only need logic to understand how the economy works, and that data and evidence are useless. Absurd. But that’s the kind of alternative that’s out there, and some people really believe that stuff.

No matter how much we might wish they were, economists are not go-to experts who know just how the world works or how to fine tune it. They are not car mechanics. And if they act like they are car mechanics, you should instantly be suspicious. But they do have a lot of interesting things to say. They might help you clarify or re-evaluate your own beliefs about how the economy functions. They can also help you spot the flaws in each other’s arguments.

And in the end, you’re the Royal Physician. You may not know everything, but the prince is dying, and you pick from among the “experts” you’ve got.

Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University. He blogs at Noahpinion.

This originally appeared at The Atlantic. More from our sister site:

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Nothing says, "I love the Earth!" quite like bringing bulldozers into an old-growth forest to create a fake ruined castle.

Though an international investigation has failed to provide any clear evidence that an intelligence failure allowed the Boston Marathon bombings to happen, like so many corrupt cops, environmental polluters, and moviegoers before us, it seems everyone forgot about Steven Seagal. Just like the drug dealers in Marked For Death, these terrorists attacked his family (America), and they made the wrong guy very, very interested in diplomatic missions to Russia, where Seagal helped to “open up doors” for a delegation of U.S. lawmakers like Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher—much as he’d helped to open up doors for Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio at suspected cockfighting rings, with much the same sense of grace and accomplishment.

Seagal was a natural choice to provide the introductions due to his close friendship with Vladimir Putin, both men having long ago bonded over a shared inflated sense of their physical prowess and a wistful ...

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The woman in red

Capcom announced today that its globe-trotting, pogo-jumping platformer DuckTales Remastered is coming to PC platforms via Steam, Origin, Impulse, GamersGate, Green Man Gaming, and "numerous other places PC gamers download their wares."

Helmed by Double Dragon: Neon developer WayForward, DuckTales Remastered was first revealed as a downloadable game for Xbox Live Arcade, the PlayStation Network, and the Wii U's eShop back in March. Capcom later announced plans for a PC port, leading up to today's announcement.

The PC version of DuckTales Remastered will launch this summer, "within or around same window as the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii U versions," at $14.99. Capcom will reveal more details at E3 next week.

DuckTales Remastered coming to PC via Steam, other services originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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“This meat will show you! you’re DEAD! gwaargh!!!!!” - 

Super Bonk 2 (Red/Hudson - SNES - 1995)

Andrea Nguyen andrealikes.to


Andrea Nguyen andrealikes.to


Andrea Nguyen andrealikes.to

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