Tadeu

A fear submitted by coziestbean to deep-dark-fears.

hope everyone is having a blast today! but amid all the partying and celebrating, take a little time to remember what really happening — a bunch of money leaving your account, forever

i’m back from PAX east, thanks for your patience — i wanted to devote time to getting a full three broodhollows up because it was getting the short end of my stick for a while. but i’m back and ready to get some work done, right after i finish my citizenly duty!

and i have even more good news! chainsawsuit podcast episode 50 was live at PAX this weekend, and the audio is amazing. it’s one of our very best shows we’ve ever done, please check it out!!

An image from the future past.

(via via @stevenf)

If you think the articles in Wikipedia are too long to read, there’s a new Tumblr ready to enlighten you on all manner of subjects. TL;DR Wikipedia bills itself as “Wikipedia condensed for your pleasure.” It’s a hoot! Some of the entries are even funnier than these; I picked out a few that lacked objectionable language to show here. Otherwise the air conditioner entry would be at the top. My accountant would disagree about the last one, though, at least in my case. -via Metafilter

I know shit about Game of Thrones but I got so much fucking life from this

One stretch of road in the Netherlands may make you feel like you're cruising through a video game. A new glow-in-the-dark pavement has replaced power-sucking streetlights for a 500m (.3mi) piece of the highway. The result is a Tron-like street that...

La Llareta (up to 3,000 years old; Atacama Desert, Chile)

Spruce Gran Picea #0909 – 11A07 (9,550 years old; Fulufjället, Sweden)

Welwitschia Mirabilis #0707-22411 (2,000 years old; Namib-Naukluft Desert, Namibia)

Antarctic Moss #0212-7B33 (5,500 years old; Elephant Island, Antarctica)

Jōmon Sugi, Japanese Cedar #0704-002 (2,180-7,000 years old; Yakushima, Japan

Underground Forest #0707-10333 (13,000 years old; Pretoria South Africa) DECEASED

Since 2004, Brooklyn-based contemporary artist Rachel Sussman has researched, collaborated with biologists, and braved some of the world’s harshest climates from Antarctica to the Mojave Desert in order to photograph the oldest continuously living organisms on Earth. This includes plants like Pando, the “Trembling Giant,” a colony of aspens in Utah with a massive underground root system estimated to be around 80,000 years old. Or the dense Llareta plants in South America that grow 1.5 centimeters anually and live over 3,000 years. This is the realm of life where time is measured in millennia, and where despite such astonishing longevity, ecosystems are now threatened due to climate change and human encroachment.

Sussman’s photographs have now been gathered together for the first time in The Oldest Living Things in the World, a new book published by the University of Chicago Press. Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and travelogue, the book details her adventures in tracking down each subject and relays the valuable scientific work done by scientists to understand them. It includes 124 photographs, 30 essays, infographics and forewords by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Carl Zimmer.

You can learn more about Sussman’s project in her 2010 TED Talk. (via Hyperallergic)

Update: Rachel Sussman was just named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.

After a brief hiatus from his whirlwind New York residency last October, Banksy emerged with at least two new pieces over the weekend. The first depicts a trio of shady government officials crowding around a phone booth using analog recording devices to eavesdrop on conversations. That piece popped up in Cheltenham, a borough of Gloucestershire, England which is not coincidentally home of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The second piece which depicts two lovers basking in the light of their mobile devices just appeared on Banksy’s website and is also presumably in the UK.

Goat GIFs [x]

Previously: Animals Stealing Food

ginchycomics:

When called, they each came for different reasons.

 Google has a new patent application with the USPTO (via 9to5Google), which takes one of the basic concepts of Glass and extends it even further, embedding tiny cameras that could be embedded in contact lenses for various uses, including photographing what a wearer sees, or providing the basic input for a contact-based assistive device for the visually impaired. Google has previously detailed a… Read More

Suppose a large number of people each have a slightly better than 50% chance of correctly answering a yes/no question. If they answered independently, the majority would very likely be correct.

For example, suppose there are 10,000 people, each with a 51% chance of answering a question correctly. The probability that more than 5,000 people will be right is about 98%. [1]

The key assumption here is independence, which is not realistic in most cases. But as people move in the direction of independence, the quality of the majority vote improves. Another assumption is that people are what machine learning calls “weak learners,” i.e. that they perform slightly better than chance. This holds more often than independence, but on some subjects people tend to do worse than chance, particularly experts.

You could call this the wisdom of crowds, but it’s closer to the wisdom of markets. As James Surowiecki points out in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, crowds (as in mobs) aren’t wise; large groups of independent decision makers are wise. Markets are wiser than crowds because they aggregate more independent opinions. Markets are subject to group-think as well, but not to the same extent as mobs.

***

[1] Suppose there are N people, each with independent probability p of being correct. Suppose N is large and p is near 1/2. Then the probability of a majority answering correctly is approximately

Prob( Z > (1 – 2p) sqrt(N) )

where Z is a standard normal random variable. You could calculate this in Python by

from scipy.stats import norm
from math import sqrt
print( norm.sf( (1 - 2*p)*sqrt(N) ) )

This post is an elaboration of something I first posted on Google+.

did you know there’s lots of ways to zone people? zones aren’t just for friends anymore.

according to behavioral research doctors, the human mind is “lousy with zones”

Just a reminder - I'm posting new content and curated content over at The Nib.

pentecost:

^{Matthias Clamer’s Bergman-themed photos for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (x)}

A matter of life, Jeffrey Brown