QUESTION ASKED: Can AI Take The Guesswork Out Of Beer Brewing?
If AI is going to take over everything, I can’t think of anything better to do than sit around drinking beer.
Archive for 2016
July 11, 2016
DON SURBER’S TRUMP THE PRESS: I’ve almost finished reading a galley of Don Surber’s new book on Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential campaign. Glenn’s already given Trump The Press a link, and deservedly so. Here’s my overall impression: Don Surber has written an essential first history that is also a fun and witty romp. The book is a professional journalist’s exercise in factual due diligence. He documents –in arrogance-stripping detail– media bias, ineptitude, exaggeration and failure to learn from self-inflicted, unforced errors.
Surber has a knack for irony-rich chapter titles that also state the theme. Here are two examples: “An Army of Vincent Canbys” (Canby panned Stallone’s breakout Rocky movie, Trump’s candidacy is dismissed by similar toff experts); “Jumping the Shark” (The Fonz, of course.How many times has the media written Trump off as a lost cause due to perceived excess?).
Surber’s review of the December 2015 “schlonged” controversy is a wicked chuckle. Recall Trump said Hillary “got schlonged” when Obama whipped her in 2008. The reaction was instantaneous and vicious. He’s a wicked Republican misogynist! Hillaryites screamed. It’s a synonym for fornication.
“But was “schlonged” really a synonym for fornication? NBC analyst Jeff Greenfield asked a few linguistic scholars and found that while the noun schlong is Yiddish for penis, the verb schlonged is not. “On further review, Trump is right on this. ‘I got schlonged’ is a commonplace New York way of saying: ‘I lost big time,’ without the genital reference,” Greenfield tweeted on December 22.”
OK, Trump won that one on fact. However, if voters associated “schlonged” with Bill Clinton’s schlong, then Trump had also underscored an opposition weakness. Bill Clinton was the real misogynist. Perhaps they did. Surber argues that “People mistook his (Trump’s) extemporaneous speaking style for being undisciplined, but he had mastered speaking from an outline instead of a script.” Whatever happened Trump continued to win “the news cycles” and he did so by “being newsworthy.”
Good book.
THIS IS SURPRISING, GIVEN HOW HARD THEY’VE PUSHED IT: HPV-Related Cancer Is ‘Epidemic’—But Few Get Vaccinated.
HARVARD STUDENTS PRESSURED TO DISASSOCIATE:
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) released a video today covering Harvard University’s announcement that it will start punishing students who join single-gender clubs. Economics professor and Harvard president emeritus Larry Summers; cognitive scientist and psychology professor Steven Pinker; and civil rights attorney, author, and FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate are among those who talked with FIRE for our latest video.
Check it out below and see FIRE’s website for more coverage.
EUDAIMONIA, HEDONISM, AND GENES:
When they parsed the data, they saw that Fredrickson’s prediction appeared to be wrong. “This whole hedonic well-being stuff—just how happy are you, how satisfied with life?—didn’t really correlate with gene expression at all,” Cole said. Then he checked the correlation with eudaemonic happiness. “When we looked at that, things actually looked quite impressive,” he said. The results, while small, were clearly significant. “I was rather startled.” The study indicated that people high in eudaemonic happiness were more likely to show the opposite gene profile of those suffering from social isolation: inflammation was down, while antiviral response was up. Since that first test, in 2013, there have been three successful replications of the study, including one of a hundred and eight people, and another of a hundred and twenty-two. According to Cole, the kind of effect sizes that are being found indicate that lacking eudaemonia can be as damaging as smoking or obesity. They also suggest that, although people high in eudaemonic happiness often experience plenty of the hedonic stuff, too, the associated health benefits tend to surface only in those who lead what Aristotle might have called a good life.
Unrelated: Would a New Yorker writer use a phrase like “polluted by Christian moralizing” about any other religion?
21ST CENTURY CRIME: Ruling could make sharing passwords for subscription services a federal crime.
THE LOCAL BLOOD BANK KEEPS CALLING ME, AND I’VE ALREADY GIVEN TWICE THIS YEAR: Summertime sees desperate need for blood donations.
DEMOCRATS AND DEFICITS — THEY GO TOGETHER! McAuliffe announces $266 million shortfall in Virginia budget. “Virginia finished its fiscal year $266 million in the red as payroll- and sales-tax receipts lagged below expectations, Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Friday.” Bad luck!
KABUKI UPDATE: Sanders to campaign with Clinton Tuesday.
You probably didn’t see that coming. Or this:
The Clinton campaign said Sanders would join the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee during an event in Portsmouth, N.H. The two will discuss “building an America that is stronger together and an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top.”
Clinton has taken several steps toward Sanders in recent days, including by calling for a public option to be added to ObamaCare.
There’s been a lot of talk about the “public option” all of a sudden.
BOOM: President Obama Calls for ‘Public Option’ in Affordable Care Act.
Writing as Barack Obama, J.D., in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the president lauded the health-care overhaul and excoriated its opponents, arguing the law has sharply reduced the number of America’s uninsured and improved coverage for those who had it.
“The Affordable Care Act is the most important health care legislation enacted in the United States since the creation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965,” he wrote. “Although partisanship and special interest opposition remain, experience with the Affordable Care Act demonstrates that positive change is achievable on some of the nation’s most complex challenges.”
The article appeared as a ‘special communication’ in which he offered evidence, findings, and a description of their relevance. Among its most striking sections were those in which he acknowledged the law’s shortcomings and advocated responses to them. In his call for a public option, he noted the existence of parts of the country with limited insurance competition, where customers may have no choice but to swallow high premiums.
If the President actually cared about “choice,” he’d call on Congress to scrap his signature law and then allow insurers to sell plans customers actually want, to customers in every state.
21ST CENTURY OLIGARCHS: Kim Kardashian Makes Her Dad Proud With $45 Million Mobile Game Fortune: “Not Bad for a Girl With No Talent”
We seem to be transforming into a post-talent nation.
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM UPDATE: Pastafarian lodges complaint with ACLU over right to wear pasta strainer.
Last year a Massachusetts woman won a similar battle with her local DMV.
BREAKING NEWS: 3 DEAD IN SHOOTING AT MICHIGAN COURTHOUSE. “Two of the deceased are court bailiffs, and the other casualty is the shooter, whose identity has not yet been confirmed… WZZM-TV reporter David Bailey reported that there are three people dead and two court employees were shot.” Other reports indicating that in addition to the three dead, one was injured.
BREAKING:
Fed. judge rules that Virginia delegate to convention cannot be bound to vote for Trump on first vote. pic.twitter.com/tUoVPGIzXE
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) July 11, 2016
TELL HER THAT WE NEED TO TAKE THINGS AWAY FROM YOU ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD — I’M SURE SHE’LL UNDERSTAND: Time to Strip Team Hillary of Its Security Clearances — Forever.
(Classical reference in headline.)
CAVEAT EMPTOR: Everything we love to eat is a scam.
Fraudulence spans from haute cuisine to fast food: A February 2016 report by Inside Edition found that Red Lobster’s lobster bisque contained a non-lobster meat called langostino. In a statement to The Post, Red Lobster maintains that langostino is lobster meat and said that in the wake of the IE report, “We amended the menu description of the lobster bisque to note the multiple kinds of lobster that are contained within.”
Moving on: That extra-virgin olive oil you use on salads has probably been cut with soybean or sunflower oil, plus a bunch of chemicals. The 100 percent grass-fed beef you just bought is no such thing — it’s very possible that cow was still pumped full of drugs and raised in a cramped feedlot.
Unless your go-to sushi joint is Masa or Nobu, you’re not getting the sushi you ordered, ever, anywhere, and that includes your regular sushi restaurant where you can’t imagine them doing such a thing, Olmsted says. Your salmon is probably fake and so is your red snapper. Your white tuna is something else altogether, probably escolar — known to experts as “the Ex-Lax fish” for the gastrointestinal havoc it wreaks.
Ugh.
AT AMAZON, save in Storage & Organization.
THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S BEEN AN EXPENSIVE FLOP, LIKE EVERYWHERE ELSE: Germany Votes To Abandon Most Green Energy Subsidies. “The amount of money flowing into European green energy from governments and the private sector collapsed from $132 billion in 2011 to $58 billion last year, according to a May report by a British auditing firm. Green energy’s failure to meet reliability and cost goals were the primary reasons for declining investment. Europe has poured $1.2 trillion into the green energy industry to fight global warming, but its CO2 emissions and power bills just keep rising.”
Meanwhile, thanks to fracking, U.S. energy bills — and carbon emissions — have fallen.
THE HORROR. THE HORROR. BLOOMBERG’S BETSY FISCHER MARTIN TRIGGERED IN THE FRIENDLY SKIES, tries to get United pilot fired for allegedly directing passengers via the airplane’s PA system “to pay attention ‘to the pretty young ladies in the aisle’ for safety instructions.”
Geez, why can’t she attempt to get rocket scientists fired because of their shirts or roll Indiana pizza parlors like normal socialist justice warriors with bylines? I’m so old I remember when journalists simply reported the news rather trying to whip up Internet hate mobs.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Public university now requires applicants pledge commitment to ‘diversity and inclusion.’
I’m old enough to remember when loyalty oaths were considered bad. But of course, those were oaths pledging loyalty to America.