THE NEW YORK TIMES DISCOVERS THAT RECYCLING IS A CROCK.
Archive for 2019
March 17, 2019
NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: Drug which makes human blood ‘lethal’ to mosquitoes can reduce malaria spread, study shows.
In a very-slightly-related topic, I woke up in the middle of the night a few weeks back with the introduction to a fantasy novel in my head and wrote it down. Called “Poison Soul,” it was about a guy who, when his soul was eaten by the Great Old Ones, forced them to vomit it back up, along with all the others they’d eaten. Sort of the Lovecraftian version of a bad shrimp. Don’t know if I’ll ever get anywhere with it, but it was weird to wake up with several paragraphs written in my head. And, frankly, if you’re going to deal with soul-eaters, something like that just makes sense.
NO MORE EMOTIONAL SUPPORT GORILLAS IN THE CLASSROOM?: “U. Minnesota proposes banning emotional support animals from classrooms, offices.”
I had a student a few years ago who gleefully told me about his efforts to annoy his landlord by demanding the right to two large canine emotional support animals. That’s the problem with our legal system. We create entitlements on the assumption that they won’t be used as a weapon. But that assumption turns out to be unwarranted.
OPEN THREAD: You know what to do.
SO THE INSTA-WIFE AND I HAVE BEEN WATCHING “GOD FRIENDED ME” ON CBS, AND LIKING IT. A “God” account on Facebook sends the protagonists friend suggestions, which guide them toward people who need help. Is it God? Is it AI? Is it someone else? We don’t know yet. But the show is engaging, the cast is likable and, though interracial, not the least bit woke, and the writing is good. I’m surprised it’s getting so little buzz.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Rise in teen suicide connected to social media popularity: study.
WORST CASE OF SUICIDE I EVER DID SEE: Ex-Putin adviser found dead in D.C. hotel had complete neck fracture.
Might as well be planning to testify against the Clintons.
IN PROGRESS: The Best of Jerry Pournelle.
RIGHT NOW IT’S STILL MOSTLY A TOY, BUT FUTURE GENERATIONS WILL BE MUCH MORE: Apple Watch may spot heart problem but more research needed.
PRACTICING SAFETY: The Glock Striker Control Device.
GOOD IDEA, BUT I’D INCREASE THE AGE RANGE CONSIDERABLY: Missouri lawmaker proposes mandatory ownership of AR-15.
Related: It Takes a Militia: A Communitarian Case for Compulsory Arms Bearing.
(Update, from Charlie:) What is it Glenn says? If only someone had thought of that before?
VOTE SUPPRESSION: Washington State Joins New Jersey In Trying To Keep Trump Off Its 2020 Ballot. This is disgraceful, and they shouldn’t think it will be forgotten.
NEBRASKA: ‘It’s just heartbreaking’: Air Force gives up fight to stop water at Offutt; one-third of base is flooded. SAC HQ is okay, which I suppose means that The Hole isn’t flooding.
NEWSWORTHY: The ghastly massacre in Christchurch this week is certainly newsworthy and richly deserving of the universal condemnation it is getting. But let’s also spare a thought for the massacre of over a hundred Christians at the hands of Muslim militants in Nigeria these past few weeks. So far it has been ignored in the MSM.
P.S.: It’s more evidence for my study (with Hal Pashler) showing that one’s political views tend to bias one’s judgment about what is newsworthy. Yes, I know that should be obvious, but you might be surprised at the extent to which journalists argue that their own views do not bias their reporting.
DE BLASIO RUINS EVERYTHING: People Aren’t Banging in NYC Parks Like They Used To.
NOW OUT FROM MEGAN FOX: Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo.
WELL, I’LL ORDER ONE FROM AMAZON RIGHT NOW AND GET STARTED: Physicists have discovered that rotating black holes might serve as portals for hyperspace travel.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LATE-20TH CENTURY HEADLINES: The first woman to fly commercial to space describes what it’s like to see Earth from 55 miles up. I love how things are going, I just wish they’d gone this way 20 years or so earlier.
CULTURAL CONCEPTS OF DECENCY AND RESPONSIBILITY: IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in.
Really, for industry insiders, IBM did nothing out of the ordinary. AI researchers hoover up data from various corners of the internet all the time to feed the ever-hungry machine-learning algorithms that require massive amounts of it to train. Instagram photos, for example, are a common source of image data; the hashtags often conveniently correspond to the content of the photos, making it extra easy to generate labeled data. New York Times and Wall Street Journal articles are also a common source of data for well-written, copy-edited sentences. Even better that they are categorized by topic: technology, business, sports.
In fact, scraping data from publicly available sources is so much of an industry standard that it’s taught as a foundational skill (sans ethics) in most data science and machine-learning training. Meanwhile, most tech platforms are designed to invite such scraping by offering APIs with direct access to their data. Until recently, this was done without second thought. (Hello, Facebook.)
To more and more people, it seems that they see ordinary people as experimental subjects. That isn’t a good place to be.
POLAND BUYS HIMARS: Well, the U.S. Marines and U.S. Army like the system. Plus F-35s can spot targets for HIMARS’ GPS-guided rockets. The goal is conventional deterrence of Russian neo-imperialists who seek to recover the RUBK. For more details, see Chapter Four of Cocktails from Hell.
IN MOVIES AND TV, PLUS-SIZE ACTRESSES FINALLY ASSUME LEADING ROLES.
As Glenn noted yesterday, Hollywood is preparing us for “the hungering.”
JOE BIDEN: ‘I HAVE THE MOST PROGRESSIVE RECORD OF ANYBODY RUNNING…ANYBODY WHO WOULD RUN.’
Gaffetastic as always — and speaking of gaffetastic, given his many crypto-racist statements and gaffes over the decades, Biden has long appeared to be working strangely hard to lock down the Wilsonian wing of “Progressivism…”