[The academic publishing] model is incredibly inefficient under every perspective, and results in a colossal waste of public funding, and forces researchers worldwide to waste countless hours that could be devoted to better research (or to have fun with family and friends). It is a system deeply rooted in the past, oblivious to the advent of the Web and related new forms of communication, information sharing, social networking and reputation.
Marey’s chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, and the most interesting fact is that all the frames were recorded on the same picture, using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Some call it Marey’s “animated zoo”.
I suppose people will think I am advocating moral relativism. Actually I am not making any sort of moral argument, my argument is aesthetic. I am celebrating the existence of times and places that are rich and strange worlds unto themselves, whether it be 17th century Venice, 18th century Tahiti, 19th century London, or 21st century Tokyo.
I hate how our discussions of “the far” always implicitly assume that we are right and they are wrong. If East Asian culture is more puritanical than us in some respects, we are to believe that they are Objectively Wrong. And if in other respects the very same society is less puritanical, well they are also Objectively Wrong in those practices.
The rising incidence of Type 1 diabetes may be due, in part, to the current practice of protecting the young from sun exposure. When newborn infants in Finland were given 2,000 international units a day, Type 1 diabetes fell by 88 percent, Dr. Holick said.
#8220;The heart of the problem is, perhaps, that no one really knows how to organize and maintain large systems that rely on locking” admonished Nir Shavit recently in CACM. Which gives rise to the natural follow-up question: is the Solaris kernel not large, does it not rely on locking or do we not know how to organize and maintain it?
In cinema and theater, we often hear about method acting, a technique by which actors try to create the situations, emotions, and thoughts of their characters in themselves in order to better portray them. In creating Cow Clicker, I rather felt that I was partaking of method design, embracing the spirit and values and ideals of the social game developer as I toed the lines between theory, satire, and earnestness. The Internet is paralyzing because it contains so much potential information. Even over the few days I spent developing Cow Clicker, I found myself watching people play, listening to feedback, and imagining changes. I “listened to my players” and made enhancements far beyond what was reasonable for a work of carpentry or a simple parody.
In such a situation, rational egoists – the individuals posited in much of orthodox economic theory – will free ride, leaving it to others to bear the costs of collective action, which will therefore not take place, even if it would foster the interests of all involved. Hence the possibility of a delightful paradox: the very markets in which Homo economicus, the rational egoist, appears to thrive cannot be created (if they require the solution of collective action problems, as in Chicago) by Homines economici.
Innocent defendants may plead guilty in return for a shorter sentence to avoid the risk of a much longer one. A prosecutor can credibly threaten a middle-aged man that he will die in a cell unless he gives evidence against his boss. This is unfair, complains Harvey Silverglate, the author of “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent”. If a defence lawyer offers a witness money to testify that his client is innocent, that is bribery. But a prosecutor can legally offer something of far greater value—his freedom—to a witness who says the opposite. The potential for wrongful convictions is obvious.
[David Foster Wallace] defines something as malignantly addictive when “(1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.
From a distance, Comte’s approach might seem to invite the creation of secular religions, complete with updated versions of holy texts, uniforms and inspiring songs. But there is, perhaps, a more plausible and less kitsch moral to be drawn. Rather than founding new religions, Comte prompts us to consider the effects of the disappearance of beliefs, a process comparable to a tongue rolling over the gummy pocket of an absent molar. His utopianism could inspire us to revisit a range of religious concepts that could enrich or invigorate secular life, in areas such as education, community politics, travel or marriage.
37signals can build simple — almost trivial — software and earn three million customers because they absolutely will not compromise on their philosophy of simplicity, transparency, and owning their own company, and that’s something millions of people respect and support. Competitors could build trivial web applications too (as Joel Spolsky is fond of saying, “Their software is just a bunch of text fields!”), but without the single-minded obsession it’s just software with no features.
To remain un-copyable, your One Thing needs to be not just central to your existence, but also difficult to achieve. Google’s algorithm, combined with the hardware and software to implement a search of trillions of websites in 0.2 seconds, is hard to replicate; it took hundreds (thousands?) of really smart people at Microsoft and Yahoo years to catch up. 37signals’ ranting platform — a blog with 131k followers and a best-selling book — is nearly impossible to build even with a full-time army of insightful writers.
Crime did not rise in every city where housing projects came down. In cities where it did, many factors contributed: unemployment, gangs, rapid gentrification that dislocated tens of thousands of poor people not living in the projects. Still, researchers around the country are seeing the same basic pattern: projects coming down in inner cities and crime pushing outward, in many cases destabilizing cities or their surrounding areas. Dennis Rosenbaum, a criminologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that after the high-rises came down in Chicago, suburbs to the south and west—including formerly quiet ones—began to see spikes in crime; nearby Maywood’s murder rate has nearly doubled in the past two years. In Atlanta, which almost always makes the top-10 crime list, crime is now scattered widely, just as it is in Memphis and Louisville.
In some places, the phenomenon is hard to detect, but there may be a simple reason: in cities with tight housing markets, Section8 recipients generally can’t afford to live within the city limits, and sometimes they even move to different states. New York, where the rate of violent crime has plummeted, appears to have pushed many of its poor out to New Jersey, where violent crime has increased in nearby cities and suburbs. Washington, D.C., has exported some of its crime to surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.
If you start making junk-ridden charts just because the long-term recall is better then I’m afraid you are missing the point of what data visualization is about. In a corporate environment, where you have to use dozens of charts every single day, you just can’t make them all stand out (it’s like the absurd idea of exploding all the slices in a pie chart). People just need the god damn chart to learn something. They don’t want to remember it three weeks later.
The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
—
Hermann Minkowski’s address to the Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians in 1908
