If so, Jessica Hische can help you figure out the appropriate response:
Click to see full image (NSFW language)
H/T to Tim Harford for the link.
January 21, 2011
Have you ever asked yourself if you should work for free?
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January 17, 2011
QotD: The impermanence of “The Cloud”
We adopt many web services because they’re convenient (and free!), but it’s only after becoming dependent on those services that we recognize why they were provided for free in the first place: after all, it’s only by eliminating the inconvenience of paying users that startups can snag attention and secure the freedom to alter, downgrade, or cancel their services at will. By then, of course, we’re trapped in an unstable relationship, and our only means of recourse is to wail as loudly as possible, “You broke my heart!”
The big lesson that should have come out of the Tumbleocalypse was that we trust too easily. Did any of us listen? Nah. Instead, we’re signing our friends up to Dropbox to score 250 megs of bonus storage space and sending our most important documents to “the cloud.” We trust Dropbox because we trust others who use Dropbox: web designers, tech writers and professionals who, we believe, would never gamble with an unproven, flaky, or suspect service. Without this kind of trust-by-proxy, free web services couldn’t survive at all. Can you imagine anybody in their right mind signing up for a Facebook account today without a good friend by the sidelines whispering, “Don’t mind all that privacy whaffle. I know these guys mean well.”
Cloud storage is convenient, of course — ask anybody who’s experienced the horrors of manually synching PC to iPhone — but we downplay the risks involved in outsourcing control of the data we own. We so badly want to live in the future that we’ve lost the ability to question what living in the future might actually mean.
[. . .]
Those who believe that “the cloud” can act as a storage platform for our collective memories believe that everything that was available to us yesterday will be just as available to us tomorrow. Where exactly does this conviction come from?
The web is like any other sprawling city, and maybe worse: it’s so damn rickety it’s a minor miracle it hasn’t collapsed entirely. When you link, you do so trusting that the data to which you direct your readers won’t just up and disappear into the virtual ether. Except that, inevitably, it will — the short history of the web has established that much. We live somewhere, we leave, it becomes forgotten, and then we come back years later to find our old haunts brutally 404’d.
Connor O’Brien, “Link Rot”, The Bygone Bureau, 2011-01-17
January 6, 2011
Mark Steyn on the state of Britain
From a longer column on the general state of decline in the Anglosphere, Mark Steyn points out the negative aspects of British public education on modern day “Britons”:
In cutting off two generations of students from their cultural inheritance, the British state has engaged in what we will one day come to see as a form of child abuse, one that puts a huge question mark over the future. Why be surprised that legions of British Muslims sign up for the Taliban? These are young men who went to school in Luton and West Bromwich and learned nothing of their country of nominal citizenship other than that it’s responsible for racism, imperialism, colonialism, and all the other bad -isms of the world. If that’s all you knew of Britain, why would you feel any allegiance to Queen and country? And what if you don’t have Islam to turn to? The transformation of the British people is, in its own malign way, a remarkable achievement. Raised in schools that teach them nothing, they nevertheless pick up the gist of the matter, which is that their society is a racket founded on various historical injustices. The virtues Hayek admired? Ha! Strictly for suckers.
When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want,” to be accomplished by “cooperation between the State and the individual.” In attempting to insulate the citizenry from the vicissitudes of fate, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity. Churchill called his book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples — not the English-Speaking Nations. The extraordinary role played by those nations in the creation and maintenance of the modern world derived from their human capital.
What happens when, as a matter of state policy, you debauch your human capital? The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers; marriage is all but defunct, except for toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population. One-fifth of British children are raised in homes in which no adult works. Just under 900,000 people have been off sick for over a decade, claiming “sick benefits,” week in, week out, for ten years and counting. “Indolence,” as Machiavelli understood, is the greatest enemy of a free society, but rarely has any state embraced this oldest temptation as literally as Britain. There is almost nothing you can’t get the government to pay for.
And this bit where he shows that the British government defies parody:
For its worshippers, Big Government becomes a kind of religion: the state as church. After the London Tube bombings, Gordon Brown began mulling over the creation of what he called a “British equivalent of the U.S. Fourth of July,” a new national holiday to bolster British identity. The Labour Party think-tank, the Fabian Society, proposed that the new “British Day” should be July 5th, the day the National Health Service was created. Because the essence of contemporary British identity is waiting two years for a hip operation. A national holiday every July 5th: They can call it Dependence Day.
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December 23, 2010
Some interesting links
A few links to follow at your leisure, as they’re not in any sense time-critical:
- What happens when men make Christmas cookies.
- Eric S. Raymond provides a preliminary Taxonomy of haterboys.
- Police said alcohol apparently played a big role. Apparently so.
- The porn productivity hack.
- On second thought, let’s not go to Portland. It is a silly place.
- Mister DNA (commenting on a post at The Agitator): Nothing captures the essence of Rock & Roll like singing, “Obey Authority”.
- Just to add a touch of the surreal, British Airways reverse-hijacks their own passengers.
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December 20, 2010
Once again, correlation is not causation
An excellent example of what statistical analysis can and cannot show:
Do mobile phone towers make people more likely to procreate? Could it be possible that mobile phone radiation somehow aids fertilisation, or maybe there’s just something romantic about a mobile phone transmitter mast protruding from the landscape?
These questions are our natural response to learning that variation in the number of mobile phone masts across the country exactly matches variation in the number of live births. For every extra mobile phone mast in an area, there are 17.6 more babies born above the national average.
This was discovered by taking the publicly available data on the number of mobile phone masts in each county across the United Kingdom and then matching it against the live birth data for the same counties. When a regression line is calculated it has a “correlation coefficient” (a measure of how good the match is) of 98.1 out of 100. To be “statistically significant” a pattern in a dataset needs to be less than 5% likely to be found in random data (known as a “p-value”), and the masts-births correlation only has a 0.00003% probability of occurring by chance.
Part of the problem is that our brains have evolved to detect patterns and relationships — even when they’re not really there:
Mobile phone masts, however, have absolutely no bearing on the number of births. There is no causal link between the masts and the births despite the strong correlation. Both the number of mobile phone transmitters and the number of live births are linked to a third, independent factor: the local population size. As the population of an area goes up, so do both the number of mobile phone users and the number people giving birth.
The problem is that our first instinct is to assume that a correlation means that one factor is causing the other. While this does not cause a problem when using pattern-spotting as an evolved survival tool, it does cause severe problems when assessing possible health scares based on a recently uncovered correlation. For the majority of cases, correlation does not indicate the presence of causality.
H/T to Maggie Koerth-Baker for the link.
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December 19, 2010
Something else for your Christmas list
H/T to Gerard Vanderleun for the link.
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December 14, 2010
No surprises at all in Gawker’s 50 most-popular passwords
An article in the Wall Street Journal has the 50 most popular passwords from the Gawker data heist:
Recognize the pattern? Here’s a word cloud from my last post on passwords:
Other posts on this topic: Passwords and the average user, More on passwords, And yet more on passwords, and Practically speaking, the end is in sight for passwords.
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December 2, 2010
Smug, but nursing that inferiority complex: urban Canada in a nutshell
John Geddes seems puzzled by the apparent contradiction:
Can we settle on the putdown of preference when it comes to right-wingers expressing their disdain for Canada?
They often resort to either of two seemingly contradictory, but equally condescending, lines about Canadians: we are insufferable in our sense of moral superiority, or we exhibit an equally tiresome inferiority complex.
Now, I’m willing to take my lumps, but do they have to come from both directions at once? Can’t you decide if my national ego is obnoxiously over-developed or pathetically under-developed?
I can only assume that Mr. Geddes hasn’t attended too many parties in Toronto or Ottawa. Both psychological maladies are often displayed by the same people . . . sometimes in the same conversation. Torontonians in particular are capable of sneering at vulgar Americans in one moment, then fretting that they don’t pay enough attention to our “world class” city in the next. Short of finding a way of expressing both thoughts simultaneously, I’d say that was a strong indication that urban Canadians can hold both thoughts without an overwhelming sense of contradiction.
December 1, 2010
This should be good for stirring up spirited debate
Sarah Bee reports on the kerfuffle around Satoshi Kanazawa’s book Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature:
Women long for the classic Barbie figure with big boobs, long blonde hair and blue eyes because it makes men want to impregnate them, an evolutionary psychologist has proclaimed.
London School of Economics reader Satoshi Kanazawa has successfully manipulated the more malleable and shameless news outlets into excitedly regurgitating the provocative theories contained in his book, Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. He explains that the traditional attributes of the buxom blonde babe have evolutionary advantages, as the Daily Mail duly recounts.
Big boobs are supposedly indicative of fertility, along with a large waist-to-hip ratio. Blonde hair displays grey hairs less obviously, thus concealing age — men prefer the younger bird for a better shot at passing on their DNA, sensibly enough.
Blue eyes, Kanazawa points out, more clearly display pupil dilation, which occurs when the peepers’ owner sees something she likes. Thus a man can tell more quickly if a blue-eyed woman fancies a bit or not, saving precious sharking time at the bar.
Kanazawa further postulates that women are getting hotter and having lovelier daughters, while men are regrettably as fugly as ever they were. Beautiful women have more children than the overlooked homely types, and also have more female children, and on it goes in a wondrous babeification of the species.
This is a case where the science may point in a direction that is so politically and socially unwelcome that everyone just ignores it. Or it could be a huge joke to put the politically correct folks into a lather. Pick your option and season to taste.
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The inevitable convergence of new technology with sex
PC World looks at the latest convergence of all the sex-obsessed geeks in the world and the latest consumer electronics toys:
It’s practically the universal rule of electronics: Where there’s technology, there’s sex. Embrace it or shun it, but it’s the way of the world.
Now, it looks like Microsoft’s new Kinect may be the latest gadget to fall prey to prurient interests. The Kinect is undergoing a series of experiments designed to turn its motion-sensitive virtual gaming into motion-sensitive virtual mating.
Oh, come on — are you really that surprised?
The original term was “teledildonics”, which has the virtue of allowing you to discuss it without quite giving away the true subject.
If you want to know about the possibilities of Kinect sex, just ask Kyle Machulis. Machulis, aka “qdot,” runs a site called slashdong.org (Google it at your own risk). The site, which I probably shouldn’t mention by name more than once, focuses on the meeting point between sex and tech. It featured a blog this week exploring the idea of X-rated uses for Kinect-enabled Xboxes (hat tip to the crew from CNET for finding the page).
In the blog, Machulis — who was recently cited by New Scientist as a Kinect-hacking authority — observes how the Kinect is able to use depth in order to identify a person’s body shape. He goes on to note, however, that Microsoft’s gaming console really tracks the human body “as a whole,” looking at “major geometric features” of a user’s form. This doesn’t bode well for the prospect of Kinect sex; without getting too graphic, let’s just say that the primary anatomy involved in intimate relations isn’t exactly a “major geometric feature.” Sorry, fellas.
New technology is notoriously prone to being harnessed to the interests of prurience . . . after Gutenberg and his competitors got the mass-produced bible business going, one of the next profitable niches to be explored was the erotic/pornographic book market.
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November 29, 2010
With a bit of effort, even Erotica can be drab and uninteresting
Laurie Penny attended the “Erotica” trade show, and was underwhelmed:
Welcome to Erotica: Britain’s Gulag of desire
If you had to build a prison for human pleasure, it would look like this.You shuffle through the clinical, white foyer of the Olympia Grand Hall in Kensington and, after presenting several forms of ID to prove that you’ve paid the requisite £20 for your sexy times, security guards usher you into a huge iron stadium full of concession stands and bored-looking women in their scanties.
This is Erotica, “playtime for grown-ups”: a festival that is billed both as Europe’s “best-attended erotic event” and “a unique shopping experience” — statements that, taken together, possibly explain a great deal about western sexual dysfunction.
[. . .]
The punters are English, bourgeois and middle-aged; the strippers onstage and in the booths are young and eastern European. They smile desperately through shrouds of fake tan. The punters, a mixture of hardcore fetishists in rubber and older couples in fleeces, clutch plastic pints of lukewarm larger as they watch the grim stage show. Strippers gyrate in nothing but thongs and a couple of England flags, a cross between a jiggle joint and an Anglo-fascist rally. In true British style, the audience claps politely while pre-recorded applause thunders over the speakers.
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November 26, 2010
Rewarding bravery or giving “attaboy” awards?
Strategy Page reports on the huge increase in medals being awarded to US troops:
The U.S. Army has reported that some 857,000 medals have been awarded to the 1.2 million soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s 48 percent as many medals awarded during World War II, when six times as many soldiers served overseas. It’s also 30 percent of those awarded during Vietnam, where 25 percent more soldiers served. This odd pattern is the result of the excessive number of medals given out during the Vietnam war.
This has not been forgotten. Five years ago, American troops began grumbling about what was perceived as disrespectful use of Bronze Star medals as “attaboy” awards for officers and senior NCOs who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for lower ranking personnel you want to pin a medal on for no good reason
[. . .]
This awards inflation was a very unpopular aspect of the Vietnam war, and became a major embarrassment after the 1983 Grenada invasion (where the army tried to award more medals than there were troops involved, but the public caught wind of it and forced the brass to back off.)
Compared to the Canadian military, the US hands out a lot more medals: in my long-ago militia days, we used to joke that American recruits got medals for shining boots and using the latrine. Of course, that was right after the Vietnam era, so the “medal inflation” was perhaps at its most obvious stage.
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November 14, 2010
Wandering minds or wandered researchers?
I can’t improve at all on Chris Myrick’s comment on this article:
Harvard psychologists have determined that we are happiest when: having sex, exercising, in intense conversations with friends, listening to music or playing. Aside from their use of an iPhone app to determine this, (http://www.trackyourhappiness.org/), I’m missing the news value.
However, I see potential for a follow-up study where researchers can determine whether receiving phone messages during sex, sport or engaging conversation puts a damper on someone’s mood.
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November 9, 2010
The five stages of grading
By way of Ilkka’s blog, a new look at the plight of the grad student:
Everyone is familiar with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her stage model of coping with grief popularly known as the five stages of grief. What you may not know is that Kübler-Ross actually developed her theory as a graduate student, basing her conception of the process of loss on the experiences one goes through over a grading weekend.
In coping with grading, it’s important for graduate students and young professors to know that they are not alone and that this process takes time. Not everyone goes through every stage or processes the reality of grading in this order, but everyone experiences some version of at least two of these steps.
Read the whole thing.
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November 5, 2010
Now the sale of bogus explosive detectors makes more sense
Remember a couple of items from earlier this year about a British manufacturer being arrested for selling fake bomb detection devices called the ADE-651? These devices were claimed to be so sensitive that they could even “detect elephants, humans and 100 dollar bills”. I figured that it was all just a kickback scam, but Strategy Page explains how the scam was not only possible but easy:
But it wasn’t just bribes that made the ADE 651 survive over a year of use in Iraq. Arabs, more than many other cultures, believe in magic and conspiracies. After the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, many Moslems again blamed Israel. A favorite variation of this is that, before the attacks on the World Trade Center, a secret message went out to all Jews in the area to stay away. Another variation has it that the 19 attackers (all of them Arab, 15 from Saudi Arabia) were really not Arabs, but falsely identified as part of the Israeli deception.
[. . .]
American troops arriving in Iraq go through a real culture shock as they encounter these cultural difference. They also discovered that the cause of this, and many other Arab problems, is the concept of “inshallah” (“If God wills it.”) This is a basic tenet of Islam, although some scholars believe the attitude preceded that religion. In any event, “inshallah” is deadly when combined with modern technology. For this reason, Arab countries either have poorly maintained infrastructure and equipment (including military stuff), or import a lot of foreigners, possessing the right attitudes, to maintain everything. That minority of Arabs who do have the right attitude towards maintenance and personal responsibility are considered odd, but useful.
The “inshallah” thing is made worse by a stronger belief in the supernatural, and magic in general. This often extends to technology. Thus many Iraqis believe that American troops wear sunglasses that see through clothing, and armor vests that are actually air conditioned. When they first encounter these beliefs, U.S. troops think the Arabs are putting them on. Then it sinks in that Arabs really believe this stuff. It’s a scary moment.
However, many troops learn to live with, and even exploit, these odd beliefs. Troops at one base discovered that they weren’t being attacked much, because many of the locals believed that the base was surrounded by a force field, so the troops would casually make reference to their force field, when they were outside the wire and among the locals. This reinforced the force field myth, and made the base safer. Other troops would invent new fantasies, like a pretending that a handheld bit of military electronics was actually a mind reading device. That often made interrogations go a lot quicker. Not all Arabs believe in this stuff, and those that didn’t and worked for the Americans, often as an interpreter, could only shrug their shoulders when asked about it.
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