ecmendenhall

I work with a manual QA team who explicitly recruit testers on the autism spectrum. It's a great mission and they've done great work: http://www.businessinsider.com/startup-hires-people-on-autis...

The Harold McGee article linked on the right mentions that the alkaline ingredients in ramen noodles are slightly different from baking soda:

>As for the particular alkaline ingredients that are added to noodles, Chinese and Asian alkaline noodles, in general, contain potassium and sodium carbonate, which are not the sort of things that we usually have lying around in our kitchens. They’re carbonate salts of those metals, sodium and potassium. They’re standard ingredients in Asia but not so much in the West.

>However, you can easily make your own version of them by taking baking soda and baking it at a low temperature—200°, 250°F—for about an hour. You take baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, and turn it into sodium carbonate just by that gentle heat. Now, that leaves out potassium carbonate, but I’ve found that when I’ve experimented with it, simply using sodium carbonate gives you most of the effect that you’re looking for in an alkaline noodle.

Would it make sense to prebake the baking soda? I'll have to experiment myself.

You're probably using the right thesaurus. The default on Apple devices is the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, which is great at conveying little shades of meaning. I'm always delighted to find a "Word Notes" entry by an author I like. Try "bourgeois" for Zadie Smith or "feckless" for David Foster Wallace.

(Here's a list of all the word notes by author: http://lasersoptional.com/2012/08/21/it-was-wonderful-marvel...)

Ah, right. That makes sense. If only it was mentioned on the download page!

This bug was pretty serious. I'd better be extra careful and install and verify this myself.

Oh, good: there's a standalone installer available (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1726). But the download is served over HTTP. Maybe I can just try the same URL with HTTPS:

  $ curl --head https://support.apple.com/downloads/DL1726/en_US/OSXUpdCombo10.9.2.dmg
  HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
  Server: Apache/2.2.24 (Unix)
  Location: http://download.info.apple.com/Mac_OS_X/031-3279.20140225.Zzasf/OSXUpdCombo10.9.2.dmg

Nope. Well, at least I can verify the SHA1 sum displayed on the download page. Wait, no, that was served over HTTP, too.

Okay, I'll follow Apple's instructions for checking the certificate fingerprint in the installer (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5044). But that page (Last modified November 2011) displays a different fingerprint (9C864771 vs FA02790F)...and that fingerprint was also served over HTTP.

Gives up and opens the App Store.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on an encrypted, backed-up, redundantly distributed hard drive — forever.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on conspiracy theories (in Turkish politics)[1], but it includes a section reviewing academic literature on conspiracy theories and a lot of resources in the bibliography.

Karl Popper wrote briefly about conspiracy theories in "Open Society and its Enemies."[2] It was part of a larger argument about emergent vs. planned orders, but I think it's a very good point: many conspiracy theories arise "from the mistaken theory that, whatever happens in society – especially happenings such as war, unemployment, poverty, shortages, which people as a rule dislike – is the result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups." It's simply hard for us to accept that improbable, harmful events are the result of lots of unplanned actions rather than one malevolent design.

[1]: http://arizona.openrepository.com/arizona/bitstream/10150/14... [2]: http://ovo127.com/2011/01/24/sir-karl-popper-the-conspiracy-...

Money might buy "freedom from depression," but I suspect it does so by buying antidepressants and therapy.

I think Robert Sapolsky is on to the best explanation of depression: it's a disease rooted in biology and genetics, similar to (and exacerbated by) chronic stress. (Here's a lecture that I'm sure has been posted here before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc). Reducing stress can alleviate the symptoms, but really effective treatments treat depression as a disease.

This is interesting, but I think completion rates (and enrollments, to a degree) are bogus statistics. All the incentives are aligned toward signing up for lots of courses, with or without any intention to finish. I'm "enrolled" in 13 Coursera classes at the moment, but only active in two (and something close to this has been my moving average for the last six months).

The only cost to me is a few too many automated emails. And since course quality still varies widely, trying out lots of courses and sticking with the best ones is a good strategy.

Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001...

His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society).

The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?"

Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation.

[1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...

> Side note: Wouldn't it be awesome if composer supported composer.sexpr files natively, so that we would no longer have to write JSON?

If you, too, think this would be awesome, check out extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn.

I second this. But don't take my word for it. Here is 5.24 (one of my favorites) translated by Long:

  "Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a 
  very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short
  and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of
  that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it
  thou art."

And by Hays:

  "Remember:
  Matter. How tiny your share of it.
  Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
  Fate. How small a role you play in it."

Two of my favorite pieces of "other media:"

This Flickr photostream by "Moravius," who is some sort of humanitarian aid worker in NK. There are lots of photos from outside Pyongyang, which I rarely see elsewhere on the web: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kernbeisser/sets/

The Twitter account of James Dresnok, the last living US defector to North Korea: https://twitter.com/JamesDresnok

There's a great documentary on Dresnok called "Crossing The Line." His Twitter account is one of the weirdest internet artifacts I've discovered: he only posts every 2-3 months, and the first account he followed was a Kim Jong-il parody.

If you're sufficiently convinced by this, the 538 model, or your favorite electoral vote map, and you are willing to bet your beliefs (and you are in a jurisdiction that has not regulated prediction markets out of existence), Intrade contracts on an Obama victory were trading around $6.70 today.

Here is a short presentation with another perspective on the Cybersyn project which should be of interest to designers and quantitative visualization types: http://compscifi.com/

It argues that the design of the Presidential control room and its simplified visualizations of economic information created an illusion of omniscience and control over the economy by using visual cues from modernist design and science fiction. But behind the scenes, the project was mostly run by humans exchanging data over teletype machines and hand-pasting information to slides.

There's a wonderful example of the project's simplified model of the economy around 7:58. Do you think this captures the complexity of the Chilean economy with enough fidelity that policymakers could have made reliable predictions about the effects of their interventions? (I don't. This is why: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html)

I have great hope that agent-based modeling and simulation will become useful tools in economics, but they are only useful when we accept that they are wrong. We should approach synoptic tools like Cybersyn that promise power and control over complex social systems with extreme skepticism.

Technical understanding always determines ambition!

You've given me two excellent answers in the last few weeks. (The other was on Aristotle, inter-subjective selection, and N-dimensional optimization). Thank you!

This happened to me, too. For once, carrying travelers checks came in handy.

In Turkey, most ATMs accept my extra-long PIN, but very few have UIs designed to fit more than 4 digits. On many of them, the digits will continue outside of the form field and sometimes all the way off the screen.

Ichiro and Steve Nash are wonderful role models, but I don't think they're very good models, which this essay seems to overlook. "Black Swan Farming" is about the enormous, counterintuitive variance of returns to startup investments. Sports just isn't in the same domain: a batter with 1000x more hits than the league average is inconceivable, but 1000x variations in startup outcomes are quite common.

Sure. I use CRON-O-Meter (http://cronometer.com/) to track my diet and weight, RunKeeper (http://runkeeper.com/home) and Fitocracy (https://www.fitocracy.com/) to track exercise, Moodscope (http://www.moodscope.com/login) to track my mood, and YourFlowingData (http://your.flowingdata.com/) to track anything else I want to measure. My favorite self-tracking service was an MIT Media Lab project called Mycrocosm (http://mycro.media.mit.edu/), but it's pretty much dead. (I wrote a Python script to extract my old data. I'll clean it up and publish it).

Some of these services are completely siloed, some of them export data as .csv or XML, and some of them actively interact with one another (e.g. Fitocracy imports Runkeeper data, CRONometer can connect to a Withings scale). Each tool works well in its niche, but there's no easy way (yet!) to get all the data in one machine-readable place.

Here's the direct link to try it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=facebook+report

As someone with a long history of incomplete self-tracking projects, this kind of automated collection and analysis is great. (If only I could get the rest of my data in the same place!) What I'd really like to see is a tool like IFTTT for self-trackers.