February, 2017 | Chris Aldrich

🎧 Our Computers, Ourselves | Invisibilia (NPR)

Listened to Our Computers, Ourselves from Invisibilia | NPR.org

In Our Computers, Ourselves, a look at the ways technology affects us, and the main question is : Are computers changing human character? You'll hear from cyborgs, bullies, neuroscientists and police chiefs about whether our closeness with computers is changing us as a species.

Possibly not as interesting to me because I’ve watched this space more closely over the past 20 years or so. Still it’s an interesting episode asking some great questions.

I can’t believe I flew through season one so quickly.

🎧 The New Norm | Invisibilia

Listened to The New Norm from Invisibilia | NPR.org

You probably don't even notice them, but social norms determine so much of your behavior - how you dress, talk, eat and even what you allow yourself to feel. These norms are so entrenched we never imagine they can shift. But Alix Spiegel and new co-host, Hanna Rosin, examine two grand social experiments that attempt to do just that: teach McDonald's employees in Russia to smile, and workers on an oil rig how to cry.

This is a fantastic episode that fits right into the heart of their running theme. The psychology of the smile isn’t something one thinks about often, but it has such a profound effect on our daily lives.

📺 Is There a Russian Coup Underway in America? | The Closer S2 E11

Watched Is There a Russian Coup Underway in America? from GQ Videos

Why we urgently need a special prosecutor to investigate Russia’s meddling in the election

Watch this video on The Scene.

Sage vs Underscores

Bookmarked Sage vs Underscores | WordPress Starter Themes (Roots)

Sage makes you a better developer. Modern build tooling, live reloading, modern PHP & requirements, DRY templates with template inheritance and more.

Modern front-end workflow

If Underscores is a “1,000 hour head start”, Sage is a 10,000 hour head start.

Write stylesheets with Sass, automatically check your JavaScript for errors, optimize images, enable synchronized browser testing, and more with our gulp setup.

How Authors and Publishers Can Increase Book Discovery | DBW

Read How Authors and Publishers Can Increase Book Discovery by Daniel Berkowitz (Digital Book World)

Chris Sim, founder and CEO of Kadaxis, spoke at Digital Book World about how indie authors and publishers can better use keywords to increase book sales.

Don’t Cancel the Academy Awards Over Trump. Oscar Nominees, Try This Instead. | Slate

Read Don’t Cancel the Academy Awards Over Trump. Oscar Nominees, Try This Instead. (Slate Magazine)

With the news that that the latest disaster in Donald Trump’s Lizard Brain Jamboree will bar Oscar nominee Asghar Farhadi from attending the Academy Awards (and Farhadi’s later decision to skip them whether he is allowed to come or not), the film community has been scrambling to find an effective response.

🔖 A de Bruijn identity for discrete random variables by Oliver Johnson, Saikat Guha

Bookmarked A de Bruijn identity for discrete random variables by Oliver Johnson, Saikat Guha (arxiv.org)

We discuss properties of the "beamsplitter addition" operation, which provides a non-standard scaled convolution of random variables supported on the non-negative integers. We give a simple expression for the action of beamsplitter addition using generating functions. We use this to give a self-contained and purely classical proof of a heat equation and de Bruijn identity, satisfied when one of the variables is geometric.

🎧 Under the Radar 65: Getting Sherlocked | Under the Radar

Listened to Under the Radar 65: Getting Sherlocked from overcast.fm

Preparing for and reacting to Apple implementing your app’s core functionality themselves.

Upshot: Cover the 3 sigma edge cases that the bigger corporation won’t bother to support.