The magician and actor, who died Saturday, had his final acting role on the Amazon series.
Month: November 2018
👓 The Biggest Scam in Publishing? | Good e-reader
The digital publishing revolution is so old that a great many reading consumers might not be able to envision a time when they couldn’t simply pop online to order a book, download a new title from their favorite author, or use an app or PDF for supplemental book material. eBooks and digital publishing have simply become a part of everyday life for many people.
Nothing worthwhile here, but it’s a great click-bait headline isn’t it?
📺 "House of Cards" Chapter 70 | Netflix
Directed by Thomas Schlamme. With Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Diane Lane, Campbell Scott. Claire allows her enemies to think she's incapacitated as they plot to remove her from office. Doug's investigation leads him to uncover a secret.
The set up on this is a bit drawn out, I’m hoping it pays off in the next few episodes.
📺 "House of Cards" Chapter 69 | Netflix
Directed by Ernest R. Dickerson. With Robin Wright, Michael Kelly, Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson. As a crisis mounts in Syria, Russian President Viktor Petrov wants to make a deal with Claire. Questions arise about Tom Yates's whereabouts.
The plot isn’t as tight as it has been in prior seasons. They’re spending a bit too much time building something to a peak, I’m not sure I’m as engaged as I should be as a result of the plot structure here.
👓 Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith Wins Miss. Senate Runoff After Racially Charged Campaign | NPR
Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith won the Senate runoff in Mississippi by a margin of 54-to-46 percent, according to the Associated Press, overcoming a series of missteps that brought the state's dark history of racism and violence to the forefront. Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the Senate earlier this year after Republican Thad Cochran stepped down because of health reasons, defeated former congressman and agriculture secretary Mike Espy. Neither candidate had won the requisite 50 percent in the first round of the special election on Election Day. She is the first woman elected to the Senate from Mississippi.
Even if she weren’t a virulent racist, she’s a horrible pick because she simply doesn’t seem to be able to think or operate for herself without being propped up by a staff behind her.
Too often I’m just saddened at what America is producing.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: The Plan to Discredit the Florida Recount | New York Times
The partisan battle over several close races risks damaging public confidence in the state’s election systems.
🎧 ‘The Daily’: A Conversation With a Freshman Democrat | New York Times
We spoke with Abigail Spanberger, a recently elected congresswoman from Virginia, about her first days in the Capitol and what it means to be a Democrat today.
Last week on “The Daily,” we looked at the campaign of a candidate who embodied the Democratic strategy for winning the House. This week, she arrived in Washington.
Abigail Spanberger a former C.I.A. officer, was elected as a Democrat in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. Listen to last week’s episode of “The Daily” about how the Democrats flipped the House, with a spotlight on Ms. Spanberger’s victory in a reliably conservative district.
The incoming group of House Democrats is the most diverse, most female freshman class in history. Members of the group also have major differences in ideology, which may present a challenge for Democratic leaders trying to unify their new House majority.
🔖 Look-and-say sequence | Wikipedia
In mathematics, the look-and-say sequence is the sequence of integers beginning as follows:
1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221, 1113213211, ... (sequence A005150 in the OEIS).
To generate a member of the sequence from the previous member, read off the digits of the previous member, counting the number of digits in groups of the same digit. For example:
1 is read off as "one 1" or 11.
11 is read off as "two 1s" or 21.
21 is read off as "one 2, then one 1" or 1211.
1211 is read off as "one 1, one 2, then two 1s" or 111221.
111221 is read off as "three 1s, two 2s, then one 1" or 312211. The look-and-say sequence was introduced and analyzed by John Conway.[1]
👓 Why suicide is falling around the world, and how to bring it down more | The Economist
Urbanisation, fewer forced marriages and more curbs on the means of self-destruction
👓 Special measures: well-being | Economist Espresso
How should society’s progress be measured? GDP tends to be used as a proxy. But its imperfections are widely known: it focuses on market-oriented production, for instance, and ignores how the gains from that output are distributed. Today experts gather in Seoul to discuss work on alternative measures led by Joseph Stiglitz and Jean-Paul Fitoussi, two eminent economists, and commissioned by the OECD, a group of mostly rich countries. Their report recommends adding a number of indicators to policymakers’ dashboards, including measures of inequality, environmental sustainability, happiness and trust. Economic insecurity—such as income buffers available to people when trouble strikes—also matters. If governments had considered insecurity during the 2007-08 financial crisis, they would have provided their economies with more support, and continued to do so even after GDP started to recover. But, as the report says, “what you measure affects what you do.”
👓 MSNBC declines to allow Sarah Sanders to dictate its programming | Washington Post
It had been nearly a month since Sarah Sanders had held what was once known as a “daily” briefing. So when the White House press secretary — along with White House officials Larry Kudlow and John Bolton — took the podium on Tuesday afternoon, cable-news channels jumped right on the proceedings. Well, most of them, anyway. While CNN and Fox News carried the tripartite briefing from the very beginning, MSNBC stayed away — until it had blown off the entire session.
This may be some of the best news I’ve heard in a year. I hope that there’s something to be learned from the experience.
