👓 Why Microformats? Owning My Reviews | Aaron Parecki
Back in October, I wrote a bunch of short mini-reviews on products and services that I use regularly. I published them all on a single page called "Favorite Things". In the past, I've written a couple of reviews on Amazon and then copied them to my website as a blog post. I decided it was time to be...
👓 Guest Post: In Praise of Globes | MathBabe
The decision by the Boston school system to replace maps of the world using the Mercator projection with maps using the Gall-Peters projection has garnered a lot of favorable press from outlets such as NPR, The Guardian, Newsweek, and many others.
Checkin Lacy Park
Checkin Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles
Checkin Basin 141
👓 Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware | Motherboard
A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.
🎧 Sacha Baron Cohen interview on WTF with Marc Maron
You know Borat. You know Bruno. You know Ali G. But you probably don’t know much about Sacha Baron Cohen. The man himself sits down with Marc in the garage to talk about what goes into bringing such rich comedic characters to life, why he was drawn to comedy in the first place, and what’s next, with his new movie The Brothers Grimsby on the horizon.
Checkin UCLA Mathematical Sciences Building
Checkin Panda Express
Checkin Westwood Village
Checkin Public Parking
🎧 Flip the Script | Invisibilia (NPR)
Psychology has a golden rule: If I am warm, you are usually warm. If I am hostile, you are too. But what happens if you flip the script and meet hostility with warmth? It's called "noncomplementary behavior" — a mouthful, but a powerful concept, and very hard to execute. Alix and Hanna examine three attempts to pull it off: during a robbery, a terrorism crisis and a dating dry spell.
Wow! Just wow! This concept is certainly worth thinking about in greater depth.
I loved the story of police and harassment; it is particularly interesting given the possible changes we could make in the world using these techniques. It shows what some kindness and consideration can do to reshape the world.
👓 Eagles point the way | Jeremy Cherfas
I rant regularly when people abuse Latin binomials by adding an unnecessary article in front of them, like people who refer to "the acanthomyops latipes". As I said at the time:
While I happily refer to the Skidelskys, I would never dream of calling them the Edward Skidelsky and the Robert Skidelsky. How hard is it to use a Latin name as a name?
Now I have a new term with which to beat people over the head. Thanks to a very informative article by Geoffrey K. Pullum over at Language Log (Glenn Frey and the band with the anomalous name) I now know not only that the band was called Eagles, not The Eagles, and also that such a thing -- "which takes no the" -- is called a strong proper name.
P.s. The comments on the Language Log post reveal that many bands, some of which I've even heard of, apparently have strong proper names, Talking Heads being my favourite.
👓 Picking nits is part of the good life | Jeremy Cherfas
I started writing this back in November 2013, and put it aside until I had read the Skidelskys' book. I haven't finished yet, but ...
How strange to hear J.M. Keynes himself on the radio, telling us in his clipped tones how in 100 years time we would be eight times richer than we were then, how we would work a 15-hour week, how "Human beings would be more like the 'lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin'." A little extract of Keynes talking about his essay Economic Possiblities for our Grandchildren, written in 1930, ended Laurie Taylor's interview with Robert Skidelsky on Thinking Allowed.
I skate around economics; I'm fascinated by it, although I have no formal training, and I do see how the allocation of scarce resources is the great problem of life. I also feel, as a biologist, that so much of what passes for sound economics is astonishingly naive, no matter how complex it may seem. Bad-mouthing Malthus, for example, just seems fundamentally stupid to me. Skidelsky, as befits a biographer of Keynes, was talking about the idea of enough, rehearsing ideas from his book How Much is Enough?: Money and the good life, co-written with his son Edward Skidelsky.