👓 Science’s Inference Problem: When Data Doesn’t Mean What We Think It Does | New York Times

Read Science’s Inference Problem: When Data Doesn’t Mean What We Think It Does by James Ryerson (nytimes.com)
Three new books on the challenge of drawing confident conclusions from an uncertain world.
Not sure how I missed this when it came out two weeks ago, but glad it popped up in my reader today.

This has some nice overview material for the general public on probability theory and science, but given the state of research, I’d even recommend this and some of the references to working scientists.

I remember bookmarking one of the texts back in November. This is a good reminder to circle back and read it.

👓 Analysis | Trump is implicated in his attorney’s Stormy Daniels payment for the first time | Washington Post

Read Analysis | Trump is implicated in his attorney’s Stormy Daniels payment for the first time by Aaron Blake (Washington Post)
The Wall Street Journal buried the lead.
This is the type of scandal that would have completely unseated any politician just a few years ago and certainly ruined a presidency. Where has our national morality gone?

👓 Project Gutenberg blocks German users after court rules in favor of Holtzbrinck subsidiary | TeleRead

Read Project Gutenberg blocks German users after court rules in favor of Holtzbrinck subsidiary by Chris Meadows (TeleRead)
The global Internet and highly territorial real world have had a number of collisions, especially where ebook rights are concerned. The most recent such dispute involves Project Gutenberg, a well-respected public domain ebook provider—in fact, the oldest. It concerns 18 German-language books by three German authors. As a result of a German lawsuit, Project Gutenberg has blocked Germany from viewing the Gutenberg web site. The books in question are out of copyright in the United States, because at the time they passed into the public domain US copyrights were based on the period after publication rather than the author’s life. The three authors involved are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).
Some interesting thoughts on cross border intellectual property and copyright. Even if a site blocks the content, there are easy enough means of getting around it that local jurisdictions would need to enforce things locally anyway. Why bother with the intermediate step?

👓 How 4,000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino its Worst Week Ever | Physics Buzz

Read How 4,000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino its Worst Week Ever (physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com)
What happens when several thousand distinguished physicists, researchers, and students descend on the nation’s gambling capital for a conference? The answer is "a bad week for the casino"—but you'd never guess why. The year was 1986, and the American Physical Society’s annual April meeting was slated to be held in San Diego. But when scheduling conflicts caused the hotel arrangements to fall through just a few months before, the conference's organizers were left scrambling to find an alternative destination that could accommodate the crowd—and ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM grand.
Totally physics clickbait. The headline should have read: “Vegas won’t cater to physics conferences anymore because they’re too smart to gamble.”

👓 Philando Castile charity wipes out school lunch debt in district where he worked | CNN

Read Philando Castile charity wipes out school lunch debt in district where he worked (CNN)
A charity that honors the memory of the late school nutrition supervisor has erased the lunch debt of every student in public schools in the St. Paul, Minnesota, district where he worked before his death by a police officer in 2016.
A new meaning for Philanthropy.

I find it unconscionable that school districts would penalize the poor this way and prevent them from getting the services that the schools should be encouraging. This is simply morally wrong and is a prime example of a negative feedback mechanism that drags society in general down instead of improving it.

👓 Exclusive: Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast | Huffington Post

Read Exclusive: Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast by Christopher Mathias, Jenna Amatulli, and Rebecca Klein (HuffPost)
Dayanna Volitich suggests Muslims be eradicated from the earth, believes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories ... and teaches middle school social studies.
We need a whole lot more reporting like this to get people out of the dark corners of society.

👓 ‘Pure madness’: Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages | Washington Post

Read ‘Pure madness’: Dark days inside the White House as Trump shocks and rages by Philip Rucker (Washington Post)
The president has fumed about news coverage of scandals and remains furious with his attorney general, while friends worry that he is becoming too isolated.
 

📖 Read pages 164-192 of Ramona the Brave by Beverly Cleary

📖 Read pages 164-192, Chapter 9: Mr. Quimby’s Spunky Gal, of Ramona The Brave by Beverly Cleary (William Morrow and Company, , ISBN: 0-688-22015-0)

A nice capper to the story, though it felt to me that Ramona won against Mrs. Griggs because her teacher was tired.

👓 ‘Miss Minnie,’ one of Johns Hopkins University’s longest-serving employees, dies at 96 | JHU Hub

Read 'Miss Minnie,' one of Johns Hopkins University's longest-serving employees, dies at 96 (The Hub)
She came to Hopkins as a cafeteria worker in 1946, retired as assistant to the president in 2007

👓 Amazon flaw costs Apple accessory maker nearly $100k as counterfeiter takes over legitimate listing | 9to5Mac

Read Amazon flaw costs Apple accessory maker nearly $100k as counterfeiter takes over legitimate listing by Chance Miller (9to5Mac)
Amazon has come under fire in the past for its lackluster approach to handling counterfeit products. Now, the online retailer is facing a broader problem, with counterfeiters going as far as to take over a company’s legitimate product listing… BuzzFeed News highlights the problem in a report, explaining how a counterfeit maker of the popular from Elevation Labs overtook the company’s own Amazon listing.
 

📖 Murilla Gorilla and the Lost Parasol by Jennifer Lloyd

Read Murilla Gorilla and the Lost Parasol by Jennifer Lloyd (Simply Read Books)
A rainstorm has passed through Mango Market. Parrot is upset by a missing parasol at his parasol stand. It is up to Murilla, the disorganized, messy and seemingly hopeless detective to solve the case. Can she do it? Of course she wants to help her friend, but first Murilla needs to find her magnifying glass.
The world Murilla lives in its pretty consistent. We see a lot of characters and things we saw in the first book. Messy Murilla looks for a mop in her stove with with reasonable comic effect.

Here there are no footprints on the ground and it’s a good clue about what happened to the missing parasol.

Rating: 3 of 5 stars

📖 The Thank You Book by Mo Willems

Read The Thank You Book by Mo Willems (Disney-Hyperion)
Gerald is careful. Piggie is not. Piggie cannot help smiling. Gerald can. Gerald worries so that Piggie does not have to. Gerald and Piggie are best friends. In The Thank You Book!, Piggie wants to thank EVERYONE. But Gerald is worried Piggie will forget someone . . . someone important.
They’re were some interesting misdirections here with a few cute reveals. Only the sharpest reader will anticipate the last one.

How are there already 25 of these books?! It was nice to have some crossover with Willems’ other books.

Rating: 4 of 5 stars

👓 Coming Soon: Reclaim Video | bavatuesdays

Read Coming Soon: Reclaim Video by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays)
The idea of running a video rental store has been bouncing around at Reclaim Hosting for over a year now. When we started renovating the CoWork space/Reclaim Headquarters over a year ago we realized we would soon have a vacant strip mall storefront at our disposal. I started floating the idea of a video rental store to Tim, but given he was knee-deep in actually designing and building CoWork with Lauren, those discussions were postponed. At this point it was not clear how it related to anything else we already do, namely run Reclaim Hosting and CoWork—it was just a fun idea.
This is an awesome sounding idea. I’d love to hear more about it. I know that folks like Kevin Smokler and David Dylan Thomas are going to flip over it.

Despite the fact that it seems like a lot of fun, I’m curious how they’re going to make sure it doesn’t bring down the bottom line and put anything else in jeopardy. I certainly get the fun part, but the minimal break even portion doesn’t sound like it’s quite there to me.

The tough part of the physical media game is that these are magnetic tapes. While many of my 90’s VHS tapes are relatively fine, my VHS from the early 80’s are in worse shape. Tougher is having machines to play these successfully on. This post reminds me a lot of the difficulties I’ve heard from UCLA Film & Television archivists doing work on tapes themselves.

👓 We Want Your VHS! | bavatuesdays

Read We Want Your VHS! by Jim Groom (bavatuesdays)
If you have some old VHS hanging around the house, yet have gotten rid of your VCR long ago—it might be high time to let Reclaim Video take them off your hands. Rather than letting them sit around collecting dust...
Interesting…