A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.
Reads, Listens
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
🎧 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.
I haven’t heard or seen any extended interviews with Sacha Baron Cohen. While this one goes a bit overboard on some of the making of his antics and films, there is some great personal background about how he got into comedy. Interestingly, he gets into an extended conversation about the theory of bouffon and clowning. It would have been nice if they detoured into 16th century commedia dell’arte, but you can’t have everything now can you?
🎧 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.
Reminds me of people using the hoi polloi…
👓 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.
👓 Analysis: Why Google has become a threat to sovereign law | Privacy Surgeon
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lashed out at Google, accusing the advertising giant of collusion with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the US State Department.
Assange believes that Google has entered into a partnership with the US Administration in which the company acts as a foreign policy enabler, influencing overseas governments and helping the White House achieve its global policy objectives. In the process Google has formed strong operational and policy bonds with America’s secretive three-letter agencies that go well beyond those of other companies.
👓 Candidates for GCC board of trustees disclose campaign finances | LA Times
In the race for a seat on the Glendale Community College board of trustees, three candidates are competing for a seat to represent District 4 in the college's first district-based election.
Two of those candidates — Yvette Vartanian Davis and Rondi Werner — are nearly head-to-head in what they have raised and spent on their campaigns, so far, according to the most recent campaign disclosure statements.
District 4 represents all Glendale neighborhoods south of East Colorado Street, including Adams Hill.
👓 Fans with typewriters | Pelican Crossing
Wendy M. Grossman (pelicancrossing.net)Yesterday in Cambridge, the veteran journalist Charles Arthur held an event at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) that asked this:
Has the public been well served by technology journalism?
Arthur assembled a smart panel of long-serving folks: Andrew Brown, Carole Cadwalladr; and Ingrid Lunden. The notable thing they all had in common: none are specifically "technology journalists". Arthur first covered tennis, computing, and science. Brown made his name writing about Sweden and religious affairs. Cadwalladr is a generalist features writer for The Observer (part of the Guardian. Lunden came to TechCrunch from telecoms and art. I did The Skeptic, and began writing for computer magazines via a personal contact.
Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I’ve gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It’s a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.
Continue reading Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber
👓 If you do this and only this, today will be a good day. | John Henry Müller
How I took back my day with a simple text document.
The very first thing each morning (after coffee but before email) I write three sentences in plain text then save this document to my desktop. I call it today.txt.
It is the only file I keep on my desktop to ensure it stays in my purview. The format is simple and looks something like this ...
If nothing else, today I am going to ___________.
I am going to do this by ______ then _____ then ______.
If I do this and only this, today will be a good day.
👓 WordPress Collaborative Editing | Ma.tt
I’m really excited about the new Google Docs integration that just launched — basically it builds a beautiful bridge between what is probably the best collaborative document editor on the planet right now, Google’s, and let’s you one-click bring a document there into a WordPress draft with a...
🎧 Criminal: Finding Sarah and Philip
In 2005, Teri Knight drove 650 miles on midwestern roads through Ohio, Indiana, Iowa and Illinois, pleading with the public to help her do what law enforcement and the FBI had not been able to: find the remains of her children Sarah and Philip Gehring. An Ohio woman read about Teri Knight’s search in her local paper, and decided she would try to help.
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A short, but mildly odd drama. You know in advance how the story is sure to turn out because someone is bothering to tell it, but it’s just tenuous enough to make you wonder if that’s where it’s really going…
In praise of quinoa | The Economist
The spread of exotic grains is evidence that globalisation works
How to Curate Better Podcast Feeds
Originally, I just browsed for new stuff by scrolling through the top picks list on the iTunes Podcasts app. But that was time consuming. After trying out the search functionality on the app, I wished I could search a little better. I decided to look for other resources that I could use to further dial in my selections. Turns out there are some pretty good websites/apps out there to help you do just that. Here are a few of the best ones I’ve found.
My thoughts on what the article leaves out:
For podcast discovery, I love using Huffduffer. It has a simple browser bookmarklet which allows you to bookmark audio to listen to later and creates iTunes or other feeds you can quickly and easily subscribe to on most of the major podcatchers.
Even better it allows you to search for topics and people. Almost everything on the site (including individuals and even the lists of people you’re following) has audio RSS feed as well as other subscription services that you can subscribe directly to. Love Elvis? Search, subscribe, and listen.
As an example, want to know what I’ve been listening to? Check out my feed where you can see a list, listen to it directly, or even subscribe.
🎧 Criminal, Episode 61: Vanish (2/17/17)
People have faked death to escape criminal convictions, debts, and their spouses. In 2007, a man named Amir Vehabovic faked his death just to see who showed up at the funeral (answer: only his mom). It’s an appealing soap-opera fantasy, but actually disappearing requires an incredible amount of planning. How do you obtain a death certificate, a believable new identity, or enough money to start a new life? Today — the answers to those questions, stories of fake death gone wrong, and a man who spends his life bringing back the dead.
Brings up a lot of interesting “what if” questions. I’ll bet that if web browsers opened up some of their data, the data exhaust one spews on a daily basis could be easily used to track one down.