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Very interesting background in the last link, thank you. Informative comments in a discussion, in response to a question, are also often my friends.

This is what's interesting to me about one argument in favor of GM. On the one hand, the author seems to argue (here and in her books) that GM is merely an extension of what farmers have been doing for ages, and that the type tools and techniques of the work done to change organisms are irrelevant.

On the other hand, GM crops are patentable, whereas hybridized crops are not (is this correct?). This is the heart of the economic argument: Farmers can buy the seed or not. But they can't produce it themselves. So the tools and techniques aren't irrelevant.

It's certainly _possible_ to have it both ways (as we do now), but this way of parsing the issue seems to me neither economically nor technologically (in the sense of patentability) advantageous to agriculture in the long term. I'd prefer not to get into a situation where the only economically sensible way to produce food is to buy seed from one source. And that's the rational choice for a company like Monsanto: increase shareholder value by becoming the only economical source of seed.

I've been seeing this book pop up all over the place for the past year or so. It seems to be the go-to recommendation from friends to other friends who are frustrated at not finding relief from chronic pain after trying many other treatments.

I haven't read the book. All I can say is that the results, from my perspective, have been mixed. Some people who have tried it and not seen their pain alleviated blame themselves for not getting to the root of their stress. I haven't heard of anyone's pain disappearing in 2 weeks. I've heard people recommend it for all kinds of pain, not just muscle and back pain. Claims about its efficacy seem to have broadened over time.

The book is set at a very good "it can't hurt to try" price point, and the word of mouth marketing makes it very appealing to people who feel desperate.

I am a random person. My experiences are anecdotal.

It looks like the document is included in the article in a PDF viewer. Sometimes those don't show up because of ad-blockers.

The Examiner does tend to cherry-pick, and it's definitely worth reviewing the document. I searched the doc for "facebook" and it looks to me like the broader goal was engagement, not "likes" as an end-all. They were working off the assumption that more likes meant more engagement, and during that campaign, people started to realize and point out that it wasn't happening. And to that end it appears to be a waste of $630k.

But it's not the case that they just blindly wanted more likes because it feels good. (The article doesn't say that, but a lot of people think about "likes" that way). Facebook and Twitter are legit ways to reach international audiences, for example, to disseminate propaganda / information (depending on how you lean).

Hey, likewise! Unfortunately there's no kickstarter for better bullying utilities. At least this does things that they might also want to do? Calculating: still for nerds. But imagine being able to check your notifications while holding someone's head under the faucet.

Well, true, that's what we've grown up with: handles that are clever and reflect something about us (or deflect everything about us). But who wants to use john.basketball.expert@gmail.com as a professional contact address? Unless your full name is John Basketball Expert, which is sort of what I'm getting at. I wouldn't change my kid's middle/surname to Basketball Expert, but I'd consider something like Emily Clementine Raptor Mitchell. Seems silly now, but I like the idea that my child could turn on and off her searchability, or at least tune it up or down.

Two namespace wars in the email address: the part before @, which is where we fight over who gets to be "johnsmith", and the domain, where we fight to get either johnsmith.com, the most neutral, popular name like gmail.com, or a short, memorable, personal, pronounceable, and easy to spell domain.

And then we pitch headfirst into the coming TLD clusterfuck! It all makes for fun times and cash money.

The namespace market is growing all the time. Something to consider when naming your kids.

Brooks's entire business model is getting people to respond to what he writes, however stupid it is. "Trolling for money" (a trite observation, but there it is). It's unfortunate that even sound rebuttals like this one feed into the cycle that makes him a successful columnist.

That's a good soundbite (honestly), but it doesn't jibe with my experience.

I think this campaign largely misses the more interesting problem, which is that we got to this point despite the fact that 1984 is a bestselling cornerstone of literature. It's been required reading in high schools for years and years.

Are the representatives on the receiving end of this campaign going to slap their heads and go "Oh golly, I never thought of that"?

There's no easy way to get through to people who think the benefits of ubiquitous surveillance outweigh the costs. They know 1984, and they don't see themselves in the role of big brother. Throwing this book at them isn't going to change that.

Edit: "There's no easy way" suggests that this is meant as a solution, which obviously isn't the campaigner's intention. What I mean is that I don't think this will have an impact other than to make the recipients think their constituents are oversimplifying the issue, a la Godwin's law.

Whenever something happens that people want to explain away, some new technical term pops out into the public discourse. It's impossible to predict what the next phrase will be, but the pattern is consistent and it's always interesting.

You take a phrase with a legitimate meaning in a technical context and say it over and over in a non-technical context. It makes everything slippery. People have to jump through mental hoops to integrate the new terminology, and you get all this wiggle room to nitpick whether some argument applies to it. You can claim it means something technical and specific if you need to, and continue to use it vaguely when you want it the other way.

I don't have a ready list of the most recent ones I've noticed, but "weapons of mass destruction," "enhanced interrogation," and "enemy combatants" are some good oldies. "Wardrobe malfunction" too.

Anyway, I never would have guessed "metadata" would join the ranks.

Audio of Stewart Brand's recent Long Now Foundation talk about reviving extinct species:

http://longnow.org/seminars/02013/may/21/reviving-extinct-sp...

A subject near and dear to my heart. In college I was briefly obsessed with cross-linguistic adverb ordering.

I wish middle school science included some linguistics. The empirical data are already in our heads, so it's a great vehicle for teaching the scientific method -- look at data, make a hypothesis, check its predictions against other data (no equipment needed!) and refine it until it encompasses the counter-examples.

That's true, but the comparison I'm getting at is the learning curve. The process of consuming an algorithm or procedure is more of a tabs-vs-semicolons thing, a language war.

I mention editors because the arguments about learning one often have to do with the trade-off between expert efficiency and expressiveness and the painful learning curve (for many). And because that's honestly what the discussion reminds me of, whether or not it's a perfect match :)

The discussion here reminds me of the longstanding debate over editors like vim/emacs vs (whatever you want to call the other editors). Or semicolons vs indentation, to make a slightly more "reading" oriented comparison.

There's obviously a difficult learning curve for many people, but others who are already proficient argue that the rewards of learning standard music notation are worth an extended effort, if that's what it takes.

The thing I've noticed most about sheet music as I'm learning it is that it's compressed. It uses different symbols and techniques to say the same thing in a smaller space, and reuses space and symbols more efficiently by applying modifier symbols at the beginning of the staff and elsewhere. It allows notes on lines and spaces instead of just spaces or just lines. Tighter, smaller, more on the page. Changes in pitch can also be indicated by modifier codes next to the notes, sharp and flat, allowing further combinations with only 2 more symbols.

So I have to learn to decompress the information at the same time I'm interpreting it. Tricky! I do stop and wonder if this compression algorithm is the right fit for humans. I don't buy the argument that continuity with the volume of existing sheet music is a good reason to never develop an alternative. But any alternative needs to be much better on some metric that outweighs continuity. Otherwise we should just keep hacking the learning process with color coding and mnemonics and whatnot.

It's funny, I was talking to a friend about my struggle to learn sheet music and music theory, and he said "It seems hard at first but you'll start to get it pretty soon." And I said "Yeah, it's sort of like math in that way." To which he replied "oh, I don't know about that, I can't do math. I've never been good at it."

That is fantastic.

That was on The West Wing.

This has nothing to do with parodies or hacker news threads. What's the point?

Is that the inverse? Would all programmers with side projects necessarily be worse than the programmers rdouble knows who don't have side projects?

Why does that matter?

What's the right thing?

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/19892/opening-website-...

No, problem exacerbated. You have 3 camps of people here. One camp expects to only open new tabs when they choose to. Another wants (and sometimes expects) links to open new tabs always. The third camp prefers to open new tabs for "external" links and not for "internal" links, and would like to see this behavior become a convention (expectation) as well.

Leaving aside the problem of what counts as an "external" link (is a link from Gawker to Deadspin "external"? Depends on how the user perceives the relationship between those sites), you're still just muddying up the web's UI conventions. That's what "default" link behavior is: a UI convention.

Not knowing where a page is going to open on the screen is a huge problem for users. Requiring them to learn why one kind of link replaces the content in the tab they're currently looking at and another kind of link opens in a new tab only makes it harder for them to "engage" with the websites they're trying to use.

"Well HackerNews, what say you? I dare you to increase your traffic and engagement."

HackerNews [sic], I dare you to allow your users to choose how they want to open new links, even if the mouse/keyboard mechanism for opening them in new tabs isn't completely 100% intuitive to some subset of web users.

I dare you to ignore any so-called "SEO" who thinks he's discovered an incredible "engagement" technique that's really just another tired way of tricking people into staying on your website.

I dare you to consult the relevant RFCs and acknowledge that the behavior of target="_blank" isn't news to anyone here.

I dare you to recognize that not every single thing on the internet has to "optimized" to get more traffic, and that "engagement" isn't just about people clicking on links.

I dare you to consider the possibility that we now have a situation where, thanks to the SEO frenzy of the past few years, there is no "correct" default behavior for links anymore, and it might be better to just let the user have control over it via their browser preferences.

I dare you to tell the world which way you prefer to open links and why it is better.

What say you? WHAT SAY YOU?

Maybe the top prize could be that everyone has to read Difference and Dominance.

Learning about Arrow's theorem definitely changed the way I think about elections in the US. It also changed the way I think about election news coverage. I used to be an ardent "horse race news" hater. I still am, in terms of how utterly it dominates election news, but now I see some utility in it as well.

Arrow and these others have focused how I look at the game-theoretic underpinnings of elections and the importance of being up to speed on exactly how candidates and interested parties are crafting strategies around the complexities built into the game. When people conflate the "message" of the candidate with the strategy (which is always) I still get irritated. I have a tendency toward partisanship and that kind of thing clouds my judgment. But the day-in day-out workings of the campaigns and PACs are more interesting to me now, because they shed light on what's fundamentally "broken" (from my point of view) in the underlying system, as opposed to what I simply find distasteful or disappointing.

Math!

Well, to be fair, the load rating on this metaphor is only 10 comments +/- 2.

I used to love the quiet car. I appreciated the serenity and the opportunity to listen to just the noise of the train. But the hostile shushing (2-3 times near me per trip, usually) started to bother me more than the transgressions. I began to worry constantly, checking and re-checking to make sure I had my phone on silent mode. Now I sit one car back and relax. The quiet car is good for people who can deal with it, and that's fine with me.

Hmm. Stay away from words that carry connotations? That's what words do. Narrative journalism exists because we are storytellers, culturally if not innately.

Producing tools that help analyze and interpret media narratives is a good idea, but it's also a hard problem that doesn't show signs of being eased by crowdsourcing or noun/verb extraction. Fact-checking has already been completely politicized: What's bare fact to one person is obvious bias to another. You can certainly classify bias and hyperbole from your point of view. But even in peer-reviewed scientific publications you find bitter fights over "theory-loaded" paradigm biases.

Alongside this I'd like to know what you think journalists do well?

Edit: For a sociolinguistic perspective, see Lakoff (both of them). On the representation of "fact," Ian Hacking has an excellent book, "Representing and Intervening" which looks at Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc.

Can you be more specific about which case you're referring to?

They're relevant because security is social as well as technical. If you want the systems that your friends or relatives use to be more secure, then you can't just dismiss someone who may be implementing those systems. Okay, fine, if they're just insulting you, keep moving.

I responded to dignify it because I thought that in spite of the invective, there's a valid point about whether the article is helpful to the people it's meant to reach. The title is needlessly insulting to the reader. The tl;dr is pretty useless. You don't learn to do things right by cargo culting a mantra that you don't understand. The content of the tl;dr should be the block quote starting under "That said, what modes should you be using?"

Yes, you're right, this is actually pretty irrelevant to the content of the article and the question of whether a particular system is secure. I think it connects to a larger issue about security education that's lurking out there, though, and the article is clearly meant to educate.