zipdog

Not just OSS, though, if you read the history of new products or discoveries the same pattern regularly occurs.

Samantha was an obscure name until 1964:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2010/7/samantha-the-u...

Its not a parody, but it deliberately uses the form of the Daily Mail. However, instead of delivering the ephemeral and trivial content of the DM, it uses that form to deliver content (intended to be) more potent.

I think one reason for using the DM's form is to highlight how empty the content of a online newspaper is, when compared to something thoughtful dressed up in the same design.

Good point. I was thinking in terms of workforce, influence and global reach, but Goog and Apple have that too. (Made edit to original)

As there's more choice, people seem to be more interested in what others are doing, so when something gets some traction it can grow very big very fast. (And this game had some help at the start, it seems).

If it wasn't Flappy Bird, it would be something else. But this game does have the key elements: simple, accessible, shareable.

Harmful to a few internet companies, but beneficial to other US companies. The leaks have identified that the NSA conducts industrial espionage to the benefit of US companies.

That said, I disagree with the grandparent's point that Corporation literally are the government. Instead, the need for large media budgets for re-election campaigns drives the political process, which makes corporations and politicians cosy.

I don't think there is a necessary contradiction in "favoring access" to government-promoted or funded arts and sciences, as well as "favoring access" to full disclosure of surveillance programs and desiring effective judicial oversight, and not "favoring access" when the government wants to have a large amount of data about the lives of its citizens.

The current surveillance is being performed without oversight and in secret: so a "favoring access" stance aligns with wanting full disclosure of the surveillance, and a judicial process that allows for oversight of what is being surveilled and when.

Within the surveillance issue is a desire for privacy (which is not "favouring access" to information, as you note), which I think comes from two issues: that the government is a public institution for the public good and so it has less expectation of privacy than an individual. and also that there is a power imbalance between what the ability to act on information between governments and other entities, and an individual.

Publicly-funded research that the public is denied access to is an issue of both government openness and power imbalance.

Government promotion of the arts and sciences (which is the reason for copyright) being used to unduly deny the public access to aspects arts and sciences falls into both as well, IMHO.

It would be interesting to know what the questions were (or even what genre) - to get a better sense of the significance of getting them right.

Unfortunately there is no indication in this article, or the abstract of the paper, and the journal article itself requires a subscription.

What is more troubling is not that so few of these results results are reproducible, but that it appears almost no-one is trying to reproduce the results of earlier studies. The ability of the scientists who wrote the paper to even get access to the resources necessary to try and reproduce the results is limited.

I'm reminded of Feymann's Cargo Cult Science:

"I was shocked to hear of an experiment done at the big accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory, where a person used deuterium. In order to compare his heavy hydrogen results to what might happen with light hydrogen he had to use data from someone else's experiment on light hydrogen, which was done on different apparatus. When asked why, he said it was because he couldn't get time on the program (because there's so little time and it's such expensive apparatus) to do the experiment with light hydrogen on this apparatus because there wouldn't be any new result. And so the men in charge of programs at NAL are so anxious for new results, in order to get more money to keep the thing going for public relations purposes, they are destroying--possibly--the value of the experiments themselves, which is the whole purpose of the thing. It is often hard for the experimenters there to complete their work as their scientific integrity demands."

For anyone who hasn't read it, the whole thing is excellent http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

Cornering the market in a useless item in order to drive up its price? Reminds me of the time Porsche cornered the market in VW shares and squeezed the short-sellers: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/32...

I agree. But I think countries can be a useful proxy if they aren't all, say, Western European, or Carribean.

The big culture zones IMHO are Americas: North, Central, South and Carribbean; Africa: Southern, Western, Eastern, Northern; Europe: Western, Mediterranean, Eastern; Asia: Middle East, India, South-East, China, Central, Japan/Korea; Pacific: Islands.

Obviously personal perspective will divide or agglomerate those, but its a rough guide.

I've been with an EA studio for the last five months and met with people from a dozen other EA studios and like you toxic is not a word I would use to describe the EA I have seen. Quite the opposite

Research indicates its may not be a placebo, eg: "Gluten Causes Gastrointestinal Symptoms in Subjects Without Celiac Disease: A Double-Blind Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial" (The American Journal of Gastroenterology 106, 508-514 (March 2011))

A potential contributing factor for the recent rise might the use of drugs such as be Accutane/Isotretinoin. 2 million US people have taken Accutane since 1982, and recently it has been linked to intestinal/bowel issues (including increased sensitivity to gluten).

I like DFW's quote. I also like a point made by Nick Hornby in 'A long way down' that sometimes it is not because they don't want to live anymore, its because they want to live so much, but are being prevented from living by things beyond their control.

The "long tail" on tools is very true, and something that took me a while to learn. I used to think I could get away with a smaller toolset of more general tools, and to just 'wing it' by using them creatively to solve the problem. But tools are a bit like OO classes: its better to do one job completely right than a dozen jobs not quite right.

Yesterday a friend explained the physiological reasons behind 25 minute breaks: basically the muscles (including eye muscles) go into a different state of relaxed-tension and its generally not good for them to be in that state while the body is sitting-looking.

There's also the issue of the effort required to concentrate on a task, which gives diminishing returns as you extend it beyond ~25 minutes without break.

However a mental flow state (what you seem to describe) requires little to no concentration effort and so can yield great returns over the time spent. The tradeoff is that the body is in a less-than-desirable muscular situation for a prolonged time - but I'm guessing the damage there is not so significant if 8 hour flow sessions are not a daily habit.

tl;dr: the 25 minute break thing is probably a good general guide, but shouldn't stop you pulling an 8 hour session if you are absorbed and productive

There's two big problems I can see with your argument that we need more consumption.

But first, I agree that consumption is one of the factors that has helped raised the standard of living worldwide.

The first problem is the broken windows fallacy. Just because buying cheap t-shirts to throw out generates a lot of beneficial economic traffic doesn't mean that its not very wasteful. The 27 extra t-shirts being thrown out each year require a substantial amount of resources to produce: if redirected elsewhere that might be another space shuttle, or something else slightly grander than a bin full of discarded linen. (Of course some of it gets trickled down to other countries to provide more clothes).

But the bigger problem is the idea that the rest of the world only lives because America consumes. This is like a fable of an island with 50 people. A dozen fished each day, a bunch grew crops, etc, etc.. and from the hard work of all of these 20% was gathered and the final person consumed it. Without that final person, the demand for all those goods would go and the entire economy would suffer. Everyone else would have much less work to do.

Why would any group of people happily put up with one of them 'doing their share' by consuming, consuming, consuming while all the others work to provide? In the short term its due to stability emerging from the historical processes that led us to this point. And also the hard and soft power of the US. But its not an endearing quality.

I find this an appropriate comment by Hofstadter, in the Intro to 'Godel Escher Bach', on the gender of the Tortoise:

The Tortoise turns out never to have been attributed either gender. But when I first read it, the question never entered my mind. This was clearly a he-tortoise. After all, an author only introduces a female character for some special reason, right? Whereas a male character in a neutral context needs no raison d'etre, a female does. And so, given no clue as to the Tortoise's sex, I unthinkingly and uncritically envisaged it as a male. Thus does sexism silently pervade well-meaning but susceptible brains.

Trustworthy and Automatic (for the link shortening) do not combine well.

At least the bit.ly service means that the traffic can be gathered and analysed (and presumably those links disabled) to get data about spam clicks.

The hwy exit differs from place to place. In Canada there's an angled edge to indicate which side the exit is on. But I'm guessing that most places have some system that subtly indicates which side, excepting, as you say, older signs

The oceans are already absorbed enormous amounts of atmospheric CO2, and it's messing up marine ecosystems by changing pH levels, among other things. It's a major cause of coral loss and possibly of jellyfish population growth. The reason IMO, for fighting things tooth and nail is that the systems we are dealing with are complex and interconnected, sort of like the world economy - which has billions of dollars of modeling yet still can't predict effects of simple changes. Major changes in any ocean system will have unpredictable effects in others.

There's been a variety of papers using MRI scans to show the brain restructuring itself during learning. This takes time. Mathematics and CS deal with abstraction upon abstraction, as well as counter-intuitive systems (negative numbers, unreal numbers, infinity just as a start), both of which I would suspect require more intense rewiring. I've taught CS to English grads, and entire classes can be spent trying to establish a single, simple (to me) concept.

But theresdefinitely more effective techniques than just exposure and time. Finding the smallest new knowledge beyond the students current (ie one thing at a time) can make a big difference. As does finding the right metaphor from within their current concepts, when adding a new one. But such things are harder to scale, being student centric, and most educations rely on some amount of scaling

One of the difficulties for a society with large numbers of unemployed is that the consumer and media culture creates aspirational needs: people want stuff, and since its not being given to them and they can't earn the money to buy it, they become frustrated. Drugs are one escape from this problem, as is attainment of a higher consciousness (that you don't really need stuff to be happy). But it seems that many people avoid the first (to addictive levels) without having the second, and so end up frustrated and angry.

I tried that experiment, and the first couple of years it was about 50/50, but most recently almost everyone who posted did so on the FB birthday date. I think theyv'e come to rely on the Facebook reminders.

It was also interesting to see the cognitive dissonance from some posts: "I'm pretty sure it was your birthday next week, but Facebook says its this week, so Happy Birthday".

I think Nascar uses this system to discourage undervaluing entries: owners declare a value for their car, and Nascar has the right to buy the car at that valuation. They would only do this if the car was under by a significant margin, so there's a huge incentive to give a fair estimate for the car.

Its also a little similar to a system used to resolve splitting a 50/50 owned company: the person who wants to buy out the other partner must first give the price they'll pay, and then the second partner must choose between buying them out at that price, or selling their share.

I recall a successful 'highest prime' search using a system that checked numbers of the form 2^n - 1 (or something like that)

When Google did a massive analysis of hard-drive failures they also didn't publish manufacturer names, because they felt that it would tarnish the company name when it might just be a production run

You mean like if http://www.factcheck.org/about/ was instant?

We know that, and they know that, but its still crucial to keep up the mechanisms of being honest,etc.

Consider the jewellery chain in the UK that sold cheap junk. Customers knew it, and the company knew, but everything was profitable until the CEO explicitly said the wares were junk. Then the sales went into free-fall.

In Sweden there was a 30th February 1712