After all that work…
2/12/2013
It seems rather silly not to have this out where people can find it 🙂
So, with no further ado, I present to you my master’s thesis on the personality perception in twitter users.
In case you hadn’t heard.
2/12/2009
I think I should start putting these daily roundups online, instead of keeping them to myself.
Science
AIDS is cured!
Two years after a stem cell transplant from a donor with AIDS immunity,
HIV remains undetectable for this guy. Sure it’s impossibly expensive,
very dangerous, and not necessarily complete. So are all first steps.
Boy instinctively play with trucks, Girls with dolls. Even chimpanzee boys and girls. It’s hardwired – not learned from our upbringing.
Cooties: an essentially part of relating to the opposite sex.
Why you sleep to remember: the first real direct insight into how the brain, changes the strength of its connections during sleep
You aren’t getting enough vitamin D. I’m definitely not.
THC is as effect as Claritin in reducing allergenic response. Is there anything it can’t do?
The Economy
How the crash will reshape america
The Goldbug variations. Paul Krugman explains why gold is not where you want your money in this depression
Obama calls in the cops on the big banks across the nation And about time too.
WTF
Toilet paper. It’s like money in these places.
I’m on break from the Convergence 08 conference , a conference on emerging technologies in Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology and Biotech.
It’s an interesting format for a conference: the morning has scheduled speakers, and the afternoons are in unconference format – if you want to present or discuss something, you show up, pick a time slot and put it on the board.
It’s crazy – there are 16 concurrent running sessions to choose from. How do you choose?
With difficulty, that’s how.
I had some reservations in regards to lumping all these different pursuits together. It seems overly pragmatic: after all, the common denominators of these emerging technologies isn’t a technical one. Artificial intelligence doesn’t (yet) have much to contribute to life extension or nanotechnology, and vice vera. The only real things these fields have in common is that they are speculative, have much less public and financial support than they deserve, and >eventually< hold promise for turning the world on it’s head – eventually.
However, so far, it has been a very good conferece, I’ve met lots of great people, and with so many different discussions set up there is plenty of opportunity for everyone to focus on whatever specific interests brought them here.
I’ll be writing up my notes at my other blog, when I have a moment to get them down.
This year’s voting stickers.
10/12/2008
This makes it all very clear: the economic crisis in plain (but very entertaining) english.
10/4/2008
Things that are going on right now are very complicated. Anyone who thinks they completely understand is kidding themselves. That said, it is possible to get a general handle on things, though unfortunately, television and even NPR, until now, have got the problem ass backward. I want all my friends to hear this show. Because you will enjoy it, and come away from it the wiser. And, right now, you need to know this stuff.
The ‘bailout’ won’t help anyone outside of financial institutions, mostly overseas. It was done under threat from the Chinese government, and was effective at resolving or delaying the problem as if it had been flushed down a toilet. Incidentally, it was just as effective in restoring ‘liquidity’ or make ‘credit’ available. The problem on Wall Street is a crisis of trust, nor some confabulated financial concept.
In any case, here is the clearest, most concise and yet comprehensive presentation yet on the problem. It’s also entertaining: This American Life is a priceless institution. Let Ira Glass’s podcast take you through the economic crisis and the ultimate solution we require.
This is both scary and heartbreaking. People just up and walk away. I hope they are ok, wherever they are.
EDIT: I’m making a bit of a habit of retracting my words, but this time, I’m pretty happy about it. Congress didn’t pass the bill this time. Time will tell if the end of the world is actually at hand, but my gut feeling is that a bunch of people – average minded, decent, reasonable people, with an emphasis on the average of mind – really don’t know how the economy works, haven’t taken the time to find out, because they are busy being politicians, and got blindsided by a couple of much smarter, yet very deluded people, who ought to know better into making a stupendous blunder, in the face of something even more, colossally, gigantically bad.
So, there is going to be another attempt shortly to do this, but the main thing that we should be all doing is getting ready for the inevitable. However, since we are guessing on a continuum, however bad you >reasonably< think it might get, keep in mind that chances are you are wrong by a bit, either up or down. So, prepare accordingly for the most reasonable, worst case scenario.
Crap! Now there are THREE hurricanes on their way to NOLA, with another forming on the african coast.
