CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-23 19:43:27 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

A counter-intuitive manifestation of a zero-one law: according to computer models. everyone who was alive in 1000BCE 3000 BCE is either an ancestor of everyone alive today (including people in extremely remote and isolated communities), or else an ancestor of nobody alive today; furthermore, someone alive as recently as 1000BCE is also the ancestor of everyone alive today.

This seems unbelievable until you realise that with each generation, anyone who is a descendant of the original person will propagate that property to slightly more than two people in the next generation on average.  This birth-death process either extinguishes early on, or else ignites and grows exponentially until it covers most of the world's population after a couple dozen generations; and then all the isolated holdouts eventually get "infected" through one or two migrants.... more »

2013-05-23 19:13:44 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

"There are opportunities in education in servicing the poor in the US and building a company in Asia — not in selling to the middle class in the US."

2013-05-23 16:55:31 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

It is showtime for +Eric Weinstein. Show 'em what you got, my remarkable friend! 

2013-05-16 13:32:07 (3 comments, 9 reshares, 14 +1s)

"One of the most common dismissals of those trying to make the world a better place is ‘get real’. Ironic, given the complete distortion of reality that governments and corporations are creating for us today. Our beef is horse, our horses are on steroids, our money is debt, and our public services are private. Daily life seems to consist of a Mad Hatters Tea Party where people are sipping imaginary tea and scoffing from empty plates as they occupy an ever less real world." #Kayfabe

2013-05-15 02:05:52 (0 comments, 6 reshares, 4 +1s)

A pretty well-researched post.

2013-05-14 13:48:41 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

If you took stock of America in the early 21st century and thought about how to create the best governing system possible, you would certainly start with utilizing the foundation of modern digital technologies. So then how could governance, or collective problem-solving, work in that new context? How could we maximize the intelligence of all Americans and get way beyond our current Congress? Do you reform the current system or reinvent the whole thing?

Reinventors is a series of virtual roundtables carried out over the new medium of group video with top innovators talking about how to Reinvent America across many different fields. We start off with an interview of a remarkable "Reinventor" to get a big idea on the table and then we hold a roundtable discussion with other experts & entrepreneurs who build on the idea. All is streamed live to the web.

2013-05-12 14:17:35 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

"Fuck 'em, that's why."

2013-05-10 19:31:24 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 7 +1s)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/reuvencohen/2013/05/08/new-zealand-government-announces-that-software-will-no-longer-be-patentable/

2013-05-09 18:45:59 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Steps to life transition:

1) Understand your own values
2) Understand the true values of your employer and lifestyle.
3) Feel the conflict/cognitive dissonance, discomfort. May manifest as physical sickness
4) Reach a significant change/awareness event, either:
    a) 'explosive' - nervous breakdown, heart attack, leaving job immediately
    b) 'implosive' - allow pressure of cognitive dissonance to deflate slowly over time 
5) Facilitate change
6) Arrive and be welcomed into a new life that supports your values

2013-05-09 18:16:08 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

2013-05-09 03:21:05 (4 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-05-08 05:04:32 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 14 +1s)

2013-05-08 05:04:09 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

The objections to using Harvard Moocs at local universities come across as very much disingenuous.  

If you want to object because you see your jobs disappearing and your business model failing, then by all means, do so.  But don't pretend it's for the good of anyone else.

2013-05-07 17:06:13 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-05-05 11:35:12 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

2013-05-04 04:24:01 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-03 15:32:56 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"This chart shows how gaming input has evolved from simple knobs to directional pads to touch screens. Including every console ever, this sprawling print features 191 species and 12 genera over seven decades of gaming."

2013-05-03 13:19:23 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-01 20:01:32 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

http://youtu.be/oSCX78-8-q0

2013-04-30 20:11:44 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Hahaha.

2013-04-30 16:38:32 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 5 +1s)

If life gives you melons, you may be dyslexic.

2013-04-30 01:58:31 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 4 +1s)

via +Thor Muller 

2013-04-30 01:56:10 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

via +Thor Muller 

2013-04-30 01:55:53 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

2013-04-30 01:00:05 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Here's another Enneper surface, drawn by Paul Nylander.  It's been cut off before it intersects itself, and it has a nice metal frame.  

This one has 5-fold symmetry: you can see a kind of pentagon on top.  But in fact it has more symmetry!   Indeed, it has the same symmetries as a pentagonal antiprism. 

That's the shape you get by taking two regular pentagons, holding one directly above the other, and then turning the top one 1/10th of a turn, like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagonal_antiprism

So, the top is a regular pentagon, and so is the bottom, but there are 10 triangles around the sides. If you hold a light directly above a pentagonal antiprism, the shadow is a regular 10-sided shape: a regular decagon. 

And in fact, the pentagonal antiprism has the same symmetry group as a regular decagon. Checking... more »

2013-04-30 00:08:16 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

cc +Lyre Calliope 

2013-04-29 18:58:59 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-04-29 18:28:48 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Difference between a boss and a leader

2013-04-29 03:10:58 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

"It blows my mind that the problem Upcoming solved — surfacing interesting events in a city, driven by public social activity — is an unsolved problem again.

And now, Yahoo will quietly take Upcoming off life support, an opportunity squandered."

2013-04-29 02:21:18 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Did Mordor import its food? An analysis.

2013-04-26 23:53:11 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

"These banks, which already possess enormous power just by virtue of their financial holdings – in the United States, the top six banks, many of them the same names you see on the Libor and ISDAfix panels, own assets equivalent to 60 percent of the nation's GDP – are beginning to realize the awesome possibilities for increased profit and political might that would come with colluding instead of competing. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system."

2013-04-26 23:20:41 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 4 +1s)

2013-04-26 20:28:45 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

2013-04-26 20:04:05 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

+Venkatesh Rao on engineering ubiquity.

2013-04-23 10:28:33 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

+Brett Scott explains Bitcoin.

2013-04-23 01:29:45 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 14 +1s)

2013-04-22 17:33:18 (15 comments, 4 reshares, 8 +1s)

"Wissner-Gross calls the concept at the center of the research "causal entropic forces." These forces are the motivation for intelligent behavior. They encourage a system to preserve as many future histories as possible. For example, in the cart-and-rod exercise, Entropica controls the cart to keep the rod upright. Allowing the rod to fall would drastically reduce the number of remaining future histories, or, in other words, lower the entropy of the cart-and-rod system. Keeping the rod upright maximizes the entropy. It maintains all future histories that can begin from that state, including those that require the cart to let the rod fall."

cc +Venkatesh Rao 

2013-04-20 22:07:29 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

It was once thought to be the most densely populated place on earth, with 35,000 people crammed into a few tiny apartment blocks and more than 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, all constructed without contributions from a single architect.

2013-04-19 21:16:31 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 9 +1s)

2013-04-18 21:26:07 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

On se fait un party dimanche! Reste 20 places! Amenez vos enfants! Assurez-vous de ne pas être suivi! (Je blaguais, pour les enfants.)

2013-04-18 19:44:36 (0 comments, 3 reshares, 10 +1s)

Via Brian Krent (fb)

2013-04-18 19:04:53 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

2013-04-18 15:38:12 (0 comments, 4 reshares, 1 +1s)

I posted, more than once, but no one seemed to care.
Why?  Because MSM says, look at "this" while they do "this."

While everyone is talking about the Boston Bombing, Obama quietly signs a law to repeal the ban on Insider Trading for Congress.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130416/08344222725/congress-quickly-quietly-rolls-back-insider-trading-rules-itself.shtml

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/04/16/obama-signs-law-gutting-insider-trading-regulations-for-congress/

2013-04-17 02:32:35 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Open source cross-platform video editing software a resounding success on Kickstarter today! Beaucoup kudos and style points:

2013-04-16 15:45:04 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 6 +1s)

"Great ideas, then, demand something from us — something more than pleasure. They demand more than just our "attention" — and far more than our standing ovations. They demand not just our eyes, wallets, and hands, but our hearts, minds, and souls. They demand our heartbreak, our hurt. They demand our minds don't just "accept" — but, as critical thinkers, object, protest, question.

In this way, Great Ideas demand precisely the opposite of TED thinking. They demand our lasting engagement, dedication and commitment; our time and energy; our frustration and infuriation; our suffering, passion, and pain — not merely our easy wonder and wide-eyed astonishment. They demand not just our rapture, but something more human: every bit of our fuller, truer, better selves."

2013-04-16 14:37:37 (9 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Responding to anthropologists' frequent claim that they embrace activist scholarship, he echoes Ms. Nader: "They don't mean it"—at least when it comes truly radical activism.

"If I were to generalize," Mr. Graeber says, "I would say that what we see is a university system which mitigates against creativity and any form of daring. It's incredibly conformist and it represents itself as the opposite, and I think this kind of conformism is a result of the bureaucratization of the university."

2013-04-15 19:41:58 (11 comments, 2 reshares, 5 +1s)

  #PublishOrPerish   #bullshit  

Nature: "It has been claimed and demonstrated that many (and possibly most) of the conclusions drawn from biomedical research are probably false. A central cause for this important problem is that researchers must publish in order to succeed, and publishing is a highly competitive enterprise, with certain kinds of findings more likely to be published than others. Research that produces novel results, statistically significant results (that is, typically p < 0.05) and seemingly 'clean' results is more likely to be published. As a consequence, researchers have strong incentives to engage in research practices that make their findings publishable quickly, even if those practices reduce the likelihood that the findings reflect a true (that is, non-null) effect." 

2013-04-14 16:06:42 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-04-13 01:27:04 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Competence is additive; inspiration is multiplicative. Hire and promote multipliers.

"It not what a person knows so much as it is how they’re able to use said knowledge to inspire and create brilliance in others that really matters."

2013-04-11 18:49:41 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet."