CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-17 19:08:43 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

I seem to have a serious problem in that my need for days off doesn't follow a regular rhythm. In an optimal situation, I could work a few days, then take a day or two off when I began feeling like I could no longer work, then continue working, as happened to suit my state of mind.

Now, since I'm working/studying from home, this would be possible.. if not for those darned weekends. Everything social is always on weekends, which means that in practice my pattern is "work for a few days, take a few days off, and then I would like to resume working again but now it's weekend and I've scheduled social stuff on the weekend so I have to take two more days off and now I've had something like four days off in a row and gotten a whole three days worth of work done this week".

I'm seriously starting to consider the idea that I should simply stop... more »

2013-05-17 14:17:56 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

One of things that probably contributes to the myth of "nobody ever changes their mind online" is that continuing to argue against doesn't mean that you're persisting on your old position, but it sure looks like it. If I have a position supported by multiple different arguments and somebody starts chipping away at them, I'm sure going to see if they can counter all of them... and as each one gets refuted, my position will be increasingly shifting towards the other person's view, all the while everyone else might think that I'm persisting in my old view.

We should more often explicitly signal that we've reduced our confidence in some position after considering the other person's argument. Of course, this can be difficult to do in the heat of a debate.

2013-05-17 13:52:34 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

"So apparently the FDA operates on an honor system where they trust that the company isn't just making up the results, and Ranbaxy just made up results. Lots and lots of results. For years."

2013-05-17 12:05:09 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Gaaahh. My mouse has started registering single clicks as multiple ones, with super-annoying consequences. Click on any interface element (like G+ notifications) where a first click brings it up and the second dismisses it, and it can take several tries to actually see it. Try to paint something with the mouse so that you could copy it, and see it select weird parts of the text. Click somewhere in the text because you want to move the cursor there, and it ends up selecting the closest word. Click on the top of an application to bring it up, and the double-click ends up changing the size of the window... aaaaargh.

(And yes, I did already tell Windows to only count the very fastest of double-clicks as a double-click, to no effect.)

2013-05-17 07:52:57 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 7 +1s)

Although I don't endorse elitism in art, that's not to say I couldn't enjoy good parody, and this made my morning:

"Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

"Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fictionThe L... more »

2013-05-16 20:12:25 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 4 +1s)

"When their first attempts produced six blastocysts but no stable cell lines, they added caffeine, which protects the egg from premature activation."

It's been officially proven now: in order to do successful science, you need caffeine.

2013-05-15 18:24:04 (6 comments, 1 reshares, 8 +1s)

Reading a physical book for the first time in a while. And wow. Have to physically keep the pages open, there's no copy-paste, search, or convenient bookmarking, and the paper is not backlit, so I have to be in a position that lets light on it instead of the position that would be the most comfortable. Man, this is primitive.

2013-05-15 16:35:43 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Huh. An app that lets you scan a product and then tells you whether its makers were owned by some company you wish to boycott, or perhaps reward. That's brilliant.

2013-05-15 13:47:31 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Not just computer games, either - it's the same in pretty much all of art, and a large part of science as well: nobody cares about the ideas.

2013-05-15 11:08:07 (5 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

In Finnish: http://www.talouselama.fi/uutiset/uusi+islamin+oppikirja+alaasteelle+allah+loi+suomen+jarviidyllin/a2004158 - "Uusi islamin oppikirja ala-asteelle: Allah loi Suomen järvi-idyllin
". Uutisen kuvauksen perusteella toi vaikuttaisi varsin mainiolta tavalta saada islaminuskoisia oppilaita tuntemaan itsensä paremmin osaksi suomalaista yhteiskuntaa. Loistavaa kehitystä. Jos vielä saataisiin toi yliopistotason imaaminkoulutuskin, mitä tuossa väläyteltiin.

In English: http://abna.ir/data.asp?lang=3&Id=271340 - "Finland Introduces Islamic Studies Textbooks into Public Schools". From the description of the book, looks like an excellent way to make students from Islamic backgrounds feel at home in Finland. More news like this, please.

2013-05-15 08:49:16 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

Because some days we all need that giant teddy....
Stay comfy my friends.

2013-05-15 08:38:04 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

It seems to have become conventional wisdom that exercise can reduce depression.  So I was surprised to see that a comprehensive review of high-quality studies by the Cochrane Collaboration found only a small effect.

(The Cochrane Collaboration is a treasure.  I can get lost wandering their site for hours.  Unlike many online time traps, I always emerge feeling far better informed about things that matter.)

2013-05-15 07:56:31 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

Good writing advice.

2013-05-14 18:07:08 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"...Plunging into an area that is littered with failures and riven with controversy, the researchers are scouring the genomes of 1,600 of these high-fliers in an ambitious project to find the first common genetic variants associated with human intelligence. The project, which was launched in August 2012 and is slated to begin data analysis in the next few months, has spawned wild accusations of eugenics plots, as well as more measured objections by social scientists who view such research as a distraction from pressing societal issues. Some geneticists, however, take issue with the study for a different reason. They say that it is highly unlikely to find anything of interest — because the sample size is too small and intelligence is too complex. Earlier large studies with the same goal have failed. But scientists from BGI’s Cognitive Genomics group hope that their super-smart sample will give theman ... more »

2013-05-14 18:05:53 (11 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

The guilty pleasures of my teenage years come back at me by offering undignified and unhelpful analogies for helping explain the sensations produced by exploring the depths of my mind.

"Sometimes after meditating I get this feeling... like if you ever watched Inuyasha enough to know that special thing of his, where the clashing energy fields between two demons produce a scar in reality, and he can aim his sword at that to unleash an attack powerful enough to kill a hundred demons? Well, sometimes during or after meditating I get a feeling like I'm looking for scars in reality like that. Not that they'd come out of energy fields or have the power to kill anyone, of course, but rather it's kinda like there's this model of reality that my mind produces and I'm looking at its surface layers and looking for a scar that would reveal the deeper layers that show how everything in... more »

2013-05-14 15:36:16 (2 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Today, I would like to say thank you to all the brave cells and cellular mechanisms of my immune system, working hard to repel the constant invasions of foreign agents as well as to destroy any potentially cancerous cells. Don't think that I wouldn't be grateful! Also, to the bacteria colonies in my gut: I hope you guys weren't too badly hit by those antibiotics I was on a while back. I really appreciate your work in keeping any invaders off our turf, too.

2013-05-13 11:29:26 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

Anybody else get incredibly annoyed when they realize they're reading a story that utilizes the "heap disaster upon disaster on the protagonist" structure? It's lazy, it's predictable, and it robs the hero of the victories and success that they'd deserve. If you want to keep the story more interesting, then give them both victories and defeats, and spice both up with unanticipated consequences that put a whole new twist on the whole victory/defeat thing.

2013-05-13 11:28:50 (9 comments, 3 reshares, 4 +1s)

"Most forms of do-gooding start out with a What (“I want to promote microfinance!”), move to a How (“maybe I should do a sponsored marathon?”) and simply take the Why for granted (“because of course microfinance is good!”).

"Effective altruism, in contrast, starts with a Why and a How, and lets them determine the What. Let me explain:

"The Why is to make the world as good a place as it can possibly be. Rather than merely aiming to make the world better than when we found it — "to make a difference" — we want to make the most difference. So, for example, rather than simply trying to find a development charity that “does good work”, Giving What We Can seeks to find those charities that do the very most to help people in developing countries with every pound or dollar they receive. In general, we seek out those activities that will do the mostgood with our time ... more »

2013-05-12 19:19:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

"Oops."

2013-05-11 10:01:44 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Today's "minds are weird" article:

"As per the front page, a tulpa is believed to be an autonomous consciousness, existing within their creator’s mind, often with a form of their creator's initial choice and design. A tulpa is entirely sentient and in control of their opinions, feelings, form and movement. They are willingly created by people via a number of techniques to act as companions, muses, and advisers. Tulpa forms can either be visualized in the mind's eye, or with practice seen as a hallucinatory figure."

That said, I'm not particularly surprised or skeptical about this - many writers, including myself, already have an experience of characters that they've created being "real" and with their own quirks and personalities, independent from those of their creator. Typically a writer creates and uses them for telling interestings... more »

2013-05-10 08:24:38 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 6 +1s)

Because forbidding people from disseminating files on the Internet has always worked so well.

2013-05-09 08:08:16 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

"...in Islamic legal doctrine, law is independent of the state. Judges are appointed by the ruler, but the law they enforce is not state created but derived by legal scholars from religious sources. I like to describe it as what Anglo-American common law would be if the decisions of judges were replaced by the books and articles of law professors." [...]

"Why would a ruler choose to leave the content of the law out of his control? Hallaq's answer is that the rulers were typically foreigners—Turkish princes, for instance, ruling over Syrian, Egyptian, Arabic populations. The existing system of Islamic law provided them with legitimacy in the eyes of the population and a link into local customs and social structures. Both were particularly important in a world where pre-modern limits on transport and communication made a modern bureaucratic state of any substantial size,c... more »

2013-05-08 19:38:00 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Balancing out the earlier article: "We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s. Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a lack of consensus about the overall effects on low-wage employment of an increase in the minimum wage. However, the oft-stated assertion that recent research fails to support the traditional view that the minimum wage reduces the employment of low-wage workers is clearly incorrect. A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to... more »

2013-05-08 19:32:22 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 2 +1s)

Anonymization of datasets continues to work as well as before: "Of the 1,130 volunteers Sweeney and her team reviewed, about 579 provided zip code, date of birth and gender, the three key pieces of information she needs to identify anonymous people combined with information from voter rolls or other public records. Of these, Sweeney succeeded in naming 241, or 42% of the total. The Personal Genome Project confirmed that 97% of the names matched those in its database if nicknames and first name variations were included."

2013-05-08 19:17:48 (5 comments, 18 reshares, 9 +1s)

Huh: "Idaho has the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. While Washington’s is nearly $2 more, the highest in the nation. You might expect that wage gap to send Washington border businesses fleeing over to Idaho. [...]

"...in 2010, a group of researchers decided to put that conventional wisdom to the test. And they used counties along the Washington-Idaho border—and hundreds others like them—to do it.

"The county that surrounds Coeur d'Alene, for example, has an economy much more closely tied to Spokane’s than to Boise’s. But the state laws governing wages stop at the state line. Bill Lester of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill was on the team that looked at 16 years worth of restaurant employment data for 316 pairs of border counties.

“And when you add up all those comparisons and look at the average of all those differences inemployment,... more »

2013-05-08 16:22:17 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

"Explosive orgasms with the help of the new molotov cocktail!"
"Should you say DA or NYET to birth control? Let the central committee decide!"

2013-05-08 11:12:19 (2 comments, 3 reshares, 3 +1s)

Ouch. And yes, I too have sometimes been embarrassed about people seeing the covers of the books I was reading, or judged a book for having too "girly" of a cover... (ebooks solve the first problem, but not entirely the second)

2013-05-08 08:44:45 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 3 +1s)

I played a few games intended to teach kids in the US about government. While none of them was exactly great in terms of entertainment value, several of them were promising, and had some interesting lessons for edugame design.

2013-05-08 07:46:01 (1 comments, 2 reshares, 2 +1s)

Looks worth seeing for the eye candy, at least. If it actually manages to retain any part of the original book's message or spirit, that will be an added plus, but I won't expect it to do so.

2013-05-08 07:32:02 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

"MIT Robots Can Assemble Your IKEA Furniture For You" http://feedly.com/k/ZOkGw3

2013-05-08 07:29:59 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

<3

2013-05-07 10:39:24 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 11 +1s)

People making online surveys: please put all the questions on a single page, instead of having a setup where the survey is broken into ten subpages where I have to answer the questions on each page before it lets me see the next one. If I consider filling out a survey, I want to know beforehand whether I should reserve 5 or 50 minutes for the task, and being denied this information generally means that I never end up doing the survey.

2013-05-06 18:50:31 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 5 +1s)

Nice brief overview of the five theses that give reason to be worried about advanced AI.

2013-05-06 18:21:58 (5 comments, 3 reshares, 13 +1s)

Now that's just brilliant.

2013-05-05 15:22:56 (10 comments, 0 reshares, 5 +1s)

I try to stick to a vegetarian diet for ethical reasons, but every now and then I end up eating meat anyway. So to feel less guilty about it, I developed the following compromise: each month, I keep track of how much money I've spent on meat products. At the end of every month, I'll donate an equivalent sum to one of the charities that effectiveanimalactivism.org is recommending at that moment.

This should help keep my meat consumption in check without being so strict that I'd fail to stick to it. Also, the estimates that I've seen suggest that the impact of donating to one of those charities is larger than the impact of having spent the same sum on meat, so I shouldn't feel that guilty even if I don't achieve much of a reduction in meat-eating.

2013-05-03 19:57:54 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 3 +1s)

The rest of this guy's portfolio is good, too: http://maximverehin.com/portfolio.htm

2013-05-03 19:38:00 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 0 +1s)

Based on the abstract, this study didn't discover anything very surprising, but it should still be well worth the read. And it's always good to see whether one's instinctive guesses were right or not:

"Three vulnerable subgroups of players (non-gamers, resistant players, and females) were studied to understand how each approaches and plays serious games. We explore forced (required) play using four different online casual games. Our research strongly suggests that the most important threat to a serious game’s impact is when players dislike the game. Serious games are likely to be least effective for players who dislike a game and most effective for those who like the game. Different people like and dislike different games, so simply advising designers to make a great game does not eradicate the problem. Additionally, non-gamers were at a distinct disadvantage as far as gameplayp... more »

2013-05-03 14:05:32 (2 comments, 1 reshares, 1 +1s)

I notice that having an interesting enough story can actually be a handicap for a computer game, if it makes the player impatient enough to see more of the story that the actual game sections become annoying distractions that you just want to get over with as soon as possible.

I was wondering why I simultaneously want to have big open-ended games filled with exploration, and also quickly end up frustrated when I play them, and this I think is the cause. I would enjoy the exploration, but I would like to see what happens next in the story even more, so I get impatient and unable to enjoy the leisurely exploring parts.

I grew increasingly frustrated with e.g. Deus Ex: Human Revolution towards the end, as the ratio of "game" segments to "story" segments seemed to just keep getting worse - I'd labor through a long stretch of pure game, hoping to get rewarded... more »

2013-05-03 09:34:30 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

"What Has Aid Ever Done For Anyone?"

2013-05-02 05:05:54 (1 comments, 6 reshares, 8 +1s)

2013-05-02 04:48:52 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

"I'd read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I'd begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was "doing to me," so I could fight back. But the internet isn't an individual pursuit, it's something we do with each other. The internet is where people are."

2013-05-01 20:24:52 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

So my first experience with Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and SERGEANT REX POWER COLT was...

...that I'm first forced to register an account on Ubisoft's service in order to play and run the game through some custom Uplay client, when I'm already launching it via Steam. When I get into the game, it first spends a while trying to "connect to servers" (on a single-player game, what?), then fails and asks to try again later, and is laggy as heck. At least it lets me play regardless. The menu interface seem to be made for consoles and is clumsy to use on a PC. Even after turning the volume all the way up, cutscenes sound really quiet, and generally don't seem to work properly. I try playing the game for a bit, the controls seem a little clumsy, though that could just be me not knowing how to play these kinds of games. Whenever I hit Esc to bring up the menu, I'm told... more »

2013-05-01 15:26:35 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 4 +1s)

Huh. This doesn't apply to all nerds, or to all normal people for that matter, but this does still sound like a valuable model:

"All people have a "tact filter", which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!"

""Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were... more »

2013-05-01 15:20:03 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 2 +1s)

2013-05-01 15:16:43 (1 comments, 1 reshares, 0 +1s)

Hat tip to ninefruitspie.tumblr

2013-05-01 11:08:43 (1 comments, 0 reshares, 7 +1s)

I just now discovered that within a 10-minute walk of my home, there's this big park area where it's possible to walk for something like 30-60 minutes without ever leaving the forest or retracing a path that you've already been to.

I've been living here for two years, and I only got my first hint of this a week back, when I was looking at a map to figure out where my local health center was. It was then that I noticed the big patch of green on the map, very close to my apartment building.

Clearly, I should spend more time looking at maps. Or exploring my surroundings.

2013-05-01 08:23:08 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"A great deal of human unhappiness and ineffectiveness is rooted in what Buddhists call "attachment"… roughly definable as an exaggerated desire not to be separated from someone, something, some idea, some feeling, etc. [...]

"This, I suggest, is the key neural correlate of the psychological phenomenon of attachment.  Attachment occurs -- neurally speaking -- when there is a circuit binding a cell assembly to the brain's emotional center, in such a way that emotion keeps the circuit whole and flourishing even though otherwise it would dissipate. [...]

"This line of thinking, if correct, suggests that it may be relatively straightforward to create digital minds without the persistent phenomenon of attachment that characterizes ordinary human minds.

"First of all, a digital mind -- if its design is not slavishly tied to that of the humanbr... more »

2013-04-30 09:46:25 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

HAPPY MAY DAY! We start celebrating May day eve tonight and May day tomorrow. We call it VAPPU.  This is a public holiday that is the only carnival-style street festivity in Finland. People young and old, particularly students, party outside, picnic and wear student caps or other decorative clothing. Balloons and other decorations like serpentines are seen everywhere.
HAUSKAA VAPPUA!

2013-04-30 09:46:17 (0 comments, 16 reshares, 21 +1s)

2013-04-30 07:27:19 (0 comments, 0 reshares, 1 +1s)

"If you like Pokemon and hate yourself, and hate your money, get this game."