CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-21 19:50:19 (25 comments, 3 reshares, 37 +1s)

I think this finally puts to rest alternative explanations of the aftermath of the disputed 2009 election: it was the final phase of a rolling coup by the clerical government, which is now exercising near-total control over the parallel and now-powerless civilian government. 

This is the last phase of a trend which began in the 1980s. If we put Montazeri, Rafsanjani, and Khatami on a continuum, the trend is relatively clear:

By 1989, Montazeri -- who was a genuine moderate, and Khatami's original successor -- was outside the Guardian Council's acceptable range of political competition. He was singled out for public ridicule and lived out the rest of his life under house arrest.

By 2005, it was clear that neither Khatami nor any of his political affiliates would be permitted to stand for office. By the standards of the late 1980s, Khatami wasn't particularly... more »

2013-05-21 01:18:18 (123 comments, 12 reshares, 64 +1s)

Alright, so after watching The Name of the Doctor, and hearing a bunch of people's theories on what, exactly, the ending meant, I clearly need to have a good public thread on the subject. Those who do not want spoilers, or those who simply do not give a damn, are encouraged to stop reading here. Those who do are encouraged to tell me why all my hypotheses are wrong in the comments.

So, I've heard a couple of very interesting hypotheses about the fate of River Song and exactly who John Hurt is playing. Here's my meta-analysis of the suggestions, and my own wild speculation:

First, River. She gives the rather broad hint that the Doctor hasn't seen the last of her, and this is tied to the fact that she was still linked to Clara via the conference call when Clara jumped into the Doctor's time stream. +Andrea Laford gave an interesting spin on this idea: we know thats... more »

2013-05-21 00:20:19 (7 comments, 4 reshares, 36 +1s)

New Video by Rachel Bloom

Very very NOT child safe.  But awesome and hilarious.  Also note that it's playing on medieval bigotries.  Expect to be offended if you are very sensitive to mocking of bigotries.

I purchased her song "Fuck Me Ray Bradbury" some time ago and it's on my regular no-child-in-the-car-or-kitchen rotation, but she has a full album now here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/please-love-me/id648598114

#supportindie   #indieartist   #indiemusician  

2013-05-20 19:50:30 (18 comments, 8 reshares, 85 +1s)

Dietmar Eckell’s Photos of Plane Wrecks With “Happy Ends” ... Amusing Planet - "Airplane wrecks usually denote tragedies, but photographer Dietmar Eckell aims to highlight the rare miracles from the history of aviation where everyone survived.

"'Happy End' is a photo-project about miracles in aviation history - 15 airplanes that had forced landings but all on board survived and were rescued from the remote locations," says Dietmar Eckell a photographer from Dusseldorf, Germany.

For nearly three years, Eckell trekked to extremely isolated locations across the world — nine countries on four continents — from Australia to Iceland looking for abandoned remains of plane wreckage. These planes have remain abandoned from anywhere between 10-70 years and have become part of the landscape. In the forests, trees grow through broken windows. In the desert,piles of ... more »

2013-05-20 19:24:21 (19 comments, 8 reshares, 64 +1s)

Hangouts, phone calls and Google Voice

Thanks for all of your feedback on last week's Hangouts launch. I wanted to quickly talk about 1) making/receiving phone calls in Gmail, and 2) Google Voice support more generally.

1) Today's version of Hangouts doesn't yet support outbound calls on the web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We're working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.

2) Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.

2013-05-20 00:05:57 (19 comments, 49 reshares, 140 +1s)

Just in case anyone hasn't seen this awesome little explosion at 130,000 frames per second. #ScienceSunday  / +ScienceSunday

2013-05-19 09:25:31 (12 comments, 10 reshares, 98 +1s)

Stealth and Venom: +Ed Yong writes about the ultra-black colors of gaboon vipers.

Very cool review, summary, and explanation of how gaboon vipers produce such deep, black colors, and how these black scales break up their outline to make them extra stealthy.  Gaboon vipers hold the record for fang length in venomous snakes.

#venom #scienceeveryday #stealth  

2013-05-17 17:45:03 (28 comments, 16 reshares, 68 +1s)

This is interesting. Amnesty International accesses your Facebook information, and determines what types of crimes you could be convicted of around the globe.

http://www.trialbytimeline.org.nz/

(H/T +Alison Marlowe)

2013-05-16 21:44:37 (92 comments, 36 reshares, 116 +1s)

This device is sure to provoke controversy, but it doesn't seem fundamentally novel to me: rather, it's the compact, portable version of something we've seen for years in naval point gunnery systems such as AEGIS and PHALANX. Basically, this is an almost entirely automated gunnery platform: you look through the scope and select a target, and pull the trigger to tell it to fire on its own mark; then it waits for a clean shot and takes it. A first-time shooter can reliably hit targets at a range of 500 yards, which is no big surprise, since the shooter isn't actually doing much of the work at all: this is an automated gun system.

Thinking of this in the range of applications: for hunting as a sport, it kind of defeats the purpose of the "sport" aspect. (Especially if you added just a bit more logic to help it identify deer or whatever on its own, and just ping the operator... more »

2013-05-16 00:35:07 (86 comments, 30 reshares, 54 +1s)

Not liking the new Google+ font? Is it hard on your eyes?

There are some known issues with the new webfont in use (Roboto), with kerning and rendering on some configurations. Other users have reported general visual problems with the new font, which kerning fixes probably won't address.

Before going further, if you are actually having visual problems reading the new font, hover over the "Home" arrow on the left to get the drop-down menu, then choose "Send feedback" near the bottom to express your concerns. This information is used to help quantify the extent of user [dis]satisfaction with the UI.

So, if you would like to force Google+ to render in Arial (or failing that, your system's "sans-serif" font which is likely an Arial/Helvetica lookalike) by default, install this Stylish script with either the Stylish extension... more »

2013-05-15 21:26:26 (143 comments, 135 reshares, 198 +1s)

Since several people have asked about this: If you want to see posts in a single column in the new Google+ UI, instead of in multiple columns, scroll to the top of your stream. To the right of your circles is a "More" menu. At the very bottom of that menu there's an option to switch between single- and multi-column mode.

#googleplustips

2013-05-15 18:10:02 (31 comments, 9 reshares, 70 +1s)

We just introduced the new Google+! Enjoy the details below.
#googlepluslove

2013-05-15 04:52:40 (27 comments, 14 reshares, 83 +1s)

For the night crew

Because this is my dad and he is glorious! At 85, he still plays boogie woogie like a man whose fingers are possessed! The other guy is  my brother. 
When I read the comments to dad today that people left he was astounded! And thrilled! So I want to thrill him some more,  because this is my Dad. :-) 

#BoogieWoogie  

2013-05-15 01:54:27 (13 comments, 13 reshares, 66 +1s)

Poole's article is perhaps one of the better-written articles on why the algorithms are coming to eat us, but it still suffers from many of the same problems that most of these articles do. Algorithms, along with corporations, have become the nebulous bugaboo of the decade: poorly-understood but powerful, they are a natural thing to blame for things which go wrong, and a natural locus for people's fears about the future. To his credit, Poole tempers this fear with a good understanding of many of the issues at play: for example, his idea of "algorithmic auditors" -- some ostensibly neutral third party who would audit algorithms used by companies to do various things and report on them to the public -- comes with a good explanation of some of the things which make the idea fundamentally unworkable. But he misses some of the simplest issues.

For example, Poole (correctly)... more »

2013-05-14 22:19:28 (15 comments, 16 reshares, 49 +1s)

A brilliant reversal of gender stereotypes from a wicked smart and talented team. Well done. 

2013-05-14 21:34:56 (22 comments, 5 reshares, 43 +1s)

Beating a man to death, then illegally detaining those who video recorded the murder, and confiscating all the videos. 

Yeah, nothing to see here, move along. 


h/t to +Jim Feig 

2013-05-14 07:29:50 (4 comments, 7 reshares, 32 +1s)

What is the Biggest Star in the Universe?

Here's another video explainer. This time, I investigate what is the biggest star in the Universe, the most massive star, and the limits of star size. This is based on an article I wrote a few years ago, which is now totally out of date and in need of a refresh.

http://www.universetoday.com/13507/what-is-the-biggest-star-in-the-universe/

Again, a big thanks to +Jason Harmer for helping me create these.

2013-05-13 22:40:55 (28 comments, 3 reshares, 29 +1s)

Apparently Japan has its "Tea Party" idiots, too.

2013-05-13 21:01:06 (17 comments, 23 reshares, 93 +1s)

Chandelier Turns a Room into a Forest:

http://www.boredpanda.com/chandelier-forest-trees-hilden-diaz/

#interior #design #productdesign #interiordesign  

2013-05-13 07:14:11 (73 comments, 45 reshares, 250 +1s)

+Randall Munroe makes an important observation: birds aren't descended from dinosaurs -- by any reasonable definition, birds are dinosaurs. T. Rex is more closely related to a sparrow than it is to a Stegosaurus. Our world has flying dinosaurs in it that eat other dinosaurs. And that's pretty cool.

2013-05-13 03:09:10 (25 comments, 11 reshares, 65 +1s)

wow, amazing

Space Oddity

2013-05-12 18:50:48 (21 comments, 1 reshares, 25 +1s)

For those who haven't seen my X-15 rants, that little black rocket powered aircraft is possibly my all-time favourite plane. And there were plans for an orbital version in 1958. Here, in brief, is the story of the X-15B.

http://news.discovery.com/space/history-of-space/the-x-15b-the-spaceplane-that-wasnt-130510.htm

2013-05-12 05:53:19 (22 comments, 8 reshares, 34 +1s)

A brief list of misused English terminology in EU publications is a fascinating look at the emerging dialect of English that is emerging out of the EU bureaucracy, in which odd bureaucratic language has to be translated from and to many languages. It's a good window into concepts that are common in one nation's bureaucratic tradition, but not others

2013-05-11 18:56:48 (89 comments, 57 reshares, 124 +1s)

This game is remarkably fun: You get five random images from Street View, and you have to try to figure out where in the world you are. It encourages you to travel on the one hand, and is excellent preparation for when you're recruited by a secret agency to perform a completely anonymous assassination mission in exchange for $20M, and airdropped blindly somewhere into the world.

... what? I call that "Thursday."

2013-05-11 03:56:04 (15 comments, 11 reshares, 40 +1s)

Check out Anselm Levskaya's program called polyHédronisme, which lets you draw strange and beautiful polyhedra on your web browser!

http://levskaya.github.io/polyhedronisme/

You start with a Platonic  solid and then do things to it.  I got this one by typing "aaaaD", which starts with a dodecahedron and then does "ambo" 4 times.  If you want to figure out what "ambo" means, try "D", then "aD", then "aaD".

Thanks to +William Rutiser for pointing this out! 

2013-05-10 07:34:16 (104 comments, 7 reshares, 62 +1s)

Apparently the world is a lot simpler than I thought. You can personally come to know God's will, or understand the inner workings of Satan's strategies, simply from books available in your supermarket checkout line. Who knew?

(I'm seriously tempted to buy these, just to find out what they say, but I know they'll be disappointing. There is simply nothing that could live up to covers like these... unless perhaps they were covers for blank notebooks or day planners.)

2013-05-10 04:25:03 (20 comments, 11 reshares, 46 +1s)

2013-05-10 01:55:00 (49 comments, 18 reshares, 70 +1s)

I've got to say that this was a pretty impressive heist. They compromised a credit-card processing company and raised the withdrawal limits on a few prepaid debit cards issued by another vulnerable bank; then they coded those accounts onto a bunch of physical cards, and sent large numbers of street crews out to withdraw money from ATMs. Their first heist pulled in $5M; their second, $40M. The body of the leader of the New York cashing crew was apparently found in the Dominican Republic late last month.

There's going to be one hell of a story when all of this comes out.

2013-05-10 01:46:20 (30 comments, 8 reshares, 39 +1s)

Imagine that. Pink for girls and blue for boys started out as a commercial idea.

Prenatal testing was a big reason for the change. Expectant parents learned the sex of their unborn baby and then went shopping for “girl” or “boy” merchandise. (“The more you individualize clothing, the more you can sell,” Paoletti says.) The pink fad spread from sleepers and crib sheets to big-ticket items such as strollers, car seats and riding toys. Affluent parents could conceivably decorate for baby No. 1, a girl, and start all over when the next child was a boy.

2013-05-10 01:03:52 (13 comments, 1 reshares, 38 +1s)

"The University of Washington in collaboration with Washington State University is developing an “academic redshirt” program that will bring dozens of low-income Washington state high school graduates to the two universities to study engineering in a five-year bachelor’s program.

The first year will help incoming freshmen acclimate to university-level courses and workload and prepare to major in an engineering discipline. The students will receive extra advising and a detailed course plan to help lay a strong foundation in engineering. At the UW, they will earn a spot in one of the school’s 10 engineering departments starting their second year."

Via: +Carl Evankovich 

2013-05-09 20:59:43 (13 comments, 6 reshares, 43 +1s)

If only they didn't hurt so much and girls didn't get old and wrinkly

2013-05-09 18:24:03 (68 comments, 87 reshares, 267 +1s)

This is something I'm very happy to hear. My own feeling is that patents (and similar intellectual property rights) serve the purpose of encouraging innovation when they're in a field that's already mature, development is expensive, and people need time to recoup these costs. They hinder innovation when the field is in rapid flux, and any invention is likely to be independently produced by many people: at that point, it becomes a way for companies (and other IP holders) to draw arbitrary fences about what other people can and can't do, and demand fees for work that other people did on their own. Software is one such field. (Whereas refrigerators probably aren't)

My own preferred reform would be to establish a 20-year moratorium on the granting of new patents for software, as well as a moratorium on causes of action emerging from such patents. We can look again in a few decades... more »

2013-05-09 02:46:27 (22 comments, 16 reshares, 71 +1s)

#TimeTravel  

10 Reasons Why Time Travel Is No Good

2013-05-10 18:12:10 (316 comments, 619 reshares, 1039 +1s)

How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars

Today I’m going to try to explain the real reason that barns are painted red: nuclear fusion. And yes, this is an excuse to take a mad ride around some of the stranger corners of physics and chemistry in order to give you the real, this-is-not-BS, answer to a simple question.

This question got stuck in my head as a result of an episode of a long-forgotten sitcom called Head of the Class, about a high school class full of smart kids. (Sort of like Welcome Back, Kotter in reverse) This being an American show, it’s obligatory to occasionally emphasize the superiority of the ordinary virtue of “plain folk,” so in one episode the protagonists face off in some kind of academic contest with kids from a rural school, and end up losing because their city-slicker knowledge can’t answer the question “why are barnsred?” (And ... more »

2013-05-08 06:57:19 (16 comments, 10 reshares, 71 +1s)

What a fantastic commercial. If you are a Star Trek fan, I promise you will laugh :-)
Congratulations +Audi International and +Audi USA on making me smile. 

2013-05-07 07:05:17 (46 comments, 33 reshares, 106 +1s)

Linguistic reconstruction is a branch of historical linguistics that looks for the common ancestry of languages. This is how we identify common groups of languages like the Romance languages (descendants of Latin) or the broader families like Indo-European, which includes everything from Sanskrit to English. These are generally identified by a process which involves looking for words with the same meaning and related sounds. It's not enough for sounds to be similar: you have to argue that there are rules by which sounds changed from one language to another, and that the same set of rules will transform a bunch of the words. For example, the English word "father," the French word "père," Italian "padre," Latin "pater," and Sanskrit "pitar" all have the same meaning, and we know that as Latin words moved to French, consonants like medial t's and... more »

2013-05-06 21:41:27 (24 comments, 8 reshares, 44 +1s)

The level of organization is amazing

2013-05-06 03:37:04 (28 comments, 20 reshares, 93 +1s)

This is apparently what happens when you post the halting problem as a task on a developer outsourcing site.

2013-05-06 00:53:27 (11 comments, 7 reshares, 45 +1s)

2013-05-05 17:26:19 (21 comments, 2 reshares, 95 +1s)

Even in Vegas, the machines all say: come to G+. We have interesting people. 

2013-05-04 19:55:38 (13 comments, 9 reshares, 43 +1s)

Finally, the story behind the brown M&Ms......

2013-05-04 19:37:59 (16 comments, 7 reshares, 58 +1s)

Not sure if I'm right, but it looks like Dante's Inferno carved into a molar.

2013-05-04 19:20:01 (15 comments, 2 reshares, 61 +1s)

Wanna bet?
#banksy   #lateralthinking   #trollface  

2013-05-04 18:05:16 (20 comments, 10 reshares, 52 +1s)

Dunning-Kruger Effect in Action

When you think you understand something, write out your understanding and reevaluate it.

2013-05-01 18:29:07 (34 comments, 9 reshares, 55 +1s)

Science Chamber of Horrors: Why shark embryos eat each other up in utero

Egads!

2013-05-01 16:29:52 (47 comments, 6 reshares, 57 +1s)

I don't usually post fashion stuff, but damn!
Source: http://tatianicav.tumblr.com/post/48214292690/russian-designer-ulyana-sergeenkos-debut

2013-04-30 18:13:09 (33 comments, 3 reshares, 29 +1s)

This is old news, but it's something which isn't mentioned nearly enough:

In the United States, the rate of sexual assault peaked in 1979, at 2.8 per 1000 per year. Since then, it's steadily declined, to a rate of 0.5 per 1000 per year in 2010. In other words, there's been an 88% decline over the past 40 years, and a 50% decline over the past 20.

Better still, there's no reason to doubt the numbers. If this were using the UCR metrics -- a survey of reported crimes -- then this could as easily reflect a decline in reporting rates as a decline in rape. But it's on the NCVS, which is a random-sample survey designed to be sensitive to unreported crimes.

Unless there's some factor leading people to lie in NCVS interviews, this is a real and durable result: there are many, many fewer sexual assaults today than there once were, and the number is still in... more »

2013-04-30 04:39:20 (18 comments, 12 reshares, 40 +1s)

Youtube is better than tv

2013-04-29 20:57:17 (60 comments, 19 reshares, 64 +1s)

Hmm...would you "go" here? ;)
Public Toilet On The Street Made Of One Way Mirrors.

2013-04-29 20:45:54 (14 comments, 22 reshares, 41 +1s)

There is an entire tumblr full of this: http://cosmarxpolitan.tumblr.com/ . SEE

"My boyfriend was a counter-revolutionary!" Could it happen to you?
10 ways to please the urban proletariat!
Style tips from the Central Committee!

And more!

h/t +A.V. Flox, who finds the strangest things on the Internet.