Link Dump 2015-10-30

2015-10-30

Mythbusters will be going off the air after this season.
Apparently most streaming porn sites are owned by the same company, which is big enough to have clout with producers... including producers that the company owns. This means that actresses are afraid of issuing takedown demands due to fear of being blacklisted (is that legal?) - and anyway, having porn of you online is good for your escort business, which apparently most porn actresses are.
Speaking of sex, here are some portraits of what college students think of sex and relationships.
Speaking of portraits, here are some of people who live off the grid (but still use the internet).
One would think that zen cannot be taught, and yet most koans are about a master and their student. So what exactly is the role of the master?
Finally someone acknowledges the terminology problem in education literature. I've only been saying it for two years...
It's now legal for college students in Texas to bring a gun to campus... but not for them to bring a dildo. Cue the obvious protest occurs. #CocksNotGlocks is such a clever hashtag too.
Playboy will no longer be publishing nudes. I'll be honest: their articles are actually quite good.
I'm torn between including links on sexism in the tech industry, and not including them because they're no longer news. But that's just more reason to post them. So here.
Self-driving cars must be programed to kill - otherwise how will it know whether to swerve to avoid a pedestrian (potentially killing the driver) or not (potentially killing the pedestrian)? I haven't done a search, but one argument I have yet to hear is to allow the owner of the self-driving car to select a setting. I see no reason why manufacturers have to make the decision unilaterally for everyone, and this would also relieve them of the liability. There are still remaining issues, of course, such as what should happen if the program for a particular setting has bugs, but these are much more mundane issues and not quite as philosophical.
Now that I'm at a small college without the resources of a big state school, I might start using #ICanHazPDF to get around article paywalls.
A plot of the center of rotation of our solar system, relative to the position and size of the sun.
"Computer science" has a lot of overlap with "software engineering" and "just programming", but it's definitely not reducible to either one of them. That raises the question: just what exactly does computer science teach you? Some argue it's not the "different way of thinking", in that the same argument can be used for mathematics, economics, etc.. But I think some of to other benefits listed there, such as "preciseness", exist in other disciplines as well. My personal answer is that computer science teaches representation, in a much more concrete way that other subjects (for example, mathematics) doesn't. A close second is the skill to break down procedures, again in a generic way, but I think that's more common across disciplines.
You can now pay for a computerized personal assistant - not handheld PDAs, but a service that can automatically email people to set up meetings. It's a secret how much people are in the loop behind the scenes.
New giant earthworks (a la the Nazca lines) discovered in Kazakhstan.
A number of small liberal arts colleges are firing faculty due to a trend of low enrollments. This makes me feel lucky for my current position, especially since I still sometimes have moments of "what am I doing here?".
There was an app that cleverly uses the iPhone's Force Touch to turn the device into a scale. Shame it was rejected from the App Store.
Perhaps it's just me, but I get annoyed by articles telling people not to look for jobs doing what they love, especially the idea that "work is unpleasant by definition". I get the sentiment, I really do - not everyone can make a living doing what they love, and setting that as the standard may lead to anxiety - but I also think that having it as an aspiration is a worthy goal. That is, your passion should guide your job search, and only if that fails should you then consider working on something else.
On a related note, don't go looking for your passion. Chances are you already have one, you just don't realize that it's a passion yet.
I agree that friendships are understated. My favorite part of the article: "Interviewees tended to think of their friendships as continuous, even if they went through long periods where they were out of touch. This is a fairly sunny view - you wouldn't assume you were still on good terms with your parents if you hadn't heard from them in months. But the default assumption with friends is that you're still friends." Contrast this with the joke about how a husband says to his wife, "I told you on our wedding day that I loved you, and if that ever changes, I’ll let you know."
Climbing is becoming more popular, and as a result we get a different kind of crowd in climbing gyms that we did before. A friend of mine wrote a blog post about how this is affecting the "community" feel of climbing gyms.