Articles I've Read (2014-11-15)
2014-11-15
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We landed on a comet! Not once, but three times! But now the lander is out of battery, which is sad.
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There was a lot of backlash from a scientist on the comet lander project wearing a sexist, inappropriate shirt.
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Which can be considered part of the more general problematic history of "nerd culture"
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We also discovered another habitable planet really close to home.
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Speaking of habitable planets, Interstellar gets a lot of science right. Especially the relativity...
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...for which we now have clocks sensitive enough to be affected by gravitational differences in a human scale.
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Because we want things to be understandable, we might actually be preferring understandable things to the truth.
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This is also why computers can be used to generate optional illusions, because computers don't care about making things understandable.
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Computers may also write text messages for you, so you can stop worrying about whether you come off as too desperate. Weirdly, the founders claim this is so people will ignore text messages entirely and focus on the person behind the text. Because of course their company will take off and get absolutely everyone using it.
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A classic case of optimizing for the proxy and not for the actual value. Again, because rankings are much easier to understand than "which school do I actually want to go to".
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Every student comes in with preconceptions about computer science, which is why teachers need to know pedagogical content knowledge, or how students could be wrong.
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If employment is a market, with people trading their time for money offered by companies, why doesn't the market clear?
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Although some people wonder if clearing the employment market just means a lot of bullshit jobs.
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Clif Bar has decided to stop sponsoring free-soloers and base-jumpers.
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The riots in Hong Kong have died down, but that didn't stop the protesters from being compared to American slaves.
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This was a trivia category a couple weeks ago.