Link Dump 2015-01-31

2015-01-31

Amazon doesn't always have the lowest prices. They only have the lowest prices on things that people are likely to buy.
We have enough satellites and probes and landers on Mars that we can find the ones that crashed.
Another article about the Scott Aaronson comment, this one arguing that while men may worry that they are being sexist, women are actually being harassed and assaulted and raped.
Speaking of feminism, as the Academy Awards nominees are announced, is it sexist to continue having actors and actresses compete in different categories?. One argument that it's not sexist is that men and women play different roles (no, not gender roles, character roles), that is, you can't have a man playing a mother. But I'm guessing that these roles are not the majority of nominated roles (citation needed), so I don't buy this argument.
The "open plan" office has always baffled me. Where do people actually work? Like some commenters, I enjoy working in coffee shops because of the soft fascination of other people. I can see how having the choice of open space and closed space can be helpful.
[SPOILER] Interstellar's casting of Matt Damon was successful in part because we're used to him being the good guy.
More on making people fall in love: a service for faking a boyfriend. The intended customers are people who might be gay and can't come out, or people who are pestered by their family to get married. Still, to quote KingKiller Chronicles, there's a fundamental connection between seeming and being, and get too into the role of having a boyfriend, and you might surprise yourself.
Roger Schank used to be a professor at Northwestern, although now he's moved into the education business. He's very... vocal about his discontent with the current education system, and here he asks why people like listening to lectures. It's a timely post for me, since I'm teaching an intro programming course this semester (actually lecturing, as opposed to just holding discussions). Multiple times while preparing for lecture over the last week, I felt the desire to completely flip the classroom, to use class time on exercises that build on the reading that students did at home. And yet, I find myself facing a block, not being quite sure how to do this to a room with 150 students. Since I'm one of three lecturers for the course, I'm also not sure how the other lecturers would react - although, I also know that's just the excuse to not iron out the problems.
Speaking of teaching programming, the course I'm teaching uses C++; it's only through teaching it did I realize how unsuitable it is as a first language. Even the simple Hello World has a bunch of extra stuff that I can't explain to students (Includes? Namespaces?). Compare to the same program in Python. But Python has other problems: namely, that making GUIs are hard, that doing graphics are hard, and that it's hard to make portable applications that students can send to their friends. Is JavaScript the answer?
Also filed under "unanswerable questions in education": how do we turn students into auto-didacts?
Default judgment naming you as the legal father of a child is scary... and really, really common.
There's a website that lets you order glitterbombs. It was just sold for $85,000.
LEGO is making an Avengers Helicarrier set.