Link Dump 2015-07-31

2015-07-31

A good article describing how people in tech (and more generally, in STEM) commit micro-aggressions in our daily language. I'm still working on some of these - for example, I still use a fairly demanding "why didn't you use a function here?" instead of something softer like "can you explain your thought process for this part?"
Sometimes your "dream job" turns out to not be as exciting as you think it is...
... and sometimes the process of getting to your dream job is just not worth it.
That said, if you are going to be a grad student at Michigan, the new grad student dorms seem like a good place to live. I particularly like that they're mixing students of different disciplines.
Going further down the education hierarchy, if college is not for you, consider an apprenticeship instead. I'm fairly sure that apprenticing under a skilled laborer is a much better return on investment than attending particular colleges and pursuing particular college careers.
There are people who fly around the world for a living. As in, they don't have an apartment, and live on planes and in airports. I do like how the article turns introspective at the end.
It turns out you don't need to know the language to win Scrabble in that language. You just need to memorize the dictionary.
Dan Savage points out the hypocrisy of blasting the media for outing one cheater, but blasting the cheaters when thousand of them are exposed by hackers in the Ashley Madison expose. I wonder if there's a psychological term for this; it's not scale insensitivity (in which case people won't care), it's almost scale inversion.
North Koreans use IP addresses (ie. http://74.125.224.72/) instead of domain names (ie. https://www.google.com/), because the most of the population don't know how to type.
[Moscow is a state of mind]. How Moscow.
An autistic female tech employee writes about how modern dialog on gender bias in tech fails to meet the needs of the women who, well, never had trouble fitting into tech. That the author spent more time with computers in her youth is a privilege, but not one that directly relates to gender biases.
A professor at Johns Hopkins wants graduate science degrees to include more philosophy - epistemology, ethics, etc.
I spend a lot of time worrying about how to teach computer science to supplement how students think outside of the classroom. This professor wonders the same thing about philosophy.
A short portrait of Terry Tao (the mathematician).
Empathy is a choice, and "people with a higher sense of power exhibit less empathy because they have less incentive to interact with others." I wonder if that also means introverts have less empathy than extroverts.