Link Dump 2015-09-15

2015-09-15

I do this. Not the donut thing, but the not celebrating achievement thing. I actually suspect it's endemic within academia.
Last time I linked to a talk about typography where the speaker suggested the idea of representing documents in terms of the relationship between it's parts - not just sections and subjections, but multiple types of footnotes, their relative importance, and so on. I then listened to a TED talk by the folks behind Postmodern Jukebox, a collective of musicians doing reinterpretations of pop songs (my personal favorite is their rendition of Stacy's Mom). The cool thing about the TED talk is Scott Bradlee's idea (around 5:30 in the video) to think of songs as the pairing of lyrics and some abstract melody, which can then be transformed into the styles of different periods. I don't know enough about music to understand that melodic representation would include, but I would love to learn from someone who does know music.
Should a woman still expect a man to pay for a date? (Excuse my hetero-normativity). I simply love the number of expectations buried in this ritual of dating, and how hard it is to tease apart what we expect and whether those expectations are valid. You say the man should ask if he could pay for it? Well why is it the man that does the asking? (Obligated followup question: Who pays if two lesbians go on a date? Who pays if a polyamorous group goes on a date?)
Something I've never considered before: if courage (or wisdom) is a moral virtue, then "displaying courage in facing an enemy of one's polis is morally good, but putting one's life at risk in order to pull off a stunt and impress people is not courageous at all".
You can't drink from a cup in space, since the liquid could splash, and there's no gravity to continually pull the water down the side and into your mouth. Unless, of course, you use a specially designed up.
There is a book, published in 1990, called The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. It's a strategy guide to the original SimCity (which came out in 1989), but uniquely, it relates it to real urban planning problems. Why don't more books (and games) do this? I fondly remember buying Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and thoroughly enjoyed flipping through the complementary World Almanac and Book of Facts, an encyclopedia of geographical knowledge. Good times.
A discussion of agent nouns and what they say about the nature of the people they describe.
"An adjunct instructor in philosophy, Kerry Cronin, teaches a freshman class in which an optional assignment is going out on an actual date." The article is actually about the (lack of) dating culture. I have two questions. First, the article presents apps like Tinder as being more advantageous for men than for women, but it doesn't answer (or even hint at answering) why that might be the case: is it inherent in the technology, is it both technology and culture, or even in humanity? Second - and this one the article does hint at - why is dating the model that we should aspire to? I can't help but feel that while dating fulfills some of our desires that hooking up does, the same can be said the other way around. It's unfortunate that dating and hooking up are seen (by a lot of people) as the only two mutually exclusive choice, when there are so many other models of relationships that people haven't considered.
Food for thought: property rights are eternal (ie. they don't expire). Why do intellectual property rights?
Even now, authorities still have trouble distinguishing tweeted rap lyrics from terrorist threats, or figuring out how (or whether) to punish teens who sext pictures of themselves, aka. producing child pornography.
Computer science education is making strides in including women and is struggling to recruit racial minorities. But what about students with disabilities?
The porn industry uses the term "interracial" to mean scenes (usually) performed with white actresses and black actors... and pays the actress almost double what she would earn for the same scene with white actors. Actresses also hold back from doing these scenes to "build intrigue and keep her star from burning out too quickly". This is pretty explicit racism, but I wonder if that's because actresses don't want to do it, if the industry is "keeping to tradition", or if viewers would pay more to see it. In other words, who (or what) is racist here?
Washington Post published a picture of the TSA master keys... which allowed someone to make 3D printer CAD models of them. That *work on "TSA approved" locks. What a world we live in.
I like the idea of product-focused coding bootcamps. I still find the idea of them replacing college a little over-blown though. My question is, can colleges offer courses that do this? It won't be as cheap as bootcamps, but it can also leverage the resources of the university as well as the students' backgrounds. I would be surprised if MIT/Stanford/CMU don't have courses like this, and I would like to hear comparisons between those students and ones that went to a coding bootcamp.
New Windows 10 parental activity report feature could out LGBT children. This brings to the foreground one basic assumption of parental controls: that parents are acting for the good of their children. Of course, a lot of other things break down without that assumption...
In related news, an app that allows travelers to report suspicious activity on the BART in the Bay Area disproportionately gets complaints about passengers of color. Pop quiz: what assumption did the app-makers have, that is being violated here?
Also related: futurists focus too much on technological changes and ignore changes in social values. I wonder what kind of development committee needs to be formed to prevent any of these three problems from occurring.