April Fools Classroom Prank
Whenever I have a class on April 1st, I’m always on the lookout for stuff like this. This is good, though (because it’s someone else). Guy takes it like a champ, too.
/via Devour
Blue Bottle Buys Tonx →
The Bay Area’s Blue Bottle Coffee and the Internet’s Tonx, an online subscription coffee service, are about to blend. It means an ambitious coffee player just scored a great Internet service that can help it expand its reach far beyond its retail store front presences. It’s a great fit, but also the end of an era; a signal that high-end specialty coffee is entering a new phase — one where it has to reach out to far more people if it wants to grow.
Wow—big news in the fussy coffee world. What makes Tonx so great is their simplicity—one thing, done really well. It’s hard to see how this will result in a product that’s better than what they already provide.
Jobs Report: Back to Where We Started →
The economy added 192,000 jobs in March, the 42nd consecutive month of growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. All the gains were in the private sector, pushing nongovernment employment to 116 million, just above the prior record set in January 2008, when the recession was just beginning. The private sector lost 8.8 million jobs in the recession and has gained 8.9 million since.
But the wounds of the recession are far from fully healed.
Good news. Not great news. Could always be better news.
But—good news.
Zen Pencil’s ‘Stanley Kubrick Answers a Question’ →
Zen Pencils is awesome. There’s no other way of putting it. Need proof? Check out Bill Watterson’s ‘A Cartoonist’s Advice.’ And then after you do, check out Gavin Aung Than’s latest, ‘Stanley Kubrick Answers a Question.’ As he explains:
The quote used in the comic is taken from a 1968 Playboy interview Kubrick did soon after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Minecraft, Minecraft Videos, and Kids
When friends and family ask what my son is into these days, I usually tell them Minecraft. It’s not surprising that a 10-year-old would like to play video games, and people have usually heard of Minecraft, so there’s usually some nodding of recognition.
What I don’t tell them is that while he does certainly play Minecraft, he’s also really into watching people play Minecraft on YouTube. You tell people without a 10-year-old that and you’ll find there’s less recognition and more concerned stares.
Watching people play a video game? What kind of crappy parenting led your child to this, the laziest of the voyeurisms?
I didn’t (still don’t, really) know what Minecraft was when I heard John Moltz and John Gruber talk about it (and Moltz’s piece) on the most recent episode of The Talk Show, save for having heard Gruber mention his son’s addiction to it in the past. But this piece by Moltz put me at ease, at least partially.
The nature of my enthusiasm for technology has been crippling me mentally since my daughter was born and my wife and I took on the task of keeping iPhones and iPads and televisions out of her line of sight. We will continue to do that, of course, for the time being, but I’m somewhat encouraged to see examples of how the youngest generation is using the technology at their disposal. Much to the chagrin, I’m sure, of the age advanced, it appears that kids are finding new ways to be social and intelligent and interactive and, dare I say, business-minded.
A Pediatrician Who Believes Vaccines Are Messing With Nature →
Kiera Butler:
Kenet Lansman tells me she would never deny any vaccine to parents who request it for their child. But she does share her personal beliefs with her patients: She fears that vaccines have contributed to the recent uptick in autoimmune disorders and other chronic conditions. “I think we’re just messing with nature, and we really don’t know what we’ve created,” she says. “We’ve reduced or largely eliminated many infectious diseases. But in their place, we have an epidemic of chronic illnesses in children. The incidence of asthma, allergies, and autism spectrum disorders has dramatically increased since the 1990s. And the reason for this we don’t know. But my concern is that vaccines have played a role.”
She has a policy of giving only one vaccination at a time, and only when a child is completely healthy. “I believe that the detoxification pathways in the body can be overwhelmed by too many vaccines given on one day,” she explains.
Pediatric Alternatives prioritizes childhood vaccines based on the perceived risk of a kid acquiring a given disease. “We live in a very healthy community,” Kenet Lansman says. “The incidence of these illnesses are very low, not only here, but nationwide. And so it’s safe to do a modified vaccine schedule, in my opinion.”
It’s frightening that these are the thoughts of a licensed physician. Although, I must admit, she’s right. We are messing with nature. But the reality of that nature—and I wonder how often she reminds the parents she misleads—is that a return to “normalcy” would result in many more dead babies, children, elderly, and eventually, healthy adults and teens.
‘It’s not about shifts as much as it is about optimal positioning.’ →
Baseball's approach to defense, long unchanged except for the gloves getting bigger, is undergoing the most radical change in strategy since the Reconstruction Era. Defensive shifting, which started as a trend several years ago, is becoming epidemic. Major League teams "shifted" 8,134 times last season, compared with just 2,357 in 2011.
Aided by increasingly complex technology, the most forward-thinking teams create different schemes and setups for virtually every batter, then switch it up, depending on the pitch count.
As someone admittedly stuck in the purgatory between knowing what I was taught about baseball as a kid and knowing what I’ve learned recently about advanced metrics, this piece finally put shifting in perspective for me, specifically, the rest of the quote used in my title:
"It's not about shifts as much as it is about optimal positioning," said Dan Fox, director of systems development (in effect, wonk-in-chief) for the Pittsburgh Pirates. "The number of times we do optimal positioning should be the number of opposing hitters we face throughout the season."
It’s ‘Climate Change’ as opposed to ‘Global Warming.’ I totally get it now.
Adjusting Your Bear Risk Assessment →
Let me illustrate this with a simple example. Suppose observations showed conclusively that the bear population in a particular forest had recently doubled. What would we think of someone who, knowing this, would nevertheless take no extra precautions in walking in the woods unless and until he saw a significant upward trend in the rate at which his neighbors were being mauled by bears?
The point here is that the number of bears in the woods is presumably much greater than the incidence of their contact with humans, so the overall bear statistics should be much more robust than any mauling statistics. The actuarial information here is the rate of mauling, while the doubling of the bear population represents a priori information. Were it possible to buy insurance against mauling, no reasonable firm supplying such insurance would ignore a doubling of the bear population, lack of any significant mauling trend notwithstanding. And even our friendly sylvan pedestrian, sticking to mauling statistics, would never wait for 95 percent confidence before adjusting his bear risk assessment. Being conservative in signal detection (insisting on high confidence that the null hypothesis is void) is the opposite of being conservative in risk assessment.
This is the response that FiveThirtyEight commissioned after the shit storm (no pun intended) that raged because of this FiveThirtyEight piece by Roger Pielke Jr. that declared, quite confidently, that:
In the last two decades, natural disaster costs worldwide went from about $100 billion per year to almost twice that amount. That’s a huge problem, right? Indicative of more frequent disasters punishing communities worldwide? Perhaps the effects of climate change? Those are the questions that Congress, the World Bank and, of course, the media are asking. But all those questions have the same answer: no.
After reading both, what it comes down to, and what Emanuel seems to agree with, is something I’ve maintained for a while now—I’d rather err on the cautious side of climate change, and be wrong, than ignore what we can observe and quantify, and be right.
That’s not politics; that’s common sense.
Andrew Kim Reviews the First Sony Walkman →
Sony intended it to be a trendy product for consumers under 20 but it became popular regardless of demographics. The Walkman went on sale in 1979 at ¥33,000 which equates to roughly $500 today. Sales were predicted to be 5,000 per month but Sony sold upwards of 50,000 in the first two months of sales.
If you read Kim’s site, Minimally Minimal, regularly, you probably, like me, go for the design/fabrication details and for the photography. This review doesn’t disappoint in either respect.
As for the product itself, I think he makes some great points about technology and about people not knowing what they need until you show it to them. And of course there’s the design of the Walkman, which looks right at home in 2014. Before I was hooked on Apple, I was hooked on Sony. I think this review of the Walkman TPS-L2 captures why.
‘One of the most public conversations in the history of American law enforcement.’ →
In the government’s eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat. The bureau trained spotlights on the property and set up giant speakers that blasted noise day and night—the sound of “rabbits being killed, warped-up music, Nancy Sinatra singing ‘These Boots Are Made for Walking,’ Tibetan monks chanting, Christmas carols, telephones ringing, reveille.” Doyle writes, “I got to where I was only getting about an hour or two of sleep every twenty-four hours.”
Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the F.B.I. assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history: ten Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, six hundred and sixty-eight agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, fifteen U.S. Army personnel, thirteen members of the Texas National Guard, thirty-one Texas Rangers, a hundred and thirty-one officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, seventeen from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and eighteen Waco police, for a total of eight hundred and ninety-nine people. Their task, as they saw it, was to peel away the pretense—Koresh’s posturing, his lies, his grandiosity—and compel him to take specific steps toward a resolution.
A fascinating piece of writing. I don’t think Gladwell’s mild assertion that the Branch Davidians were just misunderstood, mishandled peaceable religious folk is totally proven here. But there’s certainly another side of the story that isn’t told nearly as often.