tingilinde

the renegade raging grannies sing out

science and race

The notion of race is largely cultural and is not something that can be biologically defined.  But the question of why and how people make these distinctions and create their prejudices is still an open question and one that science can address.

It is sad to witness second hand through friends how much racism still exists in the US.  It makes you very sensitive to the use of race baiting dog whistles in the current campaign from the right...

 

 

just who is the mitt guy?

John Cassidy, writing in the current issue of The New Yorker on how the selection of Ryan tells us a lot about Romney, but the fundamental question of who Romeny really is happens to be a task for Mitt.  If he can't do it, I'm sure Obama will help.

crowdsourced science in the 19th century

From Scientific American .. a piece on the contributions of Matthew Maury to the concept of crowdsourcing science...

snip

...

Maury embarked in crowdsourcing data in 1842 when, as a lieutenant, he was placed in charge of the Depot of Charts and Instruments of the Navy Department. Sailors followed a strict routine and were systematic in recording very specific observations around the clock. Ships were mobile weather stations, accumulating a standardized set of weather variables with the strictest regularity at 15 minute intervals. As much as sailors emphasized these routines, once a voyage was completed, the logs were practically viewed as rubbish.

But when Maury saw the Navy’s stockpile of old ships logs, he quickly realized the collective information could improve navigation. Maury developed a method to systematically extract key information from each log book. Today, in an era of climate change, the information from old logs are valuable again

...

fascinating stuff

It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that many of the "social innovations" brought on by the Internet are hardly new ...  after all, we are fundamentally social creatures.

 

microsoft and the apple/samsung verdict

Probably too much is being written on the Apple/Samsung verdict, but my guess is Microsoft sent Tim Cook (Apple's CEO who happened to be celebrating his first full year as CEO yesterday) an awfully nice bottle of wine last night.

It may be the total cost to a phone marker for Windows may be comparable to or even less than the "free" Andorid due to licensing fees from Apple and Microsoft - and potentially others.  Not to mention the Microsoft UI offering a very nice counterpoint to Apple's.

It may well be that it comes down to Google having to indemnify the phone makers who lose suits if it wants them to continue using Android. 

A relevant question for those who value companies and buyouts is how much would Motorola be worth today compared to what Google paid? 

cycling in japan

A report on bicycle use in Japan - not at the levels of Denmark or the Netherlands, but much greater than UK use, which is greater than US use.  In the US the bike is mostly seen as a recreational toy.  But the bike turns out to be an extremely efficient mode of short range transportation - assuming it can become culturally relevant and local infrastructure supports it.

snip

...The truth is that cycling in Japan’s cities is fairly idyllic when you compare with UK cities. It’s not as good as the Netherlands, nor is it apparently anywhere near as safe as the Netherlands. But Japan seems to have achieved a comparable cycling culture to the Netherlands albeit in a very Japanese way. It’s a culture where your mum, dad, kids, friends, boss and customers ALL get about by bike. The result is that Japan doesn’t have ‘cyclists’. It has people who use a bike when it makes sense. And for most urban trips, a bike makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. 

...

 

crowdsourcing mitt's investments - the bane of mitt's campaign?

It isn't clear if they are real, but if they are they happen to be nearly 1000 pages of complex documents about Mitt's investments during the past decade (certainly not complete).  The folks hosting them are asking for a crowd-sourced effort to figure out what is likely to be going on

On first blush the claim is there is a lot of tax dodging going on through Cayman Island investments.  The existance of things like that could be very harmful to Mitt - which could explain why he won't release his tax forms for a reasonable historical period.  The ball is in his court - if he doesn't publish them it may be reasonable to suspect he really is hiding something nasty..

Already there appear to be some interesting issues... and perhaps Mitt and his wife would have to amend their taxes.  More important, if true, it just looks sleazy in the worst corporate way.

 

 

really nice treeplatform

A really nice idea for a treeplatform

what - certainly not in america! not in this day and age..

No - sadly racism is still very much alive and the race card is being played again.  I've seen too much of it with friends who don't have the right skin color (very strange as biologically the concept of "race" doesn't make sense.  It is a visual/cultural label we use to divide people)

Jim pointsto two good articles

 

Jamelle Bouie writing in The American Prospect

and 

Ta-Nehisi Coates writing in The Altantic

on religious freedom

You can't talk about religious freedom in a place until it includes freedom from religion - a good article from The New York Times Magazine about Jerry DeWitt.