tingilinde

dealing with parking density

Vertical parking and automated parking systems.

a better approach would be encouraging denser forms of transportation than the car.

 

the zephyr

80mph average speeds topping out over 110 - state of the art American train service 85 years ago.

 

what the christian right wants

A theocracy is much better than democracy from their point of view.  They also believe the Earth is only 6000 years old..  Close to mainstream in the Republican Party these days.  

From Right Wing Watch.

Rick Wiles: 'We Are Going to Impose Christian Rule in this Country' from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.

the only reason for time is so everything doesn't happen at once

No - Einstein didn't say it.  But here are some interesting photos.

 

 

the gish gallop

A favorite tactic of Trump surrogates

 

 

more facebook fun

Why anyone uses them...    Facebook and the like effectively calculate a reputation for you and then sell it.

snip

...

The confidential Facebook document provides an overview of Actionable Insights and espouses its benefits to potential corporate users. It shows how the program, ostensibly created to help improve underserved cellular customers, is pulling in far more data than how many bars you’re getting. According to one portion of the presentation, the Facebook mobile app harvests and packages eight different categories of information for use by over 100 different telecom companies in over 50 different countries around the world, including usage data from the phones of children as young as 13. These categories include use of video, demographics, location, use of Wi-Fi and cellular networks, personal interests, device information, and friend homophily, an academic term of art. A 2017 article on social media friendship from the Journal of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology defined “homophily” in this context as “the tendency of nodes to form relations with those who are similar to themselves.” In other words, Facebook is using your phone to not only provide behavioral data about you to cellphone carriers, but about your friends as well.

...

a tip of the hat to John

 

 

 

 

their's

a most impressive business model .. be sure to check the mouseover in the last frame

 

wolf livestock predation

Despite the cries of ranchers, livestock predation by wolves is not a problem. (pdf)

 

long distance travel 65 years ago

the election boiled down to coal vs climate change

coal won  (via The New York Times)

 

 

 

mapping doggerland

Mapping once occupied regions now under the North Sea.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

At least now we have an idea what Florida looks like before much of it goes away in the next hundred years or so.

 

when confronted with a global warming denialist

anti-vaxxer, flat earther, young earther or anyone else trying to drag you into a hopeless time and resource wasting "debate"  here's a good response.

 

This sort of ignorant question is beneath contempt at this point; it represents a practiced determined daily effort to not know the answer.

It gets no answer from me, other than a level gaze and silence.

 

the only good commentary on game of thrones

(I've never watched it, but this seems useful)

Zeynep Tukekci on psychological vs sociological story telling.  

snip

...

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later.

...

 

 

deutsche bank, the trumps and money laundering

hmmm...  (via The New York Times)

nothing to see here.. move along.  

And I'm sure the pro-White House/white collar crime Republican Party agrees that moving along is the best tactic.

 

 

 

rich isaacson

One of the three who won the Physics Nobel for gravitational wave detection is a friend

.  Over the years he made a point of being in awe of Rich Isaacson as the prime force who made the LIGO possible.  

Here's a piece on him

snip

...

The technology was just too hard. Plus, no one even knew what in the universe could spew out gravitational waves strong enough to be measured like that.

Normally, says Weiss, "with those two things ... that proposal would have been dead on arrival. But it wasn't that way with Rich."

Because Isaacson had studied gravitational waves, he saw the potential. So he personally shepherded this research for almost three decades.

It became the biggest project the National Science Foundation had ever funded.

"He sat in the NSF and single-handedly — I mean single-handedly — convinced everybody in the NSF this was the right thing for the NSF to support and the science was going to be spectacular if it should succeed," says Weiss. "And he made the argument stick."

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