September 2009
The New Science of Causation →
givemesomethingtoread:
Causality is a concept as meaningless as “the soul” and just as inappropriate for modern mathematical science. And yet, somehow, this doesn’t seem quite right. If causation is nothing but a meaningless word that laypeople have layered over correlation, then why the ceaseless insistence that “correlation does not imply causation”? Why are our thoughts filled with causal...
AdamFehr.com: My Sister Has Been Reading Seattle... →
It’s a Fehr-family, self-referential loop around the Mariners. Microcosmic of the season, if you will.
[2009 Mariners] The Best Defensive Team Of The... →
Despite a “loss” season, the M’s have played one of the best defensive seasons in baseball history. Interesting stats and analysis. (Yes, my brother finally got me to read Mariners-related blogs, which are actually quite good…better than most of the economics, politics or geek blogs I follow.)
Baseball Call Of The Year →
Mike Blowers (coached my brother, once) makes a hell of a call last Sunday’s game. Here’s the prediction and the actual event. Via my brother—adamfehr.com—of course.
“I don’t like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous...”
– Microsoft’s grinning robots or the Brotherhood of the Mac. Which is worse? | [Charlie Brooker]
cityofsound: The street as platform →
Idi i smotri (1985) - Plot keywords →
I have some affection for IMDB keywords. But not these. Rough movie.
DJ John - Lonely Siberian Winter, from...
Connected by Strings
merlin:
Revolver (album) [“Eleanor Rigby”]
George Martin used to claim that his composition was inspired by the Bernard Herrmann score for François Truffaut’s film Fahrenheit 451, however this is not possible because the film had not yet been released. The writers of the book Recording The Beatles theorized that Martin was probably referring to the score from Psycho, which was also scored...
“As many critics have pointed out, calling it The Da Vinci Code is like saying...”
– The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences - Telegraph Snort at the books, excerpts, snark and…most of all…comments. (Best one before I gave up…twitter.com/Hilary_W.)
Microsoft's Stephen Elop makes a big move... →
On Friday, Microsoft (MSFT) announced that its board had adopted a “say on pay” plan that will allow investors to vote every three years on compensation for senior executives.
We don’t mean to be cynical here — not too much, anyway. But what was particularly ironic about that announcement was that it came on the same day that Microsoft filed its preliminary proxy which had some interesting...
WatchFraming complete. Sizing crisis averted. | A House By The Park Mike D’s house is hauling. I should go walk around the framing and wave at Mike’s camera. See if I make the next highlight reel.
The Pain of Knowing [Planet Money] →
Kestenbaum: “Economists pretty much agree that one reason for all the waste in the health care system is a simple lack of information. We just don’t know which doctors are good, which order too many tests, which order the wrong tests etc. And the doctors don’t know, either.”
iFixit: Apple Mac, MacBook, iPod, and iPhone... →
“Speaking of a vast wasteland, you might want to start picking out and clearing...”
– Attention, People of Earth : The New Yorker The perfect remedy to a crap day—I’m tempted to shrug and go shovel gravel.
Economic Donkeys [The Baseline Scenario] →
Early in the First World War, British generals decided to attack German trenches with an initial light bombardment, followed by infantry walking in close order across No Man’s Land. The result was tens of thousands killed in a series of military disasters, but the generals reacted with only small adjustments to their approach and essentially persisted in repeating the same mistakes for years....
“I’m always charmed by old photographs of skiers which show groups of...”
– Waiting for the Weekend [The Atlantic, Aug 1991] via Ario and Give Me
True Tales of Conversational Vengeance - Nerd... →
via ascendingcoherence. Too good to quote, just read it.
The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that... →
…our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. “The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,” Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to...
“Odds are, you’re about an order of magnitude worse a philosopher than you...”
– The Splintered Mind: Why All the Children — I Mean Philosophers — Are Above Average
