RT @FrankConniff: Pentagon recommends DADT repeal be done slowly & methodically. It’s not something you can just rush into, like a war.
December 2010
November 2010
Finally, after 10 years, my bluetooth headset will play audio, not just phone calls. (iPhone 4 required.)
RT @rwaldron: Just added “git config —global alias.jk “reset HEAD” “: git jk file :P /cc @BoazSender @alexch
RT @mikemccaffrey: Congratulations to Poli-Sci-Fi Radio for its 3 year anniversary! Listen live for the next two hours: http://poliscifi …
Just completed Week 1 - Day 2 of #C25K with @c25kapp #c25kapp
“I always hoped that Buffy would live on even after my death. But, you know, AFTER.”
—Joss Whedon
“ot only does the insula “do” sensory disgust; it does moral disgust as well. Because the two are so viscerally similar. When we evolved the capacity to be disgusted by moral failures, we didn’t evolve a new brain region to handle it. Instead, the insula expanded its portfolio.”
—This Is Your Brain on Metaphors - NYTimes.com
“It is essential not to confuse the statistical usage of
“significance” with the everyday usage. In everyday usage, “significant” means “of practical importance,” or simply “important.” —Wallis and Roberts 1965, p. 385, quoted in http://www.statlit.org/pdf/2009ZiliakMcCloskeyASA.pdf
“significance” with the everyday usage. In everyday usage, “significant” means “of practical importance,” or simply “important.” —Wallis and Roberts 1965, p. 385, quoted in http://www.statlit.org/pdf/2009ZiliakMcCloskeyASA.pdf
“Sabunciyan has found that an unexpectedly large amount of the RNA produced in the brain—about 5 percent—comes from seemingly “junk” DNA, which includes endogenous retroviruses. RNA is a messenger of DNA, a step in the path to making proteins, so its presence could mean that viral proteins are being manufactured in the body more frequently than had been thought. Through this research, a rough account is emerging of how HERV-W could trigger diseases like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and MS. Although the body works hard to keep its ERVs under tight control, infections around the time of birth destabilize this tense standoff. Scribbled onto the marker board in Yolken’s office is a list of infections that are now known to awaken HERV-W—including herpes, toxoplasma, cytomegalovirus, and a dozen others. The HERV-W viruses that pour into the newborn’s blood and brain fluid during these infections contain proteins that may enrage the infant immune system. White blood cells vomit forth inflammatory molecules called cytokines, attracting more immune cells like riot police to a prison break. The scene turns toxic.”
—The Insanity Virus | Health & Medicine | DISCOVER Magazine
PoliSciFi Radio is live! http://www.poliscifiradio.com/?page_id=23 #psfr
RT @igaiga555: I’m affected by “git log —oneline —decorate —graph” !! #rubyconf http://bit.ly/bfjH8X
RT @mikemccaffrey: The Clone Wars show is hard to watch. Jedi manage to outdo Democrats at losing a huge majority to a handful of schemi …
My plan for the deficit http://t.co/WMc8PiU via @nytgraphics
“The clinical trial was conducted in 2000 and the findings were published three years later in the Annals of Internal Medicine (Lisse et al. 2003). The scientific article reported “that five [note the number, 5] patients taking Vioxx had suffered heart attacks during the trial, compared with one [note the number, 1] taking naproxen [the generic drug, such as Aleve, given to a control group], a difference that did not reach statistical significance.”2 The signal-to-noise ratio did not rise to 1.96, the 5% level of significance that the Annals of Internal Medicine uses as strict line of demarcation, discriminating the “significant” from the insignificant, the scientific from the non-scientific.
Therefore, Merck claimed, there was no difference in the effects of the two pills. No difference in oomph, they said, despite a Vioxx disadvantage of about 5-to-1. Then the apparent fraud: the article neglected to mention that in the same clinical trial three additional takers of Vioxx, including the 73-year old woman whose survivors brought the problem to public attention, suffered from heart attacks. Eight in fact suffered or died in the clinical trial, not five. It appears that the scientists, or the Merck employees who wrote the report, simply dropped the three observations.
Why? Why did they drop the 3? We do not know for sure. The courts will decide. But an outsider could be forgiven for inferring that they dropped the three observations in order to get an amount of statistical significance low enough to claim— illogically, but this is the usual procedure—a zero effect.” —
Therefore, Merck claimed, there was no difference in the effects of the two pills. No difference in oomph, they said, despite a Vioxx disadvantage of about 5-to-1. Then the apparent fraud: the article neglected to mention that in the same clinical trial three additional takers of Vioxx, including the 73-year old woman whose survivors brought the problem to public attention, suffered from heart attacks. Eight in fact suffered or died in the clinical trial, not five. It appears that the scientists, or the Merck employees who wrote the report, simply dropped the three observations.
Why? Why did they drop the 3? We do not know for sure. The courts will decide. But an outsider could be forgiven for inferring that they dropped the three observations in order to get an amount of statistical significance low enough to claim— illogically, but this is the usual procedure—a zero effect.” —
The Cult of Statistical Significance By Stephen T. Ziliak and Deirdre N. McCloskey
Persistence and Virtual Realities
Nicholas pointed me to this article discussing this article about MMOs vs. multiplayer console games, and pointing out that many of the innovations of MMOs have been adopted (coopted?) by console games. According to Frank, “alternate worlds” (by which I think he means persistent and shared virtual worlds) have failed to break through to widespread market acceptance. If this is so, the big question is, why haven’t they? What’s so different about persistence?
One of the many ways in which common sense hasn’t yet caught up with virtual worlds is that it’s both technically easier and more natural to have many independent and transient virtual worlds than one singular and persistent universe. It’s what people want from a game (or really, from entertainment in general) — a “what if” experience that has a defined lifetime, even if certain traits follow a player from game to game.
Throughout human history people have played games and enjoyed stories and, more recently, movies and TV shows. If you step back a little you realize that “independent and transient virtual world” is a pretty good definition of “game” or “story”, whereas a unitary persistent all-in MMO (or a Gibsonian cyberspace) is kind of weird and anomalous and even tedious, more like a job than a game. If a console game is like a story, an MMO is more like an afterlife or a delusion, a fantasy that people may indulge in but only as a backdrop to the mundane, not as an entertaining diversion.
People had similar dumb ideas early on about 3D UIs, typified by the scene in Disclosure where Michael Douglas straps on a VR headset and walks through aisles in a virtual library, only to find what he’s looking for by opening a flat video chat window and having a conversation in English with a librarian AI. Just as three dimensions are not nearly enough to represent information storage, retrieval and analysis, one universe is also not nearly enough to represent the many desired “what-if”s of entertainment. Most MMOs have many servers, and even shared-universe MMOs have a multiplicity of instances and games, which reset, play, disappear, and repeat.
The real world already has persistence; it’s a feature, not a bug, when fantasy worlds transcend that limitation.
“The movie’s motivating fear, then, is easily named, which is simply that the bombs could hit again; that peace could evaporate; that it’s not over; eight years later and here we go again. The next time you hear someone say that horror movies traffic in “our fear of the unknown,” Godzilla is how you tell them that they’re wrong. When the movie came out, Nagasaki and Hiroshima weren’t even a decade back. Some people live in fear of the entirely known.”
—» Telling Stories about Superweapons; or, There’s Only One Way This Can End Christian Thorne • Commonplace Book
RT @plukevdh: Awesome panel : “if you’ve come to this panel for coherent educational discussion, you are absolutely in the wrong place.” …
#rubyconf Teaching Ruby BOF moved to wherever we eat lunch today. Look for the hand grenade! @ultrasaurus @j3 @rubynuby
Sad that 2/3 of lightning talks won’t happen (including mine on Wrong) cause they only scheduled 1 hour for 25 talks #rubyconf
