I just got a notification that someone reshared this picture that I originally shared here on G+ 3 years ago. It was a popular share, so I'm sharing it again.



I recreate the wheel every time I try to format currency, and I do it wrong every time.

Hopefully I'll remember this post next time…

Etsy does business in more than 200 regions and 9 languages. It’s important that our member experience is consistent and credible in all regions, which means we have to format prices correctly for all members.

It's pretty embarrassing for Vox to have published this article by Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions explaining how piracy harms the film industry.

He tries to make a more subtle argument than drawing a direct line between piracy and reducing revenue. Instead he tries to argue that reduced revenue from piracy means studios are less willing to make art movies.

That assumes facts not in evidence! AFAIK, there's no solid evidence that piracy reduces revenue. I mean, that's a worthwhile thing to study and discuss…but it's either ignorant or dishonest to just take that as a given.

Magic Leap demonstration of their AR technology.

In this country we've decided that education is a public good and yet what we really mean is "just for the people closest to me" which doesn't make much sense to me.

This article has an interactive graphic to look at school districts near you. All the dollar amounts have been adjusted to regional costs.



During the first, unconscious stage, our brain processes specific features of objects such as color or shape. It then analyzes these objects with a very high time-resolution. But crucially to the proposed model, there is no actual perception of time during this phase — even time-dependent features such as duration or changes in color are not perceived as such. Time simply becomes a value assigned to each state, just as color or shape. In essence, during this stage your brain gathers and processes data, then puts them into a spreadsheet (a brainxcell if you will,) and “time” becomes just another value in a column.

Reshared post from +Ward Plunet

Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls

Alex Reben came up with 2.5 million ideas in just three days. Nearly all of them are terrible – but he doesn’t mind. He thinks he has found a way to thwart patent trolls by putting their speculative ideas in the public domain before they can make a claim. In his project, called All Prior Art, Reben, an artist and engineer, uses software to rummage through the US patent database, which is freely available online. The software extracts sentences from patent documents and splices them into phrases that describe new inventions. The result is a bizarre array of contraptions that don’t quite make sense. A robotic phone book. A nasal plug adorned with magnetic jewellery. 3D-printed soap that kills pests on strawberry plants. And one of Reben’s favourites – a temperature-regulating adult nappy with a built-in hood.

Reshared post from +Simon Wardley

The robots are coming … for whom the bell tolls.
I often read articles about how machine intelligence and robotics will replace basic roles in society, they will become the new drivers, the new waiters, the new hospital porters and nurses of this world. But is this likely? And if they are going to replace…

I come across so many people on the internet giving advice on how to meet some fitness goal. You know, the ones about how to get rid of tummy fat, get tone arms, etc.

Much of the advice I read sounds plausible.

Pretty much none of it ever includes any scientific evidence, and its infuritating.

Andrew Gelman thinks we should just drastically discount our confidence in the results of any paper published before 2016 because journals are terrible and they will never, ever fix their problems.

Let’s just put a bright line down right now. 2016 is year 1. Everything published before 2016 is provisional. Don’t take publication as meaning much of anything, and just cos a paper’s been cited approvingly, that’s not enough either. You have to read each paper on its own. Anything published in 2015 or earlier is part of the “too big to fail” era, it’s potentially a junk bond supported by toxic loans and you shouldn’t rely on it.

This is based on an an article (http://goo.gl/sYHBKo) that shows just how bad journals are at acknowledging and fixing the problems with published papers.