With the recent Heartbleed security bug, it got me in the mood to go through and audit my passwords.  So, I opened up the LastPass security audit page and saw that I have 740 passwords saved.

I'm pretty sure that I imported from KeePass when I started using LastPass years ago, and I used something else before I used KeePass, so these are login credentials for probably 15 years worth of internetting, but there's no way I'm going through 740 sites and checking to make sure they're still alive, see if I still want to keep the account, etc…

Originally posted on Google+ · April 11, 2014

Being better at math didn’t just fail to help partisans converge on the right answer. It actually drove them further apart. Partisans with weak math skills were 25 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. Partisans with strong math skills were 45 percentage points likelier to get the answer right when it fit their ideology. The smarter the person is, the dumber politics can make them.

How politics makes us stupid
There’s a simple theory underlying much of American politics. It sits hopefully at the base of almost every speech, every op-ed, every article, and every panel discussion. It courses through the…

Originally posted on Google+ · April 7, 2014

Generally, I don't expect companies to react well when they are criticized about "controversial" topics.  (I hate that I had to use the word controversial there)

Nabisco had an ad about their graham crackers that showed gay couples and called it wholesome.  Of course, people being what they are, Nabisco received a lot of negative feedback about that.

They responded with this.

Originally posted on Google+ · April 4, 2014

As chlorophyll absorbs light to convert it to energy, it emits a bit of fluorescent light.  Using existing satellites NASA figured out how to measure this florescence.

Below, you see North America during growing season…wherein it demonstrates that during this time of year it is the most productive (in terms of amount of photosynthesis) area on the planet.  _This includes being more active than the Amazon basin_.

source: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/seeing-photosynthesis-from-space-nasa-scientists-use-satellites-to-measure-plant-health/#.Uz3-2tVdWCl

Originally posted on Google+ · April 3, 2014

Similarly, students whose parents frequently meet with teachers and principals don’t seem to improve faster than academically comparable peers whose parents are less present at school. Other essentially useless parenting interventions: observing a kid’s class; helping a teenager choose high-school courses; and, especially, disciplinary measures such as punishing kids for getting bad grades or instituting strict rules about when and how homework gets done.

Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework – Dana Goldstein – The Atlantic
The Atlantic covers breaking news, analysis, opinion around politics, business, culture, international, science, technology, national profiles on the official site of the Atlantic Magazine.

Originally posted on Google+ · March 21, 2014

A deep belief network is an artificial intelligence technique for training computers to recognize patterns.

They're pretty astounding in how much they improve a computers ability to recognize what is in an image, and this company has a Javascript+WebGL implementation that runs in your browser.

I tried a bunch of my own photos by clicking the big buttons under the interface and was pretty impressed in how well it described the content of the photos.

Deep Belief in Javascript
cityguide

Originally posted on Google+ · March 19, 2014

In a sentencing memo, prosecutors called Trudeau an "unrepentant, untiring, and uncontrollable huckster who has defrauded the unsuspecting for 30 years."

I gotta say, though…30 years and you're just now getting him to stop?  Pretty ineffectual job there, government.

Television pitchman Kevin Trudeau is headed to prison
Television pitchman and author Kevin Trudeau gets 10 years in prison for criminal contempt in connection with his infomercials and books.

Originally posted on Google+ · March 17, 2014

There's a class of crackpots with theories that, on the surface, seem to describe reality.

These people are stunningly smart and subtly un-rigorous in their theories.  And the problem with that is that it's easy to see the smartness and difficult to suss out the un-rigorousness.

And the problem with that is that the next big idea will come from someone who is stunningly smart and stunningly rigorous (or lucky) with their idea.  Because it's difficult, relative to recognizing someones intelligence, to recognize a wrong idea from a right idea, it's difficult to sieve the good ideas from the bad.

This post inspired by a recent discussion about Terrence McKenna's novelty theory.

Originally posted on Google+ · March 13, 2014

What I find really cool is that it's part of a binary star system where:

"the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star"

!

VLT Spots Largest Yellow Hypergiant Star – Mix of new and old observations reveals exotic binary system
ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer has revealed the largest yellow star — and one of the ten largest stars found so far. This hypergiant has been found to measure more than 1300 times the diameter of the Sun, and to be part of a double star system, with the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star. Observations spanning over sixty years, some from amateur observers, also indicate that this rare and remarkable obje…

Originally posted on Google+ · March 12, 2014