Contriving

In today's world a camera that only records 640×480 and can only preserve 30 seconds of video and costs $400 seems to be setting a pretty low bar.

I don't know how long your average police person's shift is, but say it's 8 hours, you could record video at 2 mbit/s and store a complete stream of that whole 8 hours in 60 gigabytes of flash storage and then you wouldn't be reliant on a cop to press the "hey save what just happened" button on the camera.

What if the officer was incapacitated and couldn't press the button?  What if the officer is behaving badly?  Why in the world would they press the button?

You could even have a button for the officer to press to mark sections of the video so you didn't have to peruse hours and hours of video to find interesting parts.

Now, I'm not saying it would be easy to create such a camera.  You'd have to have sufficient battery capacity and you'd have to think about flash durability, but those are not insurmountable obstacles.

Could This Camera Prevent Police Brutality?
Taser–the world’s favorite non-lethal weapons manufacturer–says its new surveillance device can protect both cops and citizens.

Originally posted on Google+ · August 26, 2014

Originally posted on Google+ · August 21, 2014

If you're a python programmer, the PyCharm IDE can  use Python 3 function annotations to do type suggestions and warnings.

I made this little animation to demonstrate.

PyCharm with type annotations – Gfycat
Jiffier gifs. share your gifs with the world on the fastest gif hosting platform. Yes to playback controls, No to size limits!

Originally posted on Google+ · August 21, 2014

Dyslexia has advantages:  dyslexic people are more sensitive to violations of causality.

Dyslexia is often called a “learning disability.” And it can indeed present learning challenges. Although its effects vary widely, children with dyslexia read so slowly that it would typically take them a half a year to read the same number of words other children might read in a day. Therefore, the fact that people who read so slowly were so adept at picking out the impossible figures was a big surprise to the researchers. After all, why would people who are slow in reading be fast at responding to visual representations of causal reasoning?

The Advantages of Dyslexia
With reading difficulties can come other cognitive strengths

Originally posted on Google+ · August 20, 2014

Originally posted on Google+ · August 19, 2014

GIF of that last post of mine.

i.imgur.com/hLbaJ9R.gif

Originally posted on Google+ · August 18, 2014

This is really cool, and I can imagine all sorts of amazing scifi-type stuff that could happen with this in 5-10 years.

Originally posted on Google+ · August 18, 2014

To put this in perspective, just seven years ago, estimates suggested that only 500,000 tons of methane were being released into Earth's atmosphere each year. Now we're measuring 17 million tons of it. Just in the Arctic.

The Giant Methane Monster That Can Wipe Out the Human Race
Underneath the frozen Arctic are 1,000 gigatons of the world’s most deadly greenhouse gas.

Originally posted on Google+ · July 7, 2014

This idea is a nice one, because it suggests that successful people earned their expertise, and that many people have a shot at becoming successful if they work hard enough. It gained especially wide attention through a rule it inspired in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: that to become really, really good at something, you have to intensely practice at it for around 10,000 hours, the "10,000-hour rule."

But this is an area of active dispute among psychologists — and over the years, dozens of studies have collected hard data on the link between practice and top performance in all sorts of fields. A new statistical analysis of 88 of these studies comes to the exact opposite conclusion: success mostly reflects other factors (probably things like innate talent and opportunity) rather than hours and hours of practice.

I find studies like this one especially seductive as I'm a red-blooded contrarian.  Accordingly, I find myself having to consciously increase my skepticism about them as I like the results so much.

Life isn’t fair: the people who practice the most aren’t the most successful
The importance of practice is a nice idea, but it’s a false one.

Originally posted on Google+ · July 7, 2014