long-overdue links: sexism in the tech industry, torture v. diversity, money wins elections
Mood: cheerful
Posted on 2013-05-03 15:06:00
Tags: politics links
Words: 355

It's been a while, so some of these are out of date, but they're interesting, dang it!

- Caroline Shaw, a fellow Philharmonics singer at Rice, just won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music! Congratulations to her! A short article about the piece at Slate.

- The Biggest Problem in Technology - a good synopsis of the sad episode that happened at this year's PyCon. Best sentence:

Given the advantages of time, distance, and a rational mind, it is relatively easy to see that basically everybody involved erred (though some far more severely than others).

- John Yoo Criticizes Liberals for Caring More About Torture Than Diversity - when I read the headline, I thought "oh, there might be a valid point here but the headline is clearly exaggerating"...and I was wrong, the headline is dead-on. Sheeeeeesh!

- After the Jason Collins came out, these Onion articles seem especially relevant: Gay NFL Players Must Be Unknown Special Teams Guys, Says Homophobic Man, and my favorite NFL Players Support Player Coming Out, Getting Absolutely Obliterated During Games. These were published a month ago amidst rumors that a few active NFL players were going to come out - we'll see what happens!

- Ten Practical Things to Make with a 3D Printer

- Money Wins Elections - a cool visualization page in support of the American Anti-Corruption Act, which you should definitely support!

- Abusing hash kernels for wildly unprincipled machine learning - It seems almost magical that something as crude as the hash kernel he describes actually kind of works.

- Carmen Sandiego's Africa map: television's invisible, impossible shuttle run - the Africa map did seem impossible as a kid :-)

- How a banner ad for H&R Block appeared on apple.com—without Apple’s OK - an excellent reason for HTTPS everywhere!

- Pope Francis supported same-sex civil unions in Argentina in 2010 - certainly it was just a reaction to Argentina being about to approve same-sex marriage, but...wow!

- Paramount Hopes New ‘Star Trek’ Is a Global Crowd-Pleaser - I love me some Star Trek, but this article made me a lot less excited about it. Something about seeing how the sausage is made, and how they changed the plot, etc. to appeal more to international audiences.

4 comments

Comment from wildrice13:
2013-05-03T17:13:18+00:00
Good links. I'm with you on the Star Trek movie. I know they're in it to make money, but geez... don't remove the stuff that MAKES it Star Trek to do it. Hopefully they strike a good balance, but I'm a little less optimistic having read that. When I read this line: "Research showed that foreign ticket buyers viewed the 2009 film as 'too Trekkie and too sci-fi,' in the words of one Paramount executive." and see that they're actually taking that to heart... *shudder*. The 2009 movie was good, but already moved some in that direction.

Oh, and Carmen Sandiego... awesome. As a kid I was always like, "come ON! I could do that!" And now I'm like, "whoa, that's *really hard*", and that's without seeing the statistics...

Comment from brittongregory:
2013-05-08T19:28:46+00:00
In cases like that last article, does reading it do anything other than subtract enjoyment from what would otherwise be a fun night out?

Comment from gregstoll:
2013-05-08T21:12:22+00:00
Yeah, I kinda hesitated about posting that...but I want to express my displeasure in meddling with the plot and making things less "sci-fi" to try to appeal to a broader audience. So: booo!

Comment from brittongregory:
2013-05-10T13:39:20+00:00
Fair enough. :)

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