BREAKING NON-NEWS!!!!
Twitter will “track” you… just like Facebook, Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and pretty much every site on the internet… unless you opt out.
This is the most non-news, news I’ve heard in a long time.
In 2010, I posted a video of the comedy music band, Axis of Awesome, playing their famous 4 Chords song. The video came out in 2009 but in August of 2011, they released an album with a studio recorded version. They also posted an official version of the medley and updated slightly for some more recent songs.
No Waltzing Matilda, though. But, interestingly enough, I went looking for a video with the song in it (the link I included in the post was taken down by EMI… not sure how they own an old Australian folk song). But instead, I found this version which explains some of the terms that are sung. It also seems as if it’s been covered by a lot of famous artists. I’m going to check them out when I have more time.
This boycotting of the NY Times is becoming harder and harder – especially when you have a guy like Kyle Baxter linking to interesting things. This time, he links to a story of how some people are electing to amputate (or in most cases, extend an existing amputation) to improve their quality of life. It sounds crazy but it makes sense in a meta-phsyical way if one’s life is at risk or, if after an accident or cancer treatment, the quality of one’s existence is forever altered for the worse.
As Kyle notes in his comments on the article, prosthetics have come a long way. Carbon fibers, microchips, silicone flesh, and motor relays are just what’s out there, now. Just this morning, I read a paralyzed woman was given a microchip in her brain to control a robotic arm; there’s no reason that can’t be applied to artificial limbs.
But it has to be a very surreal decision. Electing to amputate to save one’s life from cancer might not be such an easy choice as one might think; I imagine there are emotions surrounding the success rate, the change in lifestyle, etc. that really make you wonder what’s the better option. Once you go through the initial amputation, it might not be as hard to make the second choice to go further. But it goes against every natural instinct to survive and it can’t be easy to turn it off for elective surgery which speaks nothing of the costs to consider.
Anthropology and sociology are the non-computer and non-business/economic sciences that fascinate me more than anything else. If I hadn’t gone into the business and computer industries, I probably would have studied one of those two fields (or psychology). So it’s especially interesting to me when I read about how Subways, over time, have converged to like organizational structures and designs.
With equations used to study two-dimensional spatial networks, the class of network to which subways belong, the researchers turned stations and lines to a mathematics of nodes and branches. They repeated their analyses with data from each decade of a subway system’s history, and looked for underlying trends.
Patterns emerged: The core-and-branch topology, of course, and patterns more fine-grained. Roughly half the stations in any subway will be found on its outer branches rather than the core. The distance from a city’s center to its farthest terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core. This happens again and again.
Looking at a graph they produced, you can see the ration of branch stations to core stations have moved towards a common range. It’s fascinating for a few reasons. It shows that humans think and organize in similar ways because many of these systems were designed independently. But it’s also an interesting study in how city planners react to population changes or how populations react to planning. I’d also argue it’s a fascinating study in how cities limited resources with the needs of the many over the needs of the few.
This is so interesting to me. I’m looking forward to followup observations.
The Smithsonian uncovers surprisingly accurate predictions of what jobs will be around in 2012 made 30 years ago in 1982.
One prediction that hasn’t come true, though: ubiquitous space travel like airline travel is today.
via The Awl