Another complaint about austerity
It now may be clear to readers of this blog that I am not really in favour of austerity economics. Perhaps this is due to my naive or idealistic perception of the world but perhaps austerity has basic problems that no one seems to want to tackle.
Published in the Financial Times, this piece by Gillian Tett did really uncover some of these problems:
“There’s a lot of little kids going hungry round here,” explained one friend, who works in a local community centre. Indeed, just the other day she had spoken to a family where the child had been chewing wallpaper at night. “He didn’t want to tell his mum because he knew she didn’t have the money for supper,” she explained. “We hear more and more stories like this.”
To many readers of the Financial Times, such tales may seem hard to believe. After all, if you live in the more pleasant parts of southern and central England today, the idea of children chewing wallpaper seems far-fetched. To be sure, the “squeezed [English] middle” is howling about government austerity, inflation and stagnant wages – but life feels bearable for most Home Counties dwellers. And for the jet-setting international cadre in central London, austerity is just a theoretical word.
The problems are, in my humble opinion, excruciatingly simple. Kids are hungry and they do not understand why. They are human beings who lack food in some of the most developed countries in the world (a useless title if you can’t feed your children) and even though they might not inevitably become angry towards government, the transition to adulthood is not going to be all jolly and nice. They are not going to look back and say “the government did that for our own good”; one of their relatives might die from hunger and this will be the end of their hoped for exemplary citizenship.
Although one must always think about the long term and therefore accept sacrifices in the short term, sometimes the weight of these sacrifices are simply too heavy to bear.
The rationale that people will be better off suffering now from the lack of public spending (less education, less health care) in order to enjoy their lives in the foggy future is not appealing to anyone, even those who theorise it.
The solution surely cannot be as dramatically simple as erasing debt wholly. But it cannot be as dramatically simple as asking people not to eat anymore—because this is really what it is.
From atoms to galaxies: a visualisation of the observable universe
This is a magnificent animation which will show you how big Texas is compared to Pluto or how small the Sun is compared to the biggest known star, Canis Major.
From atoms to galaxies: a visualisation of the observable universe
This is a magnificent animation which will show you how big Texas is compared to Pluto or how small the Sun is compared to the biggest known star, Canis Major.
The rise of the sharing economy
The rise of the sharing economy
They chose their rooms and paid for everything online. But their beds were provided by private individuals, rather than a hotel chain. Hosts and guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco. Since its launch in 2008 more than 4m people have used it—2.5m of them in 2012 alone.
It is the most prominent example of a huge new “sharing economy”, in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet. You might think this is no different from running a bed-and-breakfast, owning a timeshare or participating in a car pool. But technology has reduced transaction costs, making sharing assets cheaper and easier than ever—and therefore possible on a much larger scale
The Economist covers what there is to know about the sharing economy with a prime example, Airbnb.
The rise of the sharing economy
www.economist.com/news/lead…|lea
They chose their rooms and paid for everything online. But their beds were provided by private individuals, rather than a hotel chain. Hosts and guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco. Since its launch in 2008 more than 4m people have used it—2.5m of them in 2012 alone.
It is the most prominent example of a huge new “sharing economy”, in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet. You might think this is no different from running a bed-and-breakfast, owning a timeshare or participating in a car pool. But technology has reduced transaction costs, making sharing assets cheaper and easier than ever—and therefore possible on a much larger scale
The Economist covers what there is to know about the sharing economy with a prime example, Airbnb.
My contention is that there is nothing in the text to rule out such a plan, and that it is simply a hole in the plot of an otherwise excellent book that the issue is never brought up. This is not to say that LoTR is in any way a bad book; it merely shows that even as excellent a writer as Tolkien does not always succeed at perfectly harmonizing the various entities which he has placed in his world. As Tolkien himself says,
Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor?
Sean Crist investigates a major plot hole in the Lord of the Rings.
My contention is that there is nothing in the text to rule out such a plan, and that it is simply a hole in the plot of an otherwise excellent book that the issue is never brought up. This is not to say that LoTR is in any way a bad book; it merely shows that even as excellent a writer as Tolkien does not always succeed at perfectly harmonizing the various entities which he has placed in his world. As Tolkien himself says,
Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor?
Sean Crist investigates a major plot hole in the Lord of the Rings.
This is the Breakfast Sandwich Maker and for $29.99, it will change the way you prepare bacon and egg sandwiches in the morning.
Get it here.
[gallery]
This is the Breakfast Sandwich Maker and for $29.99, it will change the way you prepare bacon and egg sandwiches in the morning.
Get it here.
“What is truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands an answer of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand, despite hundreds of years of looking, no acceptable answer of that kind has ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as “stable consensus”; but all turned out to be defective in one way or another — either circular or subject to counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have included a variety of theoretical proposals. Some philosophers have been led to deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some have maintained (insisting on one of the above definitions) that although truth exists, it lacks certain features that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example, that the truth may sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible. And others persist in the attempt to devise a definition that will fit all the intuitive data.
But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these strategies rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth, and the fourth is highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that our various concepts play very different roles in our cognitive economy and (correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of very different kinds. Therefore, it was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well.
Was Wittgenstein Right?, perhaps so, insomuch as you understand what he means.
“What is truth?”. This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands an answer of the form, “Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand, despite hundreds of years of looking, no acceptable answer of that kind has ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as “stable consensus”; but all turned out to be defective in one way or another — either circular or subject to counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have included a variety of theoretical proposals. Some philosophers have been led to deny that there is such a thing as absolute truth. Some have maintained (insisting on one of the above definitions) that although truth exists, it lacks certain features that are ordinarily attributed to it — for example, that the truth may sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible. And others persist in the attempt to devise a definition that will fit all the intuitive data.
But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these strategies rides roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth, and the fourth is highly unlikely to succeed. Instead we should begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that our various concepts play very different roles in our cognitive economy and (correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of very different kinds. Therefore, it was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well.
On the benefits of optimism
In a nutshell, don’t throw your phone through the window next time you’re angry:
For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety – blow off some steam – to be happier. But this is wrong. Researchers, for example, asked people who were mildly-to-moderately depressed to dwell on their depression for eight minutes. The researchers found that such ruminating caused the depressed people to become significantly more depressed and for a longer period of time than people who simply distracted themselves thinking about something else. Senseless suffering – suffering that lacks a silver lining – viciously leads to more depression.
Counter-intuitively, another study found that facing down adversity by venting – hitting a punching bag or being vengeful toward someone who makes you angry – actually leads to people feeling far worse, not better. Actually, doing nothing at all in response to anger was more effective than expressing the anger in these destructive ways.
A captivating paper by Emily Esfahani Smith for The Atlantic.
On the benefits of optimism
www.theatlantic.com/health/ar…
In a nutshell, don’t throw your phone through the window next time you’re angry:
For many years, psychologists, following Freud, thought that people simply needed to express their anger and anxiety – blow off some steam – to be happier. But this is wrong. Researchers, for example, asked people who were mildly-to-moderately depressed to dwell on their depression for eight minutes. The researchers found that such ruminating caused the depressed people to become significantly more depressed and for a longer period of time than people who simply distracted themselves thinking about something else. Senseless suffering – suffering that lacks a silver lining – viciously leads to more depression.
Counter-intuitively, another study found that facing down adversity by venting – hitting a punching bag or being vengeful toward someone who makes you angry – actually leads to people feeling far worse, not better. Actually, doing nothing at all in response to anger was more effective than expressing the anger in these destructive ways.
A captivating paper by Emily Esfahani Smith for The Atlantic.
Rats have collaborated telepathically across continents in the first use of neurotechnology to transmit thoughts directly between animals’ brains.
Telepathic rats team up across continents.
Yes, it was published some weeks ago but it needed to be up here. Isn’t that an amazing scientific achievement?
Rats have collaborated telepathically across continents in the first use of neurotechnology to transmit thoughts directly between animals’ brains.
Telepathic rats team up across continents.
Yes, it was published some weeks ago but it needed to be up here. Isn’t that an amazing scientific achievement?
Glui - a simple annotation tool for screenshots
Glui - a simple annotation tool for screenshots
Simple, lightweight and efficient. The kind of thing you’d use everyday when you work with designers and you don’t design yourself.
Glui - a simple annotation tool for screenshots
Simple, lightweight and efficient. The kind of thing you’d use everyday when you work with designers and you don’t design yourself.
Uchek turns your iPhone into a urine lab
Unveiled at TED 2013, a new app dubbed Uchek, developed by Myshkin Ingawale analyses chemical strips by taking photo of them after they have been dipped in your urine. No, really.
The logic is unbeatable: everyone pees and a lot of people have smartphones.
So what can you do with it?
With the color comparisons as a guide, the app analyzes the results, and comes back in seconds with a breakdown of the levels of glucose, bilirubin, proteins, specific gravity, ketones, leukocytes, nitrites, urobilinogen and hematuria present in the urine. The parameters the app measures are especially helpful for those people managing diabetes, and kidney, bladder and liver problems, or ferreting out the presence of a urinary tract infection.
Smart, cheap and useful. Well played.
Uchek turns your iPhone into a urine lab
Unveiled at TED 2013, a new app dubbed Uchek, developed by Myshkin Ingawale analyses chemical strips by taking photo of them after they have been dipped in your urine. No, really.
The logic is unbeatable: everyone pees and a lot of people have smartphones.
So what can you do with it?
With the color comparisons as a guide, the app analyzes the results, and comes back in seconds with a breakdown of the levels of glucose, bilirubin, proteins, specific gravity, ketones, leukocytes, nitrites, urobilinogen and hematuria present in the urine. The parameters the app measures are especially helpful for those people managing diabetes, and kidney, bladder and liver problems, or ferreting out the presence of a urinary tract infection.
Smart, cheap and useful. Well played.
After 3D printing comes 4D printing.
From Bits:
The 4-D structures are first generated by 3-D printers but then transform when activated.
“This is a whole new idea of printing, where you don’t just print static objects; you print things that turn into other things,” explained Skylar Tibbits, an M.I.T. researcher who is working on the printer collaboration with Stratasys, an Israeli 3-D printing company.