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Haunted by Data
This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop World conference in New York City. The video version is here (20 mins).
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Travel in the USA Requires ID
The TSA says it is possible to fly without ID , but then goes on to state that you still have to prove your identity in some way. If the purpose is to thwart hijackings, then it should be sufficient to simply give anonymous passengers additional screening. But that's not the purpose of ID.
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The Gig Economy
Warning: This post touches politics. The comments will likely be incendiary and polarizing. Don’t go into the comments if you don’t want to be annoyed or irritated. Many in the tech industry are taking these comments by Hillary Clinton yesterday as an ‘attack on Uber and the tech sector’: Meanwhile, many Americans are…
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A Note to My Readers
One of the things I’ve always tried to do at the Dish is to be up-front with readers. This sometimes means grotesque over-sharing; sometimes it means I write imprudent arguments I have to withdraw;…
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Fixing Italy, a little bit at a time
Italy has so many wonderful, beautiful amazing places and things, and all if it in an area about the size of California. And yet, it’s got a lot of problems too. What drives me crazy in pa…
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On software popularity
Donald Knuth once said: If I find too many people adopting a certain idea I’d probably think it’s wrong .
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The End of Safe Harbor and a Scary Path Forward
Some in detail analysis about what the end of safe harbor means for small companies, especially in Europe.
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Seneca on the proper use of time
Yesterday I wrote about the impending death of the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. I was particularly struck by this line from Sachs’ public goodbye
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The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities
This is a post loosely based on an article appearing today in the German newspaper “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” by Axel Brennicke and me. The raw data for our analysis is available. Please do let us know if you find a […] <a class="more-link"…
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Installing Red Star 3.0, North Korea's homegrown operating system
Earlier this week, someone who goes by slipstream (“pulling data out of DPRK’s ass since 2014!”) posted a torrent of North Korea’s Red Star 3.0 installer. My first instinct was to download and run it, because installing software from North Korea, what could possibly go wrong?
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A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
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Outschooling in the Bay Area
Homeschooling is interesting because, if some new approach is going to disrupt the current education system and change it radically for the better, it seems likely it would come from outside the...
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More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows
People of earth, waving at Saturn, courtesy of NASA . “It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year”...
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Processed meats as bad as cigarettes: bad reporting on good science
Today, the WHO issued a report that says, in essence, processed meats and red meats are carcinogens. This has been reported in a variety of…
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We can't see our culture very well, because we see with it
By Hand & Brain
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Epistemic learned helplessness (2013)
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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The Town That Creep Built
architectural conjecture :: urban speculation :: landscape futures
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The Vector Space of the Polish Parliament in Pictures
In fact, only of the lower house, the Sejm. During its current term, 460 deputies voted 5545 times since the 8th of November 2011. The Sejm website publishes the individual results of the votes as …
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Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy (2013)
Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora. EDIT: I’m working on something that I hope will make things better. Check out interviewing.io. I’ve been hiring people in some capacity for the past 3 years. First, I was doing it as an engineer, then as an in-house recruiter, and now as […]
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Removing EU roaming charges is a big deal (2014)
The European commission came to similar conclusions as those below - and limited the effects of its end-of-roaming-initiative to disallow a real competition between carriers from different European countries. Unfortunately, we will still suffer from limited competitions and widely varying offerings within the single…
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Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi
“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
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Happy Little Words – Analyzing the Bob Ross Twitch Chat
In late October the video game streaming site Twitch.tv launched "Twitch Creative" , essentially giving people permission to stream non-video game related creative content on the site. To celebrate the launch they streamed all 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in a giant marathon.