Salbute-making 101. (at los dos)
Don’t worry. Things end. They always have, they always will. Make sure that you can take your data when it does end, and you’ll be set.
It’s a good thing that they’re not supporting things that don’t make them money. Seriously. All good companies do. Maybe Google will become a better company with better products if it does follow that path. Maybe it’ll even stop trying to pretend it’s more morally righteous, more open, more knowledgeable of the future. Maybe it’ll just ship good, useable, important things. That would be great.
Reblogged from kateordie|5,676 notes |#
It started as a tweet, and it became an infographic.
Hey guys! Kate Leth’s subcultures are definitely cooler and more valid than yours.
As a male feminist, I’m not a fan of MRAs. As a dedicated TV watcher, I didn’t really care about My Little Pony, but I gave it a shot. And as someone who cares a lot about the clothes I wear, I’ve learned that I don’t look good in fedoras.
But I’ve met people who fit those three categories. I didn’t agree with and certainly didn’t get along with them. That’s OK. What I definitely didn’t do is trash them on the internet. And that, folks, is a lesson we all have to learn: don’t be a dick to people who can instead be understood.
Reblogged from sundayfeeling|31,663 notes |#
(Source: highcarumba)
From this review of To Save Everything, Click Here, a new book by Evgeny Morozov. In my undergrad I did a lot of work in the philosophy of science, and I came away from it with a deep appreciation for Kuhn. When research paradigms change, the new one isn’t chosen by anything much resembling rationality; theory choice seems to always be underdetermined by existing evidence. And that means that pretty much everything is value-laden, which is OK, because what isn’t value-laden isn’t interesting for humans. For instance, stats are hard because you need to know how to effectively but also responsibly use models and techniques.
What grounds the discussion of quantification (and I have a hunch that quantification’s problems, as described by Morozov, are the problems of all symbolic systems, and certainly also problems that narratives face) is the fact that these models work and matter only insofar as they aim at truth. And sure, you can be a dick about it like Morozov, but that’s no fun, and you’re going to miss out on a whole lot of important, truth-speaking stuff if you take a Luddite’s view towards all the tools of science. Sure, you might avoid seeing the wrong bits that make you feel uncomfortable. But why not actually contribute? Why not actually be a part of the refining of quantification? Why not see where it can go, and bring in your knowledge also about what is moral?
What seeeeeems to be important is that we aim at truth, so let’s not silo ourselves too much. There’s a reason why the subtitle of this blog is “at the tech frontier of the liberal arts.” It’s because I’ve found there’s too much benefit in being a scientist about the real human shit I care about to ever go back to thinking that theory has all the answers.
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We need an ethics of quantification, Morozov cries, and I cry with him. When is it good? When is it bad? How can it be used to further our ends, as opposed to being celebrated as its own end?
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From The Story of My App in the New Yorker, telling the tale of how a Christopher Niemann built the Petting Zoo app. It turns out that you very much can treat apps as an artful medium, and that, as usual, the hardest part of making good art is to trim out the bad parts.
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Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.After all the slicing away, you may realize, now that you can clearly see the idea, that it’s actually not very good.
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