Tag Archives: tab sweep

Blogging again?

Bandwhich demonstrates how little I understand networking. I don’t even know if I have to be superuser to sniff an interface. A friend wrote something not unlike Sniffglue and made a business of it, back in the olden days.

The Pew survey has a list of striking findings from 2019. Rather than striking, I’d say most of them are, “Yeah, I can believe that.”

Why isn’t this seen as a “both and” rather than an “either or?” Conservatives appreciate the importance of science even as they distrust scientists.

Although self-identifying political conservatives in the United States show high levels of distrust toward the scientific community, they are far from abandoning science as a valid epistemology and a field in which crucial cultural contests might be won. This insight—that audiences are able to partition scientific beliefs and attitudes according to cultural preferences—has been most fully appreciated in the context of conservative Protestants. Scientifically knowledgeable religious conservatives have been able to effectively partition their knowledge and attitudes in ways that maintain a broad recognition of the legitimacy of scientific endeavor while selectively rejecting the science and, more importantly the scientists, that contradict particular religious (e.g., creationist) or political (e.g., climate science) identities and worldviews; impinge on areas perceived as outside their purview, like public policy or morality; or, in the case of scientists specifically, are perceived as personally hostile toward religion.

Scott Alexander’s Adversarial Collaboration Contest included an entry by Alexander, “Is Eating Meat a Net Harm?” It was predicated on the assumption that humans are capable of eating meat, or not, with no health consequences. The evidence of the past 8,000 years, and certainly the last 100 years, argues that this is not a settled issue. For example, consider these two articles: Stangle: Impossible burgers are made of what? and Reduction in red meat consumption to ‘increase death and disease’. (The articles’ publishers have obvious conflicts of interest; however, the point of adversarial collaboration is that neither party pretends to have a neutral outlook.)

Tech Links

OOPS. I periodically publish a tab sweep. Sometimes (like now) I draft and forget to publish it. This post should have been published in mid-June.

MuPDF is a better PDF reader because it opens large PDFs faster than evince.

Geeqie is an image viewer that offers side-by-side comparisons of images.

Apple announces Swift 2 with new language features, open source. I looked it over, and I think I still like Ruby better. But it’s clearly an improvement over [[Objective] C].

A gallery of everything new in iOS 9. The Podcast app might not be quite as aggravating as before. And they’ve realized that iOS 8’s version of a shift key was a disaster.

Cute: the old After Dark screen saver implemented in CSS.

Datamation: The best features of Libre Office Writer. After using Word 2013 with it’s worst-idea-ever “Ribbon” I’m thinking of switching.

Tab Sweep – June 19

The most diverse place in America:

Remember Sarah Palin’s much-parodied 2008 interview with Katie Couric? One segment ended with this line: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Five Thirty-Eight: Which Flight Will Get You There Fastest?

Compared with the OECD, America is a Violent Country. Is it getting worse?

Indie publishing tips: Get a Spine and Get a Blurb (for your book’s cover), and The Economics of Indie Publishing.

John C. Wright explains why he doesn’t worry about an author’s politics.

There are other authors (Milton among them) who were visited nightly by the muse and dictated to him. … But her voice is there, or the story is merely words without spirit. … I do not care that Leigh Brackett was a lady or Lord Dunsany a lord. I also care very little what the author thinks in his private life when he is speaking for himself. This is why I prefer the juveniles of Robert Heinlein over his seniles. His later books were too much Bob and not enough Bob’s muse.

Lifehack: John Brandon’s 7-minute routine to change your work life and a follow-up article about implementing it. (I hate the auto-scrolling at that site, by the way.)

Acton Institute: Why the Price System is One of God’s Artworks. (Which reminds me: I need to read Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.)

Dieting doesn’t shrink your stomach, quite:

The latest science suggests that chronic food restriction can actually affect how much you need to eat to feel full—with caveats. … Numerous imaging studies have shown that the stomachs of obese people are really not that different from those of the rest of the population, indicating that there is little relationship between body size and baseline stomach size….

Thoughts about effective logo design.

Kurt Schlichter says it’s not cool when a high school graduating class has 72 valedictorians.

Shut down the TSA. Really.

This deserves more than a mention in a tab sweep: The Founders’ Model of Welfare Actually Reduced Poverty. I don’t know how well things worked before the modern social welfare system (since Roosevelt’s New Deal, say) but today it’s hard to spend almost any effort trying to alleviate poverty without giving in to despair.

Miscellaney

It’s been awhile since I blogged, so here are a few things that I might have blogged if I blogged much.

Windows has environment variables, because Microsoft used to steal ideas from Unix. But they never really understood them, so the tools they provide to configure your environment are crappy. Enter REE, the Rapid Environment Editor. (Via.)

Serenity Crew, where are you?. (Via.)

The pinnacle of the typewriter-maker’s craft, introduced 50 years ago. (Via.)

Tab Sweep

How did the mutation that prevents lactose intolerance become so widespread so quickly?

Joss Whedon endorses Mitt Romney.

Camile Paglia endorses Jill Stein. And Revenge of the Sith. Really.

Additional evidence for the grandmother longevity hypothesis.

A recent conference asks if programmers can be artists. If so, they should start with processing.

Learn Git with the Git Immersion guided tour.

Tweak Unity with unsettings 0.08 and get rid of those pesky web results!

A new version of Return to Castle Wolfenstein (co-op edition) has been released.

On the other hand, if you’re fighting the headwinds of history, here’s a guide to installing Windows 8 with just an upgrade license. (Microsoft is fighting the headwinds too, and won’t let you easily make a clean install.)

Google Ngrams are now even awesomer.

In twenty years the number of planets outside our solar system has gone from zero to almost a thousand. But now there’s an exoplanet next door:

It turns out there’s more than one way to smash the earth and build the moon.

Concerned about Genetically modified organisms? Worried about all the land mines scattered all over the world during the past century? Maybe you can pick which one worries you more: a GM mouse has been created to detect land mines. (Apropos the above, consider this piece on GMOs and pesticide use.)