Links for you. Science:
eCAMBer: efficient support for large-scale comparative analysis of multiple bacterial strains
PLoS One, I have an idea for what to do with all your profits: buy hard drives
The Military is Leaving the Missing Behind
Chauvet cave art not the work of earliest Europeans (BANKSY?!?)
KRAKEN: Taxonomic Read Classification
Other:
You Know Who Else Collected Metadata? The Stasi. (related thoughts here)
How a murder in 1933 helped make Whitey Bulger’s reign of terror possible
Can Germany Reform American Labor Relations? German corporations are far more respectful of worker rights—and may have more influence on future US developments than our politicians realize.
How Interning for TFA Convinced me of its Injustice
The Pentagon’s Phony Budget Wars: Despite the uproar over reductions to defense funding, less than 1 percent of the Pentagon’s beefy $550 billion budget will be cut this year.
PowerPoint and Knowing Your Audience(s)
Let’s get straight who is paying for whom
About That ‘Common Core’ Math Problem Making the Rounds on Facebook…
Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney
Economic Sanctions against “Sacred Values”: Why Sanctions Will Not Deter Russia
Job Creators Have Their Own Magazines
London’s Laundry Business
America’s Angriest Store: How Whole Foods Attracts Complete Shitheads.
mikethemadbiologist
My telephone company collects metadata. In fact I demand that it do so, to keep a legal record against the corporate datawhores who appear to be more a concern to me than they are to Mike the Mad Biologist.
In the same world in which Mike is a smart guy, who knows about a lot of technology things, Robert is a (presumably) smart guy who knows a lot about technology things as well.
So Robert would like to know if we can stop it with the facile equation of America with Stasi, KGB, and Romanian secret police, or the Argentinian creeps who might have killed my wife had she not had the sense to walk away from that car down the road.
Robert understands that he is speaking in the third person, which is kind of weird but is an acceptable rhetorical trope, because he is very angry about the coopting of torture upon people he loves into the service of some other person’s momentary agenda.
About that Common Core math, there is nothing new about subtracting by adding. It’s how sales clerks used to make change. (As the article suggests, but does not actually come out and say.)
That Whole Foods article is funny. Back in the bad old days before the mathematicians proved that single-queue/multi-server worked better than queue per server checkout, we got stuck behind a woman with two slightly pre-teen kids ordering 5 lbs of jelly beans at the local yuppy store. The idiot clerk put them in a single brown paper bag, resulting in jelly beans all over the place. While we were waiting for the jelly beans to be cleaned up, the woman insisted on her 5 lbs. of beans, leaving us waiting for an even longer age. Which had us thinking: Why would any yuppy mother who couldn’t possibly not know better be buying such teeth-destroying stuff for her kids. Aha! goes the light bulb. She’s looking to have an affair with the dentist, and needs an excuse to see him. And, proving it, the next year a schlock Hollywood flick came out in which a dentist was having too much fun with the customers, and the jealousy therefrom resulted in all sorts of mayhem.
(The above is dedicated to Dr. Levy, a dentist in NH CT, who diagnosed and successfully treated a horrifically painful problem that the Yale medical staff told me wasn’t treatable. And whose dental technician said, “Hmm, come to think of it, some of the women patients do seem to be here a bit more than necessary…”)