Tag Archives: turns-out-that

Everything All at Once – Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

by Myrna Posted on November 5, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Everything All at Once

How to Think Like a Science Guy, Solve Any Problem, and Make a Better World

Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

Genre: Essays

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: July 11, 2017

Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


In the New York Times bestseller Everything All at Once, Bill Nye shows you how thinking like a nerd is the key to changing yourself and the world around you. Everyone has an inner nerd just waiting to be awakened by the right passion. In Everything All at Once, Bill Nye will help you find yours. With his call to arms, he wants you to examine every detail of the most difficult problems that look unsolvable—that is, until you find the solution. Bill shows you how to develop critical thinking skills and create change, using his “everything all at once” approach that leaves no stone unturned. Whether addressing climate change, the future of our society as a whole, or personal success, or stripping away the mystery of fire walking, there are certain strategies that get results: looking at the world with relentless curiosity, being driven by a desire for a better future, and being willing to take the actions needed to make change happen. He shares how he came to create this approach—starting with his Boy Scout training (it turns out that a practical understanding of science and engineering is immensely helpful in a capsizing canoe) and moving through the lessons he learned as a full-time engineer at Boeing, a stand-up comedian, CEO of The Planetary Society, and, of course, as Bill Nye The Science Guy. This is the story of how Bill Nye became Bill Nye and how he became a champion of change and an advocate of science. It’s how he became The Science Guy. Bill teaches us that we have the power to make real change. Join him in… dare we say it… changing the world.

Original article:

Everything All at Once – Bill Nye & Corey S. Powell

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Quote of the Day: Pink Donut Boxes

by LenoreMennell Posted on May 26, 2017

Mother Jones

From Peter Yen of Santa Ana Packaging, a manufacturer of donut boxes:

Anytime you see a movie or sitcom set in New York and a pink doughnut box appears, you know it obviously took place in L.A.

I did not know that! But it turns out that pink donut and pastry boxes are unique to Southern California.1 Why? Long story short, a Cambodian refugee from the Khmer Rouge became the donut king of Orange County during the 80s before he gambled away his fortune in the 90s. When he was starting out he asked his supplier for a cheaper donut box, and the pink box was born. Click the link for the longer story.

1Are they really? Or have they since spread to the rest of the country? Let us know in comments.

Taken from – 

Quote of the Day: Pink Donut Boxes

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Unroll.me Is Latest Victim of Two Minutes Hate

by Lucile0393 Posted on April 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Have you heard of Unroll.me? I hadn’t until they suddenly popped up in my Twitter feed because everyone was telling me to uninstall their app and never do business with them again. It turns out that Unroll.me is a company that scans your email and unsubscribes you from all your spam. Useful! And free! So how do they make money? By selling data to folks who will pay them for it.

In particular, it turns out that one of their clients is Uber, which was interested in keeping tabs on its biggest competitor, Lyft. Unroll.me helps by scanning email for Lyft receipts and telling Uber whether Lyft’s business is up or down. This is what caused the commotion.

My initial reaction was: Duh. What did you think Unroll.me was doing to make money? I didn’t bother writing anything about it because I didn’t really care that much, but today co-founder Perri Chase (who’s no longer with the company) comes to the defense of her friend and Unroll.me CEO Jojo Hedaya:

Anonymized and at scale why do people care? Do you really care? Are you really surprised? How exactly is this shocking?

Or maybe you just hate yourselves because you think Uber is gross but you use them anyway and “why are these tech founders such assholes” that they have to ruin your experience where you need to delete your apps? And you love Unroll.me and you feel righteous and you have to delete that now too because you need to take a stand against these plain-as-day-in-the-terms-of-service practices.

….Let’s look at why we are really in this situation. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is out of control and no one can stop him. No one except a board who refuses to hold him accountable for his disgusting behavior. Yeah. As a woman I think he is disgusting. As a founder, the truth is I’m like DAMN. That guy is willing to do whatever it takes and I have a mild amount of envy that I’m not a shittier human willing to go to those lengths to be successful. See, Silicon Valley rewards it. He is setting the example for the future founders who want to “crush it” and be unstoppable. It’s gross. You don’t hate that Unroll.me sells your data. You hate that Unroll.me sells your data to Uber.

I still don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand, I’m distinctly unthrilled with the fact that that we all give companies access to so much personal information about ourselves—and we do it for a pittance. On the other hand, it’s pretty clear that I’m in a tiny minority. Even when people know precisely what’s going on, they mostly shrug and sign up anyway. That’s the world we live in.

Chase’s “plain-as-day-in-the-terms-of-service” defense is pretty disingenuous since she knows perfectly well that nobody reads the terms of service for the apps they use. But even if they did I doubt that Unroll.me would lose more than a few percent of their customers. Most of them probably wouldn’t care if Unroll.me sold their names and email addresses to Uber, let alone a harmless bit of aggregate data.

For what it’s worth, what I’d like to see from companies like Unroll.me is a really clear explanation on their websites of what they do. Maybe just a short, punchy bullet list: Examples of what we will do and examples of what we won’t do. That’s what I’d like. And a pony.

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Unroll.me Is Latest Victim of Two Minutes Hate

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More Annoying Camera Blogging (With Cats)

by AugustusReiner8 Posted on March 19, 2017

Mother Jones

Someday I will get bored of regaling you with pictures from my new camera, but that day is not yet. It turns out that burst mode is both a blessing and a curse.

First the curse. With my old camera, I never culled any of the photos I took. I just copied everything onto my desktop PC and left them there. Storage is cheap, and no matter how many pictures I took, I was never going to run out of room.

Then, a few days ago, I ran out of room. Not on the desktop machine, but on my tablet, which is synced to the desktop. For some reason, Microsoft uses MicroSD for expansion memory on the Surface Pro 4, and at the time I got it that meant a maximum size of 128GB. But the new camera takes pictures that are about twice the size of the old Canon, and burst mode means I can crank through a couple of thousand shots in a few days. So the Surface croaked.

In the short term, the answer was a bigger memory chip, which is thankfully available now. In the longer term, it means—what? Going through all the files every time I transfer them and weeding out 90 percent of them? That sounds tedious. Stop syncing some of the folders? I’m tired of that. It’s handy to have everything available everywhere at all times. I’ll have to ponder this.

But burst mode is a blessing too. I’ve tried a few times in the past to get a picture of Hilbert scurrying down a tree after climbing onto the roof, but I could never do it. My old camera had terrible shutter lag, slow autofocus, and no burst mode. Unless I timed it perfectly—and I never did—I couldn’t get the shot.

But burst mode plus fast autofocus makes it easy! Check it out:

Now we can all pretend to be Vogue editors, choosing just the right shot for this month’s cover. I chose No. 3, which shows Hilbert at his graceful best:

So there you have it: better action photography, but lots and lots of gigabytes. Is there a solution that’s neither mind-numbingly tedious nor exorbitantly expensive?

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More Annoying Camera Blogging (With Cats)

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Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

by CliffConde Posted on March 1, 2017

Mother Jones

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Earlier today I noted that core PCE inflation—the measure used by the Fed—has been rising very, very slowly over the past two years. “At that rate, it should hit 2 percent by about 2019 or so,” I snarked.

But that got me curious. How fast is core PCE rising? So naturally I put it into a chart:

It turns out that by 2019 it would actually hit 2.2 percent at its current rate. This is still not something we should be very worried about.1

Of course, inflation isn’t just a trend independent of everything else. If the Fed changes interest rates, or President Trump balloons the deficit, or the dollar weakens and imports get a lot more expensive, then that will affect the inflation rate. But none of those things have happened yet, and until they do we still don’t really have anything to be worried about.

1In fact, it would probably be helpful to see inflation rise to 3 percent for a year or two. If it rises above that, then it’s might be time for the Fed to act.

Follow this link – 

Inflation Probably Won’t Be a Problem Until 2019

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Trump Is Not Doing Well In the Polls

by sally53758829715 Posted on February 16, 2017

Mother Jones

Pew offers up the following comparison today:

Well, at least Trump is #1 at something. In related news, I was looking at Pollster yesterday and found something odd. I’ve mentioned before that although Trump’s disapproval rating has gone up since Inauguration Day, so has his approval rating. But it turns out that if you look only at live phone polls—generally considered the highest quality polls—his approval rating has actually plummeted by six points:

I know that there are differences between phone, IVR, and Internet polls, and IVR polls are generally considered pretty high quality these days. But the IVR/Internet polls show Trump’s approval up four points, while the live phone polls show his approval down six points. That’s a net ten point difference, which is huge.

It’s early days, and maybe it’s just a matter of small sample sizes or something. But I wonder what’s really going on with Trump’s approval rating?

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Trump Is Not Doing Well In the Polls

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Good News! The Economy Has Soared Over the Past Week.

by BernieceV96 Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

So how’s the economy doing? Getting better, getting worse, or what? Gallup asked people this question twice in November and it turns out that Republicans have had a huge change of heart over the past week. The number who think the economy is on the mend has skyrocketed from 16 percent to 49 percent.

The point of this is not to make fun of Republicans.1 Democrats responded the same way, though not by nearly as much. The point is that we shouldn’t pay too much attention to poll questions like this. I’d put the beloved “right-track-wrong-track” question in this category too. Very often, people view these things as proxies for “what do you think of the current president?” They don’t really have any idea whether the economy is getting better or worse, but they don’t like that Obama guy, so they give a negative answer.

This tendency appears to be more pronounced among conservatives than liberals, but both sides do it. As an objective measure of what people really think about the economy, poll questions like this don’t tell us much.

1OK, maybe a little bit.

Link – 

Good News! The Economy Has Soared Over the Past Week.

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2016 Features Different Candidates, But Looks Almost Identical to 2012 Anyway

by RosalynHague Posted on June 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is a very unusual candidate who’s likely to break some of our usual presidential voting patterns. Right? Sure, he’ll get the angry white males that always vote Republican, but other groups might shy away from Trump and vote for the Democratic ticket in larger numbers than usual.

Not so fast, says Alan Abramowitz. If you compare current polls to the 2012 exit polls, it turns out that most demographic groups are split almost precisely the same:

Trump’s highly unusual background, personality, and unorthodox views on certain issues have led to considerable speculation that his nomination could upset normal voting patterns by producing high defection rates among some groups of Democratic and Republican identifiers and putting new states in play in November….These claims are probably mistaken. These data show that the American electorate remains deeply divided along party lines. Democrats and Republicans, including independents who leaned toward each party, differed sharply on economic, cultural, and racial issues. Moreover, Democrats and Republicans, including Sanders Democrats and non-Trump Republicans, held strongly negative feelings about the opposing party’s likely nominee.

I guess we’ll see. I’d like to say that it depends on just what kind of moronic stuff Trump does over the next few months, but that really doesn’t seem to matter much. Anyone still willing to vote for Trump after his antics so far this year is probably going to vote for him no matter what.

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2016 Features Different Candidates, But Looks Almost Identical to 2012 Anyway

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 May 2016

by KristyMcCall41 Posted on May 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hopper has learned how to take selfies. It turns out that opposable thumbs are entirely unnecessary. All you have to do is jump up on Daddy’s lap while he’s reading on his tablet and tell him to take a picture. She looks pretty smug about the whole thing, doesn’t she?

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Friday Cat Blogging – 13 May 2016

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Matt Lauer Asked If Obama Could Imagine Trump Giving a State of the Union. Here’s His Response.

by NealHannell Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Matt Lauer asked President Barack Obama if he could imagine Donald Trump giving a State of the Union address. His response:

“Well, I can imagine it in a Saturday Night Live skit.”

Snap.

Obama also dismissed Trump’s chances of winning the presidency.

“I’m pretty confident that the overwhelming majority of Americans are looking for the kind of politics that does feed our hopes and not our fears, that does work together and doesn’t try to divide, that isn’t looking for simplistic solutions and scapegoating but looks for us buckling down and figuring out, ‘How do we make things work for the next generation?'”

He also gave a preview of what will be his final State of the Union tonight: “Part of what I want to do in this last address is to remind people, you know what, we’ve got a lot of good things going for us and if we can get our politics right, it turns out that we’re not as divided on the ideological spectrum as people make us out to be.”

He’s right: America is in pretty good shape.

Watch:

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Matt Lauer Asked If Obama Could Imagine Trump Giving a State of the Union. Here’s His Response.

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