News That Stays News

Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty Explain What They Did to Lose Their Jobs October 29, 2010

In the WSJ.

On the Death Penalty October 29, 2010

A calm, infuriating case study: one man’s death penalty case. The article is an apology for journalism. (via The Browser)

Here’s the epilogue.

Video Games October 27, 2010

1. Foreign Policy has an article on America’s Army, a free, online first-person shooter produced by the Department of Defense to train future soldiers.

2. Games often grow to resemble work. A scholar breaks down Farmville, and argues that its popularity is a product of the social norms surrounding gifts. A case study of gaming as social obligation.

3. A novelist writes about his addiction to cocaine and Grand Theft Auto in the Guardian.  He lost three years of his life to these addictions, but he still thinks GTA is one of the most preeminent works of art of the last 25 years.

All courtesy of a special report in The Browser.

Propaganda, c. 2010 October 26, 2010

Gerardo and I were just talking about Leni Riefenstahl on the phone today (Triumph of the Will is a huge snooze). In that spirit, we have

UPDATE:

It gets better.

Inside Baseball October 24, 2010

Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn’t like Black-Scholes, and thinks it helps you understand option traders like a good course in Hamiltonian Mechanics will help you understand carpentry.

Paul David writes about the stock market crash of May 6, 2010.   Most interesting bits, I think: that the most virulent diseases are all spread by non-human vectors (so that they don’t burn themselves out by killing people too fast), and that Schumpeter’s theory was based on the idea that irrational exuberance allows people to coordinate big infrastructure investments, that you could never agree to make if you had to bargain.  Also, the thought that even the expansion in the nineties gave us Youtube (networks could handle more load than they were taking), but all this last one left was huge houses, pathologically far from urban centers.

Also, the subway systems of the world, to scale.  If somebody put the right colors on the different subway lines and made a poster of this, I think I’d buy it.

Linked October 24, 2010

1. An article from Slashdot about an artificial intelligence competition in which “chatterbots” vie with each other to deceive judges into thinking that they are human. Back in 2008, a reporter from The Times was fooled, and wrote about the experience.

2. An interesting optimization problem: what route would you take to round the bases? Math says that batters could do better.

Putting a Price on Academia October 23, 2010

What happens when you start grading each professor on the amount of money he brings into the university?

Scheiße October 19, 2010

They’ve been commenting for years that rare earth extraction was coming to reside exclusively in China. Surprise! Actions have consequences.

Sigh October 13, 2010

A 2008 profile of Michelle Rhee, the fiercely reformist chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools.

Her fate today.

Rumor Mill October 9, 2010

I feel like this is the kind of stuff intel analysts put together for their briefings. Courtesy of The Browser.

1. A great piece of speculation on North Korea’s succession plans.

2. An analysis of Stuxnet, the computer worm that may have slowed the Iranian nuclear program.