The Overflow

The sun is a teensy weensy yellow dot in the middle of that...

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:52:17 +0530

The sun is a teensy weensy yellow dot in the middle of that teensy weensy circle right in the centre.

A lonely pair (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 16:04:37 +0530

A lonely pair (Taken with instagram)

animalstalkinginallcaps: I’M BEGINNING TO THINK ‘YOU HAVE...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:01:33 +0530

animalstalkinginallcaps:

I’M BEGINNING TO THINK ‘YOU HAVE LIMITED OR NO CONNECTIVITY’ IS MY COMPUTER’S WAY OF ASSESSING MY LIFE CHOICES, NOT MY NETWORK CONNECTION.

Waste (Taken with Instagram at Schlumberger MLC)

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 20:12:32 +0530

Waste (Taken with Instagram at Schlumberger MLC)

"Public service announcement: If you have high talent, programming is extremely easy to learn. The..."

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:45:05 +0530

“Public service announcement: If you have high talent, programming is extremely easy to learn. The way I became a programmer was by finding an old ZX81 computer with 4K of RAM and no tape drive, meaning that anytime you wanted to use a program you had to type it in from scratch, and pretty soon I was typing in my own programs. This was at the age of 5 or 6. This mysterious Talent doesn’t always correlate to intelligence, but if you did well at algebra and you’re currently making less than $120,000/year, consider installing Python 3, looking at some random Python programs online, and then seeing if you can write programs yourself. College majors are a highly inefficient market, with Computer Science enrollments steadily dropping, and competent programmers are in extreme demand right now – in the Bay Area, companies are paying $10-$20,000 for successful referrals. It doesn’t require a four-year education to start getting paid to do this – if you’ve got enough Talent to learn to program just by reading code, then regardless of what other career you’ve built or costs you’ve sunk, you should definitely try your hand as a modern-day wizard. This concludes the public service announcement.”

- Eliezer Yudkowsky

The Gap (via Vikram Srinivas; I don’t know where the...

Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:59:57 +0530

The Gap

(via Vikram Srinivas; I don’t know where the original is from.)

"The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1,..."

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:29:33 +0530

“The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.”

- *smirk*

via bakadesuyo

Source: “Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism” from Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

"I still think there’s a deeply problematic solipsism in most of this reporting. Apple makes lots of..."

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:41:56 +0530

“

I still think there’s a deeply problematic solipsism in most of this reporting. Apple makes lots of stuff that lots of Americans own and therefore it’s possible to make people feel a kind of psychic chain of guilt when they hear about bad conditions in the factories building the components. But this is a bit like the South By Southwest human hotspots problem, what Apple stands accused of is complicity in the misery of Chinese workers but its real crime often seems to be exposing our delicate western sensibilities to the misery.

You don’t read articles about working conditions in factories making socks destined for export to Kazakhstan, and you don’t read articles about working conditions on the rice farms that people eagerly leave to go toil in the sock factory. That rice and those socks are invisible to us and so too are the workers. What we need to see and hear about are bad conditions wherever they may be, not just the ones that provide the appealing news hook. When you read something bad about a Foxconn factory and then see that thousands of people line up for the chance of a job at one of them, that really ought to make you wonder. What were those guys doing the day before they decided to stand in line? How did that look? If you want to understand the depths of poverty that exist in the world, you can’t just look under the streetlamp.

”

- Matt Yglesias

It really should have been black (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:26:54 +0530

It really should have been black (Taken with instagram)

Sunset near the village of Nagayalanka, Andhra Pradesh (Taken...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:23:21 +0530

Sunset near the village of Nagayalanka, Andhra Pradesh (Taken with instagram)

Oh, thank God: Q) Don’t you think that the dress code for women should protect male chess...

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 13:36:27 +0530

Oh, thank God:

Q) Don’t you think that the dress code for women should protect male chess players, who may be distracted by too open clothes?

A) It’s a funny question and I don’t think it can be taken seriously. We didn’t think about that while making the regulations.

On the new ECU Dress Code for chess tournaments from http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7970.

Neil Gaiman: Reposted as something that can be reblogged. ON WRITER'S BLOCK.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:53:53 +0530

Neil Gaiman: Reposted as something that can be reblogged. ON WRITER'S BLOCK.:

neil-gaiman:

I’ve seem to be hitting writer’s block far too often now. My grade in my creative writing class is suffering because i don’t turn in anything because i’m never really satisfied with anything i do. all my good ideas seem to turn into bad ones once i write it down. How do you get pass writers…

"Creative writing schools are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in..."

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:31:28 +0530

“Creative writing schools are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in contemporary narrative. This is unfair. It is the anxiety of the writers about being excluded from their chosen career, together with a shared belief that we know what literature is and can learn how to produce it that encourages people to write similar books. Nobody is actually expecting anything very new. Just new versions of the old. Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey.”

- This rather depressing post: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/feb/28/writers-job/

neil-gaiman: Back when God and Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee got...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 01:52:45 +0530

neil-gaiman:

Back when God and Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee got together and invented the Internet, all the creatures gathered round.

“But what is it going to be good for?” they asked.

And God looked at Al Gore and Tim Berners-Lee and they looked back at Her shiftily. So God turned to all the creatures.

“One day,” She proclaimed, “there will be a whole blog that just combines photographs of cats with Magnetic Fields lyrics. That’s what it’s for.”

And all the creatures were silent.

“And that’s it?” said one of the angels, a bit puzzled.

“Well, that and porn,” said Al Gore.

strangepawers:

I Don’t Want To Get Over You

septagonstudios: George Bernard Shaw

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:08:56 +0530

septagonstudios:

George Bernard Shaw

Photo

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 14:24:24 +0530

animalstalkinginallcaps: IT WAS REALLY WEIRD. ONE DAY I WENT TO...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 22:01:05 +0530

animalstalkinginallcaps:

IT WAS REALLY WEIRD. ONE DAY I WENT TO THE PIZZA PLACE NEXT TO THE BAR DURING THE DAY, SOBER, AND I REALIZED THAT IT’S ACTUALLY SOME OF THE WORST PIZZA ON EARTH. THEN I WATCHED MY FAVORITE TV SHOW WHEN I WASN’T HIGH AND IT WASN’T FUNNY AT ALL. AFTER THAT I TOOK TWO WEEKS OFF ALL SUBSTANCES AND REALIZED I DIDN’T ACTUALLY LIKE ANY OF MY FRIENDS, MY MUSIC, OR MY HOBBIES.

TURNS OUT I’M NOT BISEXUAL, I REALLY LIKE COOKING, AND BOOKS ARE KIND OF AWESOME.

I HAD NO IDEA.

Shiva mandir in Sivasagar (Sibsagar), Assam (Taken with...

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:09:54 +0530

Shiva mandir in Sivasagar (Sibsagar), Assam (Taken with Instagram at Hiranandani Meadows)

If I EVER sign up for this, I know I will have lived. 10....

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:07:56 +0530

If I EVER sign up for this, I know I will have lived.

10. Bungee Jumping into an Active Volcano

It might night be the smartest thing to do, but it will definitely get your blood pumping. For $10,000, you can bungee jump from a helicopter into the mouth of Chile’s Villarrica volcano. The volcano is active with pools of white-hot lava bubbling below where you will come within 213 meters of the pool of molten lava.

"My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time...."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:17:44 +0530

“

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

”

- Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey