Month: July 2016

Where Did Pokémon Go Get Its Map From? – The Atlantic

Due to data flukes, private homes are being besieged by the game’s players.

Without giving his consent or having any forewarning, Sheridan’s property had become a virtual neighborhood landmark. … Sheridan is not the only person who awoke one morning to find his home had been transformed into an enormous Poké-gym. … His property has effectively been augmented by a digital beacon—a distinction that sends about 75 strangers to his front yard everyday. For him, Pokémon Go’s use of geo-data seems like a standard example of an easy engineering fix having massively unintended consequences.

“What Niantic did is they collected a lot of data and then they radically shifted the context in which that data was used,” he said. “I’m not sure I can say whether it’s right or wrong, but it makes me feel really squishy. All these people—there’s the potential for some of these locations to be flooded with strangers overnight.”

Source: Where Did Pokémon Go Get Its Map From? – The Atlantic

Many Americans Want Work, but They Don’t Want to Mow Lawns – The Atlantic

At least not for what landscapers want to pay

In June, representatives from North America’s Building Trades Unions said in a Senate hearing that the program is just a tool for roofing companies to pay $8 an hour to a foreigner instead of $22 an hour to a union member. The Southern Poverty Law Center has even gone as far as comparing the guest-worker programs to modern-day slavery. Yet there is hardly any independent research on how temporary workers affect the demand for American labor.

the vast majority offered between $12 to $18 dollars an hour for unskilled labor, ranging from canning seafood to cleaning stables

How can all this be worth the effort (and cost)? Wouldn’t it be easier to find American employees, and cheaper in the long run, by paying higher wages? In Martinez’s view, that’s not an option: “We’re already paying double the federal minimum wage, and we have to stay competitive as a business,” he says.

Source: Many Americans Want Work, but They Don’t Want to Mow Lawns – The Atlantic

 

The approximately $1,750 in processing fees per work order only works out to about $1/hour for a year-long full-time position (40 hours per week for 50 weeks a year is 2000 hours).

Soylent Is Healthier Than the Average North American Diet – The Atlantic

Soylent Is healthier than the average North American diet. And that’s embarrassing.

It’s also cheaper. Much cheaper—just over $200 for a month’s-worth, even at the current small scale of production, whereas the average American spends about $600 per month on food.

So Soylent is more healthy than junk food. Does that mean we should all replace our meals with “meal replacements”? Of course not. That Soylent is healthier is more of an indictment of our broken lifestyles than it is a reason to slurp sludge, day after day. “Better than junk food” is a low bar to set, but no lower than our standards for anything else we put in our mouths.

Source: How Healthy Is Soylent? – The Atlantic

Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

Sometimes the most important step one can take in science is back.

Thus, the goal of The Singular Universe and The Reality of Time is to take a giant philosophical step back and see if a new and more promising direction can be found. For the two thinkers, such a new direction can be spelled out in three bold claims about the world.

Source: Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

RE: The Singular Universe and The Reality of Time, by physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Unger

 

Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are.

— physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Unger

Why Modern America Scares Me: By An Internment Camp Survivor

Kiyo Sato was an 18-year-old Japanese-American living in Sacramento when WWII broke out and the government decided she and her family couldn’t be trusted.

while it’s easy to look at something like the internment of the Japanese during World War II and lump it in with the Salem witch hunts in the category of “Weird Things People Did In Olden Times,” you have to remember some of the people involved are still around. You can ask them about it!

Source: Why Modern America Scares Me: By An Internment Camp Survivor (page 1)

many defenders of Japanese internment are using it as a platform to suggest we do something similar with Muslims

the impulse to exclude, lock up, or kill an entire category of people “just in case”? That shit isn’t going anywhere.

Source: Why Modern America Scares Me: By An Internment Camp Survivor (page 2)