This is for my kind, conservative friends who reject liberalism for various reasons. It will take only 3 minutes of your time. There are 3,236 ways to differentiate conservatives and progressives, but they all reduce to one thing. Conservatives think that people who make poor choices deserve what they get, and that it’s not their (or anyone else’s)…
Archives for January 2015
Anti-Science From the Left and Right
Science denial doesn’t only happen on the right. We’re seeing from the left a startling rejection of hundreds of years of progress in medicine, in the form of rejecting vaccines. It’s interesting to chart the origins of these behaviors on the political spectrum. Conservatives tend to accept authority and follow rules, but they hate when those rules come…
A MITRE Quick Reference
MITRE’s mission is to make it easier to secure American infrastructure, which they accomplish mostly through the release of excellent dictionary and metrics projects. It’s hard to keep current with all of them, so I’ve created a list consisting of just the linked name and a one-line description of the project. CVE: Common Vulnerability Exposure a dictionary of…
When Bush Removed Saddam, Did he Create ISIS?
A couple of hard-to-argue observations: Bush removed Saddam Saddam was the force that kept extremism down The entire region is worse off than before Bush invaded The lesson is elegant in its simplicity: Any that any country that still has a dictator is, by definition, not ready to have it removed for them. When we forget this, bad…
Avoiding GitHub’s SSH Permissions Prompt
If you’ve been using GitHub for any amount of time you may have seen the error above when trying to interact with a repo using SSH. Happily, both the explanation and the fix are simple: The clone links on the side of GitHub pages are HTTPS-based So if you use that default clone you’ll have an HTTPS endpoint…
Our Founding Fathers Didn’t Go to Trade School
Like Reagan, the GOP is increasingly going after liberal education as superfluous and artsy. They want to make education all about preparation for work, and this is precisely the short-term, profit-oriented thinking that has the United States in its current position. Let me state this plainly: Education without the liberal arts is called trade school. Trade schools are…
Two Types of Free Will
What follows comes from a long-running debate with two friends on free will. We’ve made progress recently (after around 5 years), and now we’re getting into a distinction between two different types of choice, freedom, and responsibility. Here’s my friend: (1) We have the capacity to make choices that are conscious, voluntary, and deliberative. (2) This is NOT…
Take 1 Security Podcast: Episode 3
START CONTENT There was an issue with the Marriott website that exposed reservations and payment information. It’s now been fixed Police are now using a new radar to see into peoples’ homes without a warrant Security budgets are reportedly going up due to the mega-breaches in 2014 Also leading to higher pay for CIOs Anecdotally, I’d say it’s…
The Difference Between Love and Hate in a World Without Free Will
Many who doubt the position of free will skeptics use the issue of love and hate as their weapon of choice. The argument goes like so: If there is no free will, then we not only destroy hate, but also love, and that’s not something I’m willing to do. Well, two things: You shouldn’t reject something just because…
Twitter: Should You Follow Someone or Add Them to a List?
As part of my ongoing Twitter optimization, I have extracted a key optimization question: When you want to see an account’s content, should you follow them, or add them to a list? Or both? I suppose to the logical thing would be to determine what characteristics each has: Following allows you to subscribe to their updates via notifications.…
Creating a Realtime Traffic Dashboard with Google Analytics
Most know that Google Analytics is the standard for overall web stats, i.e. for granularity, going back in time, etc., but think that to get a good realtime view you need to go elsewhere. So if you run a website of any significant size you’re probably using something like Chartbeat or Woopra to monitory incoming traffic in realtime…
From oh-my-zsh to Prezto
I’ve moved my zsh environment from oh-my-zsh, which is a great project, to Prezto. Prezto is a fork of oh-my-zsh focused on simplicity and performance. I like the configuration better, it’s easier to get up and running, and it’s easier to update. If you like zsh, you’ll like it even more with either one of these projects. You…
You Should Write Email Like the BBC Writes News Stories
The text above is from a story on the main BBC website. Notice anything interesting about it? Notice how short the paragraphs are? The BBC uses 1-2 sentences per paragraph—that’s it. Go check for yourself. Click on any story. Their paragraphs are 1-2 sentences and no more. And crisp ones, too. Not the gnarly Christopher Hitchens kind. They…
Exit Rate vs. Bounce Rate
Within the domain of web traffic analysis there are two stats that are often confused: exit rate, and bounce rate. Both involve people leaving your website, so you want both to be as low as possible. Here’s how they differ: Exit Rate pertains to pageviews, and simply means that for all views to a given page, the exit…
Take 1 Security Podcast: Episode 2
Know Your Life Metrics
In both work and life, there are few things worse than having the wrong metrics. Let me explain. Most people think metrics are similar to spreadsheets or staplers—part of the office setting that nebulously help it be successful. But metrics are more than that. I’m arguing here that they deserve your ultimate attention, both in your life and…
Better Superlatives
The thing I dislike most about Apple is their overuse of the word, “amazing”. It’s downright criminal. It’d be a good drinking game during new conferences, for sure. We think it’s amazing how amazed you’ll be when you see how amazing our amazing new products are. Amazing. Sadly, that’s not much of an exaggeration. The good news is…
Raising Intelligence: The Most Underestimated Breakthrough
I don’t have any specific information to support this, but I think we’re likely to see in the next decade an approachable means of raising human intelligence by 10% (around 10 IQ points). I think this is the sleeper breakthrough. There are countless efforts in motion around understanding the brain and our emotions and our ability to focus,…
Investing in Jamming
I wrote a while back about predicting the future as a great investment strategy. Sounds easy, and stupid, since predicting the future is hard, but I think there are opportunities that shouldn’t be ignored when they arise. Example: Technology for disrupting drone communication. I cannot see how: Drones won’t become an increasingly major part of everyones’ lives in…
America Needs Small Terrorist Attacks
America desperately needs small terrorist attacks on a regular cadence. Let me explain: The American psyche is extremely brittle because we’re used to not being attacked. This is why 9/11 was so debilitating: it was because we thought we were invincible. There is essentially no way to stop being attacked; we can only learn to react well when…
Displaying Data with Dashing
I’ve been writing for a long time about the essential future skill of being able to collect and display data. I break it into three steps: Harvesting data Manipulate data Display data I’ve just started using Dashing to do the last part. The screenshot at the top shows one of the displays I made in a couple of…
If Social Media Companies Were Smart
It’s hard to predict what kind of social apps people will want in the future. Billions of dollars were spent building Facebook and Twitter, only to have the latest generation sidestep them into direct messaging apps like WhatsApp and SnapChat. So how can we build what they’ll want five years from now? Or 50? I think he only…
Take 1 Security Podcast: Episode 1
Infosec News Aggregation Sources
I’ve seen a lot of security news aggregators. My favorites tend to be: Twitter * Team Cymru Dark Reading SCMagazine Threatpost Plus I have my own aggregations I’ve assembled using Yahoo! Pipes and dozens of more obscure sources. But one I just found yesterday is pretty extraordinary: it’s called security.didici.cc, and two of the main collections can be…
Get California Air Quality Using Ruby
Here’s a quick piece of code that will pull the air quality for any ZIP code in California using Ruby and Nokogiri. It uses the AirNow website, which provides this data for the state. I have additional code on my running version that checks every hour and sends me an email if pollution gets to a certain point.…
Auto-Optimizing Images Using Folder Actions
I’ve been trying to keep my images down in size on the site, and there are a few steps that go into that: Resize to 640px in width Convert from PNG to JPG Optimize the image (smaller size) These three take time to do manually, so I just researched how to do it using OS X’s folder actions,…
Life Through the Lens of Evolutionary Psychology
There are many lenses with which to look at the world—many ways to explain why it is the way it is. You can see the world as a series of economic incentives, and map how they interact One might see it as a constant drive to power and advancement, where the strong perpetually dominates the weak Or perhaps…
The First 10 Things I Do on a New Mac
Getting a new Mac (for me invariably a MBP) is bittersweet. It’s nice to have something shiny and powerful, but setup can be tedious—especially if you don’t remember the steps. Every time I go through the process I vow to capture the steps next time. But no more. Configure the Shell Configure vim vim on the Command Line…
Happiness and Struggle
I just finished reading Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect for the first time in around 15 years. It was even more remarkable the second time, I think because I’m more thoughtful now than I was then. [ NOTE: There will be spoilers if you continue. ] The book is about human happiness, and how it relates to (and seems…
Science is Blurring the Body and Mind
From the Guardian: Both cytokines and inflammation have been shown to rocket during depressive episodes, and – in people with bipolar – to drop off in periods of remission. Healthy people can also be temporarily put into a depressed, anxious state when given a vaccine that causes a spike in inflammation. Brain imaging studies of people injected with…
The Disambiguation of Blame
I’ve written recently (here) about the philosophy podcast called Very Bad Wizards. I was just listening to the most recent episode where Tamler mentioned and responded to my analysis of the Sam Harris episode where I posed the following question: Once we as individuals, or as a society, accept that free will does not exist, what justification remains…
Taking on Tamler’s Compatibilism
I wrote recently about Sam Harris appearing on Very Bad Wizards to debate free will. Sam retweeted my analysis and Tamler (from the podcast) engaged me in some discussion on my site. Here’s are the relevant bits: May main assertion: If you are a Meat Roomba then it’s simply impossible for you to be responsible for your actions…
In The Future We’ll All Be Superheroes and Princesses
We humans are fantasy engines. Evolution, wanting to make us as successful as possible, fills our thoughts with what we wish we were. Those dreams could be that of a beautiful princess, a savage warrior, or a powerful superhero. These all make sense because they represent pinnacles of reproductive fitness. Everyone wants to be irresistible, or all-powerful, or…
Building an IDS on CentOS using Suricata
I think I may have just switched from Snort to Suricata. ~ Me, About 40 Minutes Ago One of the things I like to have on my internet servers is a basic Intrusion Detection System (IDS). This tells me interesting things like: If I’m being portscanned If malicious IPs are talking to me If there is any malware…