Obviously, I would pick:
- Fast internet
- Multiple monitors
- Good chair
Tag: Link
Transgender people are still people, obviously
“Imagine going through life every day and having so many of your interactions involve somebody trying to give you a hug and stepping on your foot while doing it,” Prince, a 31-year-old trans woman in Alexandria, Virginia, said. “And then when you ask them to step off your foot, no matter how polite you are about it, they respond with, ‘Oh, excuse me, I was just trying to give you a hug.’”
This series on Vox is remarkable and honest. I’m not sure I can do justice talking about it, and I encourage you to go read the whole series.
What it comes down to is that it doesn’t matter how people choose to live their lives. Being assigned the wrong gender at birth, or having genitals that don’t align with your perceived gender or don’t fit into our neat, tidy definitions of ‘normal’ doesn’t make anybody less of a person.
As anybody who has ever been bullied for being ‘different’ can attest, it absolutely sucks. For humans, it has been evolutionarily advantageous to sort things into distinct groups and categorize them as such. But treating human beings that way, as though some are inherently more deserving of human rights or legal protections than others, simply because of how they choose to live their lives, is absolutely devastating.
In the last couple of weeks, we have seen big musical acts like Bruce Springsteen cancel concerts in North Carolina over a terrible anti-LGBT law that passed there, and more of this needs to happen. Lawmakers need to be responsible and consider the needs of all constituents, not just those who represent the majority.
I don’t personally know anybody who is transgender, but it’s just so blindingly obvious to me that those people are just as deserving of love, care, and compassion as anybody else in the world, if not more so.
Car crashes kill an absurd number of people
The numbers are so huge they are not easily grasped, and so are perhaps best understood by a simple comparison: If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered.
I take the bus to work, and I absolutely love walking and biking. There are certain niche uses where a car is essential, but in an urban centre like Ottawa, many people can get around without relying on a car.
Having said that, just as many people, if not more, absolutely DEPEND on a car every day for transport to and from work and other social obligations. Most of this is because housing in big cities (Ottawa to some extent, Toronto and New York, for example, just take the example to astonishing extremes) is very expensive, so people choose to live where it’s cheaper, work in the urban centre, and commute for 30-60 minutes by car.
That thought is crazy to me. Even though I spend a ton of my life listening to podcasts, which are pretty perfect for car trips such as that, the thought of getting into a car every day to drive to the office is not something I think I’d enjoy that much.
Adding to that, we tend to think of car crashes as a tiny risk in our day to day lives, and it gets worse as those lives come to rely more and more on absolute certainty of normalcy. If our pizza is late, it’s free. If our Uber takes 10 minutes, we complain. When a bus breaks down (or doesn’t show up at all), we’re late for work.
But in a life (and society) where things are so safe (#firstworldproblems, anyone), the fact that any of us could die in such a quick, violent way on any given day is cause for alarm. We put car traffic above everything else in our transportation system, and yet it’s responsible for so many totally preventable deaths on our roads every day.
At some point, self-driving cars will take over, and crashes between two of those will be as unlikely as a plane crash is today. But for now, we’re stuck with an incredibly convenient transportation method where countless unknown cars around you are capable of completely changing, or ending, your life in an instant.
That’s scary, but it gives us something to strive for, and I think car culture as it exists now might be nearing its peak.
> The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life – The Atlantic
The end of green screen, and possibly the beginning of true 3D movies
Since Lytro’s tech basically captures all the 3D information in a scene, the imagery is unusually friendly to CGI. Placing virtual objects at exactly the right depth in a scene is essentially taking advantage of a native ability of the footage.
This is possibly the beginning of what I’ve been looking for since the re-renaissance of 3D movies in the last 10-15 years. As the new ‘real’ 3D movies came to theatres, what I really wanted was to be able to view a scene in full 3D (ie. with the right visuals, everything could theoretically be in focus at all times) and to be able to focus on whatever I wanted at any time.
You have no idea how disorienting it is (unless you do this, like I do) to be engrossed in a 3D movie, just to glance at something in the background of a scene and see that you can’t focus on it. Is that what living with glasses is like? It’s terrible.
I’m really hopeful that advances in 3D movies along with these Lytro cameras that are capable of capturing all aspects of a 3D scene could mean an overhaul of not only visual effects, but of the 3D movie as a whole. I think if we were to see something like this, we would be able to truly revolutionize cinema. It might take a VR type experience to truly make this happen, but I think at a certain point that’s where we’ll end up, and I can’t wait to focus on the meaningless background part of a scene in a movie, just because I can.
> Lytro’s new Cinema camera could mean the end of green screen
On watching Steph Curry and the GSW this year
Trying to figure out whether you like the Warriors, on the other hand, is like being 5 years old and trying to figure out whether you like magic.
This is exactly how I feel about Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors right now. I’m not a huge basketball fan. I’ll watch a player or team that’s doing really well (up until this year that was LeBron for me, or the Raptors in the playoffs), but I don’t really follow the league.
That being said, watching Steph Curry hit crazy, off-balance, near half-court shots routinely makes me think back to the days on the elementary school court, when it was more about having fun and seeing what’s possible than trying to be technically or strategically perfect.
It’s all the more frustrating that I felt (as a kid) that I should be making more shots than I was, in real life and in video games. But Curry manages to overcome all of that, and swishes shots that should never be taken by anybody, which is something I aspired to, but could only ever dream of.
> The Golden State Warriors are the greatest NBA team ever—and the most likable.
Carbs are getting in the way of healthy eating
Canadians heeded the exhortation to reduce fat and reduced their fat intake to 31 per cent by 2004. But during this time, obesity rates spiked, which suggests that dietary fat is not a “primary contributing factor” in obesity, said the report.
I got healthy (and lost 45 pounds in the last 8 months) but not by focusing on eating healthier foods (like salads) at restaurants and at home. But my main focus was on the AMOUNT I ate, not on the types of foods as much. I didn’t count a single calorie, and though I started my diet exercising by biking to work every day, for the last few months I’ve only really been moderately active, but haven’t gained any weight back.
The demonization of fat (and subsequent need for people to eat lots of carbs at the grocery store, or restaurants, has meant that people have to eat a lot MORE food to feel full. Letting yourself eat fat, and trying to limit the amount of carbs you eat, is probably going to become increasingly important to the North American diet, whether these guidelines officially change or not.
> The Canada Food Guide is killing you: ‘The obesity epidemic… really began with our dietary guidelines’
So…Cold-fX is BS
“The study actually showed the placebo to be more effective at relieving (some) cold symptoms than Cold-fX.”
In something surely nobody could have seen coming, it looks like there’s a non-zero chance anybody who purchased Cold-fX as a cold or flu remedy could be able to join a class-action suit in order to get some of the money they spent that didn’t work as well as a sugar pill in treating seasonal respiratory viruses.
Yikes.
> Lawyer in Cold-fX lawsuit to fight for for class-action status, which could trigger mass refund
Podcasts Like ‘Serial’ Are Encouraging Literacy
“[L]istening, unlike looking at a written page, is more active, since the brain has to process the information at the pace it is played.” My student Roberto offered similar insight: “I think it helps me out with my reading since I have to keep a pace up.”
Huh, turns out the best ways for kids to learn aren’t determined by a group of adults telling them what’s best, kids (like everybody) are going to learn best when given options and a choice. And just like I always say, podcasts are a great way to learn and take in new information, and listening isn’t nearly as much work as reading.
And if learning is work, you’re much less likely to want to keep doing it.
> Why Podcasts Like ‘Serial’ Are Helping English Teachers Encourage Literacy – The Atlantic
Driverless Cars Are Going To Be Here So Fast
[T]he ongoing conversation is good for those who wish to see self-driving cars enter use, a careful analysis of the facts, coupled with an understanding of how similar transitions have played out through history, indicates that the majority of the discussion occurring right now vastly underestimates the speed with which self-driving cars will become the norm and ignores the tectonic shifts the transition will bring to all corners of American life.
Self-driving cars will not only impact transportation, they will change how people feel about their homes, how cities are built, how families stay in touch, where we work and other facets of American life far removed from transportation.
Yes. A lot of people are seriously looking at how we can get self-driving technology into the hands of the masses. Once that starts happening, it’s going to accelerate at an unbelievable pace. Think about smart phones. The iPhone was released in 2007, with Android coming soon after. That was less than 10 years ago and almost everybody in the first world has a smartphone now.
With the massive infrastructure changes that can be made with transportation overhauls that are enabled by self-driving vehicles, the entire world is going to change so quickly. I’m not entirely convinced its all for the best, but we’ll be smack dab in the middle of it before you can honk your horn.
This whole TechCrunch piece is great and really detailed, and I’d strongly recommend reading it if you’re looking for some hardcore data about how driving really drives our modern world.
Bacteria Is Evolving to Eat Plastic
PET was only invented about 70 years ago. That means the bacteria must have evolved the ability to consume the plastic over the intervening decades. The results are published in Science.
I don’t want to say ‘I told you so’, but I kind of called this one.
As I keep saying, yes of course, plastic is a huge problem that we shouldn’t necessarily ignore, but nature (and evolution) are fascinating, and work on dizzyingly short timescales. In the second case of finding ‘fauna’ capable of digesting plastics so far (a fungus being the first, as mentioned in the linked article), bacteria have proven themselves to be unbelievably adaptable in even a short amount of time (plastic was invented less than 100 years ago).
When humans first started domesticating cattle, and really began using their milk into adulthood for sustenance, humans in Western Europe quickly gained the ability to process lactose, to the point that pockets in much of the world have no problem eating milk and cheeses. Evolution is amazing!
> Scientists Have Discovered a Bacteria That’s Evolved to Eat Plastic