The Right Way to Practice. In just our fourth session together, Steve was already beginning to sound discouraged. It was Thursday of the first week of an experiment that I had expected to last for two or three months, but from what Steve was telling me, it might not make much sense to go on. “There appears to be a limit for me somewhere around eight or nine digits,” he told me, his words captured by the tape recorder that ran throughout each of our sessions. “With nine digits especially, it’s very difficult to get regardless of what pattern I use—you know, my own kind of strategies. It really doesn’t matter what I use—it seems very difficult to get.” Steve, an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, where I was teaching at the time, had been hired to come in several times a week and work on a simple task: memorizing strings of numbers.
What Steve didn’t know—but I did—was that pretty much all of psychological science at the time indicated that he was right. Also in Psychology The Science of Gratitude But no. Quora. Build a Motion Sensing Security Camera with a Raspberry Pi and Windows IoT. History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. Quora. Edward Snowden: Privacy can't depend on corporations standing up to the government. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the Free Software Foundation's LibrePlanet 2016 conference on Saturday with a discussion of free software, privacy and security, speaking via video conference from Russia.
Snowden credited free software for his ability to help disclose the U.S. government's far-reaching surveillance projects – drawing one of several enthusiastic rounds of applause from the crowd in an MIT lecture hall. + ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Pwn2Own contest highlights renewed hacker focus on kernel issues + Apple engineers could walk away from FBI’s iPhone demands "What happened in 2013 couldn't have happened without free software," he said, particularly citing projects like Tor, Tails (a highly secure Linux distribution) and Debian. Snowden argued that free software's transparency and openness are cornerstones to preserving user privacy in the connected age.
"I didn't use Microsoft machines when I was in my operational phase, because I couldn't trust them," Snowden stated. Businessinsider. Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses. Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders’s Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they’d never work in the U.S.
The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children—good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S. But this vision of homogenous, altruistic Nordic lands is mostly a fantasy. When I lived in Finland, as a middle-class citizen I paid income tax at a rate not much higher than what I now pay in New York City.
The problem is the way Sanders has talked about it. China's expansion in the disputed South China Sea. There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonalds – combined. The Salvador Dali museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. (Photo by Flickr user Matthew Paulson, used under a Creative Commons license.) There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald's restaurants. But combined, the two chains don't come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000. So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country.
By their count the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s. While most of us think of massive institutions like the Smithsonian and the Guggenheim when we think of museums, one lesson of the new data is that the majority of U.S. museums are small, nearly mom-and-pop affairs. And these museums are literally everywhere. One shocker? The data also show where museums aren't. Islamic State defector brings 'goldmine' of details on 22,000 supporters. How Often Do You Think You Should Wash Your Jeans. My Summer Job at the Bohemian Grove, Serving Milkshakes to the Shitfaced Global Elite. The_secret_history_of_the_name_jody.single. Jody Rosen I was born at 8:15 p.m. on June 21, 1969, in New York City—as good a setting as any for a Jewish farce. I’m told that my mother and father took a few days to decide on a name for their child, and I have evidence to prove it: a tiny New York Hospital bracelet, with a type-written tab identifying its wearer as “Rosen Baby Boy.”
Once, my parents might have stopped there. According to the Social Security Administration, “Babe” cracked the list of the Top 1,000 most popular names for American male newborns in the year 1899. My mother chose the name Joel after the biblical prophet. All in all, it was a reasonable name for a baby boy. It’s a curious name with an obscure history. My own name would seem to be a case in point. Jody may have been a trendy name, but the trend was short-lived, and it didn’t meaningfully alter the big picture.
Jody the Country Girl Doll was manufactured by Ideal, then the largest doll company in the United States. So I coped. “Jody?” I laughed. The Striking Personal Bond Between Obama and Trudeau. It was easy to imagine a torch being passed as Barack Obama welcomed Justin Trudeau on Thursday morning, throwing wide open a White House that seven-odd years ago brimmed with the same energy—a handsome new leader, and his enchanting young family—that Ottawa now beams out to the world. In case the point eluded anyone, the Canadian premier opened his remarks in the Rose Garden by quoting JFK: “President Kennedy’s wise words on our friendship, that what unites us is far greater than what divides us.”
Trudeau was talking about Canada and the U.S., of course, but the observation was no less true of the leaders, who have hit it off famously since he took office in November. What unites Obama and Trudeau is a shared progressive agenda, a world view that embraces the diversity so unsettling to many others, and an insistence on staying positive. “He campaigned on a message of hope and of change,” Obama observed, without needing to add why that might sound familiar. What Happens When the Surveillance State Becomes an Affordable Gadget? When Daniel Rigmaiden was a little boy, his grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea, used to drive him along the roads of Monterey, California, playing him tapes of Ronald Reagan speeches.
Something about the ideals of small government and personal freedom may have affected him more deeply than he realized. By the time Rigmaiden became a disaffected, punk-rock-loving teenager, everything about living in America disappointed him, from the two-party system to taxes. “At that age, everybody’s looking for something to rebel against,” he tells me over Mexican food in Phoenix—where, until recently, he was required to live under the conditions of his parole. “I thought, ‘I either have to fight the rigged system, or I have to opt out completely.’ ” Rigmaiden is 35 and slender, quiet with a sardonic smile and thick shock of jet-black hair. He bought gold coins with cash, built a nest egg of about $500,000, and planned to move to South America when the time was right. The very human implications of a self-taught machine playing the world’s hardest game. The analysts at Liberum, a London-based investment bank, think that British voters are very unlikely to choose to leave the EU in the referendum to be held on June 23.
They put the odds of a British exit—aka “Brexit”—at just 25%. Bookies, meanwhile, have long been offering bets on Brexit with a probability of success of only around 30%. Even so, the referendum—a campaign pledge made by prime minister David Cameron before he was re-elected in May last year—has recently captured global attention. In the markets, this has manifest itself primarily in the pound. Sterling dropped sharply against the dollar last month after Cameron set the date of the vote and prominent figures like justice minister Michael Gove and mayor of London Boris Johnson lined up in favor of Brexit, defying Cameron’s wishes.
At this point, any self-respecting stock picker would ask himself: how do I make money from this? Sebastian Jory of Liberum has an idea. That’s where one of his Brexit trade ideas comes from. Uk.businessinsider. NOAA data show warmest winter on record in USA. In news that will surprise exactly no one, we just finished America’s warmest winter in history. On Tuesday, NOAA released its official assessment of December, January, and February’s temperatures across the United States, and the results are striking: Not a single state in the U.S. had a cooler than average winter. (NOAA treats Alaska and Hawaii separately, due to shorter weather data records there—though both states were significantly warmer than normal this winter. Weather records for the contiguous United States go back to 1895.) NOAA blames the recent warm weather on a record-strength El Niño “and other climate patterns,” most notably, global warming.
This year, all six New England states were record warm, and there was only one tiny speck of blue on the entire wintertime temperature map of the lower 48, though you’d probably need a magnifying glass to find it. How a new emulator generates 3D scenes from 2D NES games. The world of NES emulation hasn't been all that exciting since the late '90s, when NESticle provided "good enough" emulation accuracy and stability for any NES game out there (though there has been a lot of subsequent work to get that final bit of true emulation accuracy).
So it was a bit of a surprise this week to stumble across a new NES emulator that provides a genuinely new perspective on decades-old games by rendering them in three dimensions. The 3DNES project, as the name implies, extends the 2D sprites of the NES into the Z axis, letting players rotate the camera around to see the sides and back of the formerly flat sprites. This isn't just a conversion of every pixel into a uniform voxel, either. In a game like Super Mario Bros., for instance, 3DNES converts pipes to into cylindrical 3D models, with bulging piranha plants embedded in the center. The emulator's developer, who goes by the handle "geod" online, has been posting videos of the work-in-progress emulator for months. What is Microsoft becoming? Behind the curtain: Ars goes inside Blue Origin’s secretive rocket factory. KENT, Wash. —Notebooks in hand, we gathered around a long table inside Jupiter 2, a conference room on the second floor of Blue Origin’s headquarters.
Ten of us had come at the company’s invitation to see for the first time, first hand, where Blue Origin builds its spaceships and rockets. For years, this had been undiscovered country for journalists. And then Jeff Bezos, as casual as you please in a blue and white checkered shirt and designer jeans, strolled into the room.
Bezos may be better known for upending the retail world with Amazon and making himself the fifth richest person in the world along the way. We were. Bezos spent the better part of three hours showing us around Blue Origin’s headquarters, from the full-size replica of Jules Verne’s Victorian-era spacecraft to the company’s football-field sized machining rooms and rocket bays. A decade has passed since Blue Origin moved into this unmarked facility in Kent, Washington, which encompasses nearly 300,000 square feet. There are ways the FBI can crack the iPhone PIN without Apple doing it for them.
The custom firmware that the FBI would like Apple to produce in order to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone would be the most straightforward way of accessing the device, allowing the federal agency to rapidly attempt PIN codes until it found the one that unlocked the phone. But it's probably not the only way to achieve what the FBI wants. There may well be approaches that don't require Apple to build a custom firmware to defeat some of the iPhone's security measures. The iPhone 5c used by the San Bernardino killers encrypts its data using a key derived from a combination of an ID embedded in the iPhone's processor and the user's PIN.
Assuming that a 4-digit PIN is being used, that's a mere 10,000 different combinations to try out. However, the iPhone has two protections against attempts to try every PIN in turn. First, it inserts delays to force you to wait ever longer between PIN attempts (up to one hour at its longest). The FBI cannot create that signature itself. Do nothing at all. Why Six Hours Of Sleep Is As Bad As None At All.
Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to both your health and productivity. Yawn. We've heard it all before. But results from one study impress just how bad a cumulative lack of sleep can be on performance. Subjects in a lab-based sleep study who were allowed to get only six hours of sleep a night for two weeks straight functioned as poorly as those who were forced to stay awake for two days straight. The kicker is the people who slept six hours per night thought they were doing just fine. This sleep deprivation study, published in the journal Sleep, took 48 adults and restricted their sleep to a maximum of four, six, or eight hours a night for two weeks; one unlucky subset was deprived of sleep for three days straight.
During their time in the lab, the participants were tested every two hours (unless they were asleep, of course) on their cognitive performance as well as their reaction time. Why Six Hours of Sleep Isn't Enough We Have No Idea How Much We Sleep. This photo is absolutely adorable. Google's DeepMind defeats legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in historic victory. A huge milestone has just been reached in the field of artificial intelligence: AlphaGo, a program developed by Google's DeepMind unit, has defeated legendary Go player Lee Se-dol in the first of five historic matches being held in Seoul, South Korea. Lee resigned after about three and a half hours, with 28 minutes and 28 seconds remaining on his clock. The series is the first time a professional 9-dan Go player has taken on a computer, and Lee is competing for a $1 million prize.
"I was very surprised," said Lee after the match. "I didn't expect to lose. Google vs. Go is an ancient Chinese board game that has long been considered one of the great challenges faced by AI. "I don’t regret accepting this challenge. " "I don’t regret accepting this challenge," said Lee. Lee will face off against AlphaGo again tomorrow and on Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday (11pm ET the previous evenings in the US). Lost cat. Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Vandalizing Soviet Monuments. Ignat Ignev / WikicommonsFigures of Soviet soldiers at the base of a Soviet Army monument were previously transformed into superheroes in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Russia is demanding that Bulgaria try harder to prevent vandalism of Soviet monuments, after yet another monument to Soviet troops in Sofia was spray-painted, ITAR-Tass reported. The Russian Embassy in Bulgaria has issued a note demanding that its former Soviet-era ally clean up the monument in Sofia's Lozenets district, identify and punish those responsible, and take "exhaustive measures" to prevent similar attacks in the future, the news agency reported Monday. The monument was spray-painted on the eve of the Bulgarian Socialist Party's celebration of its 123rd anniversary, the Sofia-based Novinite news agency reported.
The vandalism was the latest in a series of similar recent incidents in Bulgaria — each drawing angry criticism from Moscow. See also: Bulgarian Red Army Monument Painted Pink in 'Prague Spring' Apology. Uk.businessinsider. How To Keep Money From Messing Up Your Marriage. At Secretive Meeting, Tech CEOs And Top Republicans Commiserate, Plot To Stop Trump. Quora. Mathematics meets music. This Video Explains How Stress Breaks Down Your Brain. Shoshana Zuboff: Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism. Uk.businessinsider. Generation Y Now Officially Buys More Books than the Baby Boomers. Republicans Who Once Said Ted Cruz Was as Bad or Worse Than Trump Are Coming Around. Uk.businessinsider. I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ask Me Anything. : IAmA. Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here's why | Thomas Frank | Opinion. Counting to a Billion. Depression is more than a mental disorder: It affects the whole organism. Ontario announces basic income plan.
Pre-Peeled Oranges: What Some Call 'Lazy' Others Call A 'Lifesaver' Faux Friendship. Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask. Louis C.K.'s Warning About Donald Trump. Foreign diplomats voicing alarm to U.S. officials about Trump. Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II. Quora. The Major Costs People Often Overlook When Deciding to Rent or Buy. Magazine | Bilderberg: The ultimate conspiracy theory. You can now sign up for Google’s Project Fi cell service without an invite.
'Magic Mushrooms' May Permanently Alter Personality | Hallucinogens and Mind-Altering Substances | Drug Use. Why Perfectionism and Burnout Go Hand in Hand. Ego depletion, an influential theory in psychology, may have just been debunked. World's best and worst passports revealed. Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income. Removing rust with a laser. Why the Safest Form of Power Is Also the Most Feared -- The Motley Fool. The Rudaalis of Rajasthan: An Excerpt from "The Lost Generation" Fact-Check: Bernie Sanders, Abandoned Buildings and NAFTA. Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code — Free Code Camp — Medium.
DJI Phantom 3 Standard 2.7K 12MP 720P HD 3-Axle Gimbal Quadcopter. Tales From the Big House: Al Capone and Other Alcatraz Cons. Quora. I've been a painter for 10 years and always hoped this day would come. Quora. Anonymous hacks Donald Trump's voicemail and leaks the messages. Why has Eton produced so many prime ministers? Harvard Law School is quietly scrubbing slavery from its brand. Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? Uk.businessinsider. The Enigmatic Art of America’s Secret Societies. Court OKs Barring High IQs for Cops. Quora. What a Year of Racial Strife Has Taught Bernie and Hillary. The Surprising Reasons You Pay More for Car Insurance. Uk.businessinsider. Apple Launches Support Account on Twitter With Tips, Tricks, and Customer Service.
Businessinsider. Interview: Rebecca Traister, Author Of 'All The Single Ladies' Understanding The Clintons' Popularity With Black Voters. AI & The Future Of Civilization. My wife took a picture of my daughter drawing with me. At first glance, it looks like she's standing next to me, and I have very dainty feet. The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good | David Rieff. Get Better Sleep and Start Mornings Strong With the "10-3-2-1-0" Formula. Check In With the Velociraptor at the World’s First Robot Hotel. The Company Scalia Kept. The gendered way we’ve learned to ask questions is terrible for both men and women. If only NASA could find participants for their study.
When Sciatica Pain Is a Medical Emergency. Sciatica Exercises for Piriformis Syndrome Video. People.