Interesting Links for 25-04-2013

[andrewducker]

• What happens when Walmart sacks so many people it can't actually keep the shelves stacked?
  (tags: viasupergee fail shopping walmart business )
• 25 photos that demand a second look.
  (tags: photos viasupergee optical_illusion )
• ACLU Discovers Illegal Debtors’ Prisons in Ohio
  (tags: prison debt rights usa )
• Ms. Attribution (because giving the wrong

Comments

[bart_calendar]

Interesting ruling on that case. The fact that the guy said "I'm going to cum inside you" makes me think they made the right choice to consider prosecuting the guy, but it really is a judgement call

[andrewducker]

And this is why safewords are not optional.

(And yes, accidents will happen - there's more info on this case elsewhere, because the judge wanted to make it clear that he wasn't criminalising those cases. But I am _so_ not looking for them while I'm at work!)

[bart_calendar]

I really find cases like this fascinating, because they get into the reality of sex, which is generally much more complex then the theory that goes into the writing of consent/non consent laws. I love the layers and how they make people really think about what they are doing.

[major_clanger]

You may want to edit that link to the Boston bombing conspiracy theory to note that it includes extremely graphic images.

Frankly, I'm glad that I live in a country where if, my legs were blown off in a bombing and someone accused me of being an actor engaged to fake my injuries, I could sue them into the steaming pile of excrement that they inwardly are.

[andrewducker]

Fair point.

And yes (although some of these people are clearly mentally disturbed - how much of a defense would that count as?)

[gonzo21]

It's baffling isn't it, they've got people announcing that real blood is not that colour? And they think if the US government were going to stage a fake bombing, they'd use stage blood that wasn't the right colour?

[cartesiandaemon]

Well, come to think of it, if they were going to stage a fake bombing, they might (a) use fake blood that looked realistic on video, rather than fake blood that actually looked like blood and (b) totally screw it up.

I think the thing is, to a fairly true extent, the government have manufactured a mostly-spurious terror of Muslim terrorists. But they've done so by repeatedly straight-facedly massively exaggerating the threat, insisting on over-investigating, planting agent provocateurs who manufacture amateur terrorists but blow the whistle before they actually blow anyone up, and seizing on any smaller incident and treating it as if it were much more major.

There is the "conspiracy", which has mostly worked, with most people just doing their jobs and knowing when they can't ask questions. But it's not a "conspiracy theory", in the sense that several hundred people all agreeing to fake a bombing would get found out.

[philmophlegm]

I keep meaning to do an LJ post on conspiracy theories that might be true. Conspiracy theories and hoaxes are something of an interest of mine. In fact, it's a vague ambition of mine to one day be responsible for an incredibly complex hoax that somehow becomes famous. (The real hero of 'The da Vinci Code', in my view is Pierre Plantard. Look him up. Complete nutter - and an anti-semitic one at that - but a great hoaxer.)

Present me with any single conspiracy theory, and like most sensible people, I'll say it's almost certainly not true. However, statistics will tell us that if you come up with lots of things that individually only have a small chance of being true, there is an increasing chance that one or more is true. And that makes me think that somewhere out there is a bizarre conspiracy theory that actually turns out to be true.

[bart_calendar]

I'm pretty sure the conspiracy theory that Lee Harvey Oswald either didn't kill JFK or if he did had lots of help is probably true.

[gonzo21]

Operation Paperclip was a conspiracy theory for years, and then it was eventually found out that the US did smuggle many Nazi scientists into the States and get them off war crimes charges in order to work for various science projects.

Wasn't MK-ultra a conspiracy theory for years too, and then it was found out that the CIA did experiment with mind control drugs, and that was the great LSD experiments of the early 60s, where they even tested LSD bombs and things?

[steer]

Damn -- I wrote a long reply to this and LJ lost it. Don't think you can count paperclip. The only real "secret" was that they covered over some people's past a little. Prime example Werner von Braun was employed and this was announced to the public by 1945 (October). There were various similar operations (Epsilon actually got more high profile people IMHO). It's not really a conspiracy to my mind at all, just a little bit of cosmetics. "Hey, here's the new head of research... he was in Germany during the war... but he was a super nice guy."

I don't think there were any war crime charges to be got off -- and some of the paperclip men did face war crime charges.

MK Ultra though, totally. I think that's the best example I know. When someone first tried to convince me of it I thought they were nuts.

[steer]

From the Dara O'Brien piece:

"A slip on the final page saw him simplify (√5)4 as 625 rather than 25 (625’s square root)."
A slip in the reporting of the slip caused them to write sqrt(5)4 rather than sqrt(5)^4 (square root of 5 to power 4 -- can't be faffed to find appropriate html). Haha. (Took me shamefully long to figure out).

[drdoug]

Thanks for that, it had me totally baffled. I stumbled on it, thought "that makes no sense" and just took the fact that a simple GCSE maths problem can't make it through a national newspaper's editorial process intact is further evidence of the point Dara may have been making.

[naath]

That Dara O'Briain piece is very misleading - for one thing that's only one of several papers that you would have had to sit to get the GCSE. Someone had an excellent blog pots taking it apart; but I've losted the link :(

Also O'Briain is clearly a talented mathematician himself; I think him saying "wow, this is piss easy" would be like having Mo Farah come to school sports day and say "wow, they're all really slow runners". Yeah, people who are good at maths find GCSE maths really easy; does he really expect GCSE results to usefully predict who will have a Fields Medal in the future? because I don't - kids who do well at GCSE move on to A level and university study; appropriate teaching support for their interest (so they don't get bored in class) is good, but I don't think GCSEs are really *for* picking out the very best-at-maths people.

[ext_208701]

As I recall Dara has a theoretical physics degree so I'd expect him to utterly walk the paper. As a result 47/60 is a bit of a shit mark for him and I suspect the a* boundary should be a bit higher than 43.

I think the Mo Farah comparison is off - Dara hasn't seriously studied stuff for 20 years and probably wasn't one of the very best in the world at his peak - someone like Jeffery Archer would be a better comparison (as a talented amateur runner in his university days).

On that note, Mo may have beaten me to the half way point on Sunday by about 28 minutes but I beat him to the finish by at least a year. Declining standards in younger runners if you ask me :-)

[drdoug]

Yeah, I had a similar reaction. It's easy to underestimate how hard many people find maths.

It happened to me the other day. A friend asked a simple question about ratios that I'd have guessed would be pre-GCSE level that more or less any adult could do. I was surprised, but a bit of asking around suggests that most adults - including many with degrees - can't do it.

On the other hand, maths is awesome, and if Dara O'Briain can encourage and excite more people to get in to it then he gets three cheers from me.

[naath]

On the other hand I couldn't write a novel if you paid me a million quid to do it; or read a newspaper in Chinese.

Some people have some skills, some people have other skills. Takes all sorts.