Interesting Links for 09-12-2013

[andrewducker]

• Dammit - I want the Technomancer Digital Wizard Hoodie. And to be 12 again.
  (tags: technology clothing awesome )
• Why Life Does Not Really Exist
  (tags: life science meaning complexity )
• Some fascinating writing on interrogation
  (tags: interrogation )
• I have no idea what you're supposed to do if your child is a psychopath (warning: All the trigger

Comments

[bart_calendar]

One huge flaw in the methodology of that gay men article is that one third of searches for gay male porn are made by women.

Another is that it looks at the number of men who look for gay porn in the first place. Online gay men are far, far more likely to search for hookup sites than porn sites (oddly straight men are more likely to look for porn than hookup sites.)

He'd get far better data if he was looking at Manhunt, Ashley Madison, Adam4Adam and similar sites than doing it the way he did it. (Ashley Madison is the number one site for closeted dudes looking to hook up.)

[andrewducker]

You should let him know!

[andrewducker]

Oh, and what percentage would you guess?

[bart_calendar]

Totally depends on how you define "gay

[bart_calendar]

Also, I want to say you have found the only article on the Internet I have ever seen that I would say honestly deserves a trigger warning.

[andrewducker]

I got it from skreidle, and yeah, it just kept getting worse, and worse.

[alitheapipkin]

I couldn't finish it. And to think the way my maternal aunt has behaved* over the years was enough to put me off reproducing for life...

*Horribly emotionally abusive to more or less everyone around her, but only marginally criminal AFAIK.

[nojay]

Japan's just downgraded its growth figures for the year, it's importing millions of tonnes more LNG each year to fuel its gas-fired power plants and companies like TEPCO are refurbishing coal-fired (ick!) plants in places like Hirono to cover the demand for electricity while its carbon footprint and smog levels increase along with the grid price for electricity.

At the same time the nation has over twenty bought-and-paid-for reactors sitting idle, nuclear fuel is unbelievably cheap and a reprocessing plant in Rokkasho is finally ready to turn spent fuel into fresh MOX pellets, further reducing import costs while vastly reducing the amount of stored "waste". Not really a difficult decision apart from the psychological block from the events at and around Fukushima Daiichi resulting from the tsunami.

[andrewducker]

From what I've read TEPCO have been incredibly imcompetent in their handling of the whole thing, and it does worry me that there isn't more government oversight that's getting them to do things properly.

But yes.

[nojay]

TEPCO generate and supply about 40% of Japan's electricity, especially to Tokyo and environs. With the loss of about 15GW of nuclear capacity they're desperately trying to fill the gaps to keep the lights on, factories running and all the other things expected of a top-rank first-world nation that depend on electricity (water treatment, sewage, trains, street lighting, elevators and escalators in a visibly-greying nation etc

Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[cartesiandaemon]

It's always disappointing when an important concept turns out not to have a clear definitive dividing border, but I think it's anticipating the problem to assume that all concepts which don't have clear borders without fuzzy edge cases are completely useless. Most important concepts have some fuzzy edge cases, sometimes big ones -- that doesn't mean that there's some important difference between a man and a rock, even if it turns out that it's more accurate to say a machine has a little bit of it, rather than none of it.

Re: Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[andrewducker]

Yup. Particularly with concepts that radically predates the scientific method, and therefore had a very fuzzy definition that was never really written down, or depended on non-scientific concepts.

"Species" is another interesting one, with odd corner cases.

Re: Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[danieldwilliam]

And, according to Richard Dawkins, species is an almost useless concept when discussing things with non-sexual reproduction.

Re: Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, exactly, although instead of "corner cases" it's probably better to say ""all life, with exceptions that happen to be easy for humans to observe and classify" :)

[xenophanean]

"Life does not really exist"

I rather liked the article, but I did think it should come as no surprise to a philosopher that the universe doesn't match up neatly with our concepts. It doesn't do that elsewhere, so why should life be any different.

Stuff is just stuff, the universe cares nothing for our definitions.