You need to read this. If you log in via your google account, you are giving the game total access to your email, google drive, etc. That is not acceptable. Go to your google security settings and see for yourself…and tell it no.
It’s a brilliant little game, but one thing a day of playing it has convinced me of — its implementation is crap. Buggy, inconsistent, and now also, a security risk.
Our HHMI students are going to the Morris Theater tonight to watch Finding Dory (fish are biological, so it fits). You’re all welcome to join us at 7!
OK, here’s one.
In the US, we have buffoons trying to stumble into the highest office in the land; in the UK, all the buffoons (the ones who were rah-rah for Brexit) seem to be frantically scrambling away to avoid becoming prime minister. Farage, Johnson, Gove, all making epic pratfalls in their desperate race to avoid being tagged “it”, and now Leadsom has bailed out. That leaves Theresa May holding the bag.
I have to wonder how awful May must be to want a job even the clowns want to shirk.
Of all the things Twitter needed to improve their service, allowing meaningless polls of your subset of readers wasn’t one of them. But there you go, you can create polls and get the biases of your readership expressed in cold, hard numbers that mean nothing at all.
Here’s an example.
Do you agree that Black Lives Matter #BLM is the new black version of the Klu Klux Klan? (Retweet)
— Let's take a poll (@ASatyanarayanan) July 11, 2016
Do you agree that Black Lives Matter #BLM is the new black version of the Klu Klux Klan?
80% Yes
20% No
(I think you’ll need to go to this link on Twitter.com and have a twitter account to vote.)
So here’s a guy who has a lot of racist friends, who has made an utterly stupid racist statement, and is asking all of his fucking racist buddies to validate it.
Thanks, Twitter.
But it’s all right, we all are. Zimmer has begun a series called Game of Genomes in which he has had his whole genome sequenced, and is being led by a group of scientists through the analysis. So far he’s made a good summary of the procedure, and a general overview of the state of his genome.
In my own genome, Gerstein and his colleagues discovered 13 genes in which both copies appear to be broken. I have another 42 genes in which only one copy looks like it’s defunct.
It may sound strange that my genome has dozens of broken genes that cause me no apparent harm. If it’s any consolation, I’m no freak. The 1000 Genomes Project revealed that everyone has a few dozen broken genes.
Our genomes are not finely engineered machines that can’t tolerate a single broken flywheel or gear shaft. They’re sloppy products of evolution that usually manage to work pretty well despite being riddled with mutations.
I’ve probably passed down some of my uniquely broken genes to my children. Perhaps, long in the future, one of those broken genes will become more common in humans, and end up in every member of our species. That’s certainly happened in the past. My genome catalog includes about 14,000 genes that have been broken for thousands or millions of years, known as pseudogenes. Once they lost the ability to make proteins, they simply became extra baggage carried down from one generation to the next. Thanks to a genetic roll of the dice, they ended up becoming common. Now these 14,000 pseudogenes are found in all humans today.
As you can tell, it’s a nicely written summary that doesn’t require a huge amount of scientific background to understand. Good stuff!
On the recommendation of Russell Glasser, I gave Hearthstone a whirl today. I was impressed — that is one slick piece of work. I had no idea what to do or how it worked, but it’s beautifully designed and led me through the gameplay entirely painlessly — and even with a fair bit of fun. I enjoyed it, but I don’t know that I’ll get addicted to it. I guess I’m just not into card games.
The other game I tried out today is the fad of the hour: Pokemon Go. I have never played Pokemon before; my kids were all into it on their gameboys, and they also played the card game, but I was a very bad dad and didn’t join in at all. So this thing was a complete mystery to me, and still is. Unlike Hearthstone, the explanations within the game are virtually nonexistent, and you have to just stumble around and try to figure out what the heck to do.
I finally figured out the first bit, and Mary and I went on a nice sweaty (it’s hot!) walk around the neighborhood and caught Pidgees and Weedles and a Bulbasaur and an Oddish and an Evee. Unfortunately, now I have no idea what to do with them, now that I’ve got them, because the game just assumes you’re a Pokemon pal already. If you’ve got any hints, let me know.
One nice thing is that they’re both free. I guess there’s stuff you can buy as you get further into them, but I’m so dang casual there’s probably not much risk of temptation.
It’s terrible that police officers were murdered in Dallas — that was an unforgivable act of inexcusable violence. But now the police are lashing out, and it’s going to make everything worse. DeRay McKesson was arrested in Baton Rouge: he was “flagged” as a troublemaker for his role as a spokesperson and as someone who was photographing events, and tackled and thrown into jail.
Police, I beg you: stop. You are doing yourselves no favors by denying the legitimacy of the protests, and any sympathy for the genuine difficulty of doing your job is going to evaporate if you continue to confirm a reputation for brutality.
Also, the visuals are going to simply demolish the case for a valuable service that “protects and serves”. You cannot win against this.
Jonathan Bachman
I have to ask, who arrived dressed for violence and rioting? Who stands both fearless and with dignity?
If you’re one of those people who argues that it’s the criminality of the citizenry that provokes police violence, that if only black people would stop committing crimes, they wouldn’t get shot, you might want to look at the data: there is no correlation between community violence and the violence of police responses.
While some have blamed violent crime for being responsible for police violence in some communities, data shows that high levels of violent crime in cities did not appear to make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people.
Over the past several years, police departments in high-crime cities such as Detroit and Newark have consistently killed fewer people per population than police departments in cities with much lower crime rates such as Austin, Bakersfield, and Long Beach.
Rather than being determined by crime rates, police violence reflects a lack of accountability in the culture, policies, and practices of the institutions of policing, as investigations into some of the most violent police departments in America have shown. Campaign Zero, among other initiatives, seeks to directly address the policies and practices that contribute to police violence.
Here’s another report from a black policeman that explains a lot of what is going on.
On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
