Completely unexpected. I was thinking it would be a minority government, either conservative or liberal. I had absolutely no expectation that it would turn out the way it did. I was keeping an eye on some of the predictions, and last night's outcome was at the far end of probability. I don't know that anyone saw it coming.

Hm... I don't know more than the basics, really, but you can think of a Markov chain as being a directed graph (as in graph theory, not charts in Excel), with weighted edges like this. A and E are the two states, so if you're in state A, there's a 40% chance you'll move to state E, and a 60% chance you'll stay in state A.

If I'm not mistaken, it's related to Bayesian inference as well, since they both address the same basic question (If I know that X is true, what's the chance that Y will happen).

I hope that helps.

Nitpicky, and not relevant to the main story, but there's a fairly large factual error in the article. It says McAfee sold the company to Intel in 2010. It's true that Intel bought the company, but McAfee himself hasn't owned any part of it since 1994.

I don't know where that comic's going, but I want to see more.

Pop 101 - Marianas Trench It's a decent pop song that deconstructs what's popular these days.

Careful with that name. I don't think you want to get noticed by Palantir.

Descent. The first time I saw it, it blew my mind. I became obsessed with it for ages afterwards. I'd never seen anything quite like it.

For those who don't know, it was a sci-fi shooter. Mining robots throughout the solar system had gone crazy and started attacking miners. You, the Material Defender, had to fly a fighter craft through the mines, rescue the hostages, and then destroy the reactor and escape before the mine self destructed. Played from a first-person perspective, you had a full 6 degrees of freedom. Want to fly through the levels upside down? No problem. Lots of secrets and memorable enemies, it came out in 1994, but still holds up today.

Similarly, How Thank You Sounds to Chinese Ears

Discussion on that here:

And you know what? The fact that he went to the trouble to paint a yellow line on the floor and label each stack of product blows me away. He's just not an eccentric entrepreneur, he's an organized eccentric entrepreneur with a scale model of an Amazon warehouse in his basement.

That's a lovely gesture. She might not remember it in 20 years, but she'll remember it tomorrow. From reading your posts, you seem like a genuinely good person. I don't think you need to worry too much about your mistakes.

I have purely obsessional obsessive compulsive disorder. Things are troubling me constantly, and sleep does provide relief. Even so, I'd still rather stay awake 24/7. I'm constantly down on myself, what I can accomplish, what I have accomplished, etc. There'd be so much more time to improve myself if I didn't need sleep. If I want relief, I can always drink :)

EDIT: Of course, knowing me I'd probably spend the extra time playing video games and wondering why I'm not reading my library books...

I've been listening to Timecop1983 pretty heavily this week. 80s inspired electronic music.

I asked a similar question a couple months ago, the responses might be useful to you.

Wait... People actually think it looks cool?

I don't smoke, and never have. My entire life I've been surrounded by people that vilify smoking, and yet somehow I think smoking cigarettes looks cool. E-cigs thought? Nope. Completely ridiculous.

I'm amazed at how popular they are. I can think of three stores in my city that specialize in them.

It's like Walt Disney went insane and shot a snuff version of Swiss Family Robinson

What.

My coworkers (programmers) like them as travel machines for when they have to go up to the head office. They're using them to run Ubuntu though, not ChromeOS.

I don't think you put the link in. That, or Hubski doesn't want me to hear leaked Death Grips.

It's a bit technical, but it may be of minor interest to lil given her recent post on algorithmic text.

The no fingerprints on the pen is a little weird, but it sounds like a pretty weak case to me.

But nobody ever talked about Kurt being suicidal before he died, nobody.

People... don't usually see it coming. That's not weird.

And the El Duce guy? Judging from his Wikipedia article, it seems pretty plausible that he was just out for attention.

I've sort-of got a psychology degree (part of a double-major), and null hypothesis significance testing is all I know. I've known there were problems with it for a while, but I have no idea what the alternatives are (sure, Bayesian inference, but is that really a solution? I don't have the background to know,m but that journal doesn't think so). What are the alternatives?

So she's basing gender on chromosomes.

What does she say to the XY woman who's had children?

Not much else to do but keep on living it, I guess.

EDIT: I think this sounds flippant, but I do mean it. If she doesn't experience gender dysphoria and everyone around her considers her a woman, what else is there to do but keep going as before?

What I expected:

Yikes. Was it something serious?

Leaving aside any discussion of the morality of the death penalty... this just feels a lot more brutal than lethal injection. I understand the point in the article, that it could be more humane than injection if done right, but that doesn't change my immediate reaction to it. A firing squad is just... messy.

I guess you could argue that the "messiness" of it is a more effective deterrent, although I can't help but think that the crimes that would incur a death penalty aren't usually committed after weighing the risks of punishment...

Also, who signs up for being an executioner in that position? Injection, electric chair... Sure, it's killing someone regardless, but flipping a switch or depressing a syringe strikes me as slightly more removed* from the outcome of the act than shooting someone in the back of the head (or looking them in the face while you do it...).

*I can't quite untangle why I think lethal injection or electrocution (is that still done? I have no idea) is more removed from the act of killing than shooting someone. In all of those cases, you start a mechanical process that results in someone's death. I guess there are a few more points of failure than shooting someone in the head (a circuit could blow, the dosage could be wrong), but it doesn't seem like that should make a huge difference.

I had hair not quite to my shoulders when I was 18 (I'd been listening to too much Led Zeppelin). The thing is, I couldn't be bothered to actually care for it, so it always looked like a bit of a mess. When I got it cut to a normal length, pretty much everyone I knew complemented me on it and I realized pretty quickly that long hair wasn't a look I could do.

I actually like the idea of having long-ish hair though. I like the feeling of the wind blowing through it (no, really), and I even enjoy having to blow my bangs away from my eyes.

Every couple of years, I let it grow out a bit before I realize that I can't quite make it look good, and I think I'm in the process of doing that right now.

That, or I've just been too busy to make it to the barber.

Or your psych degree has you memorizing Freud

Wait, there are places that do this? Yikes. I started university as a psych major before transitioning into a comp-sci double-major, and we got maybe one or two lectures on Freud in our intro to psychology class, before dropping him for almost the entire rest of the program.

I agree. I find it interesting that Coke shut it down though. I get that they don't want to be seen as endorsing Hitler (and this is super bad press for them), but wasn't the whole point of this to take unpleasant text and turn it into happy ascii art? I'm not sure that people intentionally feeding it awful things really subverted its purpose...

I think you forgot the link?

Rush is not an emo band.

It checks out.