Carcassonne is super fun! I like to play with the variant that everyone has a "hand" of 3 tiles and you draw one at the end of your turn. That way you have more options (for increased strategy) and you can think about your turn ahead of time.

Is that one still a Target exclusive? I think it was when it came out, but not sure at this point. It might also be worth checking out the Dice Tower's 12 Kids' Games of Christmas video. It's somewhat geared towards dexterity games, but there are some good other ones there too.

The only odd thing about the draw was that Carlsen didnt play on until move 38 or 39. Carlsen knows that he's a strong favourite in the tiebreaker. All he had to do was draw all the games in the classical time control. Carlsen was playing black. He had a strong position, but nothing obviously winning. Why take a chance on things going awry in the classical when you're an 80%+ favourite in the tiebreaker? He knew Caruana would be highly pressured to draw if he offered. The draw wasn't good for chess, but it was good for Carlsen.

I think that the first time you have sex is likely to be an awkward fumbling affair no matter how old you are.

Wait, I must have missed something. Hubski has tiered userbases now?

Usually just shared common areas (kitchen, living room etc.) although the walls between bedrooms aren't usually very thick.

Heh, I thought about that joke too. My reaction when he mentioned his "gift" was to laugh, because I honestly thought he was joking (not about being able to read people, but about it being a "gift").

I talked to a guy on the subway once who was convinced that he was given a gift from God that let him know what people are like inside after spending 15 minutes with them. Yeah, I also read people. Sometimes it doesn't even take me 15 minutes.

We have a lot of space and no people so... welcome!

This is only true outside of major city-centres, though. If you want to live in Vancouver or Toronto, for instance, you'll need to be prepared to spend a lot of housing.

The podcast version is a pretty good listen. Nothing particularly surprising, but the forensic accounting is pretty neat, IMO.

Absolutely.

Video game violence continues to be a topic of debate, for better and worse. Recent studies continue to show that it's possible that violent video games have some impact on the brain and/or body, although most recent studies also suggest that playing violent video games doesn't have much of an impact on real-world behaviour. As the article says, Bushman is still last-authoring studies about video game violence. Most of the studies with Bushman's name on them suggest links between violent video games and aggression. Quite a few have had errata published about them. That's obviously concerning, although not being a cognitive science person, I have no idea how standard (or non-standard) errata are in that field. FWIW, Bushman isn't the only one whose name comes up in studies that link violent video games to aggression.

Measuring things like "aggression" will always involve some level of subjectivity. How you define "aggression" can have a significant impact on your findings. Is it increased cortisol levels? Where people aim if asked to shoot a gun with rubber bullets? What words people choose if asked to complete a story? Each of these offers an incomplete picture of aggression, at best, and pretty much any good study on this topic suggests that more work needs to be done.

Fair enough

Fun article, if a bit longer than it needed to be (too many examples of restaurants trying to make things super-shiny for critics IMO). My partner is a manager at a big retail chain. C-levels occasionally like to make "unannounced" visits to random stores to see how things are going. Days before the C-level's flight arrives, managers know about the visit and are working crazy overtime to clean things up.

I mean, I see your point, though I would argue that the asshole levels between being stupidly dismissive of American writers and raping someone are significantly different.

Damn, I was really looking forward to volleyball on Friday night.

I also got a kick out of this:

You know, God spoke to me and told me ‘go check out the Blood Moon’ back in June.

He said ‘you need to find out what’s going on’

You'd think that if anyone didn't need someone else to find out what's going on for them, it'd be God.

Shakshouka with Feta. Super easy, delicious, and quite customizable.

Good gifts are ultimately personal, so it's hard to give general advice. For guys who wear dress shirts to work, a set of metal collar stays can be a great inexpensive gift if they don't have some already. Household items like Dryer Balls can be nice. Things that aren't necessities but add convenience can be good gifts--something like a Chromecast or an Echo Dot. Ultimately, though, it really depends on what the person is into.

Never got into Starcraft. I used to play Age of Empires 2. Even watched some high-level tournaments. I was never a big fan of the emphasis on micromanagement in competitive RTS games, though (which is also why I never got into MOBAs). It seems to mostly be about who can click the fastest to exploit small glitches or gain small advantages.

FEMA is certainly correct that disasters must be managed at all levels, but the most important lesson of the 2017 disaster season is that weather disasters are becoming more frequent and more damaging.

Things are only going to get worse and FEMA's lack of funding will become even more evident. Best hope that you can afford insurance (and that your insurance doesn't go bankrupt).

A futures market for a highly-volatile, speculation-driven investment?

Thanks, but no thanks.

For American cities, highways are a drug. They’re expensive to acquire. They devastate healthy tissue and arteries, replacing previous modes of nourishment with destructive ones. They force the rest of the body to adapt to their needs, and they inflict pain on those nearby.

There's one other thing that highways have in common with drugs: You'll never have enough. Even if you invest in auto infrastructure at large cost, it'll only be a short time before more car commuters start to prioritize using the new infrastructure, leading to overuse and gridlock all over again.

Roads are there to move people, not cars. Within cities, cars are some of the least efficient ways of moving people. It's time to reprioritize the way we perceive, build, and use roads in major cities.

Yes, the tools aren't quite easily accessible/usable yet, but they are getting better, and I'm sure it won't be too long before it becomes relatively easy to "photoshop" videos in order to make it look like someone is doing something they never did. I expect that at some point in the next 5 years or so there will be a major scandal or two where big news orgs are fooled by fake videos of high-profile figures.

Good on the IOC. With that being said, this decision does put the stature of the olympic games at risk in certain sports. Does a gold medal in figure skating/biathlon/speed skating mean that the winner is the best in the world if no Russian athletes were present at the competition? Or are competitions like the World Figure Skating Championship going to become more prestigious in those sports than the Olympic games?

Not all of them are.

By and large, alt-right men don’t seem to be forcing these traditional gender roles on the women of their movement—the alt-right women are doing it themselves. The women share a profound disdain for the feminist movement, and are eager to claim the supportive, behind-the-scenes roles.

As for female empowerment, there’s nothing that has made me feel more empowered in my life than supporting and being supported by a strong man,” Claudia Davenport, an alt-right activist, said in an interview with The Economist. “I think that men and women are better off when we stop fighting nature and allow our distinct identities to shine through.”

Most alt-right groups are predominantly male, but we should be careful in assuming that there are no women who support their views or that biological determinism is a viewpoint only held by men.

“Today, 98 percent of the videos we remove for violent extremism are flagged by our machine-learning algorithms,” Wojcicki wrote. “Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70 percent of violent extremist content within eight hours of upload and nearly half of it in two hours and we continue to accelerate that speed,” she added.

Like most big tech companies these days, YT/Google is primarily interested in automation (in this case of content flagging). It'd be interesting to know if the new staff will be flagging content manually (doubtful), reviewing content that has already been flagged by their algorithms (mos likely) or refining their automated flagging algorithms (also possible).

The reddit legaladvice megathread on the topic is certainly worth reading through

I had to give up on RL when I realized that it just made me too salty. I started doing more IRL sports instead (which also make me salty sometimes, though not nearly to the same extent).

It has been a bit eerily warm up in the East, although I can't say I'm particularly keen on cold weather arriving any earlier than i has to.

You can look at their instagram site. There are a lot of feet. It's mostly just photos of ballerinas doing ballet poses in different locations. I usually prefer ones that are more focused on a landscape or urban scene.

Most recently I've bought prints from the Ballerina Project. In the past, I've gotten prints from Etsy, AllPosters, Art Gallery gift shops, and bookstores. I'm rarely unhappy with the prints I buy, although I occasionally make the mistake of buying something I don't have room to actually put up anywhere.