"weak math skills are linked with an array of poor life outcomes such as prison, unemployment, exclusion from school, poverty and long-term illness"

How about this for an example of bad math? Researchers post an article making the age-old mistake of equating correlation to causation.

As noted in the introduction, the easier it is to vote (internet, mail, motor-voter registration, etc.), the more people vote who wouldn't otherwise have voted. This is the best reason there is for not making voting easier, for it is these marginally-motivated people who are the least informed and the most ill-informed.

This piece piques one of my pet peeves, the confusion between scientists and engineers. Scientists do not build rockets--engineers build rockets. Even if a person trained in, say, physics, is designing a rocket, that person is effectively acting as an engineer.

I object to attempts to glorify certain kinds of engineers by calling them scientists. There is no such need to glorify engineers--they are glorious in their own right. Calling them scientists is a slap in the face and an insult.

Engineering and science could hardly be different. Engineers put things together; scientists take things apart.

YABL

I just returned from the CES and can report that when I'm in Las Vegas, I'm very handsome to very pretty blonde women who want to meet me later for a drink. Which is to say, they let hookers into the CES.

That's a great story. Thanks.
OP

"And yes, the invention is every bit as obvious as you can imagine."

The standard defense against this type of claim-without-support is that if it were obvious, and given that there are _lots_ of eyeballs on the subject matter, and given that it is highly useful, then someone would have already done it. Therefore, since nobody has done it before, it was not obvious.

The "it's obvious" rant is almost universal when someone sees an idea that they (a) know is good, and (b) understand. As an inventor and generally creative type myself, I can't tell you how many times people will say that something is obvious once I have explained it clearly to them, even though had I not done so, they would never have made the same invention in their lifetime. The corollary is that there is a high probability that they will then believe that the idea was their own. I once showed a choreographer the ending to her dance with which she was struggling; after its first performance, someone congratulated her on her work, especially the ending, and she took full credit even though I was standing at her side at the time.

Will this version of Qt improve the horrible impedance mismatch to the OS X GUI?

'What would it be like if we could run native code inside the browser..."

This sounds awesome. Maybe I will finally be able to run a browser inside my browser.

Nonetheless, Gleick's treatment of the likes of Shannon, Babbage, and Ada Lovelace are fair and fairly detailed, and will vastly enlighten the non-technical reader, which is, after all, the intended audience for this book.

Why is this lead piece written as a teaser instead of giving us the punch line? This is at odds with most Slashdot leads. I hope this doesn't catch on as it has for abstracts for technical papers.

128 KB Macintosh, 1984. Finally I could get to work and stop fucking around with my computer.