Posts Tagged ‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’
Weekend Links! So Many!
* Harris Wittels has died. I really loved his appearances on Earwolf, but the one I keep thinking about is his appearance on “You Made It Weird” last November, where he spoke about his addiction at length. The humblebrag.
* Oliver Sacks writes about his terminal cancer diagnosis in the New York Times.
* The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference began today. This year’s theme is “Animacy” and both Lee Edelman and Lauren Berlant are keynotes.
* TNI has a great excerpt from the beginning of Creepiness.
* A President’s Day remembrance of Ona Judge.
* Neill Blomkamp is making an Alien. The Man In The High Castle Gets Series Order From Amazon. Amazon should greenlight this next.
* The City and the City may be a BBC drama. I would have said it was unfilmable, but sure, let’s give it a try.
* Boston’s winter from hell. What the massive snowfall in Boston tells us about global warming.
* A Siberian blast—seriously, this air is from Siberia—has turned the eastern U.S. into an icebox featuring the most extreme cold of anywhere on Earth right now. Looking ahead, there’s plenty more where that came from.
* Rudy Giuliani, still horrible.
* Melodrama is so powerful, then, because by promising heroic emancipation from terrorist villainy, it implies that US citizens can overcome their feelings of diminished political agency and lost freedom. Melodrama promises that both the US state, and individual Americans, will soon experience heroic freedom by winning the War on Terror. They will cast off their feelings of vulnerability and weakness through heroic action—even when the villain they attack is not the primary cause of their powerlessness or suffering.
* The fastest way to find Waldo. You’re welcome.
* Would you like to understand how the “new” Harper Lee novel, “Go Set a Watchman,” came to be billed as a long-lost, blockbuster sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” — one of the definitive books of the American 20th century — when, by all the known facts, it’s an uneven first draft of the famous novel that was never considered for publication? Would you like to get a glimpse into how clever marketing and cryptic pronouncements have managed to produce an instant bestseller, months before anyone has read it?
* Republicans think this is their moment to kill higher education in America. And they might be right.
* Congressman Says We Don’t Need Education Funding Because ‘Socrates Trained Plato On A Rock.’ Checks out.
* The outlook for the rest of Illinois isn’t much better. We Need Syriza in Illinois.
* That there are any homeless children anywhere in the country is an unthinkable national tragedy.
* Save the Wisconsin Idea. You may have to save it from its saviors.
* The inexorable tuition explosion that will result is proving to be politically untenable, and Walker has moved immediately to head it off, consequences be damned. And UW leadership, having adopted a posture of supporting the public authority on principled grounds, is left in the politically deadly position of having to fight for the power to raise tuition arbitrarily.
* Meanwhile let’s kill all the state parks too.
* Meanwhile Milwaukee is one of America’s poorest cities. Though it still has one thing going for it.
* “Scott Walker says he consults with God, but his office can’t provide documents to prove it.”
* Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System. No! It can’t be!
* New Education Initiative Replaces K-12 Curriculum With Single Standardized Test.
* The best and worst presidents. The hottest U.S. presidents. The beardiest presidents.
* Mother Jones loves Minnesota governor Mark Dayton.
* The visiting professor scam.
* We don’t need more STEM majors. We need more STEM majors with liberal arts training.
* Academic interviews are horrible, mealtime edition.
* Oklahoma Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Advanced Placement U.S. History.
* The West Coast cargo strike.
* DWYL, porn industry edition.
* What is going to happen to all of those African-languages-speaking, archive-obsessed, genre-discovering graduate students? Listen, I have some terrible news.
* The death cult called the MLA wants you to have hope for some reason though. Really strange study.
* Florida Passes Plan For Racially-Based Academic Goals.
* Meanwhile, affirmative action for men in college admissions.
* “A Superbug Nightmare Is Playing Out at an LA Hospital.”
* But one of America’s ugliest secrets is that our own whistleblowers often don’t do so well after the headlines fade and cameras recede. The ones who don’t end up in jail like Manning, or in exile like Snowden, often still go through years of harassment and financial hardship. And while we wait to see if Loretta Lynch is confirmed as the next Attorney General, it’s worth taking a look at how whistleblowers in America fared under the last regime.
* Boston Using Prison Labor To Shovel Heaps Of Snow In Frigid Temperatures For Pennies.
* Revealing scenes from the deranged thinking in the tech industry.
* SMBC messing with the primal forces.
* LARoB reviews Kelly Link’s Get in Trouble and Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary and Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1.
* Clarissa Explains White Supremacy.
* Iceland begins to jail bankers.
* “College Apologizes for Way It Gave M&Ms to Children.”
* “Can There Be Too Many Museums?”
* “Which sexual positions are more likely to break your penis?”
* Giant Ron English art-book: Status Factory.
* An excerpt from David Graeber’s The Rules of Utopia.
* Oral histories of the early days of the HIV epidemic.
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is growing near. It’s Time to Review Your Adjunct Employment Policies.
* Trying to create a promotion track outside the tenure stream at Denver.
* The adjunct unionization movement. And more on that.
* Campus cops prepare for National Adjunct Walkout Day.
* Here’s a thing about @OccupyMLA that uses me as its stooge for part of it. Yay?
* Interesting Kickstarter: “Pioneers of African-American Cinema.”
* “DoJ report on Montana justice: Don’t get raped in Missoula, even if you’re only five years old.”
* Justice Department ‘seriously examining’ Ferguson race case.
* Another piece on the rise of the Title IX industry. Provocative Harvard Law Review forum on Title IX overreach. However bad we’re doing, though, we can certainly always do worse.
* Perhaps with each tuition bill, students should receive a breakdown of how their dollars are spent.
* Academic hiring: The Trading Places hypothesis.
* How Arizona State Reinvented Free-Throw Distraction.
* The Oscars and racism. The Oscars and sexism.
* The Brazilian town where the Confederacy lives on.
* DC Comics is bringing back Prez, this time as a teenage girl who gets elected president by Twitter.
* Holding Out For a Heroine: On Being a Woman and Loving Star Wars.
* 10 Worst Misconceptions About Medieval Life You’d Get From Fantasy Books.
* A rare piece from NRO worth linking: The Right-Wing Scam Machine.
* Former Nazi Guard Charged with 170,000 Counts of Accessory to Murder. Take the plea deal!
* The CIA asked me about controlling the climate – this is why we should worry.
* To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
* Mark Bould has another post on Jupiter Ascending trying to wrangle its treatment of gender. Lots of good discussion of Princess Leia here too.
* Plans to whip us up into another invasion in the Middle East are proceeding apace.
* When horrific child abuse becomes quirk.
* Florida police officer: “Planting evidence and lying in your reports are just part of the game.”
* Cuteness in history. Why when you see something cute you (sometimes) want to destroy it.
* Another Reason To Worry About The Measles.
* Wearable Workplace “Mood Monitors” Are About To Become A Thing.
* A People’s History of Franklin.
* Asexuals and Demisexuals in Wired.
* Five-alarm nerd alert: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has begun its final arc.
* Settlers of Catan: The Movie.
* And in case that’s not enough here’s some more proof we as a nation are still capable of great things.
One Thousand and One Wednesday Links!
I’ve been incredibly busy lately, and things are only going to get worse in the next few weeks. But for now, some links!
* I made a Twitterbot that I’m pretty pleased with: @LOLbalwarming. It’s the only authentic voice left to us in these tough times.
* Book plug: Shaviro’s No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism is really good. It’s the #3 book you should buy right now after the longstanding #1 and #2.
* And while I’m hawking stuff on Amazon: they discontinued my Swiss Army canvas wallet, so I had to find a new one. It’s leather, alas, but this Fossil wallet is everything else I want. It’s great.
* Submitted without comment: Letters in support of John McAdams from FIRE and AAUP.
* The shame of America’s parental leave.
* Why, in this day and age, is there even a Save command in any application? Its very presence implies — indeed, guarantees — that the default state of the world is unsafe. This breaks the rule our ancestors learned over billions of years of interaction with the objective world: when you do something, it stays done, until undone. Saving considered harmful. After what happened to me the other week, I am 100% on board with this.
* Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space.
* On Weird Fiction and the Interstitial.
* Chris Ware, The Art of Comics No. 2.
* Great job alert: Associate/Full Professor/Shell Oil Endowed Chair (Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured).
* Salaita Goes After University Donors in Lawsuit Over Job Loss at Illinois. UIUC responds.
* The Medicalization of Reasonable Accommodation.
* Against professors as mandatory reporters.
* Scott Walker budget cut sparks sharp debate on UW System. Deep cuts in Wisconsin. Anticipating budget cuts, nervous UW System tried to strike deal. Republican UW Professor Has Sharp Words For Walker Over Faculty Comment. Scott Walker’s State of Ignorance. A reckless proposal. A self-inflicted wound. Be skeptical. Chasing away UW’s stars. Cut athletics.
* Of course there’s time to kill primary and secondary ed, too.
* From the archives, apropos of absolutely nothing: Stalin, CEO.
* “No Crisis” is a Los Angeles Review of Books special series considering the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. A new installment to the series will be released at the beginning of each month through the fall of 2015. Our aim, as our introductory essay explains, is to “show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times.”
* As an opening gambit, I want to suggest that undergraduate students do not care about digital humanities. I want to suggest further that their disinterest is right and even salutary, because what I really mean is that undergrads do not care about DH qua DH.
* Exciting new degradations: Bill Would Allow Texas Teachers To Kill Students.
* Howard Middle School Teachers Fired for Teaching Black History.
* Detroit Cop Who Killed 7-Year-Old Aiyana Stanley-Jones While She Slept Walks Free.
* Texas school suspends 9-year-old for making ‘terroristic threats’ with magic ‘Hobbit’ ring.
Kermit Elementary Principal Roxanne Greer told the Odessa American that she could not comment on the suspension, because “all student stuff is confidential,” but Steward said that she told him that any and all threats to a child’s safety — including magical ones — would be taken seriously by the school.
* Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird. Her editor tries to put a good spin on what for all the world looks like elder abuse.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 15, Cont’d: “Wellness” and the Anti-Vaxxers.
* In France, police bravely defend liberal democracy from an eight-year-old boy.
* The Fire on the 57 Bus in Oakland.
* Why is there no Norton Anthology of Paperwork?
* Grace has Type 1 diabetes, for which there is no cure. Now 15 years old, she has endured approximately 34,000 blood tests, 5,550 shots and 1,660 medical tubing injections to keep her alive.
* The War Photo No One Would Publish.
* On running and street harassment.
* Bring the Jubilee: Croatia Cancels Debts For Tens Of Thousands Of Its Poorest People.
* Boing Boing reviews David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules.
* Understanding The Man in the High Castle.
In the TV pilot, Juliana finds a banned newsreel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which portrays a world in which the Allies won the war. The idea that this might be true fills her with an almost religious, tearful enthusiasm. In Dick’s version, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a book. Juliana discovers that that book is true—but her reaction is not exactly fervor. Instead, it’s a mixture of hope, bafflement, and a kind of displaced, distant fear. “Truth, she thought. As terrible as death.” That truth, or at least one possible truth suggested by Dick, is that there is no radical disjunction between his alternate history and our own. The TV show encourages us to congratulate ourselves on our horror at the Nazis, and our distance from them. But Dick’s novel suggests, disturbingly, that the defeat of the Nazis did not, in fact, truly transform the world. Their evil was not banished; it’s still here with us, a dystopia we can choose, and that many of us do choose, every day.
* Americans Are Working So Hard, It’s Actually Killing People.
* Study: You Can’t Change an Anti-Vaxxer’s Mind.
* Let’s politicize vaccines because why not.
* But friends, I’m here to tell you: it gets worse.
* Although there were negligible differences among the racial groups in how frequently boys committed crimes, white boys were less likely to spend time in a facility than black and Hispanic boys who said they’d committed crimes just as frequently, as shown in the chart above. A black boy who told pollsters he had committed just five crimes in the past year was as likely to have been placed in a facility as a white boy who said he’d committed 40.
* Great read about one of the founders of the Men’s Rights Movement, a former national feminist.
* Inside that creepy Nationwide ad. “Show a gun. Show a gun. Show a gun.”
* Which Racist UNC Building Are You Today? The University of North Carolina’s Silent Sam Statue Represents a Legacy of White Supremacy.
* Clergy Send In Photos To Replace Images Of Black Youth Police Were Using For Target Practice.
* Food Not Bombs Sues Fort Lauderdale Over Homeless Feeding Law.
* A brief history of the Star Wars expanded universe.
* A brief history of the Super Bowl points spread.
* The shame of the Patriots fan. They even managed to sneak in one more on their way to the championship last weekend.
* Study Links Playing Tackle Football Before Age 12 To Cognitive Impairment.
* Watching football after a traumatic brain injury.
* Florida says parents can’t opt out their kids from standardized tests.
* The Cops Don’t Care About Violent Online Threats. What Do We Do Now?
* BREAKING: Politicians listen to rich people, not you.
* Propaganda has gotten way more sophisticated since the old days.
* Man Wakes Up From Bender With Financial Problems Solved.
* Consumption Of Buncha Crunch Reverently Paused During Unsettling Scenes Of ‘American Sniper.’
* Report: Most Americans Can’t Even Name Their State’s Shadow Lord.
* Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
* Student evaluations are terrible, episode 281.
* Transgender Kids Identify With Their Gender As Completely As Cisgender Kids.
* Coming out as poor at an elite university.
* Probably wouldn’t be my first choice if I had that kind of cash, but: The Vatican Will Offer Free Shaves And Haircuts To Rome’s 3,276 Homeless People.
* Disability, the state, and minimum wage.
* Pettiness and the human condition.
* UVM Recognizes “Neutral” as a Gender Identity.
* Police Reform Is Impossible in America.
* How to tell if you are in a soft science fiction novel.
* Fun With Conspiracy Theories: Did the Chernobyl Disaster Cover Up Something Even Worse? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!
* New York cooks up a special unit for kicking hippies.
* When Cops Break Bad: Inside a Police Force Gone Wild.
* Meet the Two New Yorkers Who Are Starting a Preschool for Adults.
* When you stare too long into the abyss.
* The #1 reason people die early, in each country.
* Useless but Interesting Facts About America’s Married Couples.
* No, you’re lonely and depressed and lack self-control.
* The United States is becoming a terrible place for air travel. “Becoming.”
* Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is back.
* And you can always spot the children of sociologists.
Wednesday Night Links!
* How Bad Was It? Mitch McConnell Triumphant. Losers, not unlucky. And they probably managed to pre-lose the Senate in 2016 in the bargain. If you want a vision of the future. Decision 2014: The Higher-Ed Outlook. The biggest loser in this election is climate (as always). President Obama Has Earned Our Disapproval.
* Amazon wants to give you ten dollars: Spend $45 or More on Select Amazon Gift Cards, Get a $10 Promotional Credit for Yourself.
* I’ve seen some really polarizing opinions on this piece today: Confessions of a Young, Prolific Academic. I understand why people aren’t on board, but all the same I’m attracted to pieces that present the joyful side of academic work.
* Ecotopia today: Esteemed evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson believes the only way we can avoid a catastrophic mass extinction is to set aside half of the planet in permanently protected areas for the 10 million other species who live on Earth.
* 21 Photos Of Nature Winning The Battle Against Civilization.
* Writing the future: A timeline of science fiction literature.
* It seems like every 30-something couple has an embarrassing financial secret: their boomer parents are covering their mortgages, child-care costs and other expenses. The Bank of Mom and Dad: confessions of a propped up generation.
* New Bill Watterson Comic Is A Simple But Perfect Celebration Of Comics.
* Alone as a queer, young, black sci-fi nerd: then I discovered Samuel Delany.
* Why Banksy Is (Probably) a Woman.
* Uber defends price surge that charged Durham man $455 on Halloween.
* Prequelism infects David Chase. There is still no cure. Won’t you give what you can today?
* Why Isn’t Hogwarts Using All That Magic To Explore Space? It’s a Kind of Magic. Like Methods of Rationality minus the cult (and one page instead of ten thousand).
* And Dartmouth Professors Vote to Abolish Greek System. Nonbinding, purely symbolic, but points for trying…
These Are Monday Links; There Are Many Like Them, But These Are Mine
* If you’ve been following Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, there’s a new chapter out.
* A One-Item List For Tenure-Track Faculty: Do the job you were hired to do.
* The next wave of Afrofuturism.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: Science Fiction and the Realism of Our Time.
* Bring on the Snowpiercer thinkpieces! 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Even the liberal George Will: “We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school and get a job and become Americans,’” Will implored. “We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.”
* Identifying the bodies of those who tried to cross the border illegally.
* Halbig, King, and the Limits of Reasonable Legal Disagreement.
* There is a lizard sex satellite floating in space and Russia no longer has it under control. UPDATE: Russia Regains Control of Gecko Zero-G Sex Satellite.
* If you want to know how I do it. More links below the image!
* Iron Man Should Move to Cleveland, Not San Francisco.
* A friend said it best: Ricky Gervais is scripting Congress now.
* Star Fleet uniforms: not OSHA-compliant.
* The mask slips: Tax agency says ‘preventing poverty’ not allowed as goal for charity.
* “Our bad!” It Turns Out Hamas Didn’t Kidnap and Kill the 3 Israeli Teens After All.
* This is horrible: First case of ebola reported in Africa’s most populous city Lagos.
* When Tonga Was a Vast Empire.
* The Five Most Overrated Weapons of War.
* Community colleges and the art of the hustle.
* A lawsuit may determine whether “Happy Birthday” is really still under copyright, which is a bananas notion to begin with.
* Scientists: Rich People, Poor People May Have Shared Common Ancestor.
* BuzzFeed Writer Resigns In Disgrace After Plagiarizing ‘10 Llamas Who Wish They Were Models.’
* Blastr teases Grant Morrison’s Multiversity.
* Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert.
* If I major in philosophy, what are the career prospects?
* Ascension sounds… pretty good?
* The deadliest Ebola outbreak in recorded history is happening right now. And now the Liberian government has confirmed that a senior doctor working to fight the disease, Samuel Brisbane, has died, the Associated Press reports. That makes him the first Liberian doctor to die of Ebola in the current outbreak.
In addition, an American doctor has been infected. Keith Brantly, a 33-year-old working for American aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, has been treated and is in stable condition, according to USA Today.
This news comes just days after an announcement that the top Ebola doctor in Sierra Leone, Sheik Umar Khan, had been infected.
* And before there was The State, there was You Wrote It, You Watch It.
Monday Morning Links!
* With this the Culture / Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fanfic, culture is hereby perfected forever. Please deposit your 3D glasses in the receptacle on your way out of the theater.
* What Iuliano found was that the reality of student loan discharge in bankruptcy was that four out of 10 people that attempted to discharge their loans were successful. Granted, a 40 percent rate is not success for the majority, but it’s not inconsequential either. More disturbingly he found that in just the one study year, 69,000 debtors would have been good candidates to receive some or full relief from their student loan debt but they never even tried to discharge the loans. In fact few ever try to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy. “99.9 percent of student loan debtors in bankruptcy never attempt to get a discharge,” says Iuliano.
* Scenes from the alternate universe that is Germany: Still, the concept of paying for education remained deeply unpopular with students and the general public, and most states that introduced fees threw them out again in short order, starting with Hesse, in 2008.
* Ruth Bader Ginsberg agrees with me that the current Supreme Court is one of the most activist in history. Of course where we disagree is my feeling she should resign immediately in time to be replaced with a 35-year-old before Obama leaves off.
* Hans Poertner, professor of marine biology at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany, and co-author of a new study of the phenomenon, told the Guardian: “The current rate of [ocean acidification] is likely to be more than 10 times faster than it has been in any of the evolutionary crises in the earth’s history.”
* Yes, there’s a direct correlation between race and school closures in Detroit.
* The financial industry accounts for about 8% of GDP, but about 32% of corporate profits. These excess profits are extracted from the real economy — consumers and businesses — and constitute a drag on non-financial growth.
* And New York sues Donald Trump over his fake university. Well, I suppose that’s one down…
Wingardium Leviosa
There are two new chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up, if that’s your thing.
And That’s Before Getting Into the Whole ‘Roko’s Basilisk’ Mess
Here we see a real purpose behind lesswrong.com. Ultimately it doesn’t matter that people like Thiel or Kurzweil or Yudkowsky are pushing a crackpot idea like the singularity; what matters is that they are pushing the poisonous ideas that underlie Bayesianism. Thiel and others are funding an organisation that advances an ideological basis for their own predatory behaviour. Lesswrong and its sister sites preach a reductive concept of humanity that encourages an indifference to the world’s suffering, that sees people as isolated, calculating individuals acting in their self-interest: a concept of humanity that serves and perpetuates the scum at the top.
Stephen Bond on what’s wrong with LessWrong, with digressions into why all skepticism is neoliberalism and the rules of Fuck You, Buddy.
Transhumanist Heresy
When I wasn’t looking, it seems the transhumanists have invented their first heresy: Roko’s Basilisk. The topic is strenuously banned on Less Wrong as a “brown note” information hazard, but there is a Reddit thread with Eliezer Yudkowsky that you are strongly advised not to put into your brain, lest you put yourself at risk for being tortured forever by some less-than-friendly Friendly AI.
Charlie Stross has already called dibs on the novelization.
‘Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality’
The only fan fiction I’ve ever recommended, and perhaps even read at all: “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality,” loosely organized around an alternate universe version of the J.K. Rowling novels in which (among other things) Harry’s adoptive parents were not the repulsive Dursleys but instead an rationalist Oxford scientist. The piece is written in accordance with the author’s self-established principles of fan fiction:
The First Law of Fanfiction states that every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. Or in plainer language: You can’t make Frodo a Jedi without giving Sauron the Death Star. Read any book on writing ever and it will tell you that stories are about conflict; a hero too strong for their conflict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. For example, Dark!Dumbledore and Dark!Harry both permit a Harry strengthened over canon – the first by turning one of Harry’s canon!allies against him, and the second by turning Harry against his canon!allies. The most spectacular application of this principle that I’ve seen is Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time, in which Harry has gained all the knowledge of ancient Atlantis and has been through literally hundreds of Peggy Sue cycles in which he learns every possible twist of fate… and Voldemort, who unfortunately got to Atlantis first, has still won every time. The Mary Sue is not defined by her power, but by her lack of an even more powerful opponent. I mention this (1) so that you know I know it and (2) because the First Law of Fanfiction ought to be in a giant banner on every fanfiction site. The most fatal temptation of fanfiction writing is to think of how much easier some character’s life would be if they were a ninja. We are naturally inclined to think up ways to solve our characters’ problems for them, but must learn instead to make their lives more difficult.
The Rule of Rationalist Fiction states that rationality is not magic; being rational does not require magical potential or royal bloodlines or even amazing gadgets, and the principles of rationality work for understandable reasons.A rationalist!hero should excel by thinking – moreover, thinking in understandable patterns that readers can, in principle, adopt for themselves. As opposed to the hero just being a born “genius” who comes up with amazing gadgets through an opaque discovery process, or who pulls off incredibly complicated gambits that would fail miserably if the reader tried something similar in real life.
I found this strange and slightly wonderful mess (where else?) at TV Tropes, which points out that it’s a self-conscious Author Tract for self-educated AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, who seems to take Bayes’s theorem as something like religion.
Of course “HPatMoR” is definitely not for everyone—I can only imagine what Alex will say if he takes the bait and clicks the link—but it displays that precise nerdly obsessiveness I find I just can’t resist. When a fan-fic writers imagines his souped-up Voldemort turning the outbound Pioneer 11 spacecraft into one of his many Horcuxes—well, look, I’m not made of stone.
I should also say this link is roughly the complete opposite of “breaking news”—the ongoing project is nearly a year old.
Gerry Canavan 
NYEE Links! A Whole Lot of Them!
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* What happened when slaves and free men were shipwrecked together. Amazing read.
* Schedule for the MLA Subconference.
* The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. The full report.
* “These young T.A.s believed they were being asked to prostitute themselves in order to increase enrollment in the Spanish Department.”
* Reading Everything Aaron Swartz Wrote.
* “Obscure law lets Prince of Wales set off nuclear bombs.”
* “The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry: at least 33,480 Americans dead.”
* Your weekly must-read: N.K. Jemisin has a new SF/F column in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
* Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation.
* Adjuncts at Loyola University Chicago Want a Union. Will the Jesuit University Respect Their Demands?
* The Absolute Disruption blog has some thoughts on spoilerphobia and The Force Awakens, with a digression through my Tolkien/TFA piece. That piece has had some interesting patterns of circulation, incidentally; the Salon piece did well on Facebook and Twitter while the WordPress version has had a second life in the conservative blogosphere by way of Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen….
* George Lucas, genius. Another oral history of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Star Wars and the death of culture. What was cut from The Force Awakens. 13 Story Ideas That Were Dropped from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What is a Mary Sue, and does Star Wars: The Force Awakens have one? I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. Anakin Skywalker and the Methods of Rationality.
* Given that the term Mary Sue will always carry gendered connotations and that it is highly likely to be disproportionately applied to female protagonists—who, in big budget epics, are already vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts—I see very little benefit to its continued use.
* “This iconic picture will live in history. When a women escaped ISIS territory and was able to wear color again.” More links after the photo.
* A suggestion for search committees, and some questions.
* The Irresistible Psychology of Fairy Tales.
* From the archives: The Really Big One.
* ESPN is such a money pit it’s even dragging Star Wars down.
* My life as a job creator.
* Guy Beats Fallout 4 Without Killing Anyone, Nearly Breaks The Game.
* Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death. How Can No One Be to Blame for Tamir Rice’s Death? How Philadelphia prosecutors protect police misconduct: Cops get caught lying — and then get off the hook. Police Rarely Criminally Charged for On-Duty Shootings. When is it legal for a cop to kill you?
* Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories.
* ASU’s Global Freshman Academy Is a Complete Bust.
* Being Véra Nabokov.
* Today in loopholes: consumptive demand.
* Loophole watch, part two: Pope Francis: atheists who follow their consciences will be welcome in Heaven.
* Why not cubic centimeters, or raw tonnage? Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereas Cornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”
* Great moments in political campaigning.
* This story has everything.
* Like Goodfellas but for embezzling from a fruitcake company.
* For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions.
* Africa and the Looting Machine.
* The House That Marx Built. Marxism for Tomorrow.
* How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet.
* NSFW, obviously, but: These Real Women Want to Show You How to Give Them an Orgasm.
* Everything is totally normal, don’t even sweat it.
* We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time. Why Engineers Can’t Stop Los Angeles’ Enormous Methane Leak.
* The Opium Wars, Neoliberalism, and the Anthropocene.
* The Radical History of 1960s Adult Coloring Books.
* The DMCA poisoned the Internet of Things in its cradle.
* More than one-third of wells in dairy farm-intensive Kewaunee County were found to be unsafe because they failed to meet health standards for drinking water, according to a new study.
* William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer.
* This Man Just Guessed How Much the Movies Have Spent “Rescuing” Matt Damon.
* For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty.
* Your 2016 TV Preview.
* Why Do Employers Still Routinely Drug-Test Workers?
* When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C.
* Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.
* After difficult summer, UW-Madison fighting off efforts to poach top professors. The view from the provinces.
* The Coolest Images From National Geographic’s 2015 Photo Contest. This Is Your Brain on Nature.
* Star Wars Lego Sets Exploding at 3,000 Frames per Second Is the Best Guilty Pleasure.
* When Bobby Shrugged.
* The science myths that will not die.
* Because you demanded it! The DeBoerist Manifesto.
* And Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. But don’t you believe it! Bring on 2016!
Written by gerrycanavan
December 30, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, Aaron Swartz, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Arizona State University, bad handwriting, Bobby Fischer, Cascadia Subduction Zone, Catholicism, chess, Cleveland, climate change, coloring books, consumptive demand, corruption, cultural studies, culture, Delaware, Disney, DMCA, don't read the comments, drug testing, earthquakes, ecology, Eliezer Yudkowsky, embezzlement, English departments, entrepeneurs, epidemics, Episode 7, ESPN, fairy tales, fallout, Fallout 4, feminism, football, Freddie deBoer, galactic empires, Galápagos, games, gender, genius, George Lucas, Goodfellas, graves, guns, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, How the University Works, innovation, ISIS, Jesuits, leftism, LEGO, loopholes, Loyola, Madison, manifestos, Marx, Marxism, Mary Sue, mascots, methane, MLA, money, MOOCs, my media empire, mythology, N.K. Jemisin, National Geographic, neoliberalism, NSFW, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, opium wars, orgasms, Pacific Northwest, pacifism, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, photography, police corruption, police state, police violence, pornography, Prince Charles, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, science, science fiction, search committees, SETI, sex, sexuality, shipwrecks, slavery, spoilers, sports, Star Wars, Star Wars Holiday Special, superexploitation, Tamir Rice, taxes, television, the 1960s, the Anthropocene, the CDC, The Force Awakens, the internet of things, the Pope, the prequels, the rich are different, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, true crime, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USPS, Vera Nabokov, violence, Vonnegut, water, Wisconsin