LinkFest 2016-04-01
April Fool's Edition
The CDC is trying to make 86 million Americans sick
I've long thought the pre-diabetes thing was a bit foolish. While it is a good thing to be able to quantitate, if you don't understand what you are doing it can make you far too certain. Pre-diabetes is a lot like a risk-factor; something that is correlated with diabetes, but is in totality a poor predictor.
Neal Stephenson's review of the movie 300 is now nine years old, but I still enjoyed reading it. I liked 300 when it came out, and mostly for the same reasons Stephenson did.
A nice synopsis of the way in which not particularly devout partially assimilated children of immigrants get radicalized.
These unlucky people have names that break computers
Parsing text is hazardous.
A researcher explains the sad truth: we do know how to stop gun violence. But we don't do it.
Unfortunately for this well-meaning researcher, his suggestions involve pattern recognition, which is currently disfavored.
Peak Water: United States water use drops to lowest level in 40 years
The story is similar for gasoline. Technological progress means we do more with less.
HVAC Techs — Hackers who make house calls
The kind of unglamorous but well-paid job Mike Rowe likes to talk about.
This is a fantastic idea. We have raised the bar to graduate high school so far that we are penalizing people of normal intellectual ability.
Immigration and the Political Explosion of 2016
This is a recurring pattern in United States history.
Philosophical Reflections on Genetic Interest
Frank Salter's concept of genetic interest is a philosophical concept that is muddled up with a scientific one. Unfortunately, his philosophy isn't too sharp.
How much of the placebo 'effect' is really statistical regression?
Courtesy of the ever contrary Greg Cochran, a reason to doubt the placebo effect. Here is a recent blog post expanding on this idea, with further reading suggestions.
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