I wrote up a holiday gift guide for this year on chorus.fm, this delicious hot sauce is on it! If you’re looking for something to get a loved one check out a few of my recommendations. http://chr.us/gguide17
socials
This website is supported in part by readers. Please consider becoming a supporting member. Oh, and I have a weekly newsletter.
SORTED BY: BLOG
Thanksgiving Week Is the Event College Basketball Needs
Mark Titus, writing at The Ringer:
The most absurd week ever of regular-season college basketball came to a close Sunday night/early Monday morning when no. 4 Michigan State held no. 9 North Carolina to 45 points, no. 16 Texas A&M blew out no. 10 USC in Los Angeles, and no. 1 Duke erased a 17-point second-half deficit to beat no. 7 Florida. There’s no way of fact-checking whether this was actually the most absurd regular-season week in college basketball history, of course, but I don’t think we need to bother. Shoot, these past seven days have been so wild that the “regular season” qualifier might not even be necessary. Wichita State’s comeback to beat Cal in the first round of the Maui Invitational happened last Monday, yet I could easily be convinced that it took place a decade ago because of all that’s transpired since.
The Voices in Blue America’s Head
“Pod Save America” scored its first million-listener episode within its first several weeks, and it now averages 1.5 million listeners per show — about as many people as Anderson Cooper draws on prime-time CNN. Their podcast has come to occupy a singular perch in blue America; where an NPR tote bag once signified a certain political persuasion and mind-set, in the age of Trump, it’s a “Friend of the Pod” T-shirt.
Those numbers are insane. That said, the podcast is one of the few things that I look forward to each week to help navigate this current hellscape. It’s great.
Here’s some more photos for those curious. Oh, and the album sounds great. #glassjaw #materialcontrol
The Fermi Paradox
Tim Urban, writing for Wait But Why:
Everyone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this:
Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.
Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?”
This is one of my favorite post on the internet, but I had never linked it here. Now I have. Highly recommended reading.
SuperDuper 3.0
SuperDuper 3.0 has been released:
With that last bit of explanation, I’m happy to say that we’ve reached the end of this particular voyage. SuperDuper! 3.0 (release 100!) is done, and you’ll find the download in the normal places, as well as in the built-in updater, for both Beta and Regular users.
SuperDuper! 3.0 has, literally, many hundreds of changes under the hood to support APFS, High Sierra and all version of macOS from 10.9 to the the present.
SuperDuper! 3.0 is the first bootable backup application to support snapshot copying on APFS, which provides an incredible extra level of safety, security and accuracy when backing up. It’s super cool, entirely supported (after all, it’s what Time Machine uses… and it was first overall), and totally transparent to the user.
Fantastic app that I highly recommend. I have a reoccurring task scheduled to make SuperDuper clones of my entire hard drive as part of my back-up strategy.
We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads
We’re building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren’t even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us — and what we can do in response.
This is good.
Read More “We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads”
How Do You Go to a Gym, Though?
Casey Johnston, writing for The Hair Pin:
Kelly—I’m so glad you asked this, because as the Deepak Chopras and Oprahs and etc of the world will tell you, visualization is the key, or at least a key, to success. It’s impossible to prepare for every scenario but you wouldn’t know it to see my exhaustively anxious thought process. I am someone who tends to freeze up, and cannot, as they say, roll with the punches, so having thought through the motions does certainly help me. And Kelly, it can help you too.
This was hilarious.
Hannah’s playing with the Oregon Symphony tonight. She’s very excited and I’m very proud.
How to Heal the Left-Liberal Divide
Pete Davis, writing at Current Affairs:
Roughly speaking, these two sides could be characterized as the “populist wing” and the “establishment wing” of the party, but even the divide’s terminology is a point of controversy between the feuding sides. The party’s left wing, for example, wants to call the conflict the “left-liberal divide.” Loyalist Democrats want to play down the divide, calling for unity on the grounds that Democrats are either (if they are younger, millennial types) all members of the Left, or (if they are older, Clinton-era types) all “liberals.” The Right, meanwhile, does not understand the divide, continuing to believe in a monolithic “radical left” filled with “radical liberals.” This leads to the funny situation, as one commentator noticed, where members of both the Left and the Right reach for the same “I made it through college without becoming a liberal” t-shirt.
This is a good piece.
