Saw "The Imitation Game" last night. Lots of eye candy (elaborate scenery, extras, vintage war footage) but as is so often the case, the film-makers forgot to pay enough attention to the screen play, which made cartoons of Alan Turing, his thought process and those he worked with. I can barely recommend it, despite that fact that his story is so incredibly compelling, heroic and, in the end, sad.
Fascinating research indicates that certain questions one can ask on a date serve as proxies for complex realities. This is from OKCupid's blog in 2011, but still quite relevant.
How can ordinary citizens help to get money out of politics? Here are eight ways, courtesy of Bill Moyers. 1) AMEND THE CONSTITUTION 2) AMERICAN ANTI-CORRUPTION ACT 3) GRASSROOTS AND PUBLIC FINANCING 4) NH REBELLION 6) FEC REGULATION 7) EXECUTIVE ORDERS 8) MONEY-BOMBS
Eric Barker's summary: The five step process for making better decisions: Maintain a feeling of control over your situation. Emotional preparation. Consider how things could be worse. Monitor your breathing. Controlled empathy. Ask “What advice would I give my best friend in this situation?”
In the NYT, Carl Zimmer writes about the so-called races, based on real evidence:
In 1924, the State of Virginia attempted to define what it means to be white.
The state’s Racial Integrity Act, which barred marriages between whites and people of other races, defined whites as people “whose blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable or ascertainable admixture of the blood of another race.”
There was just one problem. As originally written, the law would have classified many of Virginia’s most prominent families as not white, because they claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.
So the Virginia legislature revised the act, establishing what came to be known as the “Pocahontas exception.” Virginians could be up to one-sixteenth Native American and still be white in the eyes of the law.
People who were one-sixteenth black, on the other hand, were still black.'
...
On average, the scientists found, people who identified as African-American had genes that were only 73.2 percent African. European genes accounted for 24 percent of their DNA, while .8 percent came from Native Americans.
Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African. The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.