placeholder

placeholder

Confessions of America's Best Drone Pilot

From the darkness of a box in the Nevada desert, he watched as three men trudged down a dirt road in Afghanistan. The box was kept cold—precisely sixty-eight degrees—and the only light inside came from the glow of monitors. The air smelled spectrally of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. On his consol...

Click to view the original at gq.com

placeholder

Hasnain says:

This is really inspiring stuff.

"We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision."

Posted on 2013-10-23T20:23:41+0000

placeholder

Dr. Arjun Srinivasan: We’ve Reached “The End of Antibiotics, Period” – Hunting the Nightmare...

The CDC doctor says we need to create a new model to fight drug resistance.

Click to view the original at pbs.org

Hasnain says:

F"or the past half century, we should have been treating our antibiotics like weapons of mass destruction - tools of last resort only to be used in emergencies, with great hesitation, and only when absolutely necessary. The industry and the doctors responded: antibiotics were too profitable and the risk seemed too distant. Now we have no weapons; we're helpless and the world is again going to be a scary place where a cut or a scrape can land you in a hospital or in a mortuary.

For the first time in the memory of anyone alive today, we're going to see medical science step backwards. We're going to be more vulnerable tomorrow than we are today, and we did it to ourselves." - a commentor

Posted on 2013-10-23T16:14:52+0000

placeholder

Trouble at the lab

“I SEE a train wreck looming,” warned Daniel Kahneman, an eminent psychologist, in an open letter last year. The premonition concerned research on a phenomenon...

Click to view the original at economist.com

placeholder

placeholder

placeholder

What's Scott Adams' secret to success? 'Goals are for losers'

Forget passion. Goals are for losers. Dilbert creator Scott Adams reveals his secret to climbing to the top: Fail. A lot.

Click to view the original at online.wsj.com

Hasnain says:

"My system of creating something the public wants and reproducing it in large quantities nearly guaranteed a string of failures. By design, all of my efforts were long shots. Had I been goal-oriented instead of system-oriented, I imagine I would have given up after the first several failures. It would have felt like banging my head against a brick wall."

Posted on 2013-10-14T17:10:28+0000

placeholder

Hasnain says:

We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.g., subjects living in high elevations talk about the mountains), tie in with other research (e.g., neurotic people disproportionately use the phrase ‘sick of’ and the word ‘depressed’), suggest new hypotheses (e.g., an active life implies emotional stability), and give detailed insights (males use the possessive ‘my’ when mentioning their ‘wife’ or ‘girlfriend’ more often than females use ‘my’ with ‘husband’ or 'boyfriend’). To date, this represents the largest study, by an order of magnitude, of language and personality.

Posted on 2013-10-13T19:42:48+0000

placeholder

Hasnain says:

"My host, who was one of Abu Iyad’s most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.

Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men – the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion.

Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family…the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had – that is, being deprived of their wives and children. And so, my host told me, that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of."

Posted on 2013-10-13T19:35:38+0000

placeholder

I got hired at a Bangladesh sweatshop. Meet my 9-year-old boss | Toronto Star

Meem, 9, works 12-hour shifts at a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She dreams of becoming a sewing operator, buying more hair clips and helping her family.

Click to view the original at thestar.com

placeholder

Reverse Engineering a D-Link Backdoor - /dev/ttyS0

All right. It's Saturday night, I have no date, a two-liter bottle of Shasta and my all-Rush mix-tape...let's hack. On a whim I downloaded firmware v1.13 for

Click to view the original at devttys0.com

placeholder

Malala: The real story (with evidence) - DAWN.COM

New findings unearth stunning disclosures that are bound to challenge the mainstream narrative of the Malala story: NFP

Click to view the original at dawn.com

Hasnain says:

Pulling out a piece of paper, the officer said: “This is the evidence. It was decoded by the Taliban’s division of quantum physics.”

Posted on 2013-10-13T10:08:09+0000

placeholder

placeholder

oftenpaper.net/sierpinski.htm

Throughout my years playing around with fractals, the Sierpinski triangle has been a consistent staple. The triangle is named after Wacław Sierpiński and as fractals are wont the pattern appears in many places, so there are many different ways of constructing the triangle on a computer.

Click to view the original at oftenpaper.net

placeholder

The fallacy of success. • Mustapha Abiola

Excerpted from All things Considered by G. K. Chesterton, from an edition by John Lane Company, New York, 1909. There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles, which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the... | Mustapha Abiola | Abstract artist. Concrete Analyst.

Click to view the original at mustapha.svbtle.com

Hasnain says:

Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run–”In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game. You must have grit and snap and go in to win. The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL.”

Posted on 2013-10-08T09:21:20+0000

placeholder

placeholder

Desert Hike EX | Twinbeard Studios

You and your coworkers just finished your IPO! Rolling in cash, you decide to attend Burning Man. However, unscrupulous bandits at the burn steal your car and drive away, with all your Bitcoins in the back seat! With only the backup Bitcoins you kept in your sock, you're going to have to hike all th...

Click to view the original at twinbeard.com

placeholder

Swiss to vote on 2,500 franc basic income for every adult

BERNE (Reuters) - Switzerland will hold a vote on whether to introduce a basic income for all adults, in a further sign of growing public activism over pay inequality since the financial crisis.A grassroots

Click to view the original at reuters.com

placeholder

placeholder

You say Twitter, I say Tweeter: Investor mix-up?

A bankrupt electronics retailer appears to have gotten caught up in the investor fervor for Twitter. Shares of Tweeter Home Entertainment Group Inc. rose as high as 15 cents Friday. That's up 1,400 percent ...

Click to view the original at finance.yahoo.com

placeholder

placeholder

Hover! by Internet Explorer

Play the remake of the classic capture-the-flag game originally created for Windows 95 and updated to celebrate WebGL in Internet Explorer 11.

Click to view the original at hover.ie