Dan’s Geometrical Curiosities
A collection of art and math projects by a Physics student, with help from a friend who likes blog...
The Russia Left Behind
A journey through a heartland on the slow road to ruin.
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.
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
http://dx.plos.org/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0073791
plosone.org
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
Terrorism is not about Terror
Terrorists act very irrationally from bang-per-buck POV
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
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.
Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2013-10-13T16:15:09+0000
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
Hasnain says:
If you read the specific User Agent string in reverse, it says "Edit by 04882 Joel Backdoor".
Sigh...
Posted on 2013-10-13T10:39:15+0000
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
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
Oops: Azerbaijan released election results before voting had even started
Few expected the presidential election to be free, but this was a bit much.
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.
Hasnain says:
I shamelessly admit I totally got nerd-sniped by this page and spent the last 30 minutes on this page.
Posted on 2013-10-08T22:34:08+0000