Also, this

Oh my fucking god, what the hell is this?

Kirk writes, “This weekend we upgraded my 14-year-old son’s laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Today I got a creepy-ass email from Microsoft titled ‘Weekly activity report for [my kid]’, including which websites he’s visited, how many hours per day he’s used it, and how many minutes he used each of his favorite apps.”

Seriously, is Windows 10 some sort of practical joke? Is this a real OS, or did Microsoft spend a few billion to troll us all for fun?

And by the way, you can disable the “feature,” but I betcha the data will all still get sent to Microsoft.

Scientific method

I think the headline is a bit unfair, but the points made in the article are good ones.

Science is and always has been an iterative, flawed process. The truth isn’t delivered in golden runes on sacred parchment; it is discovered and then refined over time. Thus it has ever been and will be.

However, what’s different now is that academics and researchers have to scrabble ever harder for perpetually-decreasing funding, which leads to all sorts of bad results for them and for society.

It’s not that science cannot be trusted, it’s just that it like nearly everything else has been co-opted and eviscerated by the neoliberal/managerial mindset and is now a client state, for lack of better terms, of big business in many ways. And even when it’s not, the priorities usually do not align with society’s needs nor is the focus on doing actual important work, but rather the effort is aimed at what can be published, and soon.

People like Peter Higgs and Maria Goeppert Mayer — both of whom spent years thinking about their discoveries before publishing a thing — would be summarily kicked out of academia today.

So, do not trust or not trust science. Realize how it is changing and that it no longer serves society, but vested interests in business and the relentless publishing schedule of academic life.

Ballroom Blintz

We made blueberry blintzes tonight for dinner. First time we’ve ever made those.

Turned out quite good, toothsome and light, yet filling.

The strange thing about blintzes is you cook the crรชpes three times.

The recipe is like:

1) Cook the crรชpes.

2) Cook the crรชpes some more.

3) You thought you were done cooking the crรชpes. WRONG!

But we’ll add it to our list of keepers.