Gaming journalism
Friday, February 13, 2015
Austerity in the UK, featuring somewhere i’ve been
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Is saving Newcastle a mission impossible?
The bins were overflowing. A few passersby suggested that newly arrived Roma people from Slovakia were to blame; others said that was unfair, and pointed out that the city council had lately halved its bin collections, and reduced street cleaning.
Therefore, life is unfair
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person
Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves.
Bill Mantlo
Monday, November 10, 2014
Bill Mantlo was a legendary writer for Marvel Comics in the 1970s and 1980s. But today, he inhabits a broken body abandoned by both the health insurance industry and the federal healthcare reform meant to help people like him. This is his story.
Probably my most hated comics writer once i got to teenage years, when i realized he was writing to an audience that was now below my intelligence. But that is a quibble in comparison to what happened to him in the American health system.
Gene Wolfe interview
Friday, August 15, 2014
Statistical proof: the Leafs stink
Thursday, April 10, 2014
The Maple Leafs’ Collapse Is A Victory For Rationality
This is not me being overdramatic. This was a season with a built-in black-and-white storyline, making it a referendum on who better grasps hockey—those who know how to interpret the numbers, or those actually running a team.
what is mathematics about?
Monday, April 7, 2014
What is mathematics about? We know what biology is about; it’s about living things. Or more exactly, the living aspects of living things – the motion of a cat thrown out of a window is a matter for physics, but its physiology is a topic for biology. Oceanography is about oceans; sociology is about human behaviour in the mass long-term; and so on. When all the sciences and their subject matters are laid out, is there any aspect of reality left over for mathematics to be about? That is the basic question in the philosophy of mathematics.
Depressing economics articles
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Work in the Age of Anxiety => The 40-Year Slump
[…]In 1974, wages fell by 2.1 percent and median household income shrunk by $1,500. To be sure, it was a year of mild recession, but the nation had experienced five previous downturns during its 25-year run of prosperity without seeing wages come down.
What no one grasped at the time was that this wasn’t a one-year anomaly, that 1974 would mark a fundamental breakpoint in American economic history.
The gambling machines helping drug dealers ‘turn dirty money clean’
“[…] It’s the main business around here. Take dole, turn it into weed, sell them, take your profits and put them into the machines. If you win, you are quids in. If you lose, you get cash from the money shops to cover your losses. Back to dole and buying drugs. There’s nothing else around here to do.”
For example, in the most recent season of Price Is Right, the Honda Accord LX was valued in different games as $22,587, $22,480 (twice), $22,934, $22,423, $22,791, and $22,841. In six of the seven times it appeared, the exact value was needed in order to win it. Memorizing prices ahead of time—even if you had a hunch you might have a shot at that Honda—has less value than you think.
