🎮 Finished playing Little Nightmares with my daughter yesterday and it is not what I expected a 5-year-old to be into but she ended up being in charge for most of it.
Survival horror: a great thing to do together as a family.
We watched Gremlins again for the first time in more than 10 years. A few things stood out:
It kind of made me want to see Gremlins 2 again, as bad as that sequel was on first (and only) viewing.
For those of you completely off Twitter, it is now in the impossible-to-avoid-Elon-Musk phase, where even if you block his account there will be people re-tweeting, quote-tweeting, subtweeting… if for nothing else then to complain.
Sadly, it is still the go-to place for medical conference updates, and right now there is a big one.
…is $1.5 million.
A few days ago, The Washington Post wrote about two medical students who are also identical twins being accused of cheating. Their school, the Medical University of South Carolina, apparently doesn’t have anyone on staff who is both versed in statistics and willing to participate in an investigation. Enter paid consultants:
The university sent their test scores to a data forensics company, Caveon, which reported that the chances of two tests that similar being completed independently was “less than a person winning four consecutive Power Ball drawings.”
Invocation of forensics is the first red flag (see: Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer). Comparing any real-life probability Rule of thumb: if what you are doing professionaly made it into xkcd you should stop doing it. to lottery is the second. The uncertanty of real-life probabilities has little to do with known odds of games of “chance”. Confusing the two leads to the ludic fallacy, or “misuse of games to model real-life situations”. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, 2007.
The twins, now lawyers, sued and won the said $1.5M. Good for them.
The older I get the more I appreciate anything in life that reduces friction. Yes, I could write a quick landing page myself and host it on Github pages for free. But for $5/year omg.lol makes it so much easier (and more esthetically pleasing than I could ever manage).
📺 Wednesday started off strong but quickly devolved into 90210 with a high body count: enjoyable, but not quite living up to the atmosphere of the first episode. It was still worth sticking it out until the end to see Fred Armisen’s Uncle Fester.
📺 Season 2 of The Mysterious Benedict Society: bright colors, quirky characters, upbeat music, and all that in sunny Europe instead of Season 1’s dreary Northwestern US. What is there not to like?
Would still recommend.
I logged in to LinkedIn for the first time in months and it looked like people were actually using it!
For self-promotion and networking, so I got what I needed and logged out before being swallowed whole.
LinkedIn: the Patrick Bateman Social Network.
Singin' in the Rain is my all-time favorite movie so its thorough deconstruction was a joy to watch, listen, and read. 🎥
(Found via Dan Cohen’s blog, which I have just rediscovered. I look forward to finding other hidden treasures in my RSS back catalog!)