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- Yeah, in a Minute... is the personal dumping grounds of Paul Landry:
- NAME AND PRONOUNS:
- "Paul" / "he–him–his"
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- and pretty much everywhere else via [About.me]...
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- But not leastly, [Fuck Facebook!]
- And Royally [Fuck Twitter!]
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News Gathering vs. Confirmation Bias
- Remember, if you do not have at least one source of news that you turn to regularly, with which you routinely disagree, then you are not practicing news gathering! You are practicing [confirmation bias].
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Science
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996) at p.32.
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[S]cience is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.
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More Recent Entries
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Author Archives: Paul
News photographer shot by cop
PetaPixel: An Ohio newspaper photojournalist was shot by a police officer last night after the cop mistook the camera and tripod the photographer was holding for a rifle. Wait—that tripod isn’t loaded, is it? I wouldn’t exactly call this a part of the never-ending war on photography, but I do think that this shows […]
Donald Trump: The “I” of any storm
Dave Pell nails it at NextDraft: President Trump doesn’t get to be graded on a curve. The Texas visit was a complete failure. No mention of the victims. No empathy for the survivors. More silly asides about crowd size and cable-TV fame. Once again, Trump proved that he will always be the “I” of the […]
Absent warrant standard, police could monitor anyone via location data
ARS Technica: This case, Carpenter v. United States, asks a simple question: is it OK for police to seize and search 127 days of cell-site location information (CSLI) without a warrant? Previously, lower courts have said that such practices are compatible with current law. But the fact that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the […]
NASA Unleashes Two Vintage Warplanes to Chase the Eclipse
Wired: WHILE MILLIONS OF astronomy enthusiasts chase the moon’s shadow on the ground during the August 21 total solar eclipse, four NASA personnel are going to have front row seats. Two pilots and two technicians will race the big black spot at 50,000 feet, well above any cloud cover. And at 400 mph, they’ll be […]
Genetic evidence suggests the Canaanites weren’t destroyed after all
Annalee Newitz, writing at ARSTechnica: The Canaanites are famous as the bad guys of the Book of Joshua in the Tanakh, or the Hebrew Bible. First, God orders the Hebrews to destroy the Canaanites along with several other groups, and later we hear that the Canaanites have actually been wiped out. Among archaeologists, however, the […]
Aging Soviet Space Vehicles Still Impress
Eric Berger, writing at Wired: The Soviet Union’s Buran space shuttle program stands as one of the saddest episodes in aerospace history. After NASA began working on its space shuttle program in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union conceived of its own orbiter program, the eerily similar looking Buran shuttle. Ultimately, the vehicle made just […]
Eclipse 2017: T-2 Months
If you’re anything like me, you heard about the 2017 eclipse over a year ago and thought “cool,” but haven’t really thought about it since. This week, some of the photography podcasts I listen to started talking about the eclipse and man, I’m really starting to get excited!
Adjustments With A Restrained Hand
Photographer Brian Matiash, writing at Digital Photo Pro: You may be asking what all this talk about camera sensors and RAW file formats has to do with faithfully representing your image. The bottom line is that making even some mild tonal, white balance and color adjustments to the straight-out-of-camera image can pay back with massive […]
Remember Chain Letters? Hackers Do
Ashwin Seshagiri, New York Times’ Tech Roundup: The victims have a choice […] Pay the hackers a ransom of one bitcoin, a digital currency worth roughly $2,365, in exchange for regaining access to the computer, or try to infect two new people on behalf of the attackers. That sucks.
Donald Trump Jr., Sub-Master of the Universe
Matt Bai, writing at Yahoo News: Say what you will about President Trump, and I’ve said plenty; you can’t say he ever lacked for what New Yorkers call chutzpah. He had the brass ornaments to risk his modest inheritance, to plow through bankruptcies, to court public humiliation in pursuit of far-flung enterprises. I actually admire […]
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