Unsold food

This is nice! We should do it, too.

Hat

Chris Y writes: Ça Par Exemple!

heebie's take: Sacray blue!

Solitary Survival

This is slightly annoyingly power-of-the-individual! in tone, but if you can get past that, it's about how, occasionally, people come out of solitary confinement mentally intact, and what they did to preserve their sanity.

Frivolity

Okay, done. I actually only bet half my deposit, because I'm guessing odds will improve slightly after the NH primary.

If you guys still have an appetite for talking about this nonsense, have some Cruz from Trivers.

Go to Hell, Dylan Matthews

AmeriCare achieves these savings relative to Sanders in a few ways, the biggest being cost sharing. Not only does eliminating deductibles and co-insurance cost money in and of itself, it also encourages people to seek more care, increasing health spending. AmeriCare doesn't have those problems …

Gotta avoid the problem of people seeking medical care!

Airdynes

So at xfit, they replaced their old, normal Airdynes with slightly fancier Airdynes with electronic displays. The instructions are usually in terms of percent exertion: "60 seconds at 70%" or "30 seconds at 100%" etc.

That thing is exhausting like I don't remember being exhausted, at least not in a sprint-type setting. We had to do repeated sets the other day at 100% and I didn't feel right for 30 minutes afterwards.

Guest Post: Mossy Character on Bitcoin

What does the blog think about bitcoin? I don't really understand how it's supposed to work, but this from a longtime evangelist, along with this at the NY Times, make it sound like libertarianism-in-practice overtaking libertarianism-in-theory. What was supposed to happen was a decentralized, self-regulating financial system achieved solely through software and self-interest. What happens instead is:

• A severely broken system
  
• Consolidation of almost all power by a handful of individuals
  
• Sabotage of repair efforts by said individuals
  
• Rising fees also imposed by said individuals
  
• DOS attacks by rival factions
  
• Open source development utterly failing to fix anything
  
• Zero-sum tribalist infighting
  
• Censorship

Especially love this:

the financial crisis convinced [Hearn] that national currencies were vulnerable to politics and bad decision-making

and:

"It never occurred to me that the thing could just fall apart because of people getting crazy and having fundamental political disagreements over the goals of the project," Mr. Hearn said in a Skype interview from his apartment. "It's really shaken my faith in humanity."

Also:

The release of Bitcoin XT was viewed...as an act of betrayal. Yes, it was democratic, but they said that decisions about the core software should be made by technical experts -- not by populist campaigns.

I shouldn't be surprised by now, but the misunderstanding of human nature is still kind of breathtaking.

Field Report: Geebies in the Wild

E. Messily writes: The Geebie is a loud, hirsute, omnivorous mammal. They live in shelters that they find or build, near rivers. They eat nearly anything but their diet mainly consists of tortillas, pasta, bread, and assorted dairy products. Most of them also love muffins. They are primarily diurnal. Geebie families sometimes live in a symbiotic relationship with up to 3 felines, of assorted sizes and colors.

It has been nearly six months since I first approached this particular den of Geebies, and they are beginning to accept me as one of their own. For example, the largest Geebie will now occasionally allow me to put dishes in the dishwasher: an obvious sign of trust and friendship. The young Geebies are also beginning to accept me, ignoring me and sitting on my lap and screaming at me just as if I were one of their kind.

There seem to be infinitely many small Geeblets, varying in lengths but with a fairly consistent diameter. The young Geeblets spend much of their time screaming- I have not yet discerned whether this is a sort of practice play, akin to puppies growling at sticks, or a more serious activity, perhaps competing for the limited attention of the parents. I suspect there may be more than one type of scream, each with its own meaning.

The mature Geebies are also quite loud, but there are not as many of them.

The Geebies leave the shelter early most mornings and go elsewhere- to hunt? To practice screaming with other families of Geebies? Who is to say? Only the Geebies know. They typically return in the early evening, ready to eat and romp and scream and pick out their clothes for tomorrow.

Geebies love to put together outfits and wear them. They collect shoes, which they each store separately in piles and guard fiercely. They also enjoy playing soccer and watching The Odd Squad or Wild Kratts on television. The adult male, whom I have been calling "Jammies", frequently patrols the vicinity, fixing and organizing anything broken or disheveled in his path. The adult female, "Heebie", is more reclusive, and spends her time nestled deep in the shelter with a phone, laptop and/or tablet. The young Geeblets roam freely, sometimes in a pack, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes individually, doing any number of mysterious and indecipherable activities. Occasionally they will approach an adult to announce that they are hungry, or to scream, before roaming away to do something else.

The Geebie is a fascinating creature and I am sure the next phase of my research will be even more rewarding.

Iowa

Let's move the politics to the front page. Sorry about the delay.

That Time of Year

If you are designing a recommendation form with a rating scale, where you rank your student in different categories according to whether they're in the top 50%, top 30%, or top X%, I would really appreciate it if you had reasonably fine gradations on the high end. This current one jumps from top 1% to top 10%. We have 8-10 math majors a year - claiming that a strong student is actually the top 1% is really ridiculously superior. But top 10% is a weak recommendation for this student. I would like to claim this student as being top 5%, please.

Also I would like codified instructions of recommendation inflation, because I still feel uncomfortable with this concept.

Game time

Guess the Correlation. I got 13 on my first attempt.

Bail outs

Trump is in a Twitter war with Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and losing badly.

Via E. Messily