"Computers are drugs. But drugs are computers."

Ivy League Grads Can’t Pass the New GED - The Daily Beast: "A corporation privatized the test, made it four times more expensive, and made it almost impossible to pass...

 The number of people who passed the GED—the high school equivalency test long seen as a “good enough diploma”—plummeted this year. About 86,500 people passed the new test in 2014, compared with 540,535 in 2013...

Part of the reason the GED is so hard is that it tests what you learn in high school, and most of what you learn in high school simply does not come up again in real life. Today I mostly use math to figure out the tip at a restaurant or divide bills among my roommates. And while I write for a living, I don’t often talk about specific verb tenses or perform close readings on 19th-century literature. Plus the test is aligned with Common Core, a set of standards not in place when I and nearly all my fellow test-takers were in high school...

I spent nearly seven hours taking the test, wracking my brain for details I haven’t thought about since 2005, when I graduated from high school. When it was all over, I felt exhausted and dumb. I did well on one test (social studies) and got about 60 percent of the questions right on two more (math and science). The test in which I thought I’d shine brightest—language arts—was my worst subject: I got just over half the questions right. If this were the real GED, I’d need to retake at least one of the tests...

But the new test is also significantly more expensive than before. One test costs about $120, up from costs closer to $30 (the specific price varies from state to state). Since it’s harder, test-takers are more likely to need to take the test again to pass all four sections, and a new scoring method means a high score on one test will no longer buoy a lower one on another. That high sticker price seems likely to keep test-takers from returning a second time: 85 percent of people who failed the cheaper, easier test already didn’t come back to try again, Turner said. And while results of the old GED just gave a score, the new computerized test comes with a customized study guide showing exactly what test-takers should study before trying again. There’s money in that, too. Pearson also sells test prep books and courses for all four new GED tests."

Next week!

The Meaning of Life: Finding Your True Identity - Tony Robbins Blog: "Identity is the strongest force in human personality. We all have a deep and abiding need to remain consistent with how we define ourselves. Any transformation you make within yourself will depend on your ability to expand this identity. By building a new, empowering set of beliefs, you can create a lasting transformation within yourself and in your life...

The fastest way to expand our identity is to do something that’s inconsistent with our current self-image. For example, complete a physical challenge like surfing or sky diving as a way to shake things up...

Our personal identities are in a constant state of evolution. We all contain the power to reinvent ourselves and create a new, empowered identity that expands what is possible in our lives. The key is to take conscious control of the beliefs we are creating about ourselves, so they can propel us toward what we desire most."

Shades of Morris Day, which means all sorts of James Brown funk.

 New Documentary Shows The ‘Moderate’ Klan of North Carolina - The Daily Beast: "The Tarheel State had a reputation as the most progressive in the country on race relations. But it also had the biggest Klan chapter in the South. If you were driving through North Carolina in the mid-1960s, chances are you’d see this billboard: “You are in the heart of Klan country. Welcome to North Carolina. Join the United Klans of America, Inc. Help fight integration and communism!” Klan support in the South was not exactly breaking news. What made these highway signs stand out was the fact that they were fairly common in what had long been considered the most progressive state in the region, where the civil rights movement had been met with a minimum of bloodshed and violence. But the fact is, by 1966 the Tar Heel State had over 10,000 KKK members, more than all the other Southern states combined...

So why North Carolina? As it turns out, the strength of the Klan was a response to the Tar Heel State’s relatively smooth transition from segregation to integration. “White people in North Carolina could not count on their politicians to resist integration like the politicians in Mississippi and Alabama,” Cunningham told the Daily Beast, “so there was this opening the Klan could step into.” It also helped that North Carolina had a Klan organizer like Bob Jones, a former lightning rod salesman who had been discharged from the Navy for refusing to salute a black officer. Jones began organizing in 1963, claiming to be a voice for poor whites who felt threatened by black progress and who were left behind by the state’s economic upturn...

Eventually, however, Jones and his Klan movement were brought down by a number of factors. Following the violence in Selma, Ala. and the murder of white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo—all recounted in the current film “Selma”—the FBI, which had been indifferent, if not openly hostile, to the civil rights movement, was forced to take on the Klan. That, plus a Jones confidant turned informant and Jones’ conviction on contempt of Congress charges after he refused to turn over the Klan’s bank accounts to a congressional committee, reduced the North Carolina KKK to a shell of its former self. Yet racial and economic anxiety, the forces that made the Klan a player in North Carolina and the South, still existed. In North CarolinaCarolina, they were channeled into support for hard-right racial demagogue Jesse Helms, elected five times to the U.S. Senate."

Inside the final season of 'Parks and Recreation' | Inside TV | EW.com: "...Parks dug itself out of that pit, found its own jaunty, homespun rhythm, and grew into one of the sharpest and warmest comedies in years. Laced with a savvy, topical wit with just right amount of bite, it has birthed two of TV’s most indelible characters, Poehler’s dare-to-dream liberal Knope and Offerman’s keep-your-dreams-between-you-and-your-pillow libertarian Swanson; their ideal-clashing friendship served as the show’s bread and butter—or, rather, steak and waffles. It has become a cultural reference point on college campuses and on social media. It has expanded Pawnee into a richly detailed folksy-weirdo universe almost as colorful as The Simpsons‘ Springfield.

...the sheer idiocy of Chris Pratt’s happy-go-dopey Andy Dwyer. “He may be mentally stupid, but he’s also emotionally stupid,” mock-defends Pratt. “IQ is just a number, and his is really low.”

Andy’s persona as children’s entertainer Johnny Karate has landed him his own kick-ass public-access program called Johnny Karate Super Awesome Musical Explosion Show. You’ll also meet another deadly serious Andy character, Johnny Karate’s brother—named… Jonathan Karate. “He wears a black karate gi, so it’s different,” explains Pratt. “When he wants to teach a kid a lesson about not talking to strangers or not holding in farts, that’s Jonathan Karate. He’s the true sensei. He’s a total Miyagi.”"

Random Thoughts: "Our schools and colleges are laying a guilt trip on those young people whose parents are productive, and who are raising them to become productive. What is amazing is how easily this has been done, largely just by replacing the word "achievement" with the word "privilege.""

Koch Bros to Bankroll Prison Reform - The Daily Beast: "The Koch brothers are turning their attention and resources to reforming the criminal justice system...

The libertarian-leaning billionaires who funded an endless stream of anti-Obamacare ads against Democratic candidates in 2014 are turning their focus to a new mission: galvanizing conservatives to pass meaningful criminal justice reform. Their policy wish list includes securing more money for public defenders, lessening sentencing disparities that affect the least well off, reforming mandatory minimums, and aiding prisoners so that they can re-enter society after serving time behind bars. It’s a counterintuitive push for the Kochs, known for more than bankrolling Republican campaigns than bettering the lives of ex-cons, with an unusual coalition of supporters...

Quietly over the past decade, a Koch Industries spokesman told The Daily Beast, the Kochs have poured seven figures in donations toward criminal justice reform, mainly through the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. As a point of comparison, the Kochs spent at least $8.5 million on political campaigns in 2014 alone—to the benefit of Republicans across the country, and the dismay of Democrats. The Kochs say they’re concerned about mass incarceration, too many criminal laws, and a system that disproportionately weighs on the poor and minorities. And over the next year, they promise to refocus on criminal justice reform."

Simulated Reality: Are We Living in the Matrix?: "The Simulation Argument presented by Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom is ambitious in that it that it does not stop by merely suggesting that we might be living in a simulated universe, it argues that we probably are living in a simulated universe! 

The argument uses evidence gathered from the world around us (about the rapid growth of our computer technology) and solid scientific reasoning to show that a rational scientific person has to take seriously the possibility that we are already living in a computer simulation. The basic principle behind this theory is that the human civilisation will one day have access to sufficient computing power capable of running simulations of their ancestors (us!). Maybe in a few thousand years in the future we might actually make a re-appearance (as Sims) in those advanced simulations. That doesn't sound too far-fetched, does it? But what if it is the case that human civilisation has, in fact, already reached that advanced state and is already running those simulations? That would mean we are living in a simulated world right now! 

In fact, the future human race could easily create simulations containing astronomical numbers of simulated beings (this has the ring of truth to it: when you run The Sims there's only one of you, but the program contains thousands of Sims). There is therefore a possibility that the number of conscious, simulated humans will one day become very much larger than the number of real humans. The Simulation Argument then goes one step further by stating that with the number of simulated humans inevitably outnumbering real humans, the computer simulation scenario is actually the most probable situation (unless you think the human race is going to become extinct pretty soon, or we're going to get bored with The Sims and start playing Tetris again - both of which seem quite unlikely). 

To sum up, the Simulation Argument is a rigorously-presented argument which means that a rational, scientific person considering the extraordinary recent increase in computing power available to us, now has to treat seriously the possibility that we are already living in computer simulation. "

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch - New York Times: "Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems. 

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. 

But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world. The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. 

But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations. “This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says...

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.” 

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon. It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude."

Why Make a Matrix? And Why You Might Be In One: "The so-called Simulation argument, which I introduced a few years ago, makes this line of reasoning more precise and takes it to its logical conclusion. The conclusion is that there are three basic possibilities at least one of which is true. The first possibility is that the human species will almost certainly go extinct before becoming technologically mature. The second possibility is that almost no technologically mature civilization is interested in building Matrices. The third possibility is that we are almost certainly living in a Matrix. 

Why? Because if the first two possibilities are not the case, then there are more “people” living in Matrices than in “real worlds.” As a “person” then the chances are that you are living in a Matrix rather than in a “real world.” The Simulation argument does not tell us which of these three possibilities obtain, only that at least one of them does. The argument employs some math and probability theory, but the basic idea can be understood without recourse to technical apparatus...

The third possibility is the most intriguing. If the vast majority of all people with other kind of experiences live in Matrices then we probably live in a Matrix. Unless we had some specific evidence to the contrary, we would therefore have to conclude that the world we see around us exists only by virtue of being simulated on a powerful computer built by some technologically highly advanced Architect."

"Everyone creates the thing they dread."

  

UVA reinstates frat after police find no proof of rape described in Rolling Stone article | The Rundown | PBS NewsHour: "The Rolling Stone story detailed an account by a woman nicknamed “Jackie” of being gang raped at Phi Kappa Psi and described a culture of violence against women at the university. The story led the university to suspend all fraternities from Nov. 22 to Jan. 9 while police investigated the allegations. Rolling Stone came under fire for the story after contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely seemed to sidestep questions about whether she had contacted Jackie’s alleged attackers. This, along with doubts over the identity of the men Jackie described and disputes about the timeline of events, led critics to doubt the veracity of the story. Rolling Stone said they no longer stood behind the story in a Dec. 5 note to readers. Rolling Stone Managing Editor Will Dana wrote: “In the face of new information, there now appear to be discrepancies in Jackie’s account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced.”"

Cops Say Nothing Happened at UVA Frat Accused of Gang Rape, But Who Really Cares? - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "No apology? No sorry about our huge mistake and rush to judgment? Keep in mind that the false accusation had consequences for the Phi Psi house, which was vandalized by angry students after Rolling Stone's story broke. UVA President Teresa Sullivan caved to public pressure to make some display of force against the frat; I would think she should be more contrite, since she was dead wrong."

'The Librarians' recap: Something wicked this way comes | EW Community | EW.com: 

"Jake: Did she say where they went? Eve: She said they passed the dynamic something project and then turned behind the blobbity-blah-blah math theory thingie. 

Jake: Two lefts, then a right. 

Morgan le Fay: You’re a Librarian? Oh, Guardian, sorry. I’ll talk slower."

Training.

1/13 - deadlifts, short bridge, alt db curls, stretch

Camilla Akerberg on Instagram: “: "Are you on that 'diet' and 'training plan' where you eat whatever and wish for a miracle to happen and the planned workouts always start tomorrow and not today? Haha time 'harden the f%#k up & do something about it!"

"In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time." - RAW

Patton Oswalt on Fighting Conservatives With Satire - The Daily Beast: "It’s like what Roger Ebert used to say, “These people can count beans but they can’t make soup.” These are people who are criticizing comedy who are not funny, who do not get comedy, and all they do is look at the separate words. They don’t look at context. They don’t look at delivery. They don’t understand irony or satire or any of that stuff. They just can look at words.  So we’ll just find better ways to look at darker subjects."

Cinema sex-symbol Anita Ekberg dies aged 83 | News | DW.DE | 11.01.2015: "...in an earlier interview, Ekberg had said she was not afraid of death. "I don't know if paradise or hell exist," she told Sweden's Aftonbladet, "but I'm sure hell is more groovy."."

"

“Don’t Eat Healthy”Our Carb Confusion | Michael Ruhlman: "So, what exactly are “stripped” carbs? The  major stripped carbs are these, she said: in the twentieth century, we created corn starch and corn syrup from the more complex carbs of corn you could actually eat; in the 1800s we stripped rice of its nutritious covering; in the 1700s we stripped flour of its nutritious bran and the germ (with its nutritious oils). These are all stripped carbs, and during the past two hundred years that we’ve increasingly relied on them they didn’t do us any good; during the last fifty years, once they began to compose the majority of our diet, they began to make our country sick on a gigantic scale. The kind of scale that, were a foreign country to wreak such havoc on our children, we would bomb them. Instead, we subsidize them. (As was noted in the very good documentary Fed Up.) This is unacceptable. You personally should not accept this. 

“People need to understand there are nutritious carbohydrates,” she says, noting that there are three categories of food molecules: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. Fruit is good, vegetables are good, even sweet corn and peas and grapes, high-sugar fruits and vegetables, carbohydrates all, because they have, she explained, a fiber matrix that make their conversion to blood sugar slow, and this has all kinds of metabolic benefits I’m not going to go into here. Stripped carbs, though, are no different really than a spoonful of sugar, triggering a flood of insulin to carry this sugar to our cells. How did this explosion of bad carbs happen? 

Sukol says it began when “some very savvy marketers in Battle Creek, Michigan, began to teach us to behave in some certain ways.” Battle Creek is, of course, the birthplace of Kellogg’s and Post cereals. The first thing Sukol advises her patients is to stay away from the bad carbs before noon. It’s just a hunch, but she thinks from experience there’s something particularly harmful about eating things like Special K or Corn Flakes before noon. Not to mention our other breakfast staples that are mainly carbs: toast, bagels, muffins, pancakes, waffles, and on and on. But really it’s that Transformer-sized aisle smack in the middle of your grocery store filled with boxes and boxes and boxes of cereals, that hulking behemoth so vast and diverse it astonishes people from other countries. That is a ground zero of a kind of unrecognized terrorism wrought on parents by our own farmers in every, city, town, and suburb of America."

"Time Magazine hits all time low with pathetic @nickgillespie article on #foiegras. Will he vote back #slavery too? @TIME shame" - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "In order to ban a choice that is as personal as food, government at any level should have extremely compelling reasons related to public health and safety for doing so. Simply finding something offensive is no more a warrant for prohibition than censoring art that you find disturbing. In the case of the foie gras, animal rights activists could only express concern for the birds that are traditionally force-fed in the production of foie gras. All animals that are ultimately slaughtered for human consumption may have our sympathy and our empathy. They do not, however, have rights that are equal to ours. The basic problem helps to explain why the California ban was written in a way that critics presciently called both constitutionally vague and impossible to enforce.... Which isn’t to say that people opposed to foie gras have no means of carrying the day. They can work to end the market for foie gras and other animal products through persuasion and informational campaigns. But they cannot and should not bank on using the coercive power of the state to force their subjective value judgements on the rest of us who have a taste for foie gras or other delicacies they find abhorrent."

Florida Police's Use of Sex Crime and Forfeiture Law Draws Ire - The Atlantic: "Predictably, many of the men arrested in these cases never went to trial because district attorneys didn't want to prosecute cases grounded in such dubious police tactics. If this approach 1) targeted men who almost certainly represented no actual threat to minors 2) in a way that made successful prosecutions relatively unlikely, why were police doing this? One incentive was the availability of federal funds earmarked for sex predator stings. Another factor: asset forfeiture, which allows police to seize the property of people who are arrested even if they aren't convicted."

Nailed it.  Tina Fey And Amy Poehler Crack Jokes About Bill Cosby's Date-Rape Allegations During The Golden Globe Awards

Cook Your Own Food. Eat What You Want.(Think for Yourself.) | Michael Ruhlman: "What America has is a living problem. America seems to think that the answer to how to eat can be found on the news, from studies, from your doctor (who’s reading the same reports you are and following the same party line now being contradicted by that “small body of unsettling data”), not even from your mayor. The data that matters to me is the data I receive after I’ve finished eating something. Do I feel good after eating a roast chicken with gravy and mashed potatoes and a pile of shaved sautéed Brussels sprouts? Yes. How about after I eat a bag of Cheetos? Not so good. What does that mean? Think about it. Think. Do you feel good after you exercise? Yes, because it’s good for you. Or you can hunt for data on the Internets if you want The Truth. Go ahead, read up on it. Or watch all the “a new study finds” stories on the ABC Nightly News. Part of the problem is our obsession with longevity rather than quality of life. Why can’t we become obsessed with good rather than long? Sure I’d prefer 90 healthy years to 75 healthy years. But do I want 75 healthy years followed by 5 years of mental and physical decline, followed by 10 years of increasing dementia that puts a strain on my family?

...Me, if I have a really good meal, al fresco, say, followed by an espresso and an eau de vie and someone offers me a cigarette? I’m going to have it. I love a cigarette. What a pleasure with, say, a grappa overlooking the harbor of Portofino on my 49th birthday. Damn, that was a good cigarette. But I have no intention of addicting myself again, because that will give me the lung cancer and emphysema that killed my dad. I’d sooner eat straight sugar than drink a regular Coke, but am I going to forgo duck confit and bacon so that I can eke out 90 years? Are you kidding me? Shoot me now. I’m sorry, I just get so goddam sick of studies and data telling me how to live, reading about this or that new diet that’s going to take pounds off my body and add countless Sound of Music years to my life. My hunch is that people don’t actually want to live longer—I think people want to be happier, to be more at ease with who they are, to feel glad when they wake up rather than dreadful, to feel good at the end of the day instead of crummy. "

The Remedial Red Pill |: "2. “The most popular trope is that ideas of gender are a social construct and that women and men are comparative equals and only their physical plumbing makes them different in form only.” There is evidence that exactly this is true. This is interesting, because she cites no evidence. That’s because there is exactly zero evidence this is the case and increasingly science is proving exactly the opposite, much to the ideological discomfort of “equalists”. Men and women’s brains are literally wired differently...  But we don’t even need those studies to grasp this most basic of human truths – we already know that men and women’s biochemistry and endocrinology work and affect their respective sex’s bodies and minds differently. Whether it’s the dominant presence of estrogen, progesterone and oxytocin in women or the dominant presence of testosterone in men, the body state – behavioral effects and emotional stimulus of those hormones make us fundamentally different beings – and that’s a good thing. Complementarianism benefits women and men."

Control the frame, control the argument.  Shallow |: "There are a lot of applications women will use “shallow” for, but the primary use is to shame men’s natural arousal/attraction cues being based on physicality...

The operative question; Why should the importance Men place on the physical always be characterized as “superficial”? Why is it that a man is “shallow” for following his biological imperative, while a woman seeking commitment is considered “prudent”? Because women are only acting on behalf of their own biological imperatives when they do so...  if men can be made to believe that a woman’s best interest is actually his own, she retains control of the frame. How do they effect this? Repeat it over and over until men identify with it and it becomes a societal norm. This then places men into a state of internal conflict – they’re not supposed to want hot women for fear of being deemed “shallow”, but yet they always seem to find themselves attracted to, and aroused by, the most physically ideal women they encounter...

It’s a man’s biological imperative to mate with as many fit and attractive females, while it’s a woman’s imperative to choose the male who is best capable of satisfying hypergamy and providing her with long term security, and by default to ultimately share in parental investment...  [but] society calls a man ‘shallow’ and a woman ‘wise’ for embracing the sexual strategies and arousal cues nature has dealt for them."

  

Richard Kadrey's Damn Tumblr: "The future is now. Meet the Robotic Spider Dress. Techno Couture from Anouk Wipprecht, a dress with insect-like robotic limbs which react to the proximity of others."

 Texts From the Avengers:

Training.

1/12 - press, pike pushups, crow, dips, coct grip, stretch

Keep Moving: Change Is a Process | Mark's Daily Apple: 

  

doingitformyself: I haven’t done a before and...: " after/during with this original photo in sooooo long!! I was 208 lbs and in the right I’m bouncing between 160 and 165 @ 5’6”. Currently I’m doing all weights and muscle gain, so I have literally zero cares for the what the scale reads. Discipline made me successful. And that definitely carried on to other areas of my life."