Edouard Chazal

The Voice in Your Head

Given that thoughts are a jumble of fragments and pieces, it occurred to me that a recorded transcript of those jumbled pieces actually might not be very illuminating. It might not even be intelligible. Meanwhile the (admittedly much more arduous) process of writing down my thoughts had been surprisingly enlightening. In one swoop, my brain was capable of detecting the patchy notions swirling in my mind, filling in their gaps to make them whole—that is, adding the stripes—and then evaluating them for their credibility and value, or lack thereof.

In other words, my own brain was a brain decoder. It required a lot more effort than merely using a digital recorder as I’d imagined, but it was also a whole lot more sophisticated—say, a trillion times more—than anything scientists have conceived of inventing.

→ Guernica Magazine

The Astrophysicists Who Faked It

In science, the question of when to believe is a deep and ancient problem. There is no universal answer, and evaluating the merits of any potential discovery always includes considering the prior beliefs of the people involved. There is no way around this.

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This was the genius of the fake signal injection: Whatever the prior belief of an individual scientist might be, it gave him or her reason to doubt it. A scientist who believed that the current generation of instruments was simply not up to the task would have to allow for the possibility that it was. A scientist tempted to elevate a signal because of the benefits of a real detection would have to temper his or her enthusiasm to avoid making a false claim. The fake injection bugaboo forced us to keep an open mind, apply skepticism and reason, and examine the evidence at face value.

→ Nautilus

It’s ugly

New lows :

The fact that APB has positioned itself as protecting users from ads, only to then say it’s going to allow ads it deems acceptable to those who pay for it, has caused real shock. “Amazing how the goalposts keep changing for their users, whilst publishers are indiscriminately targeted. It turns out Adblock Plus actually want to serve you more ads not less. True colors revealed.”

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“They’re allowing users to block ads, and then on the other side basically taking a cut from publishers to allow ads to run on the site even though they are the ones blocking the ads. It will be interesting to hear how much of a cut all three parties are taking, and how they are actually in the mix,” she said.

→ Digiday

Does the left have a future?

2560

No party can exist forever. Political traditions can decline, and then take on new forms; some simply become extinct. All that can be said with certainty is that if the left is to finally leave the 20th century, the process will have to start with the ideas and convictions that answer the challenges of a modernity it is only just starting to wake up to, let alone understand.

→ The Guardian