Vocabulary Workshop Answers
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Because we live in the future, the White House is doing a fancy enhanced live feed of the State of the Union tonight and we’re able to embed it here so you can watch it directly on Tumblr. Enjoy, and let us know what you think of the president’s speech.
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Felix: The @felixsalmon - @johngapper NYT paywall bet (Edited in response to John’s comments.)
The number we’re looking at is total paid digital subscribers to the NYT — not including print subscribers or people who get their digital subscription for free through some promotion. We’ll look at whatever public statement the NYT makes about that number…
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Email du jour:
Nate Nickerson can help facilitate meetings between members of the media at the World Economic Forum and MIT faculty. Please contact Nate in advance, if possible, or on the ground at Davos. The one exception is that media interested in Sir Tim Berners-Lee should contact Celebrity Speakers Associates.
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“Start by chopping the bacon and putting it in a pan, perhaps with a little olive oil if the bacon isn’t super-fatty. While it’s cooking you can also add other red meats like beef or venison and let it all brown together. When the bacon and meat is crispy to your liking, add the pre-cooked sprouts, along with any other veggies you may have cooked them with. Some people like their sprouts lightly cooked, others like them “cooked senseless,” as advice columnist Amy Alkon advised me to do. When the sprouts are done, add some minced garlic. Stir fry for a minute, deglaze with a shot of bourbon if you have it, and turn off the heat. (That bourbon shot is a secret trick, by the way. From hunting camp. Share it wisely.) Season with black pepper and hot sauce, and add the above dressing of vinegar, soy sauce, and olive oil. Toss the sprouts to maximize their uptake of dressing. Add the meaty, greasy sprouts to your salad, or pop them straight into your mouth.” -
“2 — The number of strips of bacon a person has to eat every day to see a 19 percent rise in the risk for pancreatic cancer. That’s about 50 grams of processed meat. Source: “Pancreatic Cancer Risk Increases With Every 2 Strips of Bacon You Eat: Study,” CBS.” —OK, this gets headlines. BUT IT IS WRONG. The “19% rise” thing is ever so impressive, but if you read the article, it turns out to correspond to a 0.00002641% increase in your lifetime chance of getting pancreatic cancer. If you’re a man. If you’re a woman, it’s even lower.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a single metastudy of 6,000 pancreatic cancer patients can’t possibly identify probabilities that small with any accuracy. And that if you tried to replicate this result somehow, you would fail. Not that anybody will.
(via felixsalmon)
(via felixsalmon)
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“In fact, the chance that what you are reporting is bogus is much higher than the 5% you so cheerfully claimed with your poignant asterisk. Because journals will only publish novel, interesting findings – and therefore researchers only bother to write up seemingly intriguing counterintuitive findings – the chance that what they eventually are publishing is BS unwittingly is vast.” -
“A member of Gagosian staff tells me that the key paintings which correlate specific colours with letters of the alphabet are the start of a game: if you look at each painting carefully, a sequence of colours will reveal a hidden word, and if you get the word first you win a spot painting.” —ArtSlant - Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot II
What?? OK people, let’s crowdsource this
(via felixsalmon)
(via felixsalmon)
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Felix: Here’s why I’m so angry at Julie Moos’s unjustifiable attack on Jim... Here’s why I’m so angry at Julie Moos’s unjustifiable attack on Jim Romenesko: the way that she’s so fucking certain that she’s right and he’s wrong, and the way that she hammers this home over and over again:
I now know that Jim Romenesko’s posts exhibit a pattern of incomplete attribution…
