April 2017

April 26, 2017

Perceptual neuroscience — it’s all in the eye of beholder

I quite liked Beau Lotto’s article Look Here in May’s Wired UK. It’s not yet online, but googling it turned up a few other interesting tidbits on perception.

Beau Lotto has just published a book, Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently, though reviewer Jonathan Rée hates it.

Michael Shemer’s TED talk, The pattern behind self-deception, explains how “the human tendency to believe strange things—from alien abductions to dowsing rod—boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble.”

Buzzfeed: 16 optical illusions even freakier than that damn dress.

Six TED talks about illusion that will make you doubt your own brain.

Ilya

April 10, 2017

  • Rutger Bregman: “We could cut the working week by a third”. Bregman’s book, Utopia for Realists, “could yet revitalise progressive thought around the globe. His solutions are quite simple and staunchly set against current trends: we should institute a universal basic income for everyone that covers minimum living expenses — say around £12,000 a year; the working week should be shortened to 15 hours; borders should be opened and migrants allowed to move wherever they choose.”
  • Digital “editions” pays off for The Times. “Users of the … paid-for mobile app are up 30 percent since this time last year, and people are viewing three times as many pages per visit as they were a year ago. Those rises all stem from a decision The Times took a year ago to push away from the trap of commoditized online news and focus on publishing three updates to the digital editions a day: at 9 a.m., 12 p.m. and 5 p.m.”

April 6, 2017

Homebrew, rbenv, ruby-build, openssl…

How to upgrade OpenSSL on Mac OS. Homebrew issues led me down a lovely garden path… and this guide helped.

Explicitly specifying the OpenSSL can work when installing a new version of Ruby with rbenv.

RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS=--with-openssl-dir=/usr/local/Cellar/openssl/1.0.2k rbenv install 2.3.1

Ilya

April 3, 2017

  • Google pitches AMP as a solution to bloated websites and poor user experiences. But, Andrew Betts asks: “could AMP actually be bad news for the web, bad news for news, and part of a trend of news distribution that is bad for society in general?”