Month: May 2011

On Burnout

Burnout is not its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s not something that can be treated pharmacologically; it is not considered the same thing as depression or a midlife crisis, though sometimes they coincide. The term was first coined by a psychotherapist named Herbert Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case. (“I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings,” the book’s numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his journal, “to do anything for them out of pity.”) While working at a free clinic for drug addicts in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that the volunteers, when discouraged, would often push harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as if they were achieving less and less. The result, in 1974, was the book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement. Others soon followed. A subspecialty of psychology was born.

lots of bla bla on burnout

Failed redactions

Timothy Lee has conducted a study of improper redaction in PACER, the US court records system. Sensitive information like social security numbers are redacted in these records, but sometimes the redaction is accomplished by drawing a black box over the text in the PDF; the text is still present in the PDF file, it’s just not displayed, and it’s easy to recover. Out of 1.8m PACER documents, there were ~2000 documents with redaction rectangles. Examining them by hand revealed 194 documents with failed redactions.

ah, the good old blackout doesn’t work with pdf, eh? and another story. this is why lawyers should not run governments: incompetent in the small, incompetent in the large.

We discovered this classified information by opening the slide “Award Actions Trend Data”, right clicking over the chart titled “Award $,” choosing “chart object,” and then clicking “open” to see the hard figures Everett used to create the graph.

heh. i thought that presentation was interesting for its geeky content. but now i guess i will take a closer look at the pdf.

Joost may have accidentally leaked 3 months’ worth of deal plans through hidden data in a PDF.

Chromium Quality

PVS-Studio was defeated. Chromium’s source code is one of the best we have ever analyzed. We have found almost nothing in Chromium. To be more exact, we have found a lot of errors and this article demonstrates only a few of them. But if we keep in mind that all these errors are spread throughout the source code with the size of 460 Mbytes, it turns out that there are almost no errors at all.

1491

lots of lost history there

Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them. The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city. Mexican cultures created corn in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering. Indeed, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

2022-11-23: Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward?

Only in the late 17th century did the French and the English begin to push into the heartland, engaging complex configurations of Indigenous power in contending for control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Yet even then colonial gains were precarious and provisional. By the mid-18th century, Indian rebellions had rolled back European incursions; the Spanish, the French, and the English clung mainly to the coasts and rivers. The vast interior of the continent was largely unknown to them, and the tidy lines of the 13 colonies were more aspirational than actual.

2023-09-08: Nice visualization

The year is 1518. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, once an unassuming settlement in the middle of Lake Texcoco, now a bustling metropolis. It is the capital of an empire ruling over, and receiving tribute from, more than 5 million people. Tenochtitlan is home to 200.000 farmers, artisans, merchants, soldiers, priests and aristocrats. At this time, it is one of the largest cities in the world.

Today, we call this city Ciudad de Mexico – Mexico City.

Not much is left of the old Aztec – or Mexica – capital Tenochtitlan. What did this city, raised from the lake bed by hand, look like? Using historical and archeological sources, and the expertise of many, I have tried to faithfully bring this iconic city to life.

400b rogue planets

Japanese astronomers claim to have found free-floating “planets” which do not seem to orbit a star. They say they have found 10 Jupiter-sized objects which they could not connect to any solar system. They also believe such objects could be as common as stars are throughout the Milky Way. Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, they detected 10 Jupiter-mass planets wandering far from light-giving stars. Then they estimated the total number of such rogue planets, based on detection efficiency, microlensing-event probability and the relative rate of lensing caused by stars or planets. They concluded that there could be as many as 400b of these wandering planets, far outnumbering main-sequence stars such as our Sun

with this, my personal estimate for the drake equation goes to 8000.

Looking at the Kepler K2 data, the scientists documented 10s of short-duration microlensing events near the galactic core. Of these, 22 were previously detected during the OGLE and KMTnet ground-based campaigns, but 5 signatures hadn’t been seen before. Of these 5, 1 turned out to be a bound exoplanet, but the remaining 4 featured super-short microlensing events consistent with free-floating planets. 1 of the 4 candidate signatures was subsequently detected in ground-based data. The microlensing events, lasting for just several hours, suggest the discovery of unbound exoplanets no larger than Earth. It’s impossible to know what the conditions are like on these presumed rogue exoplanets, but they could be “cold, icy wastelands,” and, if similar in size to Earth, their surfaces would “closely resemble bodies in the outer Solar System, like Pluto.” The new paper suggests the presence of a large population of Earth-sized rogue planets in the Milky Way. It’s becoming clear that free-floating planets are common.

China Leadership Transition

Over the past few months, several people have written asking me to offer a short “primer” on China’s upcoming leadership transition, which begins next year. The handover to a new president and premier has generated plenty of speculation in the press, about who the leaders are and what is will all mean, but sometimes it’s useful to go back and fill in the very basics, since China has a unique and in some ways quite confusing political system.

The first and most important thing to understand about that political system is that it is composed of 3 parts. In the US, we have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. In China there is the Party, the Army, and the State. Unlike in the US, where the 3 branches are co-equal and are specifically designed to check and balance each other’s powers, in China the Party is supreme and rules over the other 2 elements. China’s “leadership transition” involves coordinated handovers of power involving all 3 parts of the political system.

kremlinology applied to china’s leadership

Backward Lies

Have people tell their story backwards, starting at the end and systematically working their way back. Instruct them to be as complete and detailed as they can. This technique increases the cognitive load to push them over the edge. A deceptive person, even a professional liar, is under a heavy cognitive load as he tries to stick to his story while monitoring your reaction.