How DNA Testing Botched My Family’s Heritage, and Probably Yours, Too

Maurice Hilleman, vaccine pioneer
Beluga Mimicking a Person
Investigating postdoctoral salaries in the United States

Guns are traced using paper records because of the NRA
Jeffrey C. Hall, interview on leaving academic science. 2017 Nobel Prize winner.
Sam Zeloof blog, home vacuum lab and semiconductor fab

Global Sea Ice Area (will this year repeat the huge drop last year?)

Joe Arpaio’s evil reign: lawless abuses of power, torture and death of inmates in his jails. More evil stuff his did.

Republican voters are getting bored with the Trump show

Civil War diaoramas done with cats
How the very rich legally avoid paying taxes
Hugo winners 2017

Best Novel
The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)
All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Books / Titan Books)
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton / Harper Voyager US)
Death’s End by Cixin Liu (Tor Books / Head of Zeus)
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris Books)
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (Tor Books)

Kamikara pop up penguin by Haruki Nakamura website
America seized the traitor Lee’s plantation

Daniel Davies: One Minute MBA

Mary Katharine Goddard, printer of the Declaration of Independence and postmaster

In her boldest move, Goddard put her full name at the bottom of all the copies of the Declaration that her printing presses churned out and distributed to the colonies. It was the first copy young America would see that included the original signers’ names — and Congress commissioned her for the important job.

Solving a Rubik’s cube quickly is NP complete

In 2010, programmers found that a 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube can be solved in a maximum of 20 moves from any starting position, no matter how scrambled.

A year later, Demaine, Eisenstat and their colleagues devised a formula to solve a Rubik’s cube with sides of any length and found that the number of moves required for a cube of side n is proportional to n2/log n.

Finding the number for a cube with n=3 took several years of computing time and Demaine estimates that the n=4 case would take billions of times longer. “I conjecture it will never be fully solved,” he says.

This is the upper limit for the most scrambled cubes, but many cubes will not take that long. Figuring out whether any given configuration of a cube will take fewer moves is tricky. “We know an algorithm to solve all cubes in a reasonable amount of time,” Demaine says. “But if I give you a particular configuration of the cube, and then you want to solve it with the fewest moves for that configuration, that’s really tough.”

Cryolevitating magnet on a mobius stripSurprisingly simple tips from 20 experts about how to lose weight and keep it off by Julia Belluz

Why did Europe lose the Crusades?

Have fewer kids?

Love & Cockroaches

Obamacare reduced medical bankruptcies

Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), 1972-1995

Doctor salaries (ave $204,000 – $443,000 by speciality)

Republicans try to kill CBO (Congressional Budget Office)

X-Rated Furniture Of Catherine The Great

Killing hypothalamus stem cells reduces lifeaspan 10%, might speed up aging

Study of indiana school voucher program finds that at best it is a waste of money and that it likely retards learning. The details are worse than the title suggests

DOE ignorance and mismanagement by the Trump admin

The rise of homegrown terror on the right. This growing domestic menace deserves more time than it’s getting. by Arie Perliger

The number of violent attacks on U.S. soil inspired by far-right ideology has spiked since the beginning of this century, rising from a yearly avarage of 70 attacks in the 1990s to a yearly avarage of more than 300 since 2001. These incidents have grown even more common since President Donald Trump’s election.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that researches U.S. extremism, reported 900 bias-related incidents against minorities in the first 10 days after Trump’s election – compared to several dozen in a normal week – and the group found that many of the harassers invoked the then-president-elect’s name. Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that tracks anti-Semitism, recorded an 86 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the first three months of 2017.

Proove Biosciences raided by Feds — doctor payoffs and an opioid test that doesn’t work

The Abortion Battlefield by Marcia Angell

Four years later, Slepian was murdered at his home. The total count between 1978 and 2015, writes Haugeberg, was eleven murders (nine of them physicians), twenty-six attempted murders, 185 arsons, forty-two bombings, and 1,534 vandalizations of clinics.

Super D&D map
There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes (Charles Murray is a racist)

Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer: A new study points to a surprising reason for the varied shape of bird eggs—and shows that most eggs aren’t actually egg-shaped. Egg-scuse me? by Ed Yong. pdf

Northwestern surplus sales
U of Wisc surplus sales
EPI: Employers steal billions from workers’ paychecks each year
Notes from an Emergency by Maciej Cegłowski

The Hamilton Hustle: Why liberals have embraced our most dangerously reactionary founder by Matt Stoller
GOP Bill Would Let Your Employer Demand to See Your Genetic Information by Eric Levitz

A brief and mundane history of being a woman by El Jones
The geometry of weird-shaped dice
The U.S. Tax Code Actually Doesn’t “Soak the Rich” by Nick Buffie
Unspeakable Realities Block Universal Health Coverage In The US by Chris Ladd
Yes, Your Sleep Schedule Is Making You Sick by Richard A. Friedman

The Crazification Factor

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is —

Tyrone: 27%.

John: … you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.