jakke

taking a couple days' break, I think

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:37:54 -0700

Not dying or anything. Just that higher-priority things need attention.

I guess his Twitter followers think this is a joke or something?...

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:03:41 -0700

I guess his Twitter followers think this is a joke or something? But it’s not.

writing about lumpy investment

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:01:55 -0700

Unable to avoid having it all sound like Lumpy Space Princess in my head.

so it's like 10 degrees and drizzling here

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:23:05 -0700

Remember that whole global warming thing? That would be super desirable if it really kicked in right about now.

At least it’s supposed to be a bit warmer and sunnier in Victoria this weekend.

"nt" in Greek is pronounced "d" so the transliteration doesn't work. Lepto was used with the drachma as well.

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:38:50 -0700

Oooh, that’s actually good to know! Thanks. It looks like Cyprus uses σεντ, but maybe they have different pronunciation rules for Greek (or maybe they just wanted it to transliterate to “cent” regardless of pronunciation).

The eurozone is usually pretty strict about this sort of thing; they had a big fight with Bulgaria about the spelling of “euro” in Bulgarian which was eventually resolved in Bulgaria’s favour.

Really the best part here is that at one point the eurozone was publicly worrying more about how to transliterate the name of their currency than they were about the massive current account imbalances and regulatory laxity-fueled real estate bubbles and structural deficits.

Hey so somehow I ended up with a Greek eurocent coin! It’s...

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:23:04 -0700

Hey so somehow I ended up with a Greek eurocent coin! It’s a little smaller than a North American penny but also pretty copper-y, and it has a boat on it, and the writing says “1 CENT” in Greek (because apparently they use λεπτό, which means “minute”, instead of the transliteration σεντ).

I haven’t posted as much about Greece and the eurozone lately because there hasn’t been much exciting news - but the TL;DR is that investors are enthusiastic but their enthusiasm hasn’t trickled down to the rest of the economy. Pretty much everyone’s still unemployed or unpaid or poor and banks aren’t lending and more austerity is coming.

amindy07: sesamestreet: Today Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit...

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:50:46 -0700

amindy07:

sesamestreet:

Today Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, announced a multi-year partnership with Teaching Strategies, the educational company that publishes The Creative Curriculum and Teaching Strategies GOLD.

Learn more at http://sesameworkshop.org/school

Very cool!

These are big correlations, for sure. But it’s not clear that they’re causally linked. Parental incomes have a bigger impact than anything else on both early childhood education and long-term education/labour market outcomes, so I’m going to suggest that the story here is that kids from wealthier families receive better early childhood education and then go on to be better-educated and richer themselves.

Not that Sesame Street isn’t awesome. But yeah these are not helpful statistics at all.

finally done with everything I wanted to get finished this weekend

Tue, 21 May 2013 01:20:13 -0700

Usually I set my goals pretty unreasonably, so it’s rare that I actually kind of hit them. Possibly because I had a super chill long weekend? Now I just need to write coherent emails to send everything off to professors and I can go cuddle with my boyfriend. Domestication has basically set in, I guess.

joesquared replied to your post: hey so I saw Star Trek last night I feel fortunate b/c I did not...

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:54:00 -0700

joesquared replied to your post: hey so I saw Star Trek last night

I feel fortunate b/c I did not see anything regarding the whole Khan casting thing.

Okay going behind a cut again to discuss this.

To be fair it is totally ridiculous that a character named Khan Noonien Singh is played by a very white and very British dude. There are plenty of other actors who can be sinister as fuck who could play Khan without the obvious incongrinuity, you know? And there’s no way to explain this without accepting that it is at least partially a result of the racist society we live in.

I’ve read posts by dozens of people who know way more about racism and and way more about Star Trek on this topic. (And by dozens of people who know nothing about Star Trek and very little about racism but feel like it’s something that every social justice tumblr should discuss.) So I’m going to defer to the experts and talk about the rest of the movie bearing in mind that it’s ridiculous to have Cumberbatch cast as Khan. Sound reasonable?

hey so I saw Star Trek last night

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:18:00 -0700

And I have feelings on it! Everything’s under a cut because I guess potentially spoilers. But I’m tagging this post with everything you might have blocked, just in case.

Firstly I’m not going to talk about the casting choice of Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan. Other people have discussed it in greater detail. I realize there’s a school of thought that any racist or otherwise bigoted aspect of a media renders it unenjoyable or unwatchable. I’d respectfully suggest we can experience media that has these aspects while recognizing it and working to change the society in which it’s created and still respond to the rest of the piece. If you feel otherwise, that’s also totally reasonable.
Anyway, that aside - I quite liked it! I like the new Trek aesthetic, I like how streamlined the exposition is compared to the original Trek, and I like the light camp about the whole endeavour.
The nods to previous Trek continuity (Mudd, tribbles, Section 31) were generally quick and light enough not to weigh things down.
Still not sure how I feel about the radiation death through the glass scene. It was inserted as smoothly as it could have been, I guess?
The opening of the movie was basically the end of an episode of TV series that will never air, and that’s greatly saddening to me.
If there were a new Star Trek TV series, though - Sulu as captain, hands down. This movie did not give him nearly enough to do, but in the scenes he did have he was pretty much the only one worth watching. Especially in the captain’s chair.
Actually, plenty of characters didn’t get enough to do. I appreciate that Scotty gets to infiltrate the bad-guy ship, but it’s not clear that Chekov was really necessary at any point in the plot. Or Dr Marcus. Or McCoy, for that matter.
Not that I don’t prefer the Kirk/Spock/Uhura scenes to Kirk/Spock/McCoy scenes. McCoy is the most static of static characters, and watching Uhura speak Klingon is way more engaging than watching McCoy wave a tricoder.
The future Earth cities had a sense of wonder about them that old Trek never bothered with when it showed Earth. (Remember Picard’s vineyard?) I’d have liked to see more of Kronos, or maybe even some of New Vulcan.
I was kind of relieved that Khan was just a MacGuffin for the real villain, because a whole movie about fighting Khan would be exhausting and would produce no new allegory. Instead we got a story about retribution and remote warfare and stuff, which seems more relevant.

Anyway yeah I guess that’s what I’m thinking after having watched it once. (Other than the obvious stuff - e.g. Sulu and Kirk being mighty attractive.) Pretty likely I’ll end up seeing it again in theatre at some point.

okay yeah a straight cis guy wearing bright green nail polish with 62k notes just showed up on my dashboard

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:07:00 -0700

With everyone fawning over him for being so ~brave~ and ~quirky~ because oh my goodness what challenges he must have to face with his love of whimsy.

Unable to deal. Signing off for now.

If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn?

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:04:06 -0700

If Yahoo Buys Tumblr, What Will It Do With All That Porn?:

So yeah this seems like one of the actual big changes that Yahoo could possibly make around here - namely, shutting down porn blogs. Relatively few companies want to know that their ads are showing up with a bunch of porn (except maybe SmileyCentral I guess?) and this is already a transition that Tumblr has started.

Personally I’m not too crushed by this? I dunno, maybe I’m just not that motivated by the easy availability of porn gifs. Going to be suboptimal if blogs with a mix of actual content and porn gifs get shut down, though.

"Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:43:00 -0700

“Yahoo will need to balance its involvement with Tumblr to let the creative site flourish while also driving some benefits to core Yahoo. While Tumblr likely needs to take its feed advertising slowly so as not to negatively impact the user experience, the company should be able to leverage Yahoo!’s sales force and advertising relationships.”

- So it’s kind of cool to see what actual analysts say about Yahoo buying Tumblr. But I have a pretty hard time figuring out what benefits the site would be driving to “core Yahoo”. Better integration with Flickr, maybe? Not really sure what core Yahoo comprises, anymore.

Microsoft buys Hotmail

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:52:52 -0700

Microsoft buys Hotmail:

As previously reported by CNET’s NEWS.COM, Microsoft had been in talks to invest in Hotmail, and sources predicted that a deal might be sealed by year’s end. The stock deal for the two-year-old company has been estimated in the hundreds of million of dollars, according to industry sources. Microsoft and Hotmail officials would not comment on the price.

“This [acquisition] completes our lineup,” said Laura Jennings, vice president of the Microsoft Network. “We were missing a search engine and free email on MSN until last summer. So we did a deal with Inktomi for search [capabilities] and Hotmail is head and shoulders above the others in terms of scalability of service and members.”

During the next few months, Hotmail will be integrated into sites on the Microsoft Network, such as MSN.com, travel site Expedia, and car-buying site CarPoint. Microsoft’s idea is to drive traffic to its revenue-generating sites, such as Expedia and CarPoint, and then keep surfers within the Microsoft circle.

Wow, this happened three weeks before Yahoo bought Geocities. I like how Microsoft is up-front about the fact that they’ll be using their new search engine capabilities to drive traffic to their own sites. I also like the judicious use of square brackets in the quotes; it seems like news articles tend to avoid that now.

"GeoCities (GCTY) is the third most visited site on the Web behind AOL and Yahoo!, with 19 million..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:48:48 -0700

“GeoCities (GCTY) is the third most visited site on the Web behind AOL and Yahoo!, with 19 million unique visitors in December, according to Web research company Media Metrix.”

- Wow, that January 1999 CNN article is seriously a glimpse into another era.

nhaler replied to your photo: Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo… $4.9B FOR...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:46:00 -0700

nhaler replied to your photo: Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo…

$4.9B FOR GEOCITIES?!

In inflation-adjusted dollars? You bet. From the awesomely still-online CNN Money story dated January 28, 1999:

Internet search engine Yahoo! Inc. confirmed Thursday it will buy GeoCities, a fast-growing Web site community, in a $3.6 billion deal that will further solidify Yahoo!’s position as a frontrunner in the online popularity contest.

Under terms of the deal, expected to close in the second quarter, GeoCities shareholders will receive 0.3384 share of Yahoo! for each share of GeoCities they own. GeoCities has 31.4 million shares outstanding.

Based on Yahoo!’s closing stock price of $335.875 on Wednesday, the transaction is valued at roughly $3.57 billion, a hefty premium over GeoCities’ market capitalization of $2.3 billion.

But that’s not unusual in the fast-track Internet sector where multi-billion acquisitions have largely defined its growth — @Home, for example, agreed last week to pay a 40 percent premium for Excite.

So if you think Yahoo is spending a whole lot of money on Tumblr - well, that’s not unusual in the fast-track Internet sector.

Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo acquisitions. It’s...

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:39:33 -0700

Tumblr in the context of previous Yahoo acquisitions. It’s the biggest in a long time, but it’s waaay smaller than companies they’ve bought previously.

working on math, listening to some kind of music, bobbing my head

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:15:09 -0700

Suddenly realize that I’ve effectively spent twenty minutes dancing in my seat to Fall Out Boy.

soooo many untagged Star Trek spoilers on my dashboard

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:35:00 -0700

Fortunately they are all the same criticism of the ridiculous Khan casting soooo unless the plot is nothing but a lengthy discussion of Benedict Cumberbatch’s inherent genetic superiority I remain unspoiled.

Ads tout job grants program that doesn't yet exist

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:34:24 -0700

Ads tout job grants program that doesn't yet exist:

Prime-time ads began airing this week during NHL playoff games — currently the priciest advertising real estate on the dial — that tout a new federal Canada Jobs Grant for training workers.

Peter Van Loan, the Conservative government House leader, described the Canada Jobs Grant last week as a “proposal that needs to be fleshed out and developed fully.”

“What we’ve announced is a concept of how it could work,” Van Loan said in Toronto as the government began what it calls roundtable consultations on the proposal.

The concept requires that Ottawa, the province and the employer kick in up to $5,000 each toward the training of a worker.

Legislation to create the federal training grant is still months away from even being considered by Parliament — which is why the TV ads note in fine print that the program is “subject to parliamentary approval.”

Hey so each time you see this ad during an NHL game it’s costing $95k. And you’d better believe it’s showing dozens of times. And the program doesn’t exist yet. And it may never exist in most provinces because the provincial governments aren’t enthusiastic about kicking in money - but the ads are showing in those provinces too.

I really don’t know what to say about this. It seems like something out of political satire, but it’s real. In the article above, CBC actually links to the fundraising drive by ShitHarperDid to run their own ads mocking these ads during the same commercial breaks.