"all the spam in the world"

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
Now, once you’ve selected the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, you still have to create a character, and how many points you get to start — and how they are apportioned — will make a difference. Initially the computer will tell you how many points you get and how they are divided up. If you start with 25 points, and your dump stat is wealth, well, then you may be kind of screwed. If you start with 250 points and your dump stat is charisma, well, then you’re probably fine. Be aware the computer makes it difficult to start with more than 30 points; people on higher difficulty settings generally start with even fewer than that.
As the game progresses, your goal is to gain points, apportion them wisely, and level up. If you start with fewer points and fewer of them in critical stat categories, or choose poorly regarding the skills you decide to level up on, then the game will still be difficult for you. But because you’re playing on the “Straight White Male” setting, gaining points and leveling up will still by default be easier, all other things being equal, than for another player using a higher difficulty setting.
Likewise, it’s certainly possible someone playing at a higher difficulty setting is progressing more quickly than you are, because they had more points initially given to them by the computer and/or their highest stats are wealth, intelligence and constitution and/or simply because they play the game better than you do. It doesn’t change the fact you are still playing on the lowest difficulty setting.
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.
And maybe at this point you say, hey, I like a challenge, I want to change my difficulty setting! Well, here’s the thing: In The Real World, you don’t unlock any rewards or receive any benefit for playing on higher difficulty settings. The game is just harder, and potentially a lot less fun. And you say, okay, but what if I want to replay the game later on a higher difficulty setting, just to see what it’s like? Well, here’s the other thing about The Real World: You only get to play it once. So why make it more difficult than it has to be? Your goal is to win the game, not make it difficult.
Oh, and one other thing. Remember when I said that you could choose your difficulty setting in The Real World? Well, I lied. In fact, the computer chooses the difficulty setting for you. You don’t get a choice; you just get what gets given to you at the start of the game, and then you have to deal with it.
So that’s “Straight White Male” for you in The Real World (and also, in the real world): The lowest difficulty setting there is. All things being equal, and even when they are not, if the computer — or life — assigns you the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, then brother, you’ve caught a break

[New take. I still dislike the word 'structure' in this context].
"What is the difference between a swamp and a river? The water in both is exactly the same water, and in both it's behaving the way water behaves. The difference is in the surrounding structure. In exactly the same way humans will behave in the way humans behave, and the difference is in the structure. Systems are very important parts of structure."

BM: I think that’s how belief is, there’s a great metaphor in the play Doubt where one of the characters says “You see the stars one night when you’re in your boat out at sea, and you chart your way by those stars, and then you’re sailing for days and it’s overcast for days and days, and you don’t know if that one night you saw the stars was even real.” And he likens faith to that, that faith is believing that the one night you saw the stars was true.  I think there’s a lot of that in Sound of My Voice, there’s this idea that maybe you only get one glimpse of what the truth is, and is that enough to sustain a life of belief? Maybe you never get a glimpse at all, do you still believe?

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make “well-informed” decisions.

Poetic Stickup: Put the Financial Aid in the Bag - @TEDed @YouTube http://t.co/gBu4kN4T #edchat #language #metaphor #imagery #college

Poetic Stickup: Put the Financial Aid in the Bag - @TEDed @YouTube #edchat #language #metaphor #imagery #college

"You Too Can Become a Data Scientist

So the bottomline is that there is big money looming. Fortunes will be made and lost. Which means you too should attempt to become a data scientist.

The skills have become increasingly easy to acquire, and are getting easier by the week. But at the same time, cultural barriers to people self-classifying into the data scene are being erected.

Redefine yourself while you can. Let me know if you need any pickaxes."

"And yet in the end what Borges does is worse than invalidate his friend’s testimony. He simply ignores it. He walks out into the street and lets himself succumb to the tides of forgetting. In Mexico we know of the corruption, the political criminality, and the surging numbers of the dead. The problem is not awareness, but what we do with the awareness. We can read and guffaw about the violence in our own homes, and nothing will continue to change. Especially if our minds are, as Borges describes, “porous for forgetting,” knowledge is not an end in itself. Careful record keeping and the murder meter will not enact change; we need to enact it ourselves."

BEREZNIKI, Russia was built over excavations, every wall has cracks in every home. Straight out of invisible cities.