North Carolina’s new law enables and protects people who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. The state attorney general, Roy Cooper, has refused to defend the law in court. Should he? This is an uncomfortable question because it’s so similar to another recent case. Read both of the descriptions below and…
Lies masquerading as truth on the Web are a real problem. Now Sam Mallikarjunan is going to try to solve the problem. Mallikarjunan and his partner Andrei Oprisan are creating a browser extension called Verytas that changes the background color of stories you read: green for true, red for false, purple for satire. How does Verytas know? The…
Politicians (and other people) often can’t or won’t answer a question. How they respond says a lot about who they are. If they were honest, they would say “I won’t answer that” and then say why. But instead, they just take the airtime and answer some other question they’d rather talk about. For example, Mediaite recently…
Now that the bombing stories are done, it’s time for the blame stories — and the passive voice that inevitably accompanies them. Like the LA Times story titled: ” ‘Mistakes were probably made,’ Belgian official acknowledges after Brussels attacks.” Ya think? People performed these acts. Belgian and European police and intelligence agencies, obviously, missed something. That’s…
I use an online thesaurus frequently in my work. It’s certainly not because my vocabulary is limited. It’s because it shakes loose new ideas when I’m trying to name things. The cliche of the thesaurus user is the desperate paper-writer who doesn’t want to repeat the same word endlessly (for example, “war,”), even though they are…
There’s still blood on the ground in Brussels, a city I’ve spent time in with people I’ve befriended. I’d rather not look. But I must. Because this is when we make the worst mistakes. A friend sent me this observation yesterday: The optimal level of terrorist attacks is probably small, but not zero, just like the optimal level…
When I was young, I was certain I would be a mathematician. I still think like one. You should, too — and you don’t have to learn math to do it. A little background: I was an outstanding math student in high school and college, won an NSF Fellowship, and entered the math Ph.D. program at…
Adam Davidson’s New York Times Magazine article, “What Donald Trump Doesn’t Understand About ‘the Deal’,” provides fresh insight into Trump’s deal psychology. If you take the analysis a bit further, you get a window into the Trump presidency. In an ordinary deal (say, a consumer buying a washing machine or teams trading baseball players), there’s some transparency and…
Taylor Huckaby, who posts on the Twitter account of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), just turned honesty into a full-fledged funding debate. I’ll show you what’s special and effective about his tweets. Here’s what Huckaby tweeted in response to a complaint. @shakatron BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much…