According to this Really Cheerful Post, Why time appears to speed up with age, time really does seem to pass more quickly the older you are. Thus, from a subjective perspective, half your life is over at age ten.
And by age 50, as the years go by faster and faster, you have experienced 89% of your subjective life-time.
Happy Bastille Day.
I'm apparently the last person in the world to discover this, but nerdcore hip hopper MC Frontalot did an ode to Zork, It Is Pitch Dark
What's Zork, you ask? Well, grasshopper, get Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III (There are common installation instructions). But don't plan to get much else done for a while.
Via Early Days of a Better Nation (Scottish science fiction giant Ken MacLeod)
Amazon.com has a new promotion out to offer free two-day shipping to college students who have a .edu address and can supply the name of their college and their major. (They're also going to market to you incessantly, but that's what filters are for.)
According to the Amazon Student Terms & Conditions:
To sign up for and use Amazon Student, you must (1) have an Amazon.com account, (2) be a college student actively enrolled in at least one course at a college geographically located in one of the 50 United States or the District of Columbia, (3) be able to provide proof of enrollment upon request and (4) have a valid e-mail address that contains the domain suffix .edu. We may accept or refuse membership in our sole discretion. We may ask you to furnish documentation supporting your eligibility. If you do not provide documentation indicating that you meet the eligibility requirements above, you may be required to reimburse us for benefits you received as a result of your Amazon Student membership. The Amazon Student membership is for personal use only and not for the purpose of resale. You may not transfer or assign your Amazon Student membership or the benefits associated with an Amazon Student membership.
Does this offer of a free year of Amazon Prime include law students? Sadly, I have to think that as worded it does not: law students (except those few in a free-standing law school) are in a University, but only the undergraduates are in the “college.”
Join me in calling on Amazon to extend this promotion to graduate and professional students — they need books too!
(Spotted via Lifehacker)
UPDATE — Good news: Commentator Keith reports that when he went to sign up,
The two drop-down menus (one for level and one for field of study) contained explicit options for graduate students, specifically including law students.
So, law students, you're in! (I still have to pay $79/year.)
Guardian, Psychic octopus Paul predicts Spain to beat Holland in World Cup final
The octopus had, we are told, correctly predicted a string of world cup matches. And, indeed, Spain won.
Suppose for the sake of the argument we could satisfy ourselves that the claims about earlier matches are all true and there was no experimenter bias here, no Clever Hans phenomenon. Would one be justified in risking money on the cephalopod's next football/soccer prediction?
Most of the social science I ever learned (not to mention common sense) says no — if there's no underlying theory (and I for one don't believe in psychic octopuses) then it's rash to rely on a correlation this is likely spurious. The argument for “sometimes” holds in some systems there may be correlations between thing you can't see, for example A and B may be correlated because both are caused by C, and if you think that might be the case you might be wise to rely on the correlation even if you can't see the link,
I can't stretch that to the octopus. But it seems some folks made money off it. Will Paul move to Las Vegas?
Update: Octopus Paul is hanging up his spurs retiring.
Cryptome reports Wikileaks Website to Be Abandoned.
There is talk, though, of a new Iceland-based site to be started without the original founder.
Jotwell Blenderlaw