Submissions to the SMTM Mysteries Contest close July 1st! We’ll take a few weeks to look over all entries and share them with the judges, and will start putting out finalists after that.
Disentangling the Dark and Bright Side of Constructs with a Bright and Dark Side — a somewhat in-the-weeds post about factor analysis, but relevant if you’re interested in issues of representation and ontology.
The US is getting its first new nuclear reactor in 40 years
In some cases, symptoms “clinically indistinguishable from schizophrenia” are actually caused by lupus. Probably a good example of how diseases with identical symptoms may not have identical causes / etiologies.
In 2009, Grimes “load[ed] a homemade houseboat with chickens, a sewing machine and 20 pounds of potatoes and (briefly) sail[ed] it down the Mississippi while being tailed by Minneapolis park police” (via @caseydarnell_)
@granawkins on twitter recently hacked together long-time dream project eloeverything.co, a site where you compare two things over and over and pick your favorite, so that all things can be given an ELO rating (the ranking algorithm from chess). There have been more than 500k votes as of this writing. The leaderboard is especially fun.
Simon Sarris: Do children today have useful childhoods?
SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD 
The last link was very interesting, thank you for that. Giving children a sense of purpose and independence is important to me.
LikeLike
As a teacher and parent that last link was hugely powerful to me. I always look down on people with PhDs by default because I think “really, more school? Was that the best use of your time?” Sometimes it is, often it isn’t.
another benefit not covered in the article is that trying to make something useful is Hard. Schoolwork may not be Hard, and it is very important for all children to try to do Hard Things and occasionally fail, in order to build character- because otherwise you eventually hit the wall of the First Hard Thing and have a mental breakdown.
LikeLike