[syndicated profile] forget_what_did_feed

Posted by John Finnemore



(a) …I’m sorry, what? This is your ‘basic posture’? When a koala wants a rest - which, let’s remember, is practically always - this is the go-to? It’s a mess, koalas. I’m sorry to be harsh, but pull yourself together. First off, neither of your forepaws are holding on to the tree. One’s tucked clear behind it, and heaven knows what the other’s up to. Granted, both rear paws are hanging on for dear life, but then they would have to be. You’re quadrupeds, koalas. Get it together. 

b) I mean, marginally better, I suppose. At least you’ve got one paw each side. But you look like you’re having an existential crisis. And you’re still not holding the damn tree.

c) What are you looking at? You’re a koala. Whatever it is, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a potential prey, then it’s a leaf, it’s not going anywhere. If it’s a potential predator, it’ll eat you if it wants to. Neither flight nor flight are realistic options for you, koalas, you might as well relax. Some practicality points, I suppose, for actually using your front paws for once. But… what exactly is going on with your back half? I’m not even sure what I’m looking at there. To be fair, this might not be your fault so much as your illustrator, who I assume is Smith (1979). You might want to have a word with Smith, Koalas. I’m beginning to suspect they’re not on your side. 

d) Wow. Ok. I mean, obviously it’s ludicrous, but… I can’t deny it’s got flair. This koala is inevitably going to fall out of their tree in the next twenty to forty seconds, but right now they’re on the top of the world looking down on creation, and I haven’t the heart to criticise. Go for it. 

e) Ok, that’s surprisingly intense. This is your normal ground posture, koalas? Really? The ‘furious coffee table’? Well, it’s stable, for once. But I reckon you could take the attitude down three or four notches. Once again, remember what you are. You’re koalas. No-one is going to mistake you for Robert de Niro. 

f) Yes! This! This one! This is sitting, koalas. This is what it looks like. You look stable, you look symmetrical, you look almost half way to being a normal sensible animal. Stick with this one all week long, with perhaps a session of e) for Saturday night, and d) for Sunday morning. 

g) What’s this, koala stealth mode? Are you stalking an antelope? Get up, koalas, you look ridiculous. And what have you done to your ears? 

h) You’re going to roll away, koalas. That’s what’s going to happen here. One breath of wind, and you are quite simply going to roll away.

Why does Edinburgh Council hate cars?

May. 31st, 2025 07:53 pm
andrewducker: (lady face)
[personal profile] andrewducker
I occasionally see people complaining that Edinburgh Council hate cars. And, to be fair, I suspect that some of the council members do dislike them (The Green Party are not known for being big car fans). But the Green Party don't run the council (it's currently Labour supported by the Tories and Lib Dems - but their policies about cars vs buses are very similar to the SNP administration), so why is it that people think the council as a whole hate cars?

It's because the council has very little choice.

In a very rural area cars make total economic sense and buses make very little. There aren't enough people travelling between any two points at a given time to make it worth running buses that often, so buses either don't exist, or only connect larger areas rarely. And because they don't run that often, you can't just wander out and leap on to one to get where you need to. So you pretty much *have* to have a car.

Once you more urban you have a situation where buses are running regularly on key routes, so if you live on them then you'll be able to rely on a bus to get too/from work/school. And if you're doing that enough that you're paying for a bus pass, or that you're able to get to most of the places you want then a chunk of people don't need cars any more.

And then, as you get even more urban, you reach a key point where there are *lots* of buses. And to manage the concentration of people in the city you run out of space on the roads, at least at key parts of the day. You now have traffic jams at rush hour. And that's because you have vehicles that are 4.5m long that are carrying one person and other vehicles that are three times that length that are carrying 100 people. If you want to keep those 100 people moving then one of the most efficient ways of doing it is to get the incredibly wasteful vehicles carrying only 1 person out of the way.

Now, this is problematic. If you do it before you have decent bus routes set up for people to switch to then there will be a lot of resistance. You clearly need to hit a critical point to make it doable. And obviously you need some exceptions. But *something* like it is inevitable as people get more concentrated together. You simply cannot fit everyone in the roads if they are using cars, you need something more compact than that.

Milestones of a sort

May. 31st, 2025 04:48 pm
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I did my split squats today and didn't hate them!

Split squats always get a groan when our trainer tells us to do them, no one likes them, but I've found them a particular trial during ankle recovery. They've so good for me that lunges (which are similar) were a formal part of my physiotherapy. But that also meant they were hard, no fun, and not terribly rewarding!

I've always been fortunate that my recovery hasn't featured a lot of pain, but that almost made it more difficult to monitor, and cope with, the intense weakness in that ankle (and the knock-on effects, like my already-atrocious balance somehow got (and remains) even worse?!).

Feeling okay until my leg just didn't hold me up properly can be unsettling!

I've patiently stuck with it, doing regular bodyweight lunges in circuits when other people are doing walking lunges with the biggest dumbbells available to us there (not very big, but still!) and having to tuck myself into the squat cage for split squats at lift club so I could hang on to the bars to keep my balance.

And now I can do (very slow, increasingly wobbly) walking lunges, and I can do split squats without hanging on to anything -- except a little kettlebell! And I might have to go up to the second-smallest size of kettlebell next time actually, I was thinking today.

It's nice to feel like I'm at about the level where I would have been starting if I hadn't broken my ankle almost immediately into taking up exercise as a hobby. I mean yes it'd be nice if it hadn't taken me a year and a half to get that far, but as with so many of the other changes in my body in the past year and a half, I try not to get caught up in what-ifs and wistful regret, and I think I am doing okay at that.

Not as it was [early music, MA]

May. 31st, 2025 12:23 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Back in 2013, I winnowed down the entire listings of Boston Early Music Festival events, official and fringe, to a curated concentrate of just concerts and other events featuring music from before 1600 AD. There were about 35 of them.

The 2025 BEMF is just nine days out and the Fringe Concerts listings updated today has a total of fewer than 30 listings.

tiny delight

May. 30th, 2025 11:52 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett

Yesterday, on the drive, we found the greater part of a small light blue eggshell. (Dunnock? Starling?)

We have also, with the rain, been seeing (and relocating) lots of gastropods, so I suggested we move the eggshell into gastropod territory.

Checked back this morning, and while the blue is mostly intact the inside surface has been very clearly significantly monched. V v pleased to have provided delicious snack and also by CREATURES in general :-)

utahraptor has lost all control

May. 30th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] dinosaur_comics_feed
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May 30th, 2025next

May 30th, 2025: This comic was inspired by me having ice cream in a snowstorm, and I must tell you: IT'S GREAT. I've never felt so free, or so becreamed.

– Ryan

[syndicated profile] bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

There’s a new cybersecurity awareness campaign: Take9. The idea is that people—you, me, everyone—should just pause for nine seconds and think more about the link they are planning to click on, the file they are planning to download, or whatever it is they are planning to share.

There’s a website—of course—and a video, well-produced and scary. But the campaign won’t do much to improve cybersecurity. The advice isn’t reasonable, it won’t make either individuals or nations appreciably safer, and it deflects blame from the real causes of our cyberspace insecurities.

First, the advice is not realistic. A nine-second pause is an eternity in something as routine as using your computer or phone. Try it; use a timer. Then think about how many links you click on and how many things you forward or reply to. Are we pausing for nine seconds after every text message? Every Slack ping? Does the clock reset if someone replies midpause? What about browsing—do we pause before clicking each link, or after every page loads? The logistics quickly become impossible. I doubt they tested the idea on actual users.

Second, it largely won’t help. The industry should know because we tried it a decade ago. “Stop. Think. Connect.” was an awareness campaign from 2016, by the Department of Homeland Security—this was before CISA—and the National Cybersecurity Alliance. The message was basically the same: Stop and think before doing anything online. It didn’t work then, either.

Take9’s website says, “Science says: In stressful situations, wait 10 seconds before responding.” The problem with that is that clicking on a link is not a stressful situation. It’s normal, one that happens hundreds of times a day. Maybe you can train a person to count to 10 before punching someone in a bar but not before opening an attachment.

And there is no basis in science for it. It’s a folk belief, all over the Internet but with no actual research behind it—like the five-second rule when you drop food on the floor. In emotionally charged contexts, most people are already overwhelmed, cognitively taxed, and not functioning in a space where rational interruption works as neatly as this advice suggests.

Pausing Adds Little

Pauses help us break habits. If we are clicking, sharing, linking, downloading, and connecting out of habit, a pause to break that habit works. But the problem here isn’t habit alone. The problem is that people aren’t able to differentiate between something legitimate and an attack.

The Take9 website says that nine seconds is “time enough to make a better decision,” but there’s no use telling people to stop and think if they don’t know what to think about after they’ve stopped. Pause for nine seconds and… do what? Take9 offers no guidance. It presumes people have the cognitive tools to understand the myriad potential attacks and figure out which one of the thousands of Internet actions they take is harmful. If people don’t have the right knowledge, pausing for longer—even a minute—will do nothing to add knowledge.

The three-part suspicion, cognition, and automaticity model (SCAM) is one way to think about this. The first is lack of knowledge—not knowing what’s risky and what isn’t. The second is habits: people doing what they always do. And third, using flawed mental shortcuts, like believing PDFs to be safer than Microsoft Word documents, or that mobile devices are safer than computers for opening suspicious emails.

These pathways don’t always occur in isolation; sometimes they happen together or sequentially. They can influence each other or cancel each other out. For example, a lack of knowledge can lead someone to rely on flawed mental shortcuts, while those same shortcuts can reinforce that lack of knowledge. That’s why meaningful behavioral change requires more than just a pause; it needs cognitive scaffolding and system designs that account for these dynamic interactions.

A successful awareness campaign would do more than tell people to pause. It would guide them through a two-step process. First trigger suspicion, motivating them to look more closely. Then, direct their attention by telling them what to look at and how to evaluate it. When both happen, the person is far more likely to make a better decision.

This means that pauses need to be context specific. Think about email readers that embed warnings like “EXTERNAL: This email is from an address outside your organization” or “You have not received an email from this person before.” Those are specifics, and useful. We could imagine an AI plug-in that warns: “This isn’t how Bruce normally writes.” But of course, there’s an arms race in play; the bad guys will use these systems to figure out how to bypass them.

This is all hard. The old cues aren’t there anymore. Current phishing attacks have evolved from those older Nigerian scams filled with grammar mistakes and typos. Text message, voice, or video scams are even harder to detect. There isn’t enough context in a text message for the system to flag. In voice or video, it’s much harder to trigger suspicion without disrupting the ongoing conversation. And all the false positives, when the system flags a legitimate conversation as a potential scam, work against people’s own intuition. People will just start ignoring their own suspicions, just as most people ignore all sorts of warnings that their computer puts in their way.

Even if we do this all well and correctly, we can’t make people immune to social engineering. Recently, both cyberspace activist Cory Doctorow and security researcher Troy Hunt—two people who you’d expect to be excellent scam detectors—got phished. In both cases, it was just the right message at just the right time.

It’s even worse if you’re a large organization. Security isn’t based on the average employee’s ability to detect a malicious email; it’s based on the worst person’s inability—the weakest link. Even if awareness raises the average, it won’t help enough.

Don’t Place Blame Where It Doesn’t Belong

Finally, all of this is bad public policy. The Take9 campaign tells people that they can stop cyberattacks by taking a pause and making a better decision. What’s not said, but certainly implied, is that if they don’t take that pause and don’t make those better decisions, then they’re to blame when the attack occurs.

That’s simply not true, and its blame-the-user message is one of the worst mistakes our industry makes. Stop trying to fix the user. It’s not the user’s fault if they click on a link and it infects their system. It’s not their fault if they plug in a strange USB drive or ignore a warning message that they can’t understand. It’s not even their fault if they get fooled by a look-alike bank website and lose their money. The problem is that we’ve designed these systems to be so insecure that regular, nontechnical people can’t use them with confidence. We’re using security awareness campaigns to cover up bad system design. Or, as security researcher Angela Sasse first said in 1999: “Users are not the enemy.”

We wouldn’t accept that in other parts of our lives. Imagine Take9 in other contexts. Food service: “Before sitting down at a restaurant, take nine seconds: Look in the kitchen, maybe check the temperature of the cooler, or if the cooks’ hands are clean.” Aviation: “Before boarding a plane, take nine seconds: Look at the engine and cockpit, glance at the plane’s maintenance log, ask the pilots if they feel rested.” This is obviously ridiculous advice. The average person doesn’t have the training or expertise to evaluate restaurant or aircraft safety—and we don’t expect them to. We have laws and regulations in place that allow people to eat at a restaurant or board a plane without worry.

But—we get it—the government isn’t going to step in and regulate the Internet. These insecure systems are what we have. Security awareness training, and the blame-the-user mentality that comes with it, are all we have. So if we want meaningful behavioral change, it needs a lot more than just a pause. It needs cognitive scaffolding and system designs that account for all the dynamic interactions that go into a decision to click, download, or share. And that takes real work—more work than just an ad campaign and a slick video.

This essay was written with Arun Vishwanath, and originally appeared in Dark Reading.

Interesting Links for 30-05-2025

May. 30th, 2025 12:00 pm
[syndicated profile] tim_harford_feed

Posted by Tim Harford

The quest for the elusive Giffen good has taken economists to the depths of the Irish potato famine, to the poorest parts of rural China and to the cages of lab rats at Texas A&M University. Now the Giffen good has been spotted at Disney theme parks. But what do Giffen goods really tell us about the way the world economy works?

Giffen goods were first described in Alfred Marshall’s ubiquitous textbook Principles of Economics. Marshall generously gave credit to Robert Giffen, an eminent Victorian who seemed to be on every economic committee imaginable, but of whom one biographer noted, his “not inconsiderable power and prestige appears to be disproportionate to [his] actual contribution to economic science”.

No matter. Thanks to Marshall, Giffen’s idea is now in every economics textbook: that idea is that, in some circumstances, price hikes can increase demand for a product that nobody really loves.

The canonical example is the potato, which was the cheapest source of calories for subsistence farmers in Ireland in the mid-19th century. During the appalling trauma of the great potato famine, the price of those potatoes rose, and the expense crowded out yet more pricey foods such as meat and milk. The Giffen good was a trap: the more expensive the potatoes became, the less ability you had to buy anything other than potatoes.

In the extreme, the Giffen behaviour itself cannot be sustained: things are truly desperate, people consume nothing but potatoes, and so if the price of potatoes continues to rise, they starve.

For a product that is unattractive and yet dominates the household budget, this is a tale that makes theoretical sense, but it is very much a curiosity.

“Only a very clever man would discover that exceptional case,” opined Marshall’s contemporary Frances Edgeworth, “only a very foolish man would take it as the basis of a rule for general practice.”

Economists no longer believe that potatoes were Giffen goods during the great famine, so the quest for the “exceptional case” has continued. In 1990, the economists Raymond Battalio, John Kagel and Carl Kogut persuaded lab rats to drink more bitter quinine water and less sugary root beer by raising the price of the disliked quinine water. (The “price” in this case was the number of times a rat had to push a button to get a drink of the quinine.)

This was classic Giffen good territory, but it is striking how difficult it has been to observe it in humans rather than lab rats. It was not until 2008 that Robert Jensen and Nolan Miller published persuasive evidence that in the poorest parts of Hunan, China, rice was a Giffen good. Jensen and Miller had conducted a randomised trial in which some households received vouchers that reduced the price of rice. (The subsidy varied but was about 10 to 25 per cent of the normal purchase price.) In response, households consumed less rice, not more — the vouchers had increased their purchasing power enough for them to want to buy tastier ingredients. When the experiment ended and the price of rice rose again, these poor households ended up buying more of that costlier rice.

The story, I am pleased to say, does not end there. Last year the economist Garth Heutel published evidence that theme park rides could be Giffen goods. Park visitors didn’t pay cash for each ride — instead, like the lab rats, they paid in terms of the effort required to enjoy each ride.

Heutel argued that within the constraints of a day at a theme park, there was a strictly limited time budget. A visitor might spend a couple of hours queueing for a popular rollercoaster, but just 15 minutes waiting to jump on a carousel. What, then, if the carousel queue time doubles to 30 minutes? In that case, says Heutel, people might actually decide to ride the carousel more often. Like the canonical potato, the carousel was consuming so much of their time budget that they barely had time to ride anything else. Using data from four Disney theme parks in California and Florida, Heutel finds that some theme park rides are indeed Giffen goods.

Gratifying as it is to note the inventiveness of economists, I would suggest that the real lesson of Giffen goods is that strange things can happen when people are backed into a corner. Two years ago, I noted that some of the cheapest foods, such as sliced white bread and no-frills pasta, had been rising in price most swiftly after the pandemic. The point is not that sliced bread is a Giffen good, but that people feel trapped by such price movements. If the price of fancy products soars, people who buy fancy products can always switch to something simpler. But for those who are already buying the most basic stuff, there is nowhere to trade down to.

The financial chaos of the past few weeks has thrown up another intriguing example. The US dollar and US Treasuries have some Giffen-ish qualities. Think of US Treasuries as being the potato of the financial world: while the potato is a no-frills source of calories, Treasuries are a no-frills source of stability.

Normally, when the US economy is thriving, the dollar is strong, and when the US economy is languishing, the dollar is weak — but when the US economy is in real trouble, the dollar often rises again. The reason? If the US is in trouble, everyone is in trouble — and if everyone is in trouble, it’s best to be in the safest place, which is the US dollar. This “dollar smile” pattern is not exactly a Giffen good, but it is reminiscent of the Giffen good’s counterintuitive movements.

One of the disconcerting market movements in the wake of President Trump’s tariff announcement on April 2 was that the dollar and US Treasuries did not rise — they fell. I’m not sure how much Giffen and Marshall can tell us about this — except that the vibes seem unsettling. When the blight truly takes hold, bad things happen. Or perhaps the rollercoaster is a better analogy. The ride is rickety, the passengers are puking, and no — I’m afraid you can’t get off.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 2 May 2025.

Loyal readers might enjoy How To Make The World Add Up.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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Photo cross-post

May. 29th, 2025 11:14 am
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Gideon's nursery had photos taken. I like them.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

[syndicated profile] smbc_comics_feed

Posted by Zach Weinersmith



Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
This is another one of those comics that unfortunately feels like it's about something other than me giggling.


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