Plagiarism of crossword puzzlesMAR 06

Not to be outdone by the recent New Yorker piece on cheating in bridge, FiveThirtyEight has written about allegations of plagiarism by a prominent crossword puzzle editor. Much like in the pro bridge case, an online repository of games has led to people uncovering inconsistencies in dozens of Timothy Parker's crossword puzzles that would not have been otherwise noticed.

Crossword Plagiarism

There are two types of Parker's puzzle duplications that the database has laid bare: what I'm calling the "shady" and the "shoddy." The shady are puzzles that appeared in Universal or USA Today with themes and theme answers identical to puzzles published earlier and in separate, unrelated publications, most often The New York Times and occasionally the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. In every such case I saw - roughly 100 cases - the theme answers were in identical locations within the grid, and in many cases, the later puzzle also replicated the earlier puzzle's grid and some of its clues.

(via waxy)

  quick links, updated constantly

If the election goes wrong for you in November, here’s how to move to Canada

February 2016 was just ridiculously warm

Teens who know that Einstein and Curie struggled do better in science

The USPS is floating the idea of a virtual PO Box, a flexible address you can update to any physical address

Study: being a good empathetic parent will physically weaken your immune system

A complete history of the Millennium Falcon, from conception to finished product

Worth watching: the last three minutes of this TED talk featuring a swarm of microdrones

The NY Times editorial board: shut down NYC's notorious Rikers Island jail

Obama shares his insights into how he will choose the next Supreme Court justice "in the weeks ahead"

Global sea levels are rising at fastest rate in 28 centuries

There's no quick links archive yet. If you'd like to see 'em all, follow @kottke on Twitter.

Ray Tomlinson, inventor of email, dies at 74MAR 06

Ray Tomlinson, who implemented the first email system on the ARPANET (the Internet's precursor) and decided on the @ symbol for use in email addresses, died on Saturday at the age of 74. From his biography at the Internet Hall of Fame:

Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate, including the way businesses, from huge corporations to tiny mom-and-pop shops, operate and the way millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans. Today, tens of millions of email-enabled devices are in use every day. Email remains the most popular application, with over a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space.

"By the time you read this, I'll be dead"MAR 05

John Hofsess helped eight people die and just before he died late last month at an assisted death facility in Switzerland, he wrote this piece.

I was horrified anew in 1999 when the gifted conductor Georg Tintner, who was dying from a rare form of melanoma, jumped from the balcony of his 11th-floor apartment in Halifax to end his agony. Many Canadians would hear such news, shake their heads, utter a few sympathetic platitudes and move on. But I couldn't just sit back and wring my hands. That year, I went from advocating for assisted suicides to facilitating them. Let's not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die.

(via nextdraft)

The importance of character entrances in moviesMAR 04

Just by watching how characters are introduced in movies, you can learn who's important, what someone is thinking, the film's theme, or a character's flaws.

How to become a sushi chefMAR 04

From a new video series by Eater featuring "culinary-minded individuals who are hard at work perfecting their crafts", sushi chef David Bouhadana visits a sushi apprentice honing her skills in NYC.

The Backyard AstronomerMAR 04

With the homemade telescope in his backyard observatory, amateur astronomer Gary Hug has discovered over 300 asteroids.

Mythbusters for the ImpatientMAR 03

I've pretty much stopped watching science and engineering TV shows because their information density is often so low. Mythbusters is no exception, but this clever YouTube channel helpfully edits the 44-minute episodes down to a svelte and info-packed 2-5 minutes. (via digg)

Visual survey of NYC's disposable coffee cupsMAR 03

Coffee Cups

Gear Patrol collected a number of coffee cups from coffee shops around NYC. Prices for a small cup ranged from $1 to $4.50. I'm guessing the latter was not 4.5 times tastier than the former. (via @mccanner)

Professional bridge has a cheating problemMAR 03

Players in the top ranks of the world's professional bridge organizations have been caught cheating and the evidence is on YouTube.

On deals in which Fisher and Schwartz ended up as declarer and dummy, they cleared away the tray and the board in the usual manner. But when they were defending-meaning that one of them would make the opening lead-they were wildly inconsistent. Sometimes Fisher would remove the tray, and sometimes Schwartz would, and sometimes they would leave it on the table. Furthermore, they placed the duplicate board in a number of different positions -- each of which, it turns out, conveyed a particular meaning. "If Lotan wanted a spade lead, he put the board in the middle and pushed it all the way to the other side," Weinstein said. If he wanted a heart, he put it to the right. Diamond, over here. Club, here. No preference, here."

Here's a video showing what Fisher and Schwartz were doing:

Once you see it, it's obvious they're cheating.

What an odd seeming game when played at the professional level, BTW. Players seated so they can't see their teammates. Information is passed through bidding, but only through signals that everyone is aware of. And some available information you can use and some you can't:

Expert poker players often take advantage of a skill they call table feel: an ability to read the facial expressions and other unconscious "tells" exhibited by their opponents. Bridge players rely on table feel, too, but in bridge not all tells can be exploited legally by all players. If one of my opponents hesitates during the bidding or the play, I'm allowed to draw conclusions from the hesitation -- but if my partner hesitates I'm not. What's more, if I seem to have taken advantage of information that I wasn't authorized to know, my opponents can summon the tournament director and seek an adjusted result for the hand we just played. Principled players do their best to ignore their partner and play at a consistent tempo, in order to avoid exchanging unauthorized information -- and, if they do end up noticing something they shouldn't have noticed, they go out of their way not to exploit it.

As the story goes on to say, there are technological fixes that would curtail the cheating, but would get rid of the actual cards in a card game. Why not get rid of the humans as well and just run games as computer simulations? Again, odd game. (via @pomeranian99)

Trailer for the new Ghostbusters movieMAR 03

Paul Feig is your director; Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones are your Ghostbusters; and NYC is the backdrop. I hope the movie is better than the trailer.

The color thesaurusMAR 03

Color Thesaurus

Color Thesaurus

Designer and author Ingrid Sundberg collects the names of colors and has compiled them into a color thesaurus.

As Time Goes ByMAR 02

Barbara Davatz

In 1982, photographer Barbara Davatz took photographs of 12 pairs of people. In 1988, she photographed them again. Same thing in 1997. And in 2014. A new book, As Time Goes By, collects all those photos in one place.

Their ranks have swelled over the years, with the addition of 14 children and even some grandchildren in the meantime, so the project now covers three generations. Other themes have long since been added to the original one of self-presentation. Without revealing any specific personal information, the series narrate a wide array of changes -- physical, biographical and sartorial -- over time. They tell of separations, of aging and loss, of the growth of families and the inheritance of family traits. But also of current urban society in each period.

See also many other "Passage of Time" photo projects and the Up Series. (via swiss miss)

The sad state of US gun violence, explained in 7 minutesMAR 02

One of the video's main points:

It's not that America has much more crime. It's that crime in the US is much more lethal.

Similar to a sentiment I tweeted out a few months ago:

Easy access to guns turns bad moods, bad politics, bad religion, bad brain chemistry, and bad ideas into murder.

(via @atul_gawande)

First trailer for Finding DoryMAR 02

Hmm. I... Hmm. Up until Wall-E, Finding Nemo was my favorite Pixar film. And...I'm not sure about this. (via trailer town)

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