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I'm not sure that's really true. Take, for example, the Harry Potter movies. They were great, but imperfect, and were really well received. But they are still being readapted into a TV series.

According to disclosures: Less than 1% of NPRs budget comes from government grants (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...). Other sources put it maybe as high as 4% (https://www.newsweek.com/where-does-npr-get-its-funding-call...) across all federal, state, and local funding.

The base b here would be base 37.5 :)

A bit off topic, but William Dalrymple's book "The Anarchy" does an excellent job tracking the development of the East India Company from "the king gives you a right to establish trade with India" to the "the purpose of [all of India] is to... increase the wealth of the [EIC shareholders]."

Early in my career, I worked for a company that had one of its five core values as "Maximize shareholder value" and these would get displayed all around the company (as if they were supposed to inspire us). I thought (1) 'I can't believe anyone is actually inspired by that' and (2) 'Well, at least they're honest about it'.

In 1960, we had 16 MLB teams [1]. We currently have 30 [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_in_baseball

2. https://www.espn.com/mlb/standings

> I think to reduce social media to some of the crappy jobs it does serve artificially diminishes what it can be.

I agree completely with this. The article takes two bad parts of social media and assumes that those are the only uses for it. You've mentioned more. There's also keeping connected in a group context with family and friends that are scattered across the globe. I have an active family group in which my family shares pictures of nephews/nieces, vacation, and more - all stuff that helps keep us close when we can't see each other for long periods of time. I have an active friend group with my college roommates that does the same - when one of them discovered that his spouse was having an affair, we could all support him together.

I agree completely with this. I have an Applied Physics Ph.D. and have a similar experience. I think that if you are getting a Ph.D. for a reason other than enjoying the learning and the education, then it doesn't make too much sense. However, if you have a great pleasure in the pursuit of the field and the research in it, then it makes sense to get a Ph.D.

We don't give enough credit these days to education being its own reward.

Me too. If anything STEM is gaining steam.

To be fair, lots of local nightly news shows in America have local restaurant reviews. My parents live outside of Asheville, NC, and their local nightly news on all the broadcast channels carries restaurant reviews and lots of "around town" happenings.

I wish there was more on the different types/uses of social media. Twitter != Facebook != Goodreads != HN and so on. Even within different social media there is varying uses - using FB groups to find affinity groups like Woodworkers or a shared hobby and more is very different than just doom scrolling the news feed. I didn't get through to the actual report (just the linked article), so maybe there is more there.

Agreed. But even RL is often difficult to transfer to other domains of knowledge.

Though I agree that this is an important next challenge (and causality has been the "next challenge" for at least the last 5 years), it's often more easily solved these days with mixing in human expert knowledge to the equation (that is, using ML alongside of human expertise).

> “Lots of distributions give you straight-ish lines on a log-log plot”

I agree. I don't remember the last time I've seen a log-log plot that doesn't look linear. I've never found a lot of use in them for actually illuminating much.

I have a 5 year old who comes up with a new use for a pool noodle every time he's in the pool. A raft, an octopus, blowing water through it, a spy glass,... The simplest toys have seemingly infinite uses.

I assumed it was a reference to the surface area of a sphere - which is 4pir^2. The point would still hold.

Which, in reality, the US did do with manifest destiny... Deciding to get the whole space from sea to shining sea...

JMP was precisely my counterargument to this whole piece. JMP is an excellent data science tool when used correctly and allows for reproducibility. You can even call R from JMP if you need to do something that is easier in R.

Further, as others have commented, exploratory data analysis is much easier in an environment like JMP than it is in R - when you're just playing around with the data and trying to get a sense of it, it's much easier to make quick approximate graphs in a GUI than in a command line.

But that seems like more of a problem with news in general than Facebook - nightly news/news websites include headlines and stories like that - but we shouldn't encourage people to just put their heads in the sand...

"It seems to me that it's not so much that war "is illegal" as "certain countries have declared a monopoly on force and have the means to enforce it.""

In some lines of thought, that's the definition of illegal...

I think this is a key point - too often, data "scientists" are brought in, given lots of tools, paid lots of money, and then told to just count things. And build dashboards that count things.

The data scientists that I have seen that are successful and bring the most value and seem to have the most satisfaction are those that spend time actually doing analysis and provide deep insights into the problems they are looking in to. The answers are the easy part - asking the right question is the difficult part.

When I was in grad school, this is how I traveled each summer with my brother and cousin. We'd pick a country and have our first night (maybe a couple of nights) accommodations picked out and then let the feel of the day guide us. Some of our best times were with random people we'd meet at the hostel and then travel around with for a couple of days before going our own way.

I tend to think that this is a product of the "newness" of technologies. Old technologies - such as paper, pens, flush toilets, etc. - lasted in part because they were robust and not-precarious. We don't remember the technologies that fell by the wayside along the way - they simply didn't last.

I usually wait a week for less biased, more reliable curated news (http://theweek.com/)

Agreed. PowerBI has so much more functionality - and more adding every month. And with the ability to use R to make charts, it has a lot more customizability.