I love this quote from security expert Bruce Schneier: Remember, if it's in the news don't worry about it. The very definition of news is "something that almost never happens." When something is so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that's when you should worry about it. The truth... »
UPDATE: I've now implemented the email features described here. My email is dysfunctional. I keep things in my inbox because I can't afford for them to go out of sight, out of mind -- but then that's exactly what happens. They get buried deeper and deeper in my inbox by all the other... »
How well do you know your friends' political views? According to recent work by Winter Mason, Duncan Watts, and myself, you probably don't know them as well as you think. In particular, we found that when friends disagree on a political issue, they are unaware of that disagreement about 60% of... »
The idea of rot13 is to obscure text, for example, to prevent spoilers. It's not meant to be cryptographically secure but simply to make sure that only people who are sure they want to read something will read it. "It's handy when coordinating by text message when one or both parties are about to get... »
How do you estimate the prevalence of HIV among drug addicts? In a perfect (though somewhat Orwellian) world you'd have a giant list of all drug users, and you'd randomly select a subset of them to test for HIV. Alas, the world is messy, and we're left to less rigorous methods, for example... »
218 of you took our calibration quiz, not counting the 10% of submissions that had to be thrown out for not being complete or giving ranges with the min greater than the max or other sanity check failures. (Here's the raw data.) The bad news is that you're terrible at making 90% confidence... »
