Interesting Links for 06-07-2017

[andrewducker]

France to make vaccination mandatory from 2018

(tags: vaccination france )

US military intelligence agencies have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows

(tags: usa propaganda tv movies )

2.5% of Americans order their steak Rare. 11.7% like theirs Well Done

(tags: food cooking )

How it works when you compromise with fascists

(tags: politics immigration uk libdem viaElfy )

First tieless question in PMQs? (So, how long until ties die?)

I haven't had to wear a tie in years. I wonder what percentage of men still have to.
(tags: clothing politics uk )

Why you shouldn't be forcing your users to regularly change their passwords

(tags: security passwords advice )

Stella Creasy MP receives death threat from anti-abortion activist telling her 'hopefully she will die like Jo Cox'

(tags: abortion murder politics uk )

Probing psychopathic brains

(tags: psychopath brain psychology neuroscience )

"A List Of Reasons The DWP Stopped Paying My Benefits"

(tags: welfare UK OhForFucksSake )

Of centrists, radicals and liberals

(tags: politics libdem uk )

People With Autism Spectrum Conditions Make More Consistent Decisions, And Are More Conventionally Rational

(tags: psychology autism decisions viaJennieRigg )

Anti-semitism at Chicago Pride

(tags: lgbt usa Jews OhForFucksSake )

This Is Why Not Everyone In Scotland Thinks Free Uni Tuition Is A Great Thing

(tags: university fees scotland inequality )

Hobby Lobby Illegally Imported Cuneiform into the United States from Iraq

(tags: OhForFucksSake archeology theft history Iraq USA )

“Unexpected mutations after CRISPR-Cas9 editing in vivo” are probably not what they seem

(tags: genetics )

When security experts name their dogs...

Someone I work with does this.
(tags: security funny true )

The financing for Luc Besson's new film (Valerian) is fascinating. Hopefully the film is also awesome

(tags: movies france scifi money business )

EU and Japan reach free trade deal

(tags: europe japan trade )

Comments

When security experts name their dogs

[fanf]

Using random secure passwords for account recovery questions is a bad idea because it conflicts with the human factors of how account recovery questions are used - as in

https://twitter.com/theskorm/status/882502285812654080

> I've once said over the phone "garbled text" and they accepted it as "close enough"

My guess (not tested in anger) is that xkcd-style passphrases can reduce this risk, because they can be communicated by voice

https://twitter.com/fanf/status/882592176877834240

> This is a situation where "correct horse battery staple" passphrases are useful!

[lilysea]

France to make vaccination mandatory from 2018

I'm in favour of this, as long as they exempt people with severe egg allergy who can't safely have vaccines that were grown in eggs... (many vaccines are),

or who have other compelling medical reasons for exemption.

[randomdreams]

I have a friend who works at a private university, and is looking at what's going to happen when the public universities in her state go free for in-state, as they've said they're going to. She's in favor of the idea, but is going to personally suffer from the implementation.

[matgb]

2.5% of Americans order their steak Rare. 11.7% like theirs Well Done
Not of Americans. Of customers who ordered steak at a specific chain of US steakhouses.

It's been ahwile since I looked at the numbers but there are quite a few USian vegetarians & vegans y'know ;-)

[skington]

Please don't be That Guy. An article about "do Americans lie about how they want their steak cooked, and does that vary from cut to cut" should not have to say "but of course many people don't eat steak". In the same way that an article about refugees from war-torn Syria should not have to say "but of course many people in Western countries are well-off and haven't been uprooted from their previous lives, losing everything".

[calimac]

As others have pointed out, many steak-eaters regularly order them a shade or two rarer than they actually like, because restaurants reliably over-cook them.

Who is "the leader" in the fascism post? The bit about old white man showed it couldn't be May, so then I thought it was Trump, but then it said he had a knighthood, so I give up.

Giving your pets complex names just annoys the vet. Our cats are named Pippin and Maia, which isn't complex at all, yet it's a bigger hassle taking Maia in, because we're always asked to spell it.

[andrewducker]

That would be Vince Cable, who Andrew is annoyed about, because Vince has made positive statements about limiting immigration.

[calimac]

Oh, leader of the party. The iterative nature of the dialogue led me to think that the sequential changes had actually been put into effect before each subsequent exchange, making me think that it was the leader of a government.

What this is actually about is not compromise, but about the position of the Overton window. It isn't that compromise is bad, it's that some people won't, and the straw-man centrist's flaw is failing to recognize that.

[theandrewhickey]

It's not a straw-man centrist, it's pretty much verbatim reporting of stuff actual centrists in my party have said to me, sadly. I know it reads like a straw man, but I'm not caricaturing their position even slightly :-/

[calimac]

I'd believe that, under at least one, and probably both, of these conditions:

1, that you're leaving out a lot of subtleties and justifications from them, and just boiling it down to the quick summary that irritates you so.

2, that your own comments have been edited and sharpened by l'esprit de l'escalier.

I hold this because I'm an old reader of science fiction, and every time I've seen a political argument in a story where one side is obviously right and the other is just pigheaded or boneheaded, and I know what the real arguments are, that's always what's happened. But the writer is always convinced that he is not caricaturing his opponents even slightly.

[skington]

I don't tend to order steak on those rare occasions when I eat out, apart from when I'm down in London on expenses and I'm in an unadventurous venue like a hotel. Despite explicitly ordering it "bloody", I probably have to send it back half the time. Despite the fact that "bloody" is completely and utterly objective, unlike things like "rare" or "well-done": an unrested bloody steak should bleed when you cut into it. The end.

(Yes, I'm aware it's not actually blood.)

What's weird is when waiters ask "do you mean blue?" when there's a clear distinction, at least in France where I grew up eating meat. Blue means "cold in the middle". Bloody means "warm in the middle". Anything else means "ruined an expensive cut of meat".

(It tickles me pink that the article says "Because it’s cooked slowly and at low temperatures, a rare order of prime rib can come out without the bloodiness that turns off many rare-averse people" when it's the blood that I specifically want.)

[naath]

I don't really like steak much (compared to the price...), but if I eat it I eat it rare. Not much point otherwise. In the UK it comes out overdone, in France I get "really?" (I don't speak French, certainly not convincingly enough that they don't know I'm Brit).

[danieldwilliam]

I often order steak in a new-to-me restaurant that I might be returning too as a way of calibrating the quality of the restaurant.

When security experts name their dogs

[porridgebird]

It's always seemed completely nuts to me, to be able to retrieve or re-set passwords with "security questions" that so many people in my life would know! Especially family members I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw 'em. Yikes.

So yeah. My "first pet" has been a bunch of consonants for years. My mother's maiden name, father's middle name, make/model of my first car, etc. etc. etc., are all real answers, just not correct answers.

[momentsmusicaux]

That Luc Besson article is interesting, but it's really annoying how it keeps saying things like 'The first issue sends them back in time to fight a mad scientist under a flooded, post­apocalyptic Manhattan'.

French BD do not have 'issues', they have 'albums', basically, books. If they are serialized first, it's within a comics magazine, up to about 8 pages at a time, or within another publication such as a newspaper or general magazine, 1 page at a time.

Compromising with Fascists

[xenophanean]

A little unfair on the term compromise. At no point was any compromise reached, as one side didn't budge at all, the "Centrists" were just apologists.

However, I do think it quite neatly describes the effect of the Labour right's efforts to pander to people they would naturally disagree with in the hope that it'd get votes, whilst lambasting Jeremy Corbyn's real left for being 'unrealistic'. Things just shot rightwards. I would like to see them gone, either to the Lib Dems, or just out of politics into the boards of large companies which surely await many of them.