Small Sample-Size Theater

On Dec. 16, more than a year after the initial decision, the appeals court reversed course. The new ruling was opaque and grudging, but Mr. Clemon said he welcomed it, particularly since it is very unusual for a federal appeals court panel simply to change its mind. “I don’t recall it ever happening,” said Mr. Clemon, who graduated from law school in 1968.

Katha Politt talks to God.

I’ve had this browser window open for weeks, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about it. It connects the difficulty of eradicating spam (where falsely labeling something as spam is much worse than accidentally letting one through) to the challenge of screening for very rare things in general, whether you’re screening for diseases or trying to identify terrorists.

I went to college with Kellan. I have a clear recollection from ~1995 of walking into a computer lab and gently making fun of him for learning Perl out of a big book. Turned out, he was about eight months ahead of me, and over the years that gap has somewhat widened.

Marvelous essay, filling in some psychological gaps in my understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’m going to have to buy that book.

Via @rands

Kee Nethery stacks up straw men, and burn them down.

Herein find, from before Portal 2 came out, an art-historical analysis of GlaDOS’ motivations and emotional state. It opens up into a spectacular rabbit hole. Via @lostinfont.

Linda Greenhouse, the world’s best Supreme Court reporter, on the worst Supreme Court decision in years.

Great use of a Flash interface, depicting the before and after restoration of a Velazquez portrait of Philip IV.

The Seahawks are not any garden-variety 7-9 team: they are an incredibly bad 7-9 team.

There are 643 [escalators] in the Moscow Metro. This is a system, like Washington’s, with deep, deep stations, but, unlike in Washington, passengers here are rarely left to hoof it on their own up or down immobilized stairways. It wouldn’t work, because people don’t walk fast enough. At rush hours fully loaded trains run on 90-second intervals; it’s up to the escalators to get the passengers delivered, but just as important, to whisk them away again before they start bunching up and spilling off the platforms and onto the tracks.

90 second intervals! Great story. Via Natalia Luckyanova.

It’s Culture Wednesday! Please enjoy this circuitous analysis through art history and the North Korean edition of Kremlinology to figure out whether a painting depicts the DPRK’s heir apparent or his more popular grandfather, and the meaning of both scenarios. Via Brad Steinbacher.

And somehow I still liked it more than the first one.