Chris Aldrich

If correct, the hypothesis by Michael Lewis in Against the Rules could have some profound implications into how we view politics and particularly the current President of the United States and why we need accurate, fair, and objective journalism. Trump's fame is making him cry foul more than is necessary, particularly amidst accusations of wrongdoing. In the episode Ref, You Suck! one can see a clear analogy between the NBA and the current political hellscape.

"...he [referring to Larry Byrd, but this could easily be applied to Donald J. Trump] played with certain assumptions about the rules and how they applied to him..."

"The NBA has set out to ref the game more objectively, more accurately, more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their coaches. You want to know why? The more objectivity there is, the less power they have. Objective refs eliminate some of their privilege. The stars can't get the calls anymore just because they're stars, or anyway, not as often. Lebron James and Kevin Durant and Stef Curry and Clay Thompson, they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better than everyone else, they don't need unfairness to win. [...]

I think American life just now has at least one thing in common with basketball. The authority of its referees is under attack. And when you have a weak referee you have a big problem. Because a weak referee is a referee who can be bought or intimidated or just simply ignored. A situation goes from being more or less well referred to more or less not. Then one day you wake up in a world that seems not just unfair but actually sort of rigged. That is, it is incapable of becoming fair because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the power to preserve it. Boom!"

tagged: #Journalism #Feminism #GildedAge

Jeremy, Congratulations on having your own domain! I was poking around Hypothes.is today and was excited to see that you'd moved over from Genius.

I'm impressed that you specifically mention the IndieWebCamp philosophy, which I've also been using for the past couple of years myself.  If you need some help in IndieWeb-ifying your WordPress install, I'd be happy to help, though it's now much, much easier to do than it was even a year ago. Shortly, I'm hoping to finish up a post about the IndieWeb and academia/educational related sites, which might also be helpful, though I'm not sure when that's actually going to be finished.

I'd love nothing more than to have Hypothesis be able to have webmention support so that when people annotate my own pages or reference them across the web, the system would automatically send me a notification of that fact. Are there any coders at Hypothes.is who are also part of the IndieWeb movement who might consider doing this? Is there a way to help suggest this into Hypothes.is's roadmap?

Finally, as a side-note, to help beautify your web presence a bit, you might notice that your photo doesn't show up in the author position in your 2016 theme on single posts.  To fix this, you can (create and) use your WordPress.com username/password to create an account on their sister site Gravatar.com. Uploading your preferred photo on Gravatar and linking it to an email will help to automatically populate your photo in both your site and other wordpress sites across the web. To make it work on your site, just go to your user profile in your wordpress install and use the same email address in your user profile as your gravatar account and the system will port your picture across automatically. If necessary, you can use multiple photos and multiple linked email addresses in your gravatar account to vary your photos.

Congratulations again!

It's interesting to see the evolution of the title put on a story from its publication in a scientific journal to its reportage in a science-based magazine, and then its final form in the broad-based popular press.  

Below is a chronological list of titles that moves from Nature Materials to Quanta Magazine to Wired Magazine and finally ends with TMZ. My hypothesis (or guess, for the TMZ crowd) is that almost everyone could have easily matched the title of the article to the publication. Very telling about the process is that the Wired article is an exact reprint of the Quanta story, the only change was in the title.

Curvature-induced symmetry breaking determines elastic surface patterns

vs.

A Grand Theory of Wrinkles

A collaboration between mechanical engineers and mathematicians has revealed universal rules for how wrinkles form.

vs. 

The Fascinating Math of How Wrinkles Form

vs.

Pruned People -- Guess Who!

Okay, I'll admit that the TMZ article, has nothing to do with the original article, but only because it isn't sensational enough to make their publication - perhaps if Yeezy, The Biebs, or Kim K were invloved. You will notice, however, that the article is in fact genuine and actually appeared on TMZ.

#sciencecommunication