...and now for some musings about exploration that doesn't involve wanton destruction, murder, theft, &c.

(1)

But as soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking. Who would once have thought that the crossing of the wide ocean was calmer and safer than of the narrow Adriatic Sea, Baltic Sea, or English Channel?

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies—I shall do it for the moon, [and] you Galileo, for Jupiter.

h/t Abel Mendez at UPR; from an open letter from Kepler to Galileo (yes, those) in the Conversation with the Star Messenger, in 1610. Four hundred years later, space is far harder than ever expected, but the stars are now close indeed.

(2)

Flattened polar projection; logarithmic distance scale; systems with potentially habitable exoplanets highlighted in red. Click through for full-size, zoomable image.

(3)

Voting for the IAU's NameExoWorlds competition is open until October 31! Vote for the names of 20 exoplanets here.

I've got an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson today, expressing my concern that an important narrative is missing from the discussions of the AAU sexual assault climate survey. Excerpt:

When male survivors are invisible, they face stigma against seeking help. Though male and female survivors of sexual assault seek out institutional resources at roughly the same (low) rates, male survivors are 60 percent more likely than female survivors to speak to no one—not even a friend—after an assault. (31.2% versus 19.3% for assault by force; 38.1% versus 23.3% for assault by incapacitation.) And so male students make up more than a quarter of silent survivors, in large part because we so rarely acknowledge that they exist at all. (...)

Those numbers, by the way, come from tables 3.1a,c and 3.5a,b in the full report. Below, I've got few thoughts that didn't make it into the published version.

(1)

I've heard (and more or less believed) "one in three women" for longer than I can remember. And so the fact that the report basically confirms that number doesn't mean all that much to me. I suppose if you doubted that number but believe it now, then the report is big news, but otherwise, this isn't a new crisis because we already knew that it was a crisis, and hopefully, were already acting accordingly. Waiting until the evidence is undeniable before updating

You're a lieutenant colonel in a secure bunker buried in a secret location in the USSR. You are the night shift commander of the Soviet missile defense system. It's September 1983, so your government's stated policy is "launch on warning".

You have five warnings on your screen.

Each is tagged as an American Minuteman-III intercontinental ballistic missile, carrying three nuclear warheads of 500 kilotons each. Beyond a glimmer of a doubt, your job is to immediately escalate the matter to missile command. They will launch a counterattack, which might -- just might -- stop the second wave of American missiles before they ravage your homeland.

There are only five missiles, not the hundreds you'd expect. Five missiles will kill millions -- cities -- but not even close to everyone. The Americans could do so much more, and they've only launched five.

But if you don't pick up the phone to Moscow now and there are a hundred more that still can be stopped, and if anyone in your nation survives, you will be court-martialed for treason and sentenced to death.

Do you pick up the phone to Moscow?

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day.

...and we're back! Staring at a critical mass of cool things in my feed today, I decided to dust off this old format, and serve seven things that I think are worth reading, even if I don't have time to write more than a paragraph or so about each.

First, a reminder that my own Reading Feed is still going strong, being the place that I leave links in the top quartile or so of the things I'd read that day. It updates every day or too, so check back whenever you've got time to kill...or see the nifty widget on the upper-right of the Faults homepage for the most recent of them.

The most recent (as of Sept. 18) links, to provide a taste, are to Dylan Matthews on the anti-vax movement and anti-autism bigotry, Bruce Schneier on "The War on the Unexpected", and Alex Tabarrok on how increasing the severity of sentences fails to provide significant deterents to crime (in a way other interventions don't).

First out of the gate: My good friend Mike Yu has an excellent piece on Medium titled "What i really learned this summer":

Whenever somebody asks me what I learned this summer, I usually say, "Probably more than I have the rest of my life combined," which is true. It turns out that what I really got out of my summer was a whole new way of thinking about the world, something that’s applicable to everything from trading to business to product to politics. The premise of this framework is:

Assuming that everybody else is stupid is usually wrong, and always arrogant.

(...)

Coming

(1)

If you haven't heard, the Harvard Class of 2016 elected Program Marshals for commencement (graduation) exercises this week. Basically, it's a popularity contest to determine who gets to sit on stage with Natalie Portman or John Oliver or whoever it is this year. At some point, I guess we'll hear the results.

Of course, in the post-Clark–Mayopoulos era, exactly zero of the campaigns were serious. I think the most serious policy proposal that made it through my spam filter was, verbatim, "P.S. Jon Stewart/John Oliver for Class Day??". But, of course, posters, facebook groups, and an infuriating flood of mass emails have made an appearance nonetheless. One in particular stands out, because I think it represents a lapse in judgment so egregious, the party in question should be lowered in public status.

Karim Pirbay sent two mass emails to the senior class. The first included this gem:

If there is any way I can bribe you for a vote, I’d be happy to work something out… I recently sent some money to the Prince of Nigeria and should be receiving $10 million very soon. Should this not suffice, maybe the few screenshots I preciously saved these past three years cataloguing slightly embarrassing, potentially incriminating Snapchats will compel you to cast your vote this coming Tuesday.

Which was un-funny, and definitely lost my vote, but not the reason that we're talking now. The second was worse:

That's an email, sent from "Drew Faust" (address: kpirbay@college.harvard.edu), on letterhead that says "Harvard Office of the President", and formatted substantially similarly to the typical email sent by, well, Drew

These kids have learned some history
   and they know what warfare used to be:
tanks and guns and soldiers
   that moved across the land—
with strategies and battlelines
   converging at a place in time;
and lives were lost for reasons
   that the world could understand

On the History Channel, war
   can look exactly like before,
when you were certain it was over
   by the ticker tape parade.
They could come back home to safety;
   they could celebrate the victory;
and the landmines were all buried
   ’cross the ocean far away.

But a different kind of war
   has reached our shore,
and you never see it coming anymore.

Daniel Gelernter, CEO of Dittach, has a WSJ op-ed titled "Why I’m Not Looking to Hire Computer-Science Majors":

The thing I look for in a developer is a longtime love of coding -- people who taught themselves to code in high school and still can't get enough of it...

The thing I don't look for in a developer is a degree in computer science. University computer science departments are in miserable shape: 10 years behind in a field that changes every 10 minutes. Computer science departments prepare their students for academic or research careers and spurn jobs that actually pay money. They teach students how to design an operating system, but not how to work with a real, live development team.

There isn't a single course in iPhone or Android development in the computer science departments of Yale or Princeton. Harvard has one, but you can’t make a good developer in one term. So if a college graduate has the coding skills that tech startups need, he most likely learned them on his own, in between problem sets. As one of my developers told me: "The people who were good at the school part of computer science -- just weren’t good developers." My experience in hiring shows exactly that. (...)

Now, full disclosure: I'm a computer science major, and Harvard's course in iPhone development is taught by my current boss. Then again, I've had a longtime love of coding, taught myself to code in high middle school and still can't get enough of it, and so on. But I still have so many things to say about this, which I hope aren't too biased