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from the kids-ask-'what-is-a-sliderule'? dept.
Ars Technica has a story and a link to the trailer of an upcoming movie, Hidden Figures which is due in theaters on Friday, January 13, 2017.
This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.
Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson, now retired, was a mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. The movie is your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise, including college at the age of 15. She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.
[...] As anyone who has ever watched NASA TV during a Mars landing knows, a spaceship is only as good as its makers. There is intense drama going on behind the scenes during every flight and landing, and that's why Hidden Figures looks like such a great ride. The movie hits theaters on January 13, 2017.
I am struggling to fathom having to perform manual calculations of orbital trajectories all day — with nothing more than paper, pencil, and a slide rule — and knowing that if you make an error, there's a good chance something is going to go BOOM and probably take some lives with it. Gives fresh meaning to the term meeting a deadline.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:01PM
I think your Greasemonkey echo-chamber script should scan for links instead of keywords, since it's a specific story you want to blacklist rather than a topic.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday August 16 2016, @09:38PM
I'm not sure a keyword list will capture it.
Mostly I just want an article-by-article /ignore for my news browsing that doesn't try to be too clever.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday August 16 2016, @10:11PM
Right, but once you've identified a specific story that you don't want to see on other sites EchoChamber.user.js needs to recognize that story between different sites even when the content and headline are different. If you're thinking about matching articles using machine learning, that sounds quite a bit cleverer than seeing if they share a given link or links. Both methods will yield some false results, of course.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:09AM
My apologies. I wasn't being very clear at all. I definitely don't want anything fancy like machine learning. This is sort what I've been throwing around in my head.
- Ban something on Soylent from the echo chamber.
- Then add all article links in TFS (BBC, WaPo, etc) to the echo chamber blacklist along with the specific Soylent article.
- If I'm later browsing the old site out of boredom and one of its articles links to something that's banned (BBC, WaPo, etc) from the echo chamber, that article and all the ones it links to get auto-blacklisted as well. Vice-versa from Slashdot to Soylent.
That could be open to some heuristics since it happens that something will be presented in a clickbait, inflammatory manner on one site and more rationally on the other. 9 times out of 10 it's the old site being inflammatory and Soylent presenting a more well-rounded version of the same thing.
I don't think there's too much danger of the blacklist auto-removing the entire internet from the echo chamber even without heuristics. I'd be relying on the fact that linked articles are rarely repeated in different Soylent articles. Of course, that will need to shake out in testing.
Perhaps I could replace the article on Soylent or the old site with small indication that something is missing, but I probably don't want to know what once I'm confident it's not going to blacklist half of the internet.
Google News is a little different.
- Those specific articles from BBC, WaPo, etc also get disappeared on Google News.
- If I ban something on Google News from the echo chamber, it only gets disappeared on Google News. I'm usually pretty happy just scrolling clear past the entertainment and sports sections.
- It could add some kind of warning, maybe one of these ⚠ to the headline, if something appears here or the old site that links to one of those.
- So at a minimum, I'd need to track the URL and the reason it was banned/source of the ban.
Soylent and the old site are my go-to time-wasters, and I probably should find a better curated aggregator than Google News.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:21AM
Gotcha. I think we're basically on the same page (besides wanting to use the proposed script, but to each their own).