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A day that will live in e-fame-y.

A CSX train carrying crude oil has derailed and is on fire. At least one house has been burned and it's been reported a railcar fell into the Kanawha River.

What one would think would be an embarassing photo of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg nodding off at the last SOTU speech was laughed off by her and a colleague in a lighthearted moment before an audience at George Washington University in Washington yesterday:

"The audience – for the most part – is awake because they're bobbing up and down all the time and we sit there stone-faced, sober judges," Ginsburg said. "At least I wasn't 100 percent sober because before we went to the State of the Union we had dinner."

Ginsburg said that Justice Anthony Kennedy was the culprit, bringing wine to dinner.

At least.

When specifying timestamps like "Your points expire at 2015-02-09 12:34.". Also specify which timezone you are reffering to. Otherwise it can mean just about ANY timezone. Confusion galore.

Since last night's SuperBowl won't be a story you'll see on SN, I figured if anyone wanted to discuss it I'd start this journal entry.

I don't particularly care for football anymore, beyond watching local high school (my youngest is a senior). In fact I have not seen a single NFL play for the past 2 years except for the SuperBowl. My buddy has a party every year so I go and bring wings.

Last night's game was a great game, even if the finish was kind of an immediate letdown. However, I told my buddies the last minute of that game will be scrutinized very closely for a long time and we may never know if it was dumb luck or pure genius.

Did Belichick not call a time out at w/ 50 seconds to go w/ the intention of luring the Seahawks into making a mistake?

Anyone that has used the login from the main page using the login dialog at the top-right will be silently surprised with the login being done using https but once completed it will switch to http. And thus dump your username association with your IP-address along with the session cookie for all three letter organizations to grab. Or your local hackers to abuse for impersonation.

There's a workaround for this. Simple go to any article from the main page. Click on the [Reply] link right underneath the article text. If you are not logged in ie missing session cookie. A login dialog will be added to your comment reply dialog. Just fill in username and password and click [Preview]. Viola.. logged in!

And don't forget ONE mistake on revealing your username association with IP, browser header etc.. It's there for a eternity or something bad happens to some harddisk racks in a certain location..

Happy SSL login to you! ;-)

The mod changes recently announced by The Mighty Buzzard are another step in the right direction for the somewhat thorny moderation puzzle (What is the best moderation system, anyway?). Overall I've been pleased w/ using SN and try to visit daily, and I have somewhat relegated my visits to /. to every once in a while. Most recently I went to see if any stories related to the social login attack were posted due to its close proximity.

However, I'm still seeing a lot of stories on SN that have low comments. Why? Is the story not interesting to anyone in the SN community? Was everyone just busy that day?

What seems to be missing is the "a guy that works at CERN would chime in" feeling that a larger user base would naturally commence. SN is at, what, 5000-6000 users? The initial registration momentum seems to have tailed off somewhat.

Will a better mod system attract more users?

Seems comment submission in article threads won't work properly. One has to click submit button upto 5 times before it works. Something wrong?

What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology’s oldest debates. In the late 1800s, Francis Galton—founder of the scientific study of intelligence and a cousin of Charles Darwin—analyzed the genealogical records of hundreds of scholars, artists, musicians, and other professionals and found that greatness tends to run in families. For example, he counted more than 20 eminent musicians in the Bach family. (Johann Sebastian was just the most famous.) Galton concluded that experts are “born.” Nearly half a century later, the behaviorist John Watson countered that experts are “made” when he famously guaranteed that he could take any infant at random and “train him to become any type of specialist [he] might select—doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents.”

The experts-are-made view has dominated the discussion in recent decades. To test this idea, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues recruited violinists from an elite Berlin music academy and asked them to estimate the amount of time per week they had devoted to deliberate practice for each year of their musical careers. Based on these findings, Ericsson and colleagues argued that prolonged effort, not innate talent, explained differences between experts and novices. These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” ( http://gladwell.com/outliers/the-10000-hour-rule/ ) in his book Outliers.

However, recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece. In the first study ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17201516 ) to convincingly make this point, the cognitive psychologists Fernand Gobet and Guillermo Campitelli found that chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.

In concrete terms, what this evidence means is that racking up a lot of deliberate practice is no guarantee that you’ll become an expert. Other factors matter.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/09/malcolm_gladwell_s_10_000_hour_rule_for_deliberate_practice_is_wrong_genes.single.html

[Related Abstract]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=(Macnamara+and+Hambrick)