OTA update to Android 5.1 failed & wouldn’t boot

OTA update to Android 5.1 failed & wouldn't boot. It stayed on the spinning circles for hours. I tried clearing the cache, pulling the battery, removing the SD card, even a factory reset. If it had been a carrier phone or an actual Nexus device, I could have flashed a new system, but it's a Galaxy S4 Google Play Edition, so nobody wants responsibility for it. I finally bit the bullet and installed CyanogenMod. The phone works fine again, but the UI feels like going back in time a couple of years.

Interesting (and useful) perspective

Don’t Delay Exploring the Science of Your Child’s Procrastination

Research is showing that procras­tination isn’t a defect in ability or personality but rather a disconnect between the demands of a task and what motivates the procrastinator.

Interesting (and useful) perspective:

Procrastinators are intrinsically and not ex­trinsically motivated, meaning that neither tempting them with rewards nor warning them the sky will fall is likely to up their motivation to the threshold of action. Instead, the procrastinator has to want to do something.

“One study subject took twenty minutes of staring at a Windows 3.1 desktop before…

https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-windows-start-button-2015-7

“One study subject took twenty minutes of staring at a Windows 3.1 desktop before being able to open a text editing program…. “He was literally a rocket scientist,” Oran says. “And even he couldn't figure out Windows.”” (via Slashdot)

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Next time you hear someone complain about how a woman speaks, think about the…

The war on female voices is just another way of telling women to shut up

Next time you hear someone complain about how a woman speaks, think about the context for a moment. “We also know that the relentless attacks on women’s voices—particularly vocal fry—are sexist for one very simple reason: Men are rewarded for using the same vocal tools. ”

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Very thorough, worth reading if you have the time. TL;DR: GMOs are not the…

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/are_gmos_safe_yes_the_case_against_them_is_full_of_fraud_lies_and_errors.html

Very thorough, worth reading if you have the time.

TL;DR: GMOs are not the problem. Pesticide/herbicide overuse, monoculture, and predatory business tactics are the problem, but they're neither unique to GMOs nor intrinsic to them.

Misleading rhetoric leads people to “fix” things that aren't problems in ways that can ignore the *real* problems — or even make them worse.

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