Link Dump 3

• How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty by +Radley Balko: It’s a common and unfortunate misconception among St. Louis County residents, especially those who don’t have an attorney to tell them otherwise. A town can’t put you in jail for lacking the money to pay a fine. But you can be jailed for not appearing in court to tell the judge you can’t pay...Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts.
• What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel by +Matti Friedman: The Western press has become less an observer of this conflict than an actor in it...I want to explore the way Western press coverage is shaped by unique circumstances here in Israel and also by flaws affecting the media beyond the confines of this conflict.
• 3 Improv Comedy Tricks To Supercharge Your Social Life by +John Freund: That decision to pretend I knew what I was doing led to a memorable and hilarious scene involving a family reunion inside a cave (we discovered a ‘lost boy’ who happened to be our cousin left over from the last reunion). And it all happened because I didn’t let my lack of confidence get the better of me. In short, I faked in with confidence. 
• Antonyms for entropy: Some of my favorites are syntropy and ektropy.
• Natural distribution: Assuming you get a certain chance once per day, a twice-in-a-lifetime thing is 1 in 16,000, so your True Love is one in 16,000, not one in a million. 
• The Other Side of Diversity by +Erica Joy: I’ve searched for, and have been disappointed to find that few studies have been done on the psychological effects of being a minority in a mostly homogeneous workplace for an extended period of time. Here I’ll try to highlight how it has affected me, as I grew from a young black lady to a black woman in the predominantly white male tech industry.
• Why I left my $254,895 PM role at Microsoft by +Adam Herscher: I’ll just say… to the child of an immigrant and middle class family, raised of sufficient but not excessive means, I can only describe that number as feeling both grossly obscene while at the same time a bit like: “Well, I’ve made it.” Whereas the things I valued most early on in my career had been achieved, other ambitions in life were slipping further away with each year.
• The Kuleshov Effect: It is a mental phenomenon by which viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.
• Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con's Guide To Prison Weaponry by +Daniel Genis: Every incident I witnessed in prison, except for the melees that we had to break up when I worked in a unit for the mentally ill, was premeditated and done with purpose, however twisted that purpose was. The violence functioned as a tool for preserving order, whether to maintain the hierarchies of prisoners or to reassert the authority of the guards. It was the best form of currency we had.
• Reproducing Wealth Without Money, One 3D Printer At a Time by +Johan Söderberg: The Rep-rap project sets out to provide one piece of the puzzle in a larger peer-to-peer manufacturing infrastructure. With such an infrastructure in place, engineers can bypass fixed capital. It is a roadmap for the “exodus” of engineering practices from wage labour relations and (which is the same thing) from commodity production. The role assigned to “self-replication” in this larger scheme of things, although framed within a conceptual framework of evolutionary laws and technical determinism, testifies to the very opposite, the importance of design choices. The kind of 3D-printer that can reproduce itself (in symbiosis with human beings) is designed to ensure the community’s functional autonomy from corporations and venture capital.