Links for January 28

(by way of @scienceporn)

The news story of the week is the Greek elections that put the left wing anti-austerity Syriza into power. The Economist has a useful article on the implications for the broader Euro-zone. As Paul Krugman explains, the austerity measures Greece has imposed at the behest of the institutions that bailed it out have been ruinous for the Greek people. The best overall article I’ve read on what happens next is from the New Yorker’s John Cassidy.

SoundCloud has released a new, open source timeseries database and monitoring system called Prometheus. It’s an interesting amalgam of Graphite, Statsd, Nagios, Grafana, LogStash, and probably other things as well. It will be interesting to see if such a comprehensive tool will catch on.

For the record, poor people taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford were not responsible for the housing crisis.

Judging from what I’ve seen on Twitter, the McSweeney’s bit Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated To Gender is resonating for a depressingly large but not unsuprisingly large number of women.

Article I wish someone would write – a think piece on weather forecasting, hype, and cynical reactions to missed forecasts. This blog post by Washington Post weather editor Jason Samenow gets pretty close, just ignore the inflammatory headline.