shirgall

If coincidences didn't happen we wouldn't have a word for it. Your mind is attuned to finding patterns because that's how you notice tigers in the jungle. What you don't remember is all the ratios and numbers that *don't* make a pattern.

There is a certain amount of investment in time and money in its maintenance that goes up as we age, I can attest.

No, I haven't tried it. I think it was a piece intended to gauge interest in the product. Such things get placed in the gadget media from time to time. I suspect most people that are really interested in this are also interested in journaling, and there has been plenty of study on the effectiveness of that.

Well, Jennifer Saunders is an actress, but it holds:

Oates: http://somethingelsereviews.com/2014/03/25/hall-and-oates-i-cant-go-for-that-isnt-about-what-you-think-its-about-neither-is-maneater/ NYC isn't universal... but there is something about this song that is...

Agreed, and I admit I was being snarky in bringing it to people's attention. No "mood ring" is a substitute to enlightened introspection.

Under Robert's Rules, one of the critical components of an organization deciding on issues is that the entire organization must accept the decision once it is is made. For any organization lacking focus or getting too large this critical aspect is gone. You instead get factionalism and the use of the rules of order to force apparent consent instead of using them to fairly obtain good decisions. At a national scale, probably even at a state or county scale, the process of voting is so undermined that it really doesn't mean much, and most people know this. Voter turnout for presidential elections, for example, never got much greater than 80% in the late 1800s, and more often than not is closer to 50%, and the presidential elections draw more people to the polls than the "off season" elections. People registering their opinion has pretty low moral content. If you have voted any time since 1990 do you feel responsible for the droning of a United States citizen teenager in Yemen, where there was no declared war? You probably hate that it happened, but it didn't really matter how you voted, or even if you voted, did it?

Of course, the side effect is that any collection of this kind of ammo is now considered suspicious, right, even if the ban does not stand? The undercurrent of this latest attack is to cast aspersions where none existed before.

Yes, it is very much the case that deeper learning may involve unlearning other skills. For example, I'm a firearms instructor. One of the things I have to deal with, with boys especially, is getting them to unlearn "Hollywood" shooting. Hollywood does NOT teach good shooting skills and it is even worse when it comes to safety. Even so, everyone without a Y-chromosome deficiency that came to class already "knew" what I was going to teach. Those that came in with no preconceptions were much easier to teach. One of the team's greatest joys was getting a girl scout her rifle or shotgun merit badge faster than the typical boy could do it. (Nowadays girl scouts don't do merit badges, they do "journeys", it's really depressing). Anyway, to head back to the point, mastery comes from knowing what parts of the basics you have to unlearn to get the nuanced greater skill. Mastery comes from something that works well in a perfect position and adapting it to work well in an imperfect position. Mastery comes from knowing what to keep and what to discard to adapt to the situation at hand. The real world is messy. Getting quickly from universals to particulars is the evolutionary leap of the self-knowledgeable.

Interval training, cheat days, mental breaks, "going to the balcony" in a discussion, brainstorming... these are all ways that progress is made by changing up what is being done. Kicking the mind out of a rut in order to solve a problem is even considered heroic in many tales. Don't take it hard when you hit a wall and feel you must do something unconventional to get past it.

This particular song came back as part of Shrek, and I'm sure it was a callback for the mommies in the audience as the original song was from their generation.

In fact, most languages don't require you to write subroutines at all, it's just convenient because code reuse is easier (and harder to mess up) that way.

It is, of course, very difficult, but some of the best writing is when it is clear that honest people have honest differences of opinion and work through that. The ones that are hard to read get preachy and you can kinda tell which person is the author giving a speech to you, the audience. I am no fiction writer, but I am interested in how it goes for you.

It is not enough to say that funded research is bad because it is corporation-y. You need to get some real data, like what Ben Goldacre pulled together for his book Bad Pharma: If you want some good information on trials and how they have been somewhat broken when it comes to drug studies, this book is a good read. Has someone pulled together a systematic survey of cholesterol data yet?

I like the stream of consciousness thing, actually, it worked out well. When I present I hate having a script, I prefer to only have an outline.

It's a trite response to your question, but how many years did those people spend in government school?

Indeed, the economic hit men we sent into South America and other places were hardly capitalists. If anything, we would do anything to prevent communist takeovers by instead creating economic debts to the west which is more like fascism. I invite you to read John Perkins book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man to get some details. http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Economic-Hit-John-Perkins-ebook/dp/B001AFF266

I think the UPB tactic would be to determine the universally-preferable maturity level (and independence level) of a conscious being to be capable of giving consent. From a law perspective "the age of consent" is the dividing line between people that cannot give consent under any circumstances, and those that can (barring other conditions, such as brain damage, temporary incapacitation, or being unconscious). Common law is actually good at ferreting out candidates for universality. It could be, as Rainbow Jamz pointed out, that an additional test concerning manipulation and control could be included... but one should attempt to keep it simple.

Lionel makes some observations on the casual atheism of the American people. I grew up as a casual atheist myself, and got strident only when people tried to convert me as an adult.

And http://www.baenebooks.com/ sells DRM-free books, too.

Your judgement of the value is subjective. So is theirs. But it's better than some dictator setting the value for everything, don't you think? What *we* want is that people pay what *they* want for what they want. If their expectations are wrong, we are free to inform them. But I never expected to share my ebooks with anyone else except my family, and what do you know? Amazon, and O'Reilly, and Pragmatic Programming Press let me do that.

They could do it, but they have competitors that will offer conditions you expect... and they'll lose business. If they instead sold you a hammer for half the cost, on condition that you only use it or return it to them, some people might go for it. But think about it this way. Craftsman used to have a lifetime warranty. Now they don't except for select items. In fact, it's hard to find items with a lifetime warranty at the price Craftsman sells at. Again, there are no solutions, just costs and benefits. It's not ludicrous. It's how they can afford to sell things at that price and make a reasonable profit. If people didn't like it, they wouldn't pay for it. People think they are getting something that's worth more to them than the money they are spending. Don't knock it, just vote with your dollar. Let me add that I buy e-books from O'Reilly and I can't transfer them either, but they give me all the useful file formats and it's DRM free. I like that. I pay for that because I like it.

TED's mission statement begins, "TED is a global community, welcoming people from every discipline and culture who seek a deeper understanding of the world. We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and, ultimately, the world." While this could come across as them believing in wizardry (change the world with words), at least they say they want to be non-partisan and only support peer-reviewed research in their talks. But if you look at the "Brain Trust" that advises them you get a lot of left flavor: http://www.ted.com/about/our-organization/how-ted-works/ted-brain-trust The bias is subtle, but all organizations should be viewed skeptically. They're hardly to the left of CNN or MSNBC.

Both Amazon and Valve did seek out ways to share and lend your library with others to offset the inconvenience of losing the ability to resell. They also offset this inconvenience with (sometimes only slightly) lower prices for digital content than physical. I'm gonna borrow the idea from Stef and say there's no solution, only different approaches with different costs and benefits.