shirgall

...and a second health care worker in Texas is now infected. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/us/ebola-outbreak-texas.html My wife works in an emergency room (as I've said before). We're more than a little bit concerned.

This one is a bombshell. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/14/CIDRAP-Confirms-Ebola-Transmittable-by-Air CIDRAP is warning that surgical facemasks do not prevent transmission of Ebola, and healthcare professionals (HCP) must immediately be outfitted with full-hooded protective gear and powered air-purifying respirators. Found the CIDRAP recommendation. http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/09/commentary-health-workers-need-optimal-respiratory-protection-ebola

I get the same way about schools that teach children to memorize pieces of the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address. While I think there is some value in leaving how to memorize something, such an activity only gives lip service to the meaning of the words they are memorizing by rote. Compare this child's activity to what is essentially the presentation of a research paper (on the Torah of course) at a Bar/Bat Mitzvah. The family and the Rabbi participate in reading the passage, but the person coming of age gives a talk on what it's about.

It's an amusing thought that such a title of nobility would carry any weight with a critical thinker. The line that matters is drawn between valid and invalid arguments.

The treatment of animals depicted is not an argument against eating animals nor for giving them equal rights as sentient, moral people.

It was good work, and I enjoyed it. I ended up leaving in hopes of continuing to grow, but that ended up not working out. Kinda wish I hadn't left.

I worked for IBM, Canonical, and Collabora on improving Linux distributions and enabling hardware.

It's taxed AND subsidized, just enough that so many people get a piece of the action it's become overtly corrupt. http://www.api.org/oil-and-natural-gas-overview/industry-economics/fuel-taxes http://priceofoil.org/2014/07/09/cashing-in-on-all-of-the-above-u-s-fossil-fuel-production-subsidies-under-obama/

I used to use PasswordSafe, but when I needed to share passwords with my wife, it was unwieldy, which is how I ended up with LastPass.

There's a huge difference in the operating mode. Guns are not a disease. Guns are not a health crisis. Not everyone that has a gun becomes a probable death-dealer. (If it was that way the entire country would have been dead years ago.) However, people who catch ebola can quite unwittingly and unwillingly infect others, and have a significant motivation for hiding the possibility of infection until they go somewhere where they can be treated. They aren't using the same arguments at all. The gun control argument usually devolves to a hysterical "what about the children?" The restricted travel argument is generally, "it doesn't get to other continents if you don't take it there." In fact, the arguments for closing the border sound more like the War on Terrorism arguments: "It's better to fight it over there than it is to fight it over here." There's your parallel. ObligatoryRelevance: I've legally carried guns in public for over two decades, been a political party operative (including being a delegate), and I'm married to an Emergency Room nurse.

The way the USA is going China will soon pass it by. It's already easier to start a business in China. China starts less foreign wars. China has a more stable currency. Human rights aren't comparable, but the USA is working to bridge the gap.

I am very much a Linux fan, as it has fed me and my family for 15 years.

http://www.randalolson.com/2014/10/10/what-makes-for-a-stable-marriage/ There are some interesting results from the statistics explored in this research. They don't explore number of previous sexual partners, but they do explore the effects of marrying for looks, wealth, how many people attend the wedding, and more.

It could be worse, there's a difference between "lawful" (explicitly allowed by law), "unlawful" (both not authorized and not forbidden by law), and "illegal" (forbidden by law). At least "violative of any law" only covers illegal activities. One of the sneaky things in so-called "net neutrality" (actually a price fixing scheme for the big providers) is slipping in the language "lawful" into what network traffic is being protected (that is, "regulated"). In general, one has to jump through a few hoops to keep their website from getting slammed by the authorities. The language used is intended to allow moderation to remove illegal material if posted and to prevent a site-wide shutdown.

I didn't make any extraordinary claims. I started with the methodology that claims should be testable. You have now devalued the (family of) systems of belief you are calling "mysticism" by bringing forward your strongest claim to be something about lifespan and urination. If I understand correctly, you are calling my approach dogmatic instead of simple a system for evaluation. The "so what" strawman does not advance your argument. Perhaps I was snarky when I said you should talk to the Amazing Randy, but it's a real test.

Well, yes, there is. I'm not sure about videos on youtube for that sort of thing, but I have been through some training in this regard. Remember that random encounters with the police are always a threat to them until they categorize you as either a victim or a perpetrator. Everything you do to frame the discussion helps, including the standard advice of being respectful. However, there's a tendency, sometimes called "loggherea" where people just start saying too much. If you have a question, think about what it's like to be a business writer sending a memo to the head of the company, a technique called "bottom line up front". Ask your question without a lot of preamble. Answer questions succinctly. If you are nervous or feel out of your depth it's better to be quiet. Avoid speculation. Don't claim to know something you did not see and remember clearly. Above all, remember that under stress a whole bunch of interesting physiological things happen: * adrenaline dump -> makes you focus on threats and ignore other things (often called tunnel vision) * post-dump you may even focus on what others might consider inconsequential and might ignore what others might find to be important * if you don't have a plan to deal with an unknown situation you get distracted trying to figure out what's going on and what to do * often people experience tachypsychia, where time feels like it's in slow motion, or everything happens all at once * conversations with other witnesses can literally change what you remember (memory conformity) * detached reflection on exciting events is really really hard, especially for people with no mindfulness training If you get in a situation, write down what you remember and preserve that documentation. There's nothing wrong with taking notes! Police do play by rules, but those rules are about identifying a victim and a malefactor, gathering what is necessary to charge malefactors with crimes, pursuing them, detaining them, and prosecuting them. Their perspective on the world is often tainted by always dealing with people that are doing something wrong and who are more often threats than not. We can have empathy for this, but we must also protect ourselves from being on the wrong side of that world view.

Kudos to you Joel.

It's when cowardice is an unreasonable fear of a challenge that it becomes bad. There can be unreasonable courage too. The balance is in what you fear and what you don't fear. Try Aristotle:

Yes, this is a good one... however, I would modify this advice: If a crime has been committed against you, talk to the police to establish the active dynamic, that you were the victim and where to get evidence of the crime against you. You would be surprised how important this kind of framing is.

All snark aside, what mystical claims are testable? A $1M reward awaits you from the Amazing Randy. I didn't say I was any kind of mystic. I did point out a number of sciences which make claims based on observations and have methodologies that seem reasonable to test them. I've heard of people testing all sorts of claims and I have done experiments and followed reasoning in a number of sciences. This doesn't make me a mystic. Did I claim to know something I don't know?

Response: "I've talked with each of you about how religion poisons everything, and now you are using it to disturb what could be an enjoyable pleasant dinner conversation. Please don't. You know how I feel about this."

I'm not sure what your criticism is. I said we have to evaluate the claims and methodology of others because we can't check everything. Mathematical and philosophical are actually pretty easy to evaluate, physical, biological, and chemical claims are a little harder but not impossible. Cosmological, meteorological, and evolutionary struggle to find predictions that can be tested, but they certainly try. Mysticism and animism do not have testable claims that are comparable to even that category. My identity is 'software product producer'. I don't know why this invalidates my ability to evaluate claims in other realms.

At some point we have to stand on the shoulders of giants and there's not enough time to relive their lives to verify their experience. We cannot check *everything* so we must develop our critical reasoning skills to evaluate their claims and methodology. Even so, mysticism and animism works for people because it *feels* right, not because it *is* right.

Compared to the mafia's version of this, "the numbers racket" the government takes a far bigger cut of the action than the crooks ever did. And the crooks only did because gambling was illegal.

Modern video games like League of Legends rely on carefully-researched reward systems that make them addictive, and there's a ton of research on that. My favorite is this article in Cracked: http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html If it helps, learn from the tactics the games use and turn your own life into a series of achievements and rewards. One common problem is that people set goals that are seemingly unattainable or too far away. Like the games have daily and weekly quests, set some of those for yourself. Apply to 3 jobs this week. Get 3 people to review your resume. Another tactic is timeboxing. Build yourself a daily schedule and say, "I will spend no more than 3 hours playing League, starting at 7pm" by boxing out the time. Timeboxing is all about spending no more than a specified amount of time on something. This usually meant to stop analysis paralysis or time-wasting meetings, but it can be applied to almost anything. It is clear your gameplay benefitted most from mindfulness. Spend a little time thinking about your strategy. Strategy in this case is more about what you won't do rather than what you will do. Catch yourself and course correct, as it seemed to have produced results. Anything else? Yeah, yell at me because I'm not working on my own job search right now.