I gave up on a game of Words with Friends when my random opponent showed himself to be clearly cheating. He played 'INSMST'. I've been completely unable to find evidence for this word's existence anywhere else in the world.
It also strengthened my conviction when I googled the rando's username and found that 70% of the first page of results was that username on lists of people who were banned from various gaming communities for cheating.
If this weren't already +5 Insightful, I'd say "mod parent up".
The high pitched noise emitters were the worst idea ever. They were designed to keep teens from loitering in malls (and apparently called The Mosquito; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito), but the pitch that they transmit at is perceptible by people up to 25.
When I was working in Chicago a couple of years ago, I had to cut through a park in the Loop, and then wait on the street next to that park for a bus, while commuting to work. That park had these high-pitch transmitters and, while not quite painful, they were really obnoxious to my ears. I certainly wasn't loitering in the park, and was a (mostly) productive citizen on my way to work, but because I was in my early 20s I could still hear this awfulness. (the only reference I could find to this emitter is at http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-art-blog/2010/06/giant-eyeball-to-invade-chicago/)
The only nice thing about these high-pitch emitters is that teens eventually caught on and turned them against adults. My younger cousin once used me to test her ringtone, which transmitted at the Mosquito frequency and which she used in class so her teachers couldn't hear her phone when it went off.
one of the critical tactics is hitting the buzzer before you "know" the answer, but when you believe that there is a good chance you'll get it during the few seconds you can take before you have to give it.
I don't know if Watson did this, but it was very evident that Ken Jennings did. At least three times during the first day, he rang in and said "I don't know... uh..." and then gave an answer (which was twice the correct one and once incorrect).
I think there was a mention in Spin State about how, even after humans screwed up the Earth to the point of the surface being uninhabitable, a lot of Palestinians and Israelis moved into tunnels rather than leave the Holy Land.
The problem with artificially good-tasting things isn't some sort of Spartan discipline thing, like you claim. Some people might say "The point of X is Y bad thing, so you should have enough self-control to avoid X, rather than reduce the amount of damage that Y causes", but the real issue is that artificially low-Y X-products mess up your body's perception of the relationship between X and Y.
See this article in Behavioral Neuroscience. The experimenters gave one group of rats glucose and another group saccharine. The rats who ate saccharine gained more weight. They suggest that eating foods which your body predicts have high calories, but that don't actually have high calories, messes up your regulation of energy and the storage of calories as fat. FTFAbstract:
These experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that experiences that reduce the validity of sweet taste as a predictor of the caloric or nutritive consequences of eating may contribute to deficits in the regulation of energy by reducing the ability of sweet-tasting foods that contain calories to evoke physiological responses that underlie tight regulation.
I also read somewhere (though I can't find the source) that eating things that taste high-calorie, but aren't, inhibits your natural association between sweetness and calorie content. So the next time you eat something with real sugar in it, your body is unable to recognize that this (unlike the Sweet 'N' Low you usually eat) will make you gain weight, and you eat more regular sugar than you would have if you always ate real sugar.
The same thing happened to me, but they were always nightmares. If I had a programming assignment due that I hadn't finished, I would dream all night about trying to get it working. Then in the morning I would ignore my alarm because I thought if I could just sleep for a few more minutes I would get it to compile before class.
I've said before that it's easier closing a bank account than a Myspace account.
Closing my bank account involved walking in with my account book and walking out with cash. It took about five minutes.
Closing my Myspace account required three separate Are You Sure You Want To Do This pages before it let me go. Then three months later a friend told me she had added me on Myspace but I never responded. It turns out the account never closed. It just stopped sending me email notifications.
I have this terrible habit of double-clicking on text when I'm reading it, which selects it every couple of seconds. If more people did this maybe we could overload their servers.
In GTA3 Vice City there was one building that didn't have a roof, and had only part of a floor. With the tank and the 'flying cars' cheat, you could fly into the top of this building and out the bottom, which was nothing but open space, and fly around underneath the city. The ground was like a two-way mirror, so you could see up onto the streets and sometimes fly into the buildings from underneath. I spent hours exploring the literal underbelly of Vice City.
What does "source" mean when you say open source? If you mean creative commons or some other open licensing scheme, don't refer to it as "source", which specifically refers to software.
There are plenty of extensions of the phrase "open source" that have nothing to do with software. See Terms based on open source for examples, which include "Open source political campaign", "Open source record label", and "Open source religion".
I realize that technical people are the last people to criticize for being nitpicky about their terms, but, for the rest of the world, language changes. You should be glad that people have picked up on the ethos instead of jumping on them for inaccuracy.
The teachers who ordered us to use script justified it by saying that, once we got out into the real world, everything would have to be in script, lest we appear unprofessional.
Ha. Ha.
At least your teachers' rationale had some lost-lasting significance. My teachers justified it by saying "Once you're in any grade past third, everything will have to be in script."
we had Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, Otter Lake, etc. While educational, we never really thought of them as being so because of how they were designed; they were just plain fun
Maybe it's just me, but Number Munchers was NOT fun.
I was concerned for a while about some sort of dogmatic./ bias against Vista (and MS in general), but seeing all of these comments along the lines of "dumbass guy didn't even run his Windows right" brings back a bit of my faith in the scientific method. Or at least its application around these parts...
Slashdot Mirror
100 += 99
slashdot.c: In function 'comment':
slashdot.c:1: error: lvalue required as left operand of assignment
from the alt text: "No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says."
I gave up on a game of Words with Friends when my random opponent showed himself to be clearly cheating. He played 'INSMST'. I've been completely unable to find evidence for this word's existence anywhere else in the world.
It also strengthened my conviction when I googled the rando's username and found that 70% of the first page of results was that username on lists of people who were banned from various gaming communities for cheating.
If this weren't already +5 Insightful, I'd say "mod parent up".
The high pitched noise emitters were the worst idea ever. They were designed to keep teens from loitering in malls (and apparently called The Mosquito; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito), but the pitch that they transmit at is perceptible by people up to 25.
When I was working in Chicago a couple of years ago, I had to cut through a park in the Loop, and then wait on the street next to that park for a bus, while commuting to work. That park had these high-pitch transmitters and, while not quite painful, they were really obnoxious to my ears. I certainly wasn't loitering in the park, and was a (mostly) productive citizen on my way to work, but because I was in my early 20s I could still hear this awfulness. (the only reference I could find to this emitter is at http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-art-blog/2010/06/giant-eyeball-to-invade-chicago/)
The only nice thing about these high-pitch emitters is that teens eventually caught on and turned them against adults. My younger cousin once used me to test her ringtone, which transmitted at the Mosquito frequency and which she used in class so her teachers couldn't hear her phone when it went off.
XKCD also covered what happens when you DO give her the root password: http://xkcd.com/340/
one of the critical tactics is hitting the buzzer before you "know" the answer, but when you believe that there is a good chance you'll get it during the few seconds you can take before you have to give it.
I don't know if Watson did this, but it was very evident that Ken Jennings did. At least three times during the first day, he rang in and said "I don't know... uh..." and then gave an answer (which was twice the correct one and once incorrect).
I think there was a mention in Spin State about how, even after humans screwed up the Earth to the point of the surface being uninhabitable, a lot of Palestinians and Israelis moved into tunnels rather than leave the Holy Land.
q-bomb?
qunt?
There's a Freegeek in Chicago too.
The problem with artificially good-tasting things isn't some sort of Spartan discipline thing, like you claim. Some people might say "The point of X is Y bad thing, so you should have enough self-control to avoid X, rather than reduce the amount of damage that Y causes", but the real issue is that artificially low-Y X-products mess up your body's perception of the relationship between X and Y.
See this article in Behavioral Neuroscience. The experimenters gave one group of rats glucose and another group saccharine. The rats who ate saccharine gained more weight. They suggest that eating foods which your body predicts have high calories, but that don't actually have high calories, messes up your regulation of energy and the storage of calories as fat. FTFAbstract:
These experiments were designed to test the hypothesis that experiences that reduce the validity of sweet taste as a predictor of the caloric or nutritive consequences of eating may contribute to deficits in the regulation of energy by reducing the ability of sweet-tasting foods that contain calories to evoke physiological responses that underlie tight regulation.
I also read somewhere (though I can't find the source) that eating things that taste high-calorie, but aren't, inhibits your natural association between sweetness and calorie content. So the next time you eat something with real sugar in it, your body is unable to recognize that this (unlike the Sweet 'N' Low you usually eat) will make you gain weight, and you eat more regular sugar than you would have if you always ate real sugar.
The same thing happened to me, but they were always nightmares. If I had a programming assignment due that I hadn't finished, I would dream all night about trying to get it working. Then in the morning I would ignore my alarm because I thought if I could just sleep for a few more minutes I would get it to compile before class.
I've said before that it's easier closing a bank account than a Myspace account.
Closing my bank account involved walking in with my account book and walking out with cash. It took about five minutes.
Closing my Myspace account required three separate Are You Sure You Want To Do This pages before it let me go. Then three months later a friend told me she had added me on Myspace but I never responded. It turns out the account never closed. It just stopped sending me email notifications.
I'm still not sure if it's gone...
Jon, is that you?
... and you'll get a book deal.
I have this terrible habit of double-clicking on text when I'm reading it, which selects it every couple of seconds. If more people did this maybe we could overload their servers.
The plural of mother-in-law IS mothers-in-law
Luckily nobody ever has more than one.
Alternatively, there's The Skeptic's Annotated Book of Mormom.
In GTA3 Vice City there was one building that didn't have a roof, and had only part of a floor. With the tank and the 'flying cars' cheat, you could fly into the top of this building and out the bottom, which was nothing but open space, and fly around underneath the city. The ground was like a two-way mirror, so you could see up onto the streets and sometimes fly into the buildings from underneath. I spent hours exploring the literal underbelly of Vice City.
What does "source" mean when you say open source? If you mean creative commons or some other open licensing scheme, don't refer to it as "source", which specifically refers to software.
There are plenty of extensions of the phrase "open source" that have nothing to do with software. See Terms based on open source for examples, which include "Open source political campaign", "Open source record label", and "Open source religion".
I realize that technical people are the last people to criticize for being nitpicky about their terms, but, for the rest of the world, language changes. You should be glad that people have picked up on the ethos instead of jumping on them for inaccuracy.
The teachers who ordered us to use script justified it by saying that, once we got out into the real world, everything would have to be in script, lest we appear unprofessional.
Ha. Ha.
At least your teachers' rationale had some lost-lasting significance. My teachers justified it by saying "Once you're in any grade past third, everything will have to be in script."
I had less trouble closing my bank account than my MySpace account.
Yeah, well, I heard, motherfucker had like, thirty goddamn dicks.
I noticed that nowhere in there did you wage a war on morning breath OR nudity, nor did any water or soap start a war on your body.
I was concerned for a while about some sort of dogmatic ./ bias against Vista (and MS in general), but seeing all of these comments along the lines of "dumbass guy didn't even run his Windows right" brings back a bit of my faith in the scientific method. Or at least its application around these parts...