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User: Quirkz

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Comments · 2,769

  1. Re:The world is changing. on Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over the Human Brain · · Score: 1

    I remember being assigned 40 pages of reading. Per class. Due in two days. With four classes, that'd be 160 hours of work every 48 hours. Perhaps my texts weren't as dense as Axler's?

  2. Re:Moving from Ebooks to Paper on Online Skim Reading Is Taking Over the Human Brain · · Score: 1

    It helps, though I've also had moments where someone asks me about a word and I can say, "Well, I can give you three sentences that use it in ways I see a lot, but I'm a little fuzzy on the precise definition." Context gets you close, but not always all the way there.

  3. Re:Won't work on Australia May 'Pause' Trades To Tackle High-Frequency Trading · · Score: 1

    Personally, I think that it should be law that if you buy shares in any company (or fund or whatever), you have to hold on to them for a minimum of a week or a month. Shares represent actual physical companies which own factories and employ real people.

    I get scolded if I make changes to my retirement account which result in moving in and out of a stock any time within a three-month window. I rebalanced once and then adjusted some holdings a few weeks later and got a letter about it. Of course I'm sure the fund manager isn't restricted like that, they just didn't want me to do it.

  4. Re:Started something on Ties of the Matrix: An Exercise in Combinatorics · · Score: 1

    I had a very brief moment reading this summary when I thought, "Gee, I didn't know there was mathematical complexity snuck into the Merovingian's ties." Then I thought, "Damn, I wish they'd taken that four hours of thought into the script. They could have doubled the satisfaction value of the story with that effort."

  5. Re:civilizations' bottleneck on Why Are We Made of Matter? · · Score: 1

    No mod points, so I just wanted to say: Well done.

  6. Re:Knowledge on How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion · · Score: 1

    Could be a bunch of things:
    * very soft atheist
    * wishy-washy
    * I just don't know
    * I don't know, so ... whatever people think may be right
    * I don't want to talk about it

    I'm kind of mystified by a spectrum like yours which essentially discards the word atheist, only applicable to those who are being highly illogical or deluding themselves. There ought to be some useful purpose for it.

  7. Re:Internet has given me a faith! on How the Internet Is Taking Away America's Religion · · Score: 1

    Please don't add to the perpetual accusations of hypocrisy that come up every time this is discussed. Faith is a vague word, with many meanings. The faith exercised by the religious is not the "faith" one might put in science, and using the same word for each is confusing at best and often a disingenuous linguistic trick used to try to put the two on the same level. Trusting in the reliability of consistently repeated results is so far removed from "believing without evidence, by definition," it does nothing but harm to use the same word for both.

  8. Re:There is no way to know... on App Developers, It's Time For a Reality Check · · Score: 1

    I think a lot of solo/indie developers would be happy to talk about their failures, if you ask them. It's just not *news* so you won't have any such stories fed to you.

  9. Re:Oh, it's on SyFy? on Wil Wheaton Announces New TV Show · · Score: 1

    ghoti hunter

    I'm genuinely curious if this is meant to be a joke about "fish hunter" or a tyop [sic] of "ghost hunter" or a fiendishly clever "ghost fish hunter"?

  10. Re: genre shows that nerds like us love on Wil Wheaton Announces New TV Show · · Score: 2

    Yeah, I'd actually take a gander at a show that was mocking the ghost shows. I've joked about doing a parody ghost hunter called "Ghost Hunger" for years, but life keeps getting in the way. Those shows, while being ridiculous, have a certain creepy charm, best served with a stiff drink and a pile of sarcasm. Hopefully the other stuff includes "aliens in ancient ruins" shows, too.

    Unrelated to anything I dreamed the other night I met Wil Wheaton (I think because I'd just watched an episode of The Guild that he's in). In my dream I told him how much I enjoyed his work on Silver Spoons and apologized for not immediately recognizing him because "didn't you used to be blond when you were a kid?" Apparently my subconscious thinks he's Rick Schroeder.

  11. Re:No, it's that most English speakers are illiter on Indie Game Jam Show Collapses Due To Interference From "Pepsi Consultant" · · Score: 2

    If it's elegant to down my tools, is it equally cromulent to up yours?

  12. Re:Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra on Indie Game Jam Show Collapses Due To Interference From "Pepsi Consultant" · · Score: 1

    2. "Bad" as in "This boom box is BAD, man!!!"

    Then there was the phase my brother went through as a teenager where all adjectives were sarcastic. "Bad" was among his favorites, but he was using sarcasm on the "good" bad, so that bad had wrapped around and actually meant "bad" again.

  13. Re:Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra on Indie Game Jam Show Collapses Due To Interference From "Pepsi Consultant" · · Score: 1

    I got it eventually but had to read it a couple of times. I think I was already thrown by the headline. The words "Indie Game Jam Show Collapses" - the last three words could be either nouns or verbs, and I couldn't figure out which. I'm short on sleep, though, so it may just be me.

  14. Re:Sleep -1? on Daylight Saving Time Linked To Heart Attacks · · Score: 2

    I've heard it, too. There are references in literature to "the second sleep" which faded away in recent centuries. That second sleep being after people had their first sleep, then spent some time awake in the dark doing whatever, and then went back to bed to finish off the night.

  15. Re:Sleep -1? on Daylight Saving Time Linked To Heart Attacks · · Score: 1

    Left basically on my own for a week during a college spring break I unintentionally fell into this cycle and lived through six 28-hour days over the course of seven actual days. It was a little disorienting, particularly when it came to figuring out when and how to eat at odd hours, but it felt right in a lot of ways. I haven't had many chances to try it since, so I don't know if it was just coincidence or is really my natural cycle. At another point in my life I fell into a fairly comfortable rhythm of going to bed at 2-3 a.m. and getting up around 10 a.m., which is a little more constructive in dealing with the outside world, but unfortunately doesn't match your typical 8-5 job, and didn't last.

  16. Re:Exactly on Don't Help Your Kids With Their Homework · · Score: 1

    That's because all the busywork assignments just had you doing the same thing over and over; they were just rote exercises, and didn't have anything to do with understanding.

    That is not true learning.

    I know I held this opinion during elementary and high school, summed up by the mantra, "You showed me, I got it, why should I keep doing it?" By college I can distinctly remember feeling the opposite. I had a very clear moment of realization in one of my calculus classes where I was doing a series of complicated steps, and while the newest material felt hard, the first several steps seemed trivial, except I could remember them being "hard" just a few weeks before at the beginning of the semester. The only difference was how much time I'd had to practice the methods.

    Maybe the elementary stuff was simple enough I didn't need to practice. Maybe I just resented the exercises but they were actually helping me solidify the skill. I didn't have enough perspective to know which was right as a kid, and now I'm too far removed to be sure, but I'm slightly more inclined to believe I was a snotty kid who thought a little too highly of himself, and despite loathing the repetition it may have actually been (slightly) useful

  17. Re:Joyous upturn of hope! on Bring On the Monsters: Tolkien's Translation of Beowulf To Be Published · · Score: 1

    Another fantasical element was that people were always making predictions. When the Good Guys prophesied something it always came true, right down to the enumeration of Sam's as-yet unborn children. When the Bad Guys prophesied something, it never came true.

    Hmm. If the universe went around proving me wrong at every single turn, I might turn evil, too.

  18. Re:Awesome - excited to read this! on Bring On the Monsters: Tolkien's Translation of Beowulf To Be Published · · Score: 1

    For reasons I haven't properly identified, I really disliked John Gardner's "Grendel." I think it had more to do with the perspective (let's identify with the villain, isn't that interesting?) rather than the writing. I feel conflicted about this opinion because I greatly enjoyed Gardner's book "On Writing." I can't reconcile appreciating his thoughts on the art while not appreciating his actual work.

    13th Warrior is based on a book, isn't it? I want to say it was someone who was pretty trendy a decade or two ago, like Crichton, but I could be mixing up my stories.

  19. Evil twin? on Facebook's Face Identification Project Is Accurate 97.25% of the Time · · Score: 1

    Excellent. When can I use this technology to identify and recruit my evil twin for nefariously comedic purposes?

  20. Re:If you need to ask, then for you the answer is on Ask Slashdot: Can an Old Programmer Learn New Tricks? · · Score: 1

    I'm going to disagree. It's a good discussion, and there are a lot of other people out there wondering roughly the same thing. I'm not a programmer, just a hobbyist, and I've wondered multiple times whether I should spend my limited free time trying to learn more about a language, or more about a framework. The few times I've looked at frameworks, it's seemed like I needed a whole book to figure out what it actually did, and after a few hours I bailed in favor of just focusing on the language and learning how to code what I needed, rather than learning how to use what other people coded that I might be able to make use of.

    But I've *also* wondered many times whether I just wasn't getting it, and if maybe I was spending far too many hours recreating wheels when if I'd spent another five minutes understanding someone else's wheel + cart + horse combination I could be saving myself tons of trouble, and possibly get the benefit of things I wouldn't even think to do on my own.

    I'm very curious about this discussion, and I think I'm getting some useful information out of it. Whether or not it helps the OP, this is definitely a case where he's asking what I was thinking, and I doubt I'm the only one.

  21. Re:Seconded on Ask Slashdot: Can an Old Programmer Learn New Tricks? · · Score: 1

    Another moral might be "have a backup," I think. Now I'm curious, which Mac game are we talking about, and did your friend ever talk to the developer/publisher?

  22. Re:abstract wacky name on Lies Programmers Tell Themselves · · Score: 1

    I actually thought Gentoo *was* a name from Star Wars. I have been corrected.

  23. Re:This job will last a while on Lies Programmers Tell Themselves · · Score: 1

    Been there. Done that. Got five boxes of unused business cards to prove it.

  24. Re:Rest of World on Happy Pi Day · · Score: 1

    I was going to guess it's the third day of whatever month comes after Smarch.

  25. Re:Ticketmaster on Top E-commerce Sites Fail To Protect Users From Stupid Passwords · · Score: 1

    When I first registered online with a credit card company in the 90's, they limited me to 4 characters. I think they were still in a PIN mindset. That got fixed eventually, but not for years.