A very insightful post. I would moderate it a little by saying that, judging by my own experience, your descriptions move progressively away from the inescapable to the general. It seems to be invariably true that women do indeed operate according to their own internal, inscrutable, infernal logic, but only mostly true that the family comes with the package, and often true that she will be less financially conservative than you.
Saying that, your cynicism is perhaps a little over-the-top. Most relationships end badly to some extent (in fact, all relationships end in break-up except for the one that ends in death), but that's no more reason to avoid them than egestion is a reason to avoid eating. It satisfies a number of deep, intrinsic needs. Provided you "eat healthily" (as it were), your emotional and mental health will benefit from the nourishment.
Hear hear. This can be applied to most careers and hobbies.
I have a blog devoted principally to sharing my experiences of learning Japanese. I do this because
I enjoy writing and sharing my experiences, and wish to improve my delivery, and having a blog is good motivation to push me to write
I want to be able to look back on my experiences, and my writing, and see how I've come on, and
I want my experiences to be of value to others, however unlikely that might be.
I have all sorts of reasons for writing a blog, and money isn't one of them. If it ever becomes popular, I'll seriously consider making money out of it, but even then I would become concerned about my motivation, because if you're writing for money rather than love, your goal will be to please your readership. It's an acceptable goal if that's what you always intended, but if you were trying to achieve something more tangible then it's likely to dilute the quality of your output.
So I'm always doubtful of people who talk about "professional blogging". If you're doing it to make money in the first place, I will always have concerns about the authenticity of your insight.
For eight years her doctors were unable to diagnose Crohn's Disease? Shit, that's appalling. It's not exactly an obscure condition requiring House MD's staggering intellect, is it? It's been known about for at least a century, and while it's known to be difficult to diagnose with certainty, you'd think someone would have considered it... Still, kudos to her.
behind each one of those is usually some bogus metric that says "we're great!". The road to hell is paved with broken metrics.
Goodharts Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. If you think this is bad in corporations, you should try working in Local Government some time...
I agree, the graphics are amazing. They did raise a question for me, though.
Should games-graphics attempt to simulate reality, or cinematography? Most seriously graphics-heavy developers seem to have a slightly schizophrenic approach to graphical effects - most especially lighting effects - in that they appear to be striving for reality while simulating cinematography.
A lot of lighting effects seem to be inspired by films - lens-flare, for example - which is great for dazzling entertainment, but drops a layer of abstraction into the immersive simulation by reminding you that you're not there. There's an interesting fuzziness around bright reflections & light-sources in the screenshots here which, while impressive and pretty, look more like something from the silver-screen than the real world. It serves to remind you that it isn't real, which seems at odds with the extraordinary lengths they've gone to in attempting to accurately reproduce realistic environments and facial-modelling.
Again, I think it's gorgeous, but I'll reiterate my question: given the continuous advances in games graphics, what should developers be aiming for? Reality, or cinematography?
A rise of 83% would be significant if the growth were arithmetic (a growth entirely based on an 83% increase in each individual's usage, for example), but common sense would suggest that the growth is geometric, since a growing user-base leads to an increased time-commitment for each user. By its very nature, a social-network demands more attention as it grows.
A quick beer-mat calculation suggests that, if an increased user-base of 35% (hardly astounding) led to an increased equivalent per-user time-commitment, that would account for the 83% increase in total population time commitment.
So, not exactly an amazing figure in my opinion. Personally, my time spent on FaceBook and such has dramatically decreased ever since the novelty wore off and I realised it had reached unmanageable proportions. I don't want to spend half my time keeping track of the minutiae of a bunch of distant-old-friends' and friends-of-friends' lives. It's just not worth it.
I don't think you read the article I linked at all.
My opinion is much like that of Winston Churchill's - democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others. Its most important feature is that the ruler can be deposed at the whim of the masses, which means it's the most effective practical system we have to keep our rulers' agendas in the same rough sphere our own collective ideologies.
It sucks, but it's better than the alternatives; that was Clive James' thrust, and it's an insightful & well-reasoned argument to which I wanted to draw attention. How you've corrupted that into "want[ing] to be ruled by kings" is baffling.
Given the original remit of this endeavour - to elicit "suggestions for creating a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government" - and the fact that the top two suggestions appear completely irrelevant to that agenda, if anything the exercise proves to uphold my point. For every intelligent, informed armchair politician, there is a crap-flood of uninterested and fickle people who can't be trusted to regularly make informed choices about the future of their fellow citizen, and would happily serve their own isolated agenda at the expense of everyone else.
I'm trying to fit too much in here. Seriously, read the article. Then explain to me what made you think I was slagging off our current incarnation of democracy, rather than criticising this doomed attempt at further devolution of political decision-making.
All sorts of people wiser and more eloquent than I can help to explain why such decisions should not be left open to public vote. A good recent example is Clive James' commentary on democracy which just finished it's run over on the Beeb.
It comes down to the fact that most people don't really know what's best for society, which is why we grant stints of power to those who (we hope) do. When dealing with complex issues such as law-making and governance, we need to locate and consult suitably educated experts to make these decisions.
I have mod-points, but your PoV is so damnably immature, under-developed and ill-considered that I can't find a mod-category strong or chastising enough to express the uselessness of your post.
Not only are you obviously NAL, your dearth of other posts against this story demonstrate that you're probably not even an adult. Your whole commentary smacks of "someone should fix it to make it right, and then someone should enforce it with an absolute mandate."
Grow up. Study law. Study psychology, or sociology, or philosophy. Study anything that will open your eyes to the human condition and how best to cope with it as a society. Just please, understand that having an opinion is not the same as having something to contribute.
Did you even read the article? It was about the problems of publicly debating complex scientifically contentious issues when even well-educated people don't have the knowledge or patience to properly understand clear but complex debunking arguments. If anything, your ill-informed attempt at dragging it down without even trying to understand the points being made have served to reinforce them.
I agree entirely. This is the system working as it should.
Given that - on a busy day - you can already spend more than an hour getting through customs, passport control and so on, being detained for four hours doesn't sound so exceptional.
I think any sensible, intelligent person in the border-guards' position would have taken about as long to clear this guy. He had no fingerprints, which is cause for some concern and suspicion when this is a requirement for border-entry. Personally, I would have taken all his details, interviewed him to find his explanation - possibly requiring the services of a translator - tracked down a medical or pharmaceutical professional with knowledge of the drug, obtained written confirmation of the side-effects, and finally documented the whole damned thing.
Given that the article was very light on detail about the detention itself, and focussed more on the medical issues around the drug, people have been very quick to rattle their sabres and beat their chests about how dumb and unreasonable the security procedure was.
Four hours sounds more than reasonable in the circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a big boy, I can take it.
That's an advantage, but try getting anyone to believe you... :-)
Yes, a surprisingly high proportion of geeks are into that...
A very insightful post. I would moderate it a little by saying that, judging by my own experience, your descriptions move progressively away from the inescapable to the general. It seems to be invariably true that women do indeed operate according to their own internal, inscrutable, infernal logic, but only mostly true that the family comes with the package, and often true that she will be less financially conservative than you.
Saying that, your cynicism is perhaps a little over-the-top. Most relationships end badly to some extent (in fact, all relationships end in break-up except for the one that ends in death), but that's no more reason to avoid them than egestion is a reason to avoid eating. It satisfies a number of deep, intrinsic needs. Provided you "eat healthily" (as it were), your emotional and mental health will benefit from the nourishment.
But maybe I'm just an old romantic.
Hear hear. This can be applied to most careers and hobbies.
I have a blog devoted principally to sharing my experiences of learning Japanese. I do this because
I have all sorts of reasons for writing a blog, and money isn't one of them. If it ever becomes popular, I'll seriously consider making money out of it, but even then I would become concerned about my motivation, because if you're writing for money rather than love, your goal will be to please your readership. It's an acceptable goal if that's what you always intended, but if you were trying to achieve something more tangible then it's likely to dilute the quality of your output.
So I'm always doubtful of people who talk about "professional blogging". If you're doing it to make money in the first place, I will always have concerns about the authenticity of your insight.
Please don't say "flappy tubes" again.
For eight years her doctors were unable to diagnose Crohn's Disease? Shit, that's appalling. It's not exactly an obscure condition requiring House MD's staggering intellect, is it? It's been known about for at least a century, and while it's known to be difficult to diagnose with certainty, you'd think someone would have considered it...
Still, kudos to her.
Your post - in conjunction with your sig - is a lesson to us all.
(just kidding, I agree with you)
Abunaaaaaiii!!
Yes, you should see how much they spend on the costumes.
It's called Scheme.
behind each one of those is usually some bogus metric that says "we're great!". The road to hell is paved with broken metrics.
Goodharts Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. If you think this is bad in corporations, you should try working in Local Government some time...
Etch-a-sketch was the netbook's logical precursor, now you come to mention it...
Plus, if it's an Acer, shaking it would probably cause it to reboot anyway :-)
Yes, I hated Dreamfall too.
I agree, the graphics are amazing. They did raise a question for me, though.
Should games-graphics attempt to simulate reality, or cinematography? Most seriously graphics-heavy developers seem to have a slightly schizophrenic approach to graphical effects - most especially lighting effects - in that they appear to be striving for reality while simulating cinematography.
A lot of lighting effects seem to be inspired by films - lens-flare, for example - which is great for dazzling entertainment, but drops a layer of abstraction into the immersive simulation by reminding you that you're not there. There's an interesting fuzziness around bright reflections & light-sources in the screenshots here which, while impressive and pretty, look more like something from the silver-screen than the real world. It serves to remind you that it isn't real, which seems at odds with the extraordinary lengths they've gone to in attempting to accurately reproduce realistic environments and facial-modelling.
Again, I think it's gorgeous, but I'll reiterate my question: given the continuous advances in games graphics, what should developers be aiming for? Reality, or cinematography?
A rise of 83% would be significant if the growth were arithmetic (a growth entirely based on an 83% increase in each individual's usage, for example), but common sense would suggest that the growth is geometric, since a growing user-base leads to an increased time-commitment for each user. By its very nature, a social-network demands more attention as it grows.
A quick beer-mat calculation suggests that, if an increased user-base of 35% (hardly astounding) led to an increased equivalent per-user time-commitment, that would account for the 83% increase in total population time commitment.
So, not exactly an amazing figure in my opinion. Personally, my time spent on FaceBook and such has dramatically decreased ever since the novelty wore off and I realised it had reached unmanageable proportions. I don't want to spend half my time keeping track of the minutiae of a bunch of distant-old-friends' and friends-of-friends' lives. It's just not worth it.
I don't think you read the article I linked at all.
My opinion is much like that of Winston Churchill's - democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others. Its most important feature is that the ruler can be deposed at the whim of the masses, which means it's the most effective practical system we have to keep our rulers' agendas in the same rough sphere our own collective ideologies.
It sucks, but it's better than the alternatives; that was Clive James' thrust, and it's an insightful & well-reasoned argument to which I wanted to draw attention. How you've corrupted that into "want[ing] to be ruled by kings" is baffling.
Given the original remit of this endeavour - to elicit "suggestions for creating a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government" - and the fact that the top two suggestions appear completely irrelevant to that agenda, if anything the exercise proves to uphold my point. For every intelligent, informed armchair politician, there is a crap-flood of uninterested and fickle people who can't be trusted to regularly make informed choices about the future of their fellow citizen, and would happily serve their own isolated agenda at the expense of everyone else.
I'm trying to fit too much in here. Seriously, read the article. Then explain to me what made you think I was slagging off our current incarnation of democracy, rather than criticising this doomed attempt at further devolution of political decision-making.
All sorts of people wiser and more eloquent than I can help to explain why such decisions should not be left open to public vote. A good recent example is Clive James' commentary on democracy which just finished it's run over on the Beeb.
It comes down to the fact that most people don't really know what's best for society, which is why we grant stints of power to those who (we hope) do. When dealing with complex issues such as law-making and governance, we need to locate and consult suitably educated experts to make these decisions.
And a film.
It can be a problem.
Hungarian, not Russian. As is the biro. Both of them fall apart if you twist them too hard.
I have mod-points, but your PoV is so damnably immature, under-developed and ill-considered that I can't find a mod-category strong or chastising enough to express the uselessness of your post.
Not only are you obviously NAL, your dearth of other posts against this story demonstrate that you're probably not even an adult. Your whole commentary smacks of "someone should fix it to make it right, and then someone should enforce it with an absolute mandate."
Grow up. Study law. Study psychology, or sociology, or philosophy. Study anything that will open your eyes to the human condition and how best to cope with it as a society. Just please, understand that having an opinion is not the same as having something to contribute.
Joel Veitch said it all.
Oh no. A random encounter.
What?
Did you even read the article? It was about the problems of publicly debating complex scientifically contentious issues when even well-educated people don't have the knowledge or patience to properly understand clear but complex debunking arguments. If anything, your ill-informed attempt at dragging it down without even trying to understand the points being made have served to reinforce them.
I heard it's going to change the world.
Make it "could change the world", pull out some key facts, misspell the title and you've got a story!
kdawson
I agree entirely. This is the system working as it should.
Given that - on a busy day - you can already spend more than an hour getting through customs, passport control and so on, being detained for four hours doesn't sound so exceptional.
I think any sensible, intelligent person in the border-guards' position would have taken about as long to clear this guy. He had no fingerprints, which is cause for some concern and suspicion when this is a requirement for border-entry. Personally, I would have taken all his details, interviewed him to find his explanation - possibly requiring the services of a translator - tracked down a medical or pharmaceutical professional with knowledge of the drug, obtained written confirmation of the side-effects, and finally documented the whole damned thing.
Given that the article was very light on detail about the detention itself, and focussed more on the medical issues around the drug, people have been very quick to rattle their sabres and beat their chests about how dumb and unreasonable the security procedure was.
Four hours sounds more than reasonable in the circumstances.