*related=http://videosift.com/video/Building-a-primitive-wattle-and-daub-hut-from-scratch

Building a primitive wattle and daub hut from scratch has been added as a related post - related requested by Payback.

Three cheers for the epitome of cool!

And such a cute kitty, too! *chin scratches*

We have 4 rescue dogs and it's always touching to see how happy they can grow to be. The one abused Shepard we have would flinch if you raised your hand to scratch your head, when she first got here. Now 2 years later you have to negotiate with her for a spot on the couch, she is a whole new dog.

Of course not, but alongside iOS updates which tend to slow the phone down I think it's a very intentional 'nudge' to upgrade the phone. With iPhone/iOS being something insane like >70% of Apple's profits (I think it's higher now) they really have to keep this kind of practice up to keep sales growth chugging along.

People will usually second hand the old device if they can. The more shameless practice is with printers that will arbitrarily stop working after a programmed number of prints.

I mean I think it goes without saying that Apple has the capacity to come up with a coating that doesn't scratch. It's not just Apple of course, if you split electronics by durable and regularly replaceable you find things like appliances are more durable that gadgets.

I have been saying for ages that the tendency for the iPhone's coating to scratch, the home button to become dull, and since recently to bend is a purposeful part of the engineering process.

No offense, but this asshole only has himself to blame. You can't expect to drive on the wrong side of the road and get away without a scratch. Yeah, I get that 'everyone else was doing it' but that doesn't make it safe.

If you did high school bio, think about what you covered that has any sort of influence on medicine... =)

Frog or rat dissection? Covered that in Bio 101 in the first year of my Applied Chemistry degree (and yes, you can give a rat a Columbian necktie... . Photosynthesis? Mating?

Yeah, Bio was pretty much introducing you to broad concepts and it's nothing that doesn't get rehashed in the first 6 months of Uni via intro subjects. I think of it more as a way to dip the toe in the pool and see if the subject matter excites you enough to try and turn it in to a career.

eg. At 40 now (and having forgotten my chem degree and gone in to IT as a sys admin after working as a chef, bouncer etc), I could go back to uni barely remembering anything about chemistry and start from scratch and be none the worse for it. The keystones you talk about are literacy and numeracy, that's about it. And they are learned in primary school.

Oh sure, it helps if you can do some higher math, but English lit? Physics? Drama? Almost nothing you do at high school has any real defining affect on most of what you do as an adult. It's more like a sampler platter, and of course a way of grading students (on a curve of course, we can't have people's scores based on their own merit) to distinguish what tertiary studies they should be eligible for.

School should be about igniting curiousity as much as practical skills for life. I did "Home Economics" (ie. cooking/sewing/budgets etc) and typing (on real mechanical typewriters no less) as opposed to wood/metal shop ( I was awful at shop). My home ec teacher was always interested in making different food, so we tried some pretty out there things in grade 8 (~13 years old), and I've always been interested in cooking since. Similarly, learning to touch type has made my life radically simpler, particularly in IT (try writing a 40 page instruction manual hunting and pecking).

Most of the high school grads we see as cadets or trainees are essentially useless and have to be taught from scratch anyway. Most of the codified BS we have these days doesn't prepare kids for life, doesn't encourage critical thinking or creativity, it a self justification to keep schools open.

If it was a tank built out of expensive sofas it would be quite effective. Deploying ablative scratching post armor would solve the problem.
I hear he was originally going to call it the "Pussy Cannon" but people kept getting the wrong ideas.

Even if they screwed up the process, the process is what I love to see. I'm a fan of their art in general but I will eat up anything that shows me how to take raw materials of the earth and transform them into tools, process, and end-result. Very cool to see the slag and ore handling, and know how they constructed everything from scratch.

You clearly have a misconception of the theories being discussed here.
Not being rude or anything

Even the Matrix was a continuously running program, that only crashed & rebooted occasionally.

So don't think it the theory as a videogame with logins and save states..

It's more like.. popping in a dvd and watching until the end.

The big bang is when you pressed play.

So while, I guess, you could pause without anything knowing the simulation was paused..

If you stopped and started, that would create an entire collapse of the universe and another big bang..


So yeah, not World of Warcraft.

More like Cookie Clicker
..with browser cookies disabled..
close the window and you'll have to start from scratch.

Fallout 1 was a technically antiquated VGA (that's right, 640x480, 256 colours) post-apocalyptic turn-based tactical RPG where you could not control you team mates during combat. It was a bit buggy (and so was F2). It was Mad Max, without cars.

And yet.

Fallout is arguably the best world-building work in the history of video games. People are probably going to dispute that, but most other games are built on pre-existing lore or works, or do not have that scope*. Fallout built its world pretty much from scratch, conflating a pre-war 1950's, golden-era, overly-optimistic world-view with the bleak desolation of the nuclear holocaust that ensued (to clarify for those who really know nothing about Fallout: in this universe a nuclear war happened in the 50s**. all that's left is from that era). Beside its content which was plentiful in and of itself, this created a contrasted, yet highly coherent and mature world (and by mature I don't just mean killing friendly NPC, I mean doing Morally Very Bad Things that don't necessarily result in graphic scenes). An open world that you could roam freely, be surprised by a new discovery that you made, and at the same time find these discoveries to fit perfectly with the game's logic. In most large games you just access new areas or are carried by the story, in Fallout you would go "Holy shit I'm in the middle of a city populated by centenarian ghouls!", shortly followed by "ho, of course it's full of ghouls, that's perfectly normal". There are not many games that have this mix of unexpected/logical and dark/humorous content.

Fallout 2 had the same ho-my-God-how-could-they-get-away-with-it VGA engine (so next to zero evolution there), but quadrupled the world map (with a minimum overlap with the one from F1) and brought it fifty or so years forward, expanding the world greatly (there are now rival quasi-city-states, and your action may influence their future), while also building on the first one: some antagonists 'classes' from F1 have now grown their own identity and became NPC, and some characters are still around -- a young character you saved in F1 went back to her settlement, became its leader, built it into a town, and is now in the process of expanding it into a new state...So Fallout 2 is basically the same game, except they did that one important thing: push the game world's boundaries even more. You could never guess what next city would be like, but you could bet it would have some crazy shit in it, and yet somehow still make sense.

That's why many people don't like Fallout 3. It is not in itself a bad game, but comparatively, it's kind of coasting. Also it's too damn easy.

I'm sorry, I got carried away, you were asking if you should play the previous ones? No, you 'should' not. But you could, and for F1 & F2 you would certainly not lose your time if you know what you're getting into. And if you don't, at least go and watch their intro on Youtube, they'll give you the feel of the world.

* Possible contenders in terms of "original video game world": Elder Scrolls (vast, but less original), Deus ex (not as large), Bioshock (same), Final Fantasy (original and vast, but not as complex). Any other idea?
** Technically not the 1950s, but in practice the 50s + a bunch of high tech gizmo.

Adrenaline rushes aren't dangerous if they're done properly. Personally I'm going to make sure my little boy is exposed to plenty of 'scary' things as he grows up so he can learn about risk and how to assess/handle it properly.

I saw a great documentary about this with Danny MacAskill called Daredevils: Life On The Edge. It looked at adrenaline junkies and investigated why they do what they do. At the end of the program there's a really nice choreographed sequence with MacAskill and various others performing tricks as they descend down the step into an underground station in London, and through the station itself.

The sequence was directed by a hollywood stunt specialist who has worked with all the top guys in big blockbuster movies and he said that the stuntmen and women, far from what most people think, are the least likely people in the world to do something risky. There are two parts to this. Firstly they've learned how to be very good at assessing risk. They understand extremely well what makes something safe or risky. They've had a lot of experience and have learned from it.

Secondly they are very highly skilled. What would be very risky for us to do isn't for them because they have the training to perform safely. We only think what they're doing is dangerous because we ourselves would be very likely to be hurt doing it.

If you insulate a kid from risky experiences you deny them the chance to learn in a controlled environment. It's like teaching a kid to cook. If you look after them really well and provide everything they need and cook them fantastic nutritious meals every day until they leave home they'll love you immensely for it. Then they'll move out, try to look after themselves and end up burning the house down with a pan fire or cut the end of their finger off with a knife or shave the skin off their hand with a grater.

Teach a kid how to use a sharp knife safely and how to sharpen it and keep it keen and they'll be safe for the rest of their life. Kids should be able to use sharp knives, under strict supervision of course, to learn the safe way of doing it. They should be doing 'dangerous' things to learn to do them safely. Part of the learning process is probably going to hurt. They may well get a few cuts before they get their knife skills up to scratch, but if they're in a controlled environment these should be small compared to the injuries that happen when someone with no idea about knives forces a blunt one through something tough.

As for adrenaline sports, the more they fall over the better they learn to balance. If this kid goes on a bit of a bigger slide and gets thrown off in the corners it's going to hurt, but it's not going to kill him. He'll find his limits and respect them more.

I'd rather my kid makes his mistakes while I'm still around to clear up the mess

I'm guessing it's a cheap abrasive to scratch those teeth clean.

That creature is literally the itch it cannot scratch.