If you dig deep enough on anyone you can find scandalous dirt.    The current scandal-obsessed culture is a tool for the unscrupulous to assassinate politicians they dislike.   The public needs to stop giving a fuck about politicians' sex lives and personal lives if they want to have a government that serves the public's interests rather than the interests of those who would invade the privacy of elected officials through unscrupulous or illegal means.  The public needs to get over its primitive taboo morality based on bronze age myths.

The Invisible Pink Unicorn, by definition, is that for which no greater unicorn can be conceived. IPU
exists in the understanding. If IPU exists in the understanding, we
could imagine Her to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore, IPU must exist.

Screw everybody who disables embedding on their youtube videos.   They don't gain anything by doing that -- they just piss people off.

1. What is the action?  You may need some knowledge of science to even understand what the various possiblities for action are.

2. What are the effects of the action?

3. How do those effects relate to the fulfillment/frustration of various value judgements?

4. How do various value judgements relate to each other?   Do they contradict one another in principle, as applied, or not at al?

Science and reason are necessary for all four of those questions.

Instructions for perfect ramen:

1.  Fill pot with 3 inches of water & start heating it.

2.  While waiting for it to boil, open the ramen packets and carefully remove the noodles and sauce packets but do NOT put them in the water yet.

3.  After the water has reached a RAGING boil, put both noodle blocks in at the same time, one on top of the other.    As soon as possible, flip the stack.  Do not reduce heat yet.

4.  As soon as the water reaches a RAGING boil again and the noodle blocks soften, remove the pot from the heat and place it on a different burner.

5. While waiting 15 seconds for it to cool a little bit & finish cooking, open both seasoning packets.  At the end of the 15 seconds, pour both into the water at the same time and stir immediately.

 6. Once the seasoning is dissolved uniformly, let the noodles sit for another 15 seconds to absorb the flavor.

7.  Using a fork to restrain the noodles, pour almost all the liquid down the drain.

8.  Transfer the noodles to a bowl and enjoy!

 

Obvious design goals for pots & pans on a gas stove:

1. Unlike an electric stove, there is very little contact surface, so a large fraction of the energy is transferred in the form of electromagnetic radiaton.   This makes it important to have an outer bottom surface that is nearly black both in visible and infrared wavelengths.   Polished metal mirror finishes on the bottom dramatically reduce efficiency.

2.  The bottom of the pot/pan should be made of a good conductor such as copper or aluminum.   If they can make a multiple-pound solid copper heatsink for $50 then they can do pots and pans like that for a reasonable price also.

3.  However, the outer surface of the upper part of the side of the pot/pan should be fairly well insulated to avoid wasting heat.

4.  The pan shouldn't be too heavy, since you'll be wasting energy heating up the pan itself in addition to the food inside it.

 I got a cute little pan (just large enough to fit one burger) that follows all of these criteria, and it's pretty amazing.   I can set the burner one and a half notches lower and get the same effect as if I was using a larger pan.

 

Frozen Food:

Freezing eliminates the need for preservatives, and preserves food more thoroughly than refrigeration (or worse, sitting out in the aisle at room temperature with everybody touching it), while it is not necessarily the case that a longer period of time elapses between the production of the food and your purchase.   The cold slows down all chemical reactions and preserves the nutritional value of the food without the need for any questionable additives.

 Some people complain that frozen food tastes bad, but most of the real problem is microwaving.  Most frozen food ends up getting microwaved, and microwaves make everything taste shitty.   If you take decent quality frozen vegetables or meats and prepare them properly on a stove instead of a microwave, they'll taste great.

Another quality-reducing factor that freezing itself gets unfairly blamed for is cooking things twice.   Any time something gets cooked before being frozen and then gets cooked again afterwards, it won't taste as good as if it was just frozen raw and cooked once.

And don't even get me started on fozen meals.   They're an abomination and a public health hazard due to all the crap that gets put in them, but that's nothing inherent to freezing food.

The Civ franchise has been going mostly downhill since Civ 2.  It's hard do better than perfection, I know.   Civ 4 was not as bad as Civ 3, but still a bit of a disappointment.   Oddly enough it follows the same ranking as the first 5 star trek movies:  24135.   Here's why I hate Civ 5:

The interface has a lot of unnecessary bloat, yet lacks essential data.   For instance, instead of showing how much XP your warrior has when you select or mouseover your warrior, you first have to select the warrior THEN hover the mouse over his lame portrait to get that data in the tooltip.  Not that I agree with the MMORPGification of strategy game units in the first place, but if we have to do it that way then it would be nice to get a decent interface to display that data.

 The city interface is clunky and lame compared to all prior versions of the game.  It's like twice as many clicks to do whatever you want to do.    You have to enter the city screen and click twice before you can even start modifying worker allocation.   It no longer has hotkeys for inserting things at the beginning or the end of the production queue, and it no longer shows the partial completion status of things in the build queue unless they're currently first in line.   Worst of all, it no longer shows the build status numerically unless you hover the mouse over the stupid graphic.

Splitting the units into "multiple guys" graphically was a bad idea in the first place, but they went even further with it in this version, so that the individual soldiers are tiny and indistinct.

 Clicking on a city doesn't do anything.  You have to click on the huge nametag above it, which by the way, should have the production/growth progress bars horizontal instead of vertical to a.) make them easier to read an b.) waste less space on the oversized part of the tag that isn't actually telling you anything.

In the game setup phase when you are selecting a civ/leader, it shows the names of each civ's special units but no further details.   Unlike civ4, there's no way to click through to the civilopedia descriptions of these special units (I tried every combination of click, shift-click, crtl-click, alt-click, ctrl-shift-click,  etc and none of them did anything except plain old click which just selected the civ and exited out of the menu instead of anything to do with the specific unit icon I was clicking on).

 The voiceover is lame.  The intro cinematic is lame.   The game makes you enter 2-3 times at the end of each turn.  The game in general is typical laggy bloatware that you'd expect from typical modern game developers (who care more about superficial appearances of screenshots than having an interface/gameplay that actually works).

 There were so many little annoying design flaws that I couldn't stand playing the game for very long despite being a big fan of Civ 1, 2 and 4.

I think the kind of reading matter that isn't available on the internet falls into two broad categories:

1.  Copyrighted material, for which the misguided copyright holder is preventing electronic distribution.  This doesn't stop people from getting it from a public library, or scanning it to a PDF and distributing it online unauthorized.

2.  Material that is so uninteresting that no one has bothered to upload it.

I hope to get rid of all my paper books, to save a crapload of space in my apartment.

Also, offline shopping is obsolete except for heavy/perishable groceries, trying on clothes, cars, and furniture.

I've read all the books three times and I'm fairly obsessive about the details.

The Deathly Hallows part 1 movie seemed to rush through things so quickly that people who didn't read the books will have missed many important points -- it ended 2/3 of the way through the final book, leaving only 1/3 for the last movie.    Ron's emo fit seems out of place considering it happens like 5 minutes after they escape the Ministry of Magic, in the movie.

Many important things were left out:

Kreacher's Tale was eviscerated.   Everything that sort of redeemed Kreacher was redacted.   Lupin's visit to Grimmauld Place was redacted.

Goblin's Revenge -- here in the book you learn that Ginny attempted to steal the Sword of Gryffindor from Snape's office, and the punishment was rather lax.  We also learn from Griphook that Snape transferred a fake sword to Gringotts.   This drops keeps Snape's allegiance in doubt despite his killing Dumbledore at the end of the previous movie.

That entire chapter was cut out of the movie.  Now Snape's being a good guy will be a totally random deus ex machina in the last movie, because all attempts to foreshadow it were removed from the first part.

 Radio -- It was funny in the book, but just dull chatter in the movie.  It was associated with the resistance in the book, but just boring in the movie.   The whole idea that they have to dig a little deeper to get the truth rather than listening to the official establishment radio -- gone.   Other watering-down of the subversiveness consisted of cutting out parts about Fudge and Scrimgeour.

Everything about Phineas Nigellus was redacted, so there's no way for H,H,&R to know that Dumbledore used the sword to break the ring, and no way for Snape to find them in the Silver Doe chapter.

An even more crucial point -- the part where Harry asks Griphook to say the real sword is a fake.  That was completely redacted.    If they didn't lead Bellatrix to believe the sword was a fake, then Voldemort would know prematurely what they were up to, and the whole plot would fall apart since they wouldn't have time to plan the Gringotts break-in before Voldemort discovered his missing horcruxes.

Also, going to the Wedding and Godric's Hollow without polyjuice potion was really, really stupid.  That's not the way it happened in the book.

 All references to food during their time in the wilderness were cut.   Hermione going to muggle grocery stores in the invisibility cloak, taking stuff, and leaving some money behind, etc.   All that was cut.   Ron doesn't seem to have any motivation to go emo besides 5 minutes wearing the necklace, in the movie.

Kreacher's Tale and Goblin's Revenge were two of the best parts of the book, so I'm disappointed they got cut out of the movie.

"as well as" -> and (if applicable)

"as well" -> also

"is comprised of" -> comprises

"was comprised of" -> comprised

"incentivize" -> incent

"quotation" (when referring to a particular sequence of words rather than the abstract concept of quoting people) -> quote

Double the speed and half the ping of cable, hell yeah.

But the system for checking availability sucks.   It's designed around the premise that somebody moves into a particular apartment FIRST, and then settles for whatever internet is available there, rather than pre-screening apartments about their internet availability before signing a lease.   Consequently they make it a pain to check the status of many different addresses.  There should be a map.  Or they shoud at least put the address input all in one box so I can just copy/paste instead of splitting it up into 5 boxes.   The availability is pretty rare so I have to cast a pretty wide net -- I've already checked like 20 places.   But I know some parts of LA have FIOS availability.

There is a map, but it's not from verizon.  It's from users of dslreports.com, and fairly low-resolution due to the sparseness of the reports:  http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

Why wouldn't verizon just expose to the public whatever internal map they're using to answer yes or no to queries about individual addresses?

Disposable razors need to be made with wider spacing between the blades so that hairs don't get stuck between the blades.  Right now the lifetime of a disposable razor is determined by the amount of time it takes for the spaces between the blades to get irreversably clogged up with hairs (less than one complete shave), rather than the amount of time it takes to dull the blades.   Also, they seem to deliberately design the plastic part of the razor to deflect attempts at running water directly backwards through the blades, in order to prevent you from unclogging them.

Because of these annoyances, I just use an old fashioned single-bladed safety razor, which can be easily cleaned and unclogged.   The blades come in packages of 200 for like $20.

...is magnificent.   That is all.   Google it, download it, and listen.   I really appreciate it, regardless of whether I agree with it.

If I'm standing in line at a store and someone is talking on their cell phone, I don't mind.   It's no more annoying or distracting than if they were talking to another person who was physically there.    This whole sort of nascent taboo is silly and baseless.

I suppose the only way it would make a difference whether the other is physically there or not is if one would rather hear two sides of the conversation instead of one side, because one enjoys spying on strangers' conversations.

string file2str(string filename)
{
   int length;
   char * buffer;

   ifstream is;
   is.open (filename.c_str(), ios::binary );

   // get length of file:
   is.seekg (0, ios::end);
   length = is.tellg();
   is.seekg (0, ios::beg);

   // allocate memory:
   buffer = new char [length];
 
   // read data as a block:
   is.read (buffer,length);
   
   is.close();
   string retval(buffer,length);  // null characters have no effect  
   return retval;
}

 

Nine times out of ten, reading the whole file into memory at once and then parsing it with a stringstream is over 5-10 times faster than doing the reading and parsing at the same time with an ifstream, because the ifstream ends up sending a lot of little read requests to the hard drive instead of one long sequential read, and the one long sequential read is going to be a lot faster on almost every machine.

Typical mouse proficiency:  accuracy to 1/100 of the screen along each axis, 2 clicks per second

 lg(100*100)*2 =  26.5 bits/sec

 

Typical keyboard proficiency: 60wpm, 5 keypresses/sec out of ~40 possibilities near the home row.

lg(40)*5 =  26.6 bits/sec

 

keyboard (one-handed): ~3 keypresses/sec

lg(40)*3 = 16 bits/sec

 

combined mouse & keyboard:  42.6 bits/sec

 

Cell phone keypad:  12ish buttons, 5 keypresses/sec

 lg(12)*5 = 17 bits/sec

 

Back when sugar was expensive and automobiles didn't exist, only the upper class could get fat.

Deficit spending = selling government bonds = distracting investors from private investment targets.   Dollar for dollar, this has to have a vastly more deleterious effect on private investment than balancing the budget by raising income taxes on the rich.

I've got nothing against genetically modified crops per se, but "intellectial property" nazis like Monsanto can go die in a fire.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc._v._Schmeiser

Civilization V

Starcraft II

Cataclysm

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie, Part 1

 zomg zomg zomg!