1. Spinner's End

2. The Mirror of Erised

3.  Veritaserum

4. The last 6 chapters of the Prisoner of Azkaban.

5. The Prince's Tale 

6. Christmas on the Closed Ward 

7.  The Centaur and the Sneak

8.  Fight and Flight

9. Beyond The Veil

10. The Heir of Slytherin

Are 90% of them the sort of people who were terrible at English and History in high school?  Did they study math and computer science in college because those were the only subjects where they had any talent?    Did they then become professors and write utter rubbish that people are nevertheless obligated to read if it happens to be relevant to their field?     Do they deliberately substitute verbosity when a terse phrase will suffice, just to appear more pompous and authoritative?    Is there any real subject about which it is not possible to write clearly, concisely, and completely, with a Flesch score above 30?

I've read papers in other subjects, and none of them are as badly written as scholarly articles in Computer Science.

Medicare for all could be financed by raising taxes on the following things:

Tanning Salons

Oil used for deep-frying

Cigarettes

Alcohol

Sugar and High Fructose Corn Syrup

Gasoline  -- especially because it gives people an incentive to WALK when they're going less than 2 miles to a store, instead of driving.

Coal

Natural Gas

Beef

Pork

Junk Food in general

 

These taxes would have the additional effect of dramatically reducing our need for healthcare on average.

1 / 2

Zerg / Protoss

Orcs / Elves

Klingons / Vulcans

shorter life / longer life

more violent / less violent

less logical / more logical

voracious apetite / lack thereof

sweaty / dry

less patient / more patient

more breeding / less breeding

ugly / pretty

vulgar / refined

Less disciplined / more disciplined

blacker / whiter

Were you among the last generation to experience monkey bars in childhood?

Does a single grain of sand in your shoe annoy you so much that you balance on one foot while you take off the other shoe, shake it out, and put it back on?

Do you often move at excessive speeds while doing mundane activities on foot, just for fun?

Can you ride a bike in a perfectly straight line at speeds below half an inch per second?

Can you ride a bike with no hands, while steering it precisely through a winding path or light pedestrian traffic?

Do you get the urge to stretch more than 5 times a day?

Do you make paper airplanes and get annoyed when they're asymmetric by half a millimeter?

Just tax all fossil fuels and distribute the resulting revenue as a dividend to all citizens (to offset the negative externalities of pollution, and the increased cost of fuel).   This is morally justified because the air we breathe belongs to all of us, and anyone who fouls it should have to compensate others.   The tax rate could be adjusted to meet specific targets (like whatever the cap would have been in cap and trade).  This avoids giving big polluters a windfall in free permits, and avoids a all the loopholes in phony offset accounting.

Regardless of HOW you burn coal, you're still releasing roughly the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere per pound of carbon burned.  Carbon Capture and Storage is still a pipe dream wanna-be-boondoggle.  Pressurized caves full of CO2 will inevitably release into the environment over geologic time.    If we ever finish digging up and burning all the fossil fuels on the planet, the climate will be fucked regardless of the speed or manner in which it's done.

Strunk, Elements of Style, chapter 13:

Omit needless words.

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Many expressions in common use violate this principle:

the question as to whether whether (the question whether) there is no doubt but that no doubt (doubtless) used for fuel purposes used for fuel he is a man who he in a hasty manner hastily this is a subject which this subject His story is a strange one. His story is strange.

In especial the expression the fact that should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs.

owing to the fact that since (because) in spite of the fact that though (although) call your attention to the fact that remind you (notify you) I was unaware of the fact that I was unaware that (did not know) the fact that he had not succeeded his failure the fact that I had arrived my arrival

See also under case, character, nature, system in Chapter V.

Who is, which was, and the like are often superfluous.

His brother, who is a member of the same firm His brother, a member of the same firm Trafalgar, which was Nelson's last battle Trafalgar, Nelson's last battle

As positive statement is more concise than negative, and the active voice more concise than the passive, many of the examples given under Rules 11 and 12 illustrate this rule as well.

A common violation of conciseness is the presentation of a single complex idea, step by step, in a series of sentences which might to advantage be combined into one.

Macbeth was very ambitious. This led him to wish to become king of Scotland. The witches told him that this wish of his would come true. The king of Scotland at this time was Duncan. Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth murdered Duncan. He was thus enabled to succeed Duncan as king. (55 words.) Encouraged by his wife, Macbeth achieved his ambition and realized the prediction of the witches by murdering Duncan and becoming king of Scotland in his place. (26 words.)

The worst part of spam is that it reduces the likelihood of the successful transmission of legitimate correspondence.   For example I just got an SC2 beta invite that was legit, but I almost deleted it right away because I was expecting phishing.

 This is an age of spam.    Needless complexity is everywhere, begging to be savaged with Occam's razor, but requiring great finesse so to extract the tumor and not the vital organs.

In the age of the streisand effect the only way to effectively censor something is to make it disappear in a crapflood of useless rubbish.    A frontal assault would only draw attention to it.

Scones, fuck yeah!

 Monty Python, fuck yeah!

David Attenborough, fuck yeah!

Stephen Fry, fuck yeah!

QI, fuck yeah!

Jimmy Carr, fuck yeah!

Stephen Hawking, fuck yeah!

Harry Potter, fuck yeah!

NHS, fuck yeah!

Captain Picard, fuck yeah!

Sherlock Holmes, fuck yeah!

Richard Dawkins, fuck yeah!

Charles Dickens, fuck yeah!

Top Hats, fuck yeah!

Imperialism.............  fuck yeah?

Bad Teeth

 

Link to the original: http://www.videosift.com/video/For-The-55-Of-Video-Sifters-FUCK-YEAH

The USA has lots of inefficient meddling in business, but does jack shit to help the poor get decent education and health.   In fact it's actively harming the health of the poor by subsidizing typical Burger King food (especially sugar/HFCS), and harming their education by underfunding educational public broadcasting. Poor health is a major cause of stupidity, which is a major cause of unemployment.

This thing happens almost every day, and is extremely annoying.

I'm halfway through the crosswalk on a walk light, walking at 3-4mph.   Then some car arrives at the intersection and instead of waiting their turn, starts turning left, through the same crosswalk, at high speed.  They seem to time it so that they just barely miss me by a foot or two.   Sometimes I have to accelerate to get out of the way.   This feels extremely disrespectful.   People who do that are scum.   They shouldn't start turning until the way is completely clear.

There is no logical reason two separate words here when one will suffice.  They could be used interchangeably without any possibility of misunderstanding.  The meaning of further is never anything but a metaphorical use of farther.

The ipod shuffle 4th gen is a downgrade from the ipod shuffle 2nd gen because:

* Half the battery life

* It skips the last 5sec-5min of EVERY SINGLE FILE at random.

* It's not interoperable with 3rd party headphones.

* No manual control over podcast loading and ordering -  bloated software does a shitty automatic job of it instead.   It should at least employ a round robin policy instead of starting over at the A's every time you plug it in, which is virtually every day because of the shitty battery.

* Can't select a block of files at once to mark them as old, because it insists on grouping the files by the name of the podcast, which is typically 1 file per folder on the ipod for my usage patterns.  As a consequence it keeps reloading shit that I skipped before.

 * It gets into a state where you can't even load your own MP3s onto it manually as music.  Try to drag and drop an audiobook into it and get the NO symbol.   Try to restore it, in the middle of the restoration process, windows opens it up like you justp lugged in a thumb drive, causing iTunes to complain that another program is using the files and it can't complete the restoration process.   Obviously apple didn't even test their shitty product on vista.

* Still has the same crippleware bullshit of not letting you load stuff from two computers.

* Still uses the same ridiculously laggy, bloated, crippleware, proprietary bullshit called iTunes for transferring files.

 I'll never buy another apple product again, because iTunes and Ipod shuffle 4th gen are such a steaming pile of shit.

 Google's new word definition feature is a downgrade from its old word definition feature because it provides a really dumb summary written by an intern somewhere instead of the variety of good sources that it used to combine.

People who say X is the greatest country in the world are stupid bigots.  Or at least, the 99.9999% of them who don't know enough about the other 250+ countries to justify such an assertion, are.

People waste energy because it's cheap.  People waste as much of it as they can afford to waste.    Look at a typical oven.   To cook a pizza in it, you have to preheat the oven.   This involves heating up all the metal on the inside of the oven, all the air in the oven, etc.   The oven is probably 50-100 times the volume of the pizza.  Then it's constantly wasting that heat (the exterior surface will feel warm due to shoddy insulation).   Then after the pizza's cooked and you take it out, all that heat that went into heating up the oven itself is vented and wasted.   If the oven were smaller and the interior of it were tiled with a strong insulator, you could probably cook a pizza with less than half as much energy.

Look at the stove.   Boil some water.   While you're doing it, a large fraction of the heat from the burner is bypassing the water and going straight to the air.  The sides and top of the pot are losing heat too.   If the pot had a very conductive bottom, insulated sides, and an insulated lid, it would surely waste a lot less energy and boil your water faster.

Look at your refrigerator.   Until you open it, every joule of energy that it's using is a result of inadequate insulation.   They idle in the hundreds of watts.

 Look at your windows.  When it's -10 outside, they're constantly hemmorrhaging energy in the form of heat that was produced with your electricity.   The interior of the window may have frozen condensation on it, while most of your room is kept at room temperature by a steady stream of wasted electricity.   In that case you're losing hundreds of watts of energy per square meter of window.   Windows are an extremely wasteful luxury if you intend to have any climate controls indoors.  Even double-pane windows are crap compared to some fiberglass insulation.  The smaller the windows, the better.

Look at the insulation in your walls.  It's not very thick.   If you didn't have huge windows bypassing everything, then your heating bill would be inversely proportional to the thickness of your insulation.   If your house was insulated properly, heating cost would be nearly zero (body heat and incidental electicity use, properly contained by insulation, would suffice to maintain room temperature inside, in any cold climate).  If you had even more insulation than that, you could use excess indoor heat as a power source for a generator that uses indoors as the hot reservoir and outdoors as the cold reservoir.  A couple feet of foam would suffice.

--  everything about the House of Gaunt

-- nearly everything about Barty Crouch, Barty Crouch Jr, and Winky

-- "The Parting of the Ways"

-- all of the detective work and foreshadowing

-- The story of Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs

-- most of the penseive memories about voldemort

-- Luna's quiddich commentary

-- Some good dialogue that was replaced with shitty dialogue

It's really irritating that 99.9% of men's underwear has insufficient specificity in sizing. Seriously, only 5 sizes for everybody? What the heck are they thinking? With how many millions of pairs are sold every month, you'd think they could have more, like 15 or 20 sizes.

Also, I hate the elastic waistbands that are used as a crutch for wildly inaccurate sizing. On every pair of underwear I have, either the waistband is too tight or the rest of it is too baggy. And i'm not fat at all. My body mass index is completely average (Rather below average, considering I live in the USA).

If it's sized properly it should apply no more pressure than the minimum that is necessary to prevent it from falling off. Every underwear I've tried applies several orders of magnitude more than that, or else falls off. I've tried taking underwear that fits perfectly, except for the elastic waistband that applies too much pressure, and stretched it out as much as possible in order to weaken the elastic. That helps a little bit.

The lyrics of the song in its opening credits made secular humanists (who are the majority of the trek fan base) cringe.   The theme alone was an affront to one of Gene Roddenberry's core principles about star trek.

Instead of orchestral themes, it had this cheap wannabe pop song.

Instead of moral dilemmas, it had tits.

Instead of shakespearean stage actors and drama professors playing well-balanced and noble characters, it had typical TV actors playing trigger-happy rednecks.

IIRC, entire ACORN scandal consists of:

1.  Out of 2 million low-income voters registered, a small percent of the workers turned in bogus forms with bogus names like Captain Crunch. Acorn was required by law to turn in ALL of the forms rather than arbitrarily discarding some of the forms at their discretion (because if the law were otherwise, people who register voters could throw away half the forms and disenfranchise half the people who thought they had registered).    Not one vote is known to have been cast under any of these bogus registration attempts.

2.  Some people dressed up as OBVIOUSLY fake pimps and prostitutes, strolled into dozens of ACORN branches until they found someone who put them on (OBVIOUSLY bullshitting them) and they took it completely seriously.   Later, they took the videos credulously to Fox news, which also believed every word in the videos was serious, because they're a bunch of morons with no sense of humor.

3.  Republicans have a ragefest and try to treat organizations as guilty until proven innocent if any ONE of their employees has been indicted for fraud (i.e. arbitrarily accused by one prosecutor, not yet put on trial or anything).   This rule inadvertently bars the gov't from funding a shitload of defense contractors, but that part is not really going to be enforced, because all they really wanted was an unconstitutional bill of attainder against ACORN.

Am I missing something?

TiVo and downloaded video are very convenient, but I've been thinking about some possible benefits of watching actual broadcasts:

 

1.  You don't get a rewind/pause and you know it, so it forces you to actually focus on the program for a continuous block of time.

2.  You get up and walk around every commercial break (which is like every 10 minutes).

 

With tivo/web:

1.  You don't have to focus on it because you can ignore it and rewind or pause and use IM or go to some other website , so ADHD is multiplied by over 9000.    It may take days to finish a 1 hour video.

2.  You are less likely to get up and stretch.

 

 

I haven't watched broadcasts in months, but I haven't literally thrown away my TV yet.