dgordon

You Bar (http://www.youbars.com/) does something like this for nutrition bars. People with food allergies will be particularly interested.

With 9/11 in recent memory, it becomes clear that "don't let people defend themselves because someone might get hurt" is a weak argument at best.

Oh, and the scene in "Snakes on a Plane" where half the plane gets sucked out because of a few bullet holes is quite false.

The legalities work the same way they would on the ground.

The ridiculous overrepresentation of INTJ and INTP has shown up everywhere I've been on the internet -- not quite to this degree, though. That may have something to do with the places I go, though, since I consistently test as one or the other.

Apparently, some of the difference in mortality profile is because there hasn't been a major H1N1 flu in quite a while, so older people have some immunity to H1N1 that younger people don't have because their immune systems have never faced such a virus.

Considering how much just about every other quote in that article was taken out of context, I would expect that was too.

"Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre."

I don't agree that recognizing that money is a means to an end and is not to be put before that end disqualifies you from being a genuine capitalist, or that being a capitalist and an intellectual are mutually exclusive. I also don't agree with the subtle denigration of capitalism slipped in with the synonym "lucre."

"The sensitive cultural critics behind South Park captured this perfectly in their line, "this is gayer than sex with men"."

I think The Simpsons beat them to that one: "You kissed a girl! That is so gay!" (said to Nelson Muntz by one of the other bullies)

Also, having sex with men doesn't necessarily make you gay. :-P

So the poor haven't gotten poorer after all?

If you want, pick a standard of absolute wealth and try to argue that the rest of my statement isn't true.

It remains to be seen whether Twitter will actually succeed.

Who defines "need," given that you don't mean "subsistence survival?"

"(02) It has a propensity to make the richer richer and the poorer poorer."

The poor in the first world are richer than the rich were for most of history. The poor in the third world are no poorer than in the past.

So no.

"Smart kids just have to be satisfied with the lectures and assignments that are designed for the marginal kids."

No, fuck that.

Everything else that can be said on this is mere commentary.

Also, what tastes good in a single sip for a blind taste-test can be different from what tastes good when you drink a glass of it. I think Malcolm Gladwell talked about this in Blink.

Actually, prevalence of transsexual women (the accepted term for what you meant, since "women" is what they identify as) is probably quite a bit higher than that. http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html does an analysis that concludes that said prevalence is on the order of 1 in 500.

But I don't think we were talking about transsexuality, which is something different from the intersex conditions which might make this whole business of sex testing more complicated than one might expect.

"So, your average female sporter would probably blow you away in most contests then."

This is irrelevant. In track and field, elite to sub-elite high school boys beat all women ever in the sprints and field events, and even in longer distances the best US high school boys beat the women's world records. In basketball, for instance, the difference is even greater because height makes a big difference -- in fact, D1 women's basketball programs apparently bring in men who are semi-serious intramural basketball players to get better competition in practice.

"After a certain age, their curiosity dies."

Dies, or is killed?

"That was less true when Gates took it than it is now. Now, scores are "recentered", so you can get a couple questions wrong and still get a perfect 800."

Not true, for the math anyway. You can get a few wrong on the verbal section and still get an 800, and don't ask me how the writing works.

In any case, the effects of the 1994 recentering on higher-end scores (for whatever they're worth) are greatly exaggerated.

"It might have been predetermined, but there's still an act of choosing, a weighing of possibilities, a judgment between them, and action. And those judging them later will too be able to judge their judgment, their character, and make decisions based on that."

And that would all be predetermined too.

Someone came up with this before me: you should believe in free will because if it exists you're right and if not you couldn't have done otherwise anyway. It's like Pascal's Wager, except not stupid and wrong.

No it isn't. Everything I've heard suggests that chess players tend to peak around their mid-30s, and then you have Viktor Korchnoi, who won the Soviet junior championship at 16, was playing for the world championship at 50, and was rated 85th in the world at 75. His 78th birthday is coming up next week.

That would be the present of "capitalism."

I'm pretty sure mass murder an order of magnitude above the Holocaust is not the answer here.

But saying "This isn't reddit" will get you a few.

Someone I know is highly allergic to pineapple; eating more than a few bites could easily cause her to suffocate to death without intervention. She didn't realize this for years because she only ate canned pineapple, which doesn't affect her at all. One day she had dried (but not cooked) pineapple and went to bed; fortunately she didn't like the taste and only had a bite or two because she woke up swollen and having a hard time breathing. After that, she was still able to eat canned pineapple without any problems. Whatever it is that causes the reaction must be broken down for good by heating the pineapple to canning temperatures.

I don't remember the last time I read a top-ten book, and my list of recently-read books is probably wildly different from yours, as are both from a random third person here. The Internet opens up news and alternative news dramatically -- it's not a three-channel world and hasn't been for a long time, which brings me to TV -- a lot of people here don't watch it at all. I don't watch much. "Same subjects" might be true from a big enough view -- there are only so many categories of thought to go around, but within politics, science, world events, local events, philosophy, games, sports, etc., there's a lot of territory to make up a huge variety of subjects that people talk about.

Oh, and even though I disagree with your post and recognize that it's irrelevant to the article, I voted it up because it's relevant to the topic at hand and shouldn't have been voted down to 0.

I was thinking of the Asch experiments well before they were mentioned in the article. Notably, I seem to recall reading elsewhere that later attempts to replicate Asch's work failed, and suggestions that the particularly conformist culture of 1950s America was responsible. Yet this article suggests that what the subjects perceived, in the case where the question had an objective answer, actually changed according to brain imaging, not that they were made unsure and went along with the group.

"Asch talked about the power of the "minority of one." When a unanimous group pressures the individual, that group is weakened as soon as one person breaks off."

Wouldn't it be more accurate -- and perhaps more revealing -- to call this the "minority of two?"

Maybe we'd have a decent train system instead of having subsidized suburbia.

It's a reaction to the overvaluing of joke posts on Reddit, Digg, and such, no doubt.

"So let me spell out my thoughts explicitly: If success is the carrot, then failure is the stick, and I think we do our best work when we are conscious of both."

I was disappointed here. This seems far too trite a conclusion for the thoughts he put forth in the rest of the entry. Did he feel compelled to wrap it up quickly for some reason? I don't know. But there's so much more he could have said, even within a reasonable-length blog entry.

I won't be the first to say here that producing and consuming, as this post uses the terms, are not mutually exclusive (and are probably orthogonal.) But I believe we choose how much of each we are.

Now I need to prove this to myself. By my recent activity, I am a great consumer and not much of a producer.

"Massive wealth generated in modern societies, though it tends to fall into the hands of a few (exponentially so), is generated by having a society/collective. If you have more wealth than you could ever generate with your own two hands, then you're benefitting from society in a major way, regardless of how much society takes back. (Even this is not strictly true--what you can generate with your own two hands depends on education, inventions society has given to you (like language), etc. It's hard to calculate one's debt to society.)"

You know, if you replace every instance of "society" in that sentence with "people throughout history who were left free to create things that make life easier, without having the product of their effort stolen from them," you'd get something Ayn Rand might have written herself.