mindviews

Maybe I do something unusual - I pick a completely random seed artist in an genre I don't usually listen to. Then I do the Pandora rating voodoo and before very long I've got a channel I like. I've had good luck finding new classical and jazz music this way. (Pop/Rock Top N I can get anywhere, and I haven't seen many indie bands on Pandora anyway.)

Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/)

Create a station with a seed artist and then it suggests other music you might like. Rate each song played and pandora will refine the suggestions.

I like this idea for personal projects (er, experiments) as well. I have a list of side projects I work on, but new items get added much faster than existing ones get done. A lot of times the list feels like a burden. A mental switch from "I should write this widget for myself" to "I wonder if this widget would make life easier" takes the mental pressure off and at the same time reminds me why I wanted to make that widget in the first place. Sometimes that switch in perspective is the difference between having the motivation to tackle an item on the list and not.

An acoustic device that produces high-amplitude waves at the resonant frequency of the human cranial cavity: head goes pop!

I think you mistook my comment as an argument against Libertarianism - it was not intended to be such. My point was that people oversimplify both the implementation and the analysis of Libertarian principles. A system with many, many free actors can be amazingly complex, and what I'm suggesting is that for people to see the value of the system they need to recognize and embrace that complexity.

For example, the basic principles of a free market (e.g., supply and demand) are easy to state but result in complex transactions. When things don't "work out" for someone in the real work and they raise an argument against "free markets" (as in the current housing bubble), we need to be ready to point out all the complex ways that the free market worked correctly but where the non-free parts distorted it (government policies encouraging loans to unqualified applicants).

In complex systems with non-linear behavior, we need to be very careful that we understand the full context of an event or we won’t be able to extrapolate the results. That’s why first-order approximations fail so often in mathematics and in real life.

This is a more important point that I think most people realize. The classic "flaw" in Libertarian thinking (both among self-described Libertarians and those who criticize it) is neglecting higher-order effects. The prisoner's dilemma is a perfect example of this. The game played once is very different from the game played repeatedly. You'll find the same sort of differences in numerous other game-theoretic situations.

Unfortunately, most supporters of Libertarian policies only get to the first-order implementation and then stop and are rightly criticized for the limitations and flaws that result. All of the complexities of higher-order effects are neglected, but those are the parts that actually make the theory workable in the real world.

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a book after GEB called "I am a Strange Loop" that deals pretty much exclusively with the ideas of self and consciousness. This is far and away the most compelling argument for consciousness being an emergent property of the brain that I've ever seen. I strongly recomend this book for anyone interested in the topic.

Don't forget you can add an empty constructor constraint in c# generics.

public T AssignLiteItem<T>(ArchivingItem archivingItem ) where T : Item, new() {

T myITem = new T();

myITem.ItemReference = new ItemReference(archivingItem.Id);

return myITem;

}

I do wish the compiler handled constraints for arbitrary constructor signatures on generic types, however...