patdennis

I eat sleep and breathe politics. It's what I do for a living, and it's most of what I care about.

That said, I don't come here to read about politics.

I have never in my life been able to see one of these things correctly, and I've tried since about age 7 or so. One day!

I'm in my mid 20's, and I'm definitely not at that point yet. Your mileage may vary. Regardless, I feel like commuting is still probably an important factor - but I absolutely believe that other things come into consideration over time.

For the past four years, I've moved 1-3 times per year (I work in politics, and move to wherever the interesting elections are happening).

The only universally applicable piece of advice I can give is this: Your commute matters. A lot.

Seriously. Annoying roommates, beautiful balconies, new appliances - none of these things has had nearly the effect on my day to day happiness as living within a 3-4 mile bike ride from work.

This is the first New York Times article reporting on what would later be known as the AIDS epidemic.

Edit: Here's the takeaway quote, in my opinion: "Cancer is not believed to be contagious, but conditions that might precipitate it, such as particular viruses or environmental factors, might account for an outbreak among a single group."

Edit2: "Dr. Curran said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals from contagion.'"

Don't get me wrong, I love Muckrock! Wasn't trying to say you guys aren't necessary. I file FOI requests for a living, and I'd love to be in touch with you guys about a number of things - best practices for turning government records into structured data, the importance of reforming records retention on the government side to reduce the burden on public records officers, fixing FOI on the local level, etc.

Feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter: twitter.com/patdennis

I was just trying to preempt the inevitable "investigative journalism is dead" comments.

People get excited about things like this and say things like "this is REAL investigative journalism". Or "I wish mainstream journalists would start doing this".

Look, I read documents like this all day long. So do investigative journalists. It's just that very few people care about the stuff we find until it turns into an international spy thriller.

Just because you don't care about it on the state/local level doesn't mean we don't put in the work.

Edit: You can look at some of the great investigative journalism you're probably not paying attention to here: http://www.ire.org/blog/extra-extra/

You started your comment with "If I didn't know better". Do you know for a fact that they're not hinting at this? Or did I misread.

The person who popped out of the other end of the teleporter would be doubtful.

Does it make a difference if it's a teleporter that destroys the original as an necessary part of its function, vs one that destroyed the original but didn't need to do so, vs one that did not destroy the original?

Here's one of my favorites. Glad to see the pros are evenly split, because this one really toasts my brain too.

Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?

Accept or lean toward: survival 337 / 931 (36.2%) Other 304 / 931 (32.7%) Accept or lean toward: death 290 / 931 (31.1%)

Designing better cars; making parts for the 3d printers that built the cars.

The modern cables are from a single source, and that source is in a military prison.

You have access to your raw data through 23andme. At least I do. It's a text file (sitting in a Truecrypt partition, in my case).

For $50, I had 23andme read my genotype for a pretty significant number of already studied genes, but far from my complete genome.

How much of a difference does it make to the end user whether their complete genome is sequenced, compared to 23andme's model?

> All additional information will make your prediction better

I don't think this is true... I find that there's a point where additional information becomes noise, and can make your prediction less useful.

Ah yes. The social safety net is causing society to be overrun by a plague of undesirables. If we would only let people die in the streets, our society would be pure.

Edit: I'm being sarcastic.

How did he know to escape to China? How did he know how to get there? I'm genuinely curious.

Before I studied the history the use of asbestos as an industrial material, I didn't take warnings like this seriously. Now I do.

It's the same logic as offering Office for OS X. They know holding a OS monopoly isn't feasible. Might as well make money off of the holdouts.

MMM's main thesis is that the quality of life bit takes care of itself through hedonic adaption [1]. If you can make it to that point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

A large part of my day to day job involves summarizing political careers from thousands of pages of news articles.

As a general rule, I find that for every thousand pages of news copy, one can usually distill about thirty pages of useful facts (the rest being redundant, speculative, filler, or otherwise unimportant).

Sounds like mental illness to me. Like he's delusional.

Similarly, I don't understand why people named Aaron always make unfair generalizations.

Did anyone else notice how laggy the display looked when she spun the roulette wheel? I hope that's not system wide.

Here's an interesting article about how one family deals with the issue: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/11/01/our-new-237-per-mo...

If anyone is looking for a more accurate biography of BF, I particularly enjoyed Walter Isaacson's. [1]

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=L64OOJGaCKIC&printsec=f...

CMC doesn't have an election for another six years, I wouldn't say it's suicide. On the other hand, you're right that she's not going to spend political capital on something she knows isn't going to go anywhere.

Edit: To be clear, she could do it. She's on the Homeland Security committee. But she's a in a tough battleground state and it's she really has to pick her battles carefully

A well set up Google Reader account can do wonders... but it takes a while to get to that point.

Through a process called discovery.

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)