rd108

Here's the TED talk ("censored" from TED) A TED Talk on Income Inequality by Nick Hanauer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIhOXCgSunc

I've been a bitcoin supporter. But there is a twinge in me that remembers government, properly set up, can often protect the weak from the strong. Extremely wealthy corporations and individuals moving around anonymous money would make it impossible to tax and impossible to know where political contributions were coming from. I don't know the answer-- I flip flop back and forth between total openness for everyone and total secrecy for everyone.

Yup. found the file I wanted by looking through the source for *.mp3 and finding the static file asset.

does anyone know the fastest way to rip a sound file from this flash player for private use?

I love "Buddhist Nike+"! We are staying away from language that might turn people off but it's a pretty compact way to describe this whole set of devices. :)

this is a great idea. I personally have found using a mala to be really rewarding. We've played with various timing methodologies but maybe there's a physical hardware device that combines a biosensor and mala we haven't considered yet. Thank you. :) Happy new year.

This is really interesting. We're making products for helping people be more mindful, including some with biosensor integration (brainwaves via EEG, heartrate via optical sensors.) We're programmers ourselves and would love people's insights into what they'd pay for in terms of a tool to help them "be more mindful" while at work or at play. You can email me directly at rohan (at) brainbot.me to get in touch! Thank you.

Congratulations, guys. Excellent work and I love Ipython :)

To be fair, that's generally only a criticism of fMRI experiments. Far from all the neuroscience research being done.

Unfortunately the bluetooth protocol got a lot easier to integrate into our app in iOS 5, but we may release on other platforms in the future! Thanks for the +1 for iOS4.

Rick Hanson's stuff is great. Here's a lecture he did at Google several years ago: http://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhasBrain

For now, it'll run on the mobile phone only. We're working to make it available on all devices, though. That won't happen for at least a year.

Thanks Itaxpica. I come from an academic cognitive neuro background too and shared a lot of your concerns. We've shown empirically that you can use an active (non-gel) EEG system to do limited things. We are interested in mindfulness and meditation, which often involves sitting still and closing your eyes. These facts make it easier to use our detection algorithms successfully than it might in other realms. Check out neurosky, emotiv, interaxon and other folks to see products in the space--> still in its infancy, but we're practically seeing results for our narrow focus, which is meditation.

Of course, and thank you for reaching out! My previous (pre-startup) job was to do neuroimaging of mindfulness on longterm practitioners in the lab of Sara Lazar. You can check out some of their publications to get going--> http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/~lazar/

Our startup is bringing those findings from the lab onto our mobile phone (check out www.brainbot.me for some info, although admittedly not much yet!) Right now we're busy prototyping and working on our first release.

You can actually use these electrical signatures to make meditation a trackable, quantifiable "exercise activity". Just like you log running miles with, say, RunKeeper. Really cool to see more people getting excited about it the science! Disclaimer: cofounder at a startup doing this.

can anyone confirm the Start fund's $150K convertible debt note is still on the table for every YC startup?

Lehrer himself (@4:50) on the Colbert Report explained why "creatively borrowing" others work is fundamental to innovative thinking. I would preface this with "ironically", but he actually believes his argument.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/41274...

I'm sorry, none of what I read seemed very egregious to me. In many cases, I couldn't even decipher whether something had been really plagiarized or not. You DO use lots of material from other people when writing a story-- some of these phrases, especially under tight deadlines and late nights, likely jumble into a mish-mash of words and phrases that might spill out while writing.

Even the case of copying someone else's mistake (in the "10 sportswriters" example) also seems forgivable to me... and- forgive me if I'm too generous- just another mistake, albeit this time on Lehrer's part.

They haven't failed. The project is alive and running-- I mean, I USE Diaspora. Check out the github page-- this isn't a period in Diaspora's story, it's a comma leading to better things and even more community control.

What? I USE diaspora. it's awesome.. I actually prefer it to Facebook because there's less noise (my interests are not the same as the 400 friends I made while living in college dorms.)

It's essentially the same idea, except that you elicit a particular brainwave signal only when recognizing something you've already seen. I believe India experimented with using it in murder trials a few years ago-- if the accused elicits a P300 upon seeing the actual murder weapon amongst a line-up of dozens of other weapons, they must know a priori how the murder took place and hence be guilty. Interesting times and there really are applications that could benefit from this kind of analysis.

Did not realize Feynman used meditation, isolation tanks, etc.!

"First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was."

wonder if you can use a gyroscope to add some of this effect....

Is there a real controversy over whether the Harappan script is writing vs. "a kind of ornamentation"? Your comment smacks of condescension but I'm sure you can just provide citations. Your (wikipedia) article contains some arguments based on relative frequency of symbols, but is controverted by studies of modern pictographic languages with similar characteristic (e.g. Chinese.)

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/324/5931/1165

You also mentioned the Brahmi script is "unquestionably based on the scripts of the ancient Near East". That is also news to me. Could you provide citations, please?

The real controversial implication, IMHO, of studying ancient Indian languages is that Sanskrit (used over thousands of years and refined by rigid grammar rules by e.g. Panini 500 B.C.) may actually be the language from which Latin, and hence many European Romantic languages, developed.

http://mutiny.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sanskrit-mother-of-eu...

That's probably worth diving into, if you are genuinely curious. As the Welsh linguist Sir William Jones said,

"The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

[edit- link added and fluff redacted. :)]

This is a great library, and Kenneth has worked really hard to improve it over time. I love Requests.

How is it that credit cards can be used anonymously?

Not that I don't trust Google with my personal data, of course.... ;)

I'm confused. What does this actually mean?

"You can delete information from Web History using the remove feature, and it will be removed from the service. However, as is common practice in the industry, and as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users."

So.... why would I delete this information if Google still keeps it elsewhere? Do I just have no ability to control what data Google collects on me, even if I agree to stop using its services?

Curious- why is Germany a safe harbor for DotCom?

Does anyone know how they "shut down https"?