GiraffeNecktie

The author lost me at the end when they said to stop pulling up dandelions. Dandelions are not a native species (at least in North America) and are not a good food source for native pollinators.

For overcoming pitchiness, the "one weird trick" I learned from a singing teacher is to imagine you are moving in the opposite direction from the actual pitch. If you're going higher, imagine you're going lower and vice versa.

This helped me overcome the tendency to constrict the throat when reaching for a higher note or to go flat when heading lower.

When CBSA searched your car were they doing it as a power trip or were they doing it for some unexplained reason? The latter is just part of the job. I travel quite often to the states and find that the CBSA agents are almost uniformly polite and often friendly. Going the other way, I find CBP agents are generally surly and aggressive.

No, DHS did not "steal" your boat. They confiscated it and you'll get it back by following some lengthy and convoluted appeal process.

But I seriously don't understand Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and why they have to be such utter dickheads on the Canadian border. Their Canadian counterparts (CBSA) are just as effective and efficient and somehow manage to be generally sane and rational.

Yep.

These guys are claiming 4 to 8 hours, 4,000 feet etc. http://www.uniteddrones.com/aether-aero/ Heck even 10 minutes flying and one day solar recharge would be awesome in an urban area for stealthy long term observation.

It's important to distinguish two, seemingly contradictory positions:

1 People won't love me for who I am. In fact, it's the job of the rest of the world to show me where I need to improve. But, on the other hand ...

2 I should love people for who they are. It's not my business to make people over. My job is to make myself over. There's more than enough work to be done there. Working on other people's supposed failings is just a distraction from my real business.

That's a rough paraphrase of Byron Katie's "Work", an approach that has helped me tremendously for the last dozen years or so. Whenever I get miserable it's usually a clue that I'm working on someone else's 'business'.

1. I believe that was addressed in the video. These are very short range devices that can be recharged by solar energy or by sitting on power lines.

2. See the video.

3. You might be able to deny access to buildings with mosquito nets but you're not going to stop close range surveillance, painting targets and other uses. Mosquito nets themselves would be relatively trivial to dismantle with a swarm of these (you'd only need to land one with explosives on the net).

But the nice thing about a publicly financed health care system is that early interventions become much more likely when people aren't forced to make decisions like "Should I spend my paycheck getting this lump in my breast checked out or should I spend it on groceries for the family."

One reason is that it represents the first acknowledgement that health care is something that every man, woman and child should have.

That's not to say there aren't horrible things about Obamacare (i.e. terrible business model) but yes, it's a start.

When I was a kid, I used to read paper books in bed, at the dinner table, relaxing on the couch, sitting on the toilet, riding the bus, in my room when I was supposed to be doing my homework etc. Apparently that wasn't a problem but now if I use a digital device in much the same way, it's an ominous sign of the collapse of society and the coming apocalypse. Damn those corrosive pixels!

"To the oncologist who told me I couldn't survive: fuck you."

Although maybe he did you a favor by externalizing the thing you had to fight. Sometimes life is funny like that.

I'm astonished that anyone would hesitate for even a nano-second to give this kid anything less than a godspeed and God bless. I'm sorry, but the kid has already launched himself into orbit, he's not going to come back to earth for the sake of two or three years of choking down generic, all-purpose pablum at the local high school.

You write "it creates good behavior within society through induced paranoia toward people who have a mindset toward committing crimes"

I pointed you to stats which showed that people who carry firearms become more belligerent themselves, more likely to escalate an argument (because they know they can defend themselves) more likely to kill themselves or members of their families etc.

Far from "creating good behavior", firearms do the reverse by encouraging people who are weak, unstable, angry, depressed or confused to act out.

Except that that's not at all true. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/pro-gun-myths-fa...

Meh. Still sounds like an absolute bargain for a government project which always entails tons of overhead starting with a complex and time consuming procurement process, project management, auditing, vacations, management changes, political spin doctoring, competing priorities, etc etc.

And then it's military on top of that, which means ruggedized equipment, security and lots of field testing.

Actual actual link http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-01/first-solar-may-sel...

Also has more information about incentives etc.

Sounds good in theory but I don't think the average doctor, let alone the average patient, is capable of independently weighing the pros and cons of every novel treatment. And then you have desperately people who might normally be more skeptical but will believe just about anything in the pain and torment of a moment when they or a loved one falls ill.

No thanks. I'll take the imperfect regulation over the "free market" any day.

I don't see that shutting down the FDA is a good alternative. There are countless therapies that are dangerous and/or ineffective and plenty of unscrupulous or incompetent people who want to flog them. Yes there's a human cost to regulation, but that's nothing compared to the cost of opening the floodgates to every half-baked idea out there, not to mention the damage to medical science when the medical trials are bypassed.

Over the years there have been a few joyriders with little or no flight experience who have stolen planes. Some landed ok some not so ok. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1870&dat=19801116&...

Damnit, Aaron, we still need you.

I think you missed his point. He wasn't trying to establish that New Guineans somehow "invented" the idea of not sleeping under a dead tree, merely that the author wasn't personally tuned to the risks of being under trees until he spent time with the people there. That's all.

As in slim black rectangle? What other shape or color would you suggest?

Just watched this the other day on Netflix. http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/happypeople/

Takes you deep into Siberia to the winter campsites of trappers. Harsh life but very beautiful.

"Flashcard systems don't work"

No one tool is going to do everything. Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear.

Language acquisition is all about growing a set of extremely complex interconnections between brain cells. You need to grow a massive number of interconnections between many areas of the brain (including to sensory and emotional areas) and you need to strengthen those connections by repeated firing.

Software, books, audio and video can play a supportive role but there's a big chunk of the brain development that is only going to come from struggling to express your own mind and to interact with real people in real time.

Yes it does. In California, sexual harassment includes assault and that, most certainly, is a crime. So you could face both a civil complaint and a criminal charge (for the assault part of the harassment)

http://www.equalrights.org/publications/kyr/shwork.asp

Note this quote: "The conduct of the harasser must either be severe or it must be pervasive to be sexual harassment. A single incident is probably not sexual harassment unless it is severe. For example, a single incident of rape or attempted rape would probably be sexual harassment (it would also violate criminal laws)."

It can be. "Sexual harassment" is kind of a broad term that could include just about anything.

There's a great short story by Alice Munro called the Albanian Virgin which appeared in the New Yorker some years back.

As the saying goes "No good deed goes unpunished."

For me, it's more of a "general rule" than a "golden rule".