StrictDabbler

As a West Coaster, I had to look up nearly every term in this article. As usual, "Canadian" almost entirely means the central/east areas.

Oh good, I've been waiting for this.

I'm glad to see WCRI is still there, though it's hard to claim it's fully "off-campus".

There's no single cause. Forming memories requires many parts of the brain. Injury to or illness in any one of them can cause anteretrograde amnesia.

It's like asking "what makes a person unable to walk?" Arthritis, paralysis, muscle wasting, MS, Parkinson's, a broken bone, an amputated foot... some are temporary, some are permanent.

Walking is hard, even though most of us can do it. Forming memories is similarly hard.

The pronunciation of the word is already on the boundaries between "awk-toe-poos", "awk-tuh-puhs", and "awk-tah-piss" depending on your region just in America.

So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.

A human or animal corpse that was accidentally mummified is still called a mummy. It's a technical term. A lot of mummies are just people who died in a peat bog, desert or ice cave.

Many mummies were also made cruelly rather than respectfully. The Maori mummified the fallen as trophies of war. The Inca would leave sacrifices to be mummified by the mountain ice.

So yes, somebody who dies in a derelict building and dries out is a mummy.

The drying is straightforward, water evaporates, but do you maintain a personal mikveh?

I'm reading through the requirements and this is a serious piece of plumbing, expensive to install at home.

But it has such a purifying ritual function that I think showing up at a communal mikva'ot with a toaster would be awkward.

Does everybody expect that some people will have toasters? You take out your dental bridge and your earrings, trim your nails and your calluses, pick up the toaster and walk on in?

These facilities mostly resemble nice spas.

I'm not mocking the belief here, just curious what it's like as a human participating. If I were trying to purify a toaster I'd pour deionized water into a rubber tub but I gather that doesn't count.

Edit:

To answer my own question, it looks like communal mikva'ots are built with separate sections similar to a sink just for the immersion of things like dishes and toasters and don't require as much personal cleaning, so that's simple and human. As these things usually are.

I hope they can get access to the materials collected by "The Art of Sierra" team. That team went around collecting hundreds of documents including many original background paintings and then completely failed to produce the intended art book.

"The Art of Sierra" was started something like 15 years ago and it's been 9 years since their last facebook post. The project is totally dead but they still have all that priceless memorabilia.

Oh, of course. My reply wasn't intended as a challenge. I'm just enthusiastic. It's one of my favorite "bad" games.

I have also been obsessed with "Below the Root" since it came out.

Dale Disharoon/DeSharone had an odd insight into textures. Look at the ladders. Look at the vines, both those that can be climbed and those that can be cut with a "trencher beak". Look at the way the trees evoke growing wood. The visuals are much more evocative than should be possible at this resolution.

Dale also did a Disney-licensed Apple II game based on "The Jungle Book" which is similar in character to "Below the Root" and a game based on "Alice in Wonderland". Both are strange and mystical and full of odd vines that remind me of the patterns left by the cellular automaton "Langton's Ant".

All Dale's games were unfair and opaque but that was the state of the art.

I enjoy the similarity between this and the famous "Huey Lewis and the News" rant from American Psycho.

Appreciate it.

Sincerely,

156876

156876

Just logged in, there's nothing left.

I remember being so annoyed I hadn't signed up a few weeks earlier and gotten a 5-digit instead.

You're aware that plenty of people have a child and don't succeed on any of these levels? Many millions of people.

Their children suffer for it, of course.

Having a child doesn't fix anybody. Suggesting that it does, through necessity, is nearly the stupidest thing an adult can say.

It's frustrating that you explicitly said you don't want kids and 1/4 of the responses are "have kids".

I would suggest (re)watching Groundhog's Day.

After that I would suggest taking up a hobby that involves actual progress. Music, sketching, dance. Something you can really fail at and that isn't practical.

Cooking and running are practical self-care. Some people elevate them to the level of achievement but you aren't experiencing that satisfaction or drive there.

Reading is just media consumption.

Pick something you can't do but that you wish you could do. Try to become non-shitty at it. Rinse and repeat until something clicks.

Set a schedule. Practice the guitar once a week.

It won't necessarily be a purpose. Most people don't find a purpose, they just arrange a useful set of dopamine pumps that satisfies them. That's enough for a primate, especially in recovery.

Our lives don't mean anything. We're stuck in a pyramid scheme where the only "meaning" is to have a kid and hope the kid finds a purpose. The kid has the same problem so they procreate. Ad infinitum, ad absurdum.

Searching for purpose is futile. Searching for satisfaction has a chance.

"The Law was named for Grant De Patie, a gas station worker who was killed in 2005 by an underage drunken driver ... Grant was dragged 7.5 kilometers before his body was dislodged from the white Chrysler LeBaron."

Make a little stop off in 1996, when Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall was procedurally generated and the map took 70 hours to cross. Buggy, empty-seeming and many issues with persistence.

Procedural generation has always been Bethesda's goal. They pre-cooked the generation for a while instead of doing it real-time in pursuit of quality. They're just returning to their roots.

The sexual economy of the time was barter-based. It was understood that women traded sexual access for economic advancement. Women couldn't even have their own credit cards. They had to be married and co-signed. In that context Feynman's chapter isn't a "pick up artist" narrative at all. It's empowering.

It presents the possibility that a woman might just want to have sex, and that not trying to buy her with gifts might be a welcome reprieve from constantly having to negotiate.

The only "pickup artist" trick in the book is that he stops trying to offer women drinks as a social opener. He stops thinking that buying a woman a drink is an exchange that contributes to his chance of bedding her.

This is creepy? Not offering to intoxicate a woman in order to sleep with her is the problem?

At the end of the chapter he says something like "I never tried that again, but it certainly was interesting."

That always struck me as sad. He'd taken a step out into the world where women had agency and he gave in to the cultural pressure to step back.

I'm only addressing the book here. These other questions of behaving well with respect to students or anger are beyond my knowledge.

This is a technical use of the word "collides".

The Cruise car failed to yield, continued at a green light, and was struck by the fire truck. So presumably it did not detect the truck.

It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all.

A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology.

Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened.

Edit: Rarely have I had a comment so misinterpreted. I am not excusing Cruise in any way. This is a major design failure for the entire industry.

For clarity, automated cars should be required to have a rock-solid radio-based system that is aware of the position of any nearby emergency vehicle.

All emergency vehicles should have a transponder to signal their location to automated cars.

There's no reason to be relying on visual detection of flashing lights for a fire truck. A fire truck costs most of a million dollars and a transponder is not an expensive requirement.

There should be a standard for radio frequency announcement before automated cars are rolled out and there is not.

That push was the first thing that happened after the Apollo/third-party nonsense.

"Hey, we have a platform that's full of incredibly useful and obscure knowledge. It's so known for this that a video about how useful we are just went viral on another major platform.

So the natural next step is to go back fifteen years and try to redo facebook, right? Let's put more stupid ape stuff on the main page."

It is clear that Spez is furious that he's not Zuckerberg and he hopes he can retroactively become him.

It's also a "prisoner's dilemma" that involves playing against every other company on the planet.

If you don't patent an idea that you use somebody else will and they will extract rent from you.

So you must "defect" by paying lawyers to search through every product you make looking for ideas you've used that don't have a patent.

You cannot "cooperate" by refusing to patent ideas.

You cannot "cooperate" by refusing to inform people they've violated your patent, because somebody else who uses the idea may also be granted a patent and now you have to go to court or settle.

The result is a flood of articles saying "Apple patents obvious idea X! What bastards!", when in fact every major corporation has no sane option to avoid that behavior.

Pooled water is tightly restricted in California by law. The combination of the climate and the land continuity with Mexico and Central America makes them particularly vulnerable to mosquito-borne illness and those concerns have been built into the water-management system for many decades.

So that's one reason they can't do that.

The tire story was the result of Nordstrom's absorbing a local department store chain in Alaska. They weren't just taking in a product Nordstroms doesn't stock.

The dumb version of the story was good PR at first and was disseminated among the staff but contributed to unreasonable customer expectations.

That is a single-blind test unless your wife consistently made two portions with labels, randomized which one you got, tracked your migraines against a blinded list of the labels and examined the data afterward.

You might be half-remembering the TNG episode "Relics" in which Scotty is rescued from a Dyson sphere after seventy-five years in a transporter buffer.

Scotty demands, and eventually obtains from Guinan, an actual bottle of Aldebaran whiskey. He has the holodeck recreate the bridge of the original Enterprise and drinks the whiskey there.

Picard shows up, Scotty offers Picard the bottle, then at the last moment warns him that it's real alcohol. Picard responds "I know, who do you think gave it to Guinan?"

There's an Isaac Asimov story from the 50's that I wonder if you've read. It's called "Blank!"

In the story the scientist takes a friend forward 22 hours, but outside the time machine door there's nothing. Total darkness.

The friend asks if the scientist forgot the movement of the Earth and the galaxy, but the scientist assures him that no, that motion has been accounted for.

Instead it appears they've arrived between quantum periods, stuck forever out of phase with ordinary time like an elevator stuck between floors and frozen by the lack of momentum.

I ask because that's the first story I read that drew attention to needing to travel in space to keep up with the planet.

It's amazing how people keep looking past the question.

I am saying that a citizen walking into a police station with a gun is obviously in more danger than a person who goes in without a gun. Absolutely that's intimidating.

It's not about rights. I just don't trust the police enough to open-carry into a police station. Why take that risk? What do you gain? Is it just capital-F "Freedom"?

These are attacks on people in custody. How is that remotely relevant? None of these people had the opportunity to open carry a gun when those attacks happened.

Regardless, I am not saying he should not be allowed to do it. It's not boot-licking. I am wondering, practically, about the motivation.

Drawing a gun in a police station is a death warrant. Even looking like you're going to pull it could get you shot or arrested.

I don't normally go around wearing something on my belt that could get me killed if I move my hand near it. I would only do so for a very good reason.

So I'm looking for a better reason than "because I can". I don't see one in your response.

It seems to me that if you haven't invested in a proper gun safe for your car you shouldn't be carrying in the first place because there are definitely places that you cannot take a gun into, even in Texas. I have never known a gun-owner who did not purchase a proper gun restraint for their car.

Still, if you don't have a gun safe in the car surely you do the same thing as you would when going to court, a school, a church, an amusement park, voting at a polling place, a racetrack, a hospital, a nursing home, or to any other business that prohibits handguns on the premises. You leave it at home, right?

I am trying to think of a good reason to open-carry into a police station apart from "making a point".

You won't be the "good guy with a gun" in an active shooting. You won't be robbed. You won't be attacked.

If you draw your gun at a police station for any reason you will be arrested or killed.

Like, technically in my state I have the right to open-carry a rifle past a school while wearing a ski-mask as long as I'm off-property. Completely legal.

If I did that while picking my child up from school to "assert my rights" surely you'd think I was being insane, confrontational and threatening because I could have no legitimate interest in doing so.

It seems very odd to not just leave your gun in the car. Perhaps you're a principled pedestrian or cyclist? That I could see.