divia

Read Sex, Lies, and Menopause: http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Lies-Menopause-Shocking-Replacemen...

The book references tons of studies.

RIP indeed, though I can't help but think of this passage from The Catcher in the Rye:

That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say “Fuck you.” I'm positive, in fact.

I've spent a lot of time walking around barefoot (no Vibrams either--never felt like spending the money on them) in cities (NYC and SF), and your feet get used to the concrete thing really quickly. Your feet toughen up and it's not a big deal. I agree about barefooting being annoying in cold weather though.

Heh, nice notice of nonsense name :-).

http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=ebdb...

Here's a picture my friend made that I like: http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=73c3...

Seasteading (http://seasteading.org/) hopes to be the next release valve.

The rats, after decades of development, are believed to be the most depressed in the world.

I'm not against animal testing in general or this sort of thing in particular, but I found that sentence strangely evocative.

Heh, sorry to state the obvious. I had such a good time in the tank that I tend to be a bit of an evangelist. If you trust them at all, it's also been studied by the National Institute of Mental Health and they think it's safe.

One thing about renting a tank for an hour that makes it quite different from what's done at Gitmo is that you're free to get out of the tank at any time. If you're curious, I'd recommend doing it.

Interesting. That makes me want to try an anechoic chamber :-). However, the flotation tank also has body temp air and water, no light, good soundproofing (I've also always gone in wearing earplugs). It's true that if I were splash inside, I'd probably hear it some, and that if I floated to the side, I'd feel the edge. But when I went floated, I always lay as still as I could for the whole time, which was pretty still. So I don't really see what would make it all that different, other than maybe the fact that you're lying down instead of sitting.

I find these results surprising. For what it's worth, I've been in a sensory deprivation tank around five times (for an hour the first time, and for an hour and a half all subsequent times), known a handful of other people who've tried it too, talked to the two women who ran the place I went to, and leafed through The Deep Self by John Lilly, which includes many descriptions of people's time in the tank. All of these things led me to believe that hallucinations after just 15 minutes were quite rare. Granted, half the participants were picked because they tested as prone to hallucinations, and maybe there's something about the room they used that makes it different from the tank, but I'm still quite surprised.

If anyone's interested in reading about my experience the first time I went, which was less dramatic, I described what I could remember here: http://divia.posterous.com/my-first-hour-in-the-flotation-ta....

I've had sleep paralysis pretty frequently over the years during afternoon naps. For me it's always the same: someone is calling out to me, but I can't respond or get up because I'm paralyzed. Usually I realize what's going on before too long, and it's not a big deal. But this past Monday, for the first time ever, I managed to not only realize what was going on, but close my eyes, concentrate on my hypnogogic imagery, and transform it into a lucid dream. If you can pull that off, I'd highly recommend it.

"Big money isn't hard to come by. All it costs is a lifetime of singleminded devotion to acquiring it and making it grow into more money, to the utter exclusion of all other interests. They say that the age of opportunity has passed. Nonsense! Seven out of ten of the wealthiest men on this planet started life without a shilling--and there are plenty more such strivers on the way up. Such people are not stopped by high taxation nor even by socialism; they simply adapt themselves to new rules and presently they change the rules. But no premiere ballerina ever works harder, nor more narrowly, than a man who acquires riches."

-A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

If you like Nethack at all, though it's been a few years since I've played them, I highly recommend Angband (http://www.thangorodrim.net/, somewhat outdated website, but I'm not sure what the current one is) and its variants. ToME (http://t-o-m-e.net/main.php?tome_current=0) is one I know of that's in active development these days.

Can you extend that observation to the adopted kids you know? The adopted children I know are far less like their parents than the biological children I know. Granted, the adopted children I know were not implanted in their adopted mothers' wombs, so it's not a perfect comparison, but I definitely think it's worth thinking about. Observation about parents and children who are biologically related doesn't seem to me to be particularly informative when thinking about nature and nurture.

It's also the eye color of the main character of possibly the greatest historical fiction series of all time, The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett.

It used to be thought that you could judge someone’s character by looking at the shape of his head. Whether or not this is true of people, it is generally true of Lisp programs.

from pg's On Lisp

Paul Graham states basically the same theory in "Why Nerds are Unpopular":

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

I imagine that explaining the emergent phenomenon is less lazy than blaming someone, though simply labeling it as such may not be.

I thought this comment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4d/youre_calling_who_a_cult_leader/3... had an interesting analysis of why some people are accused of being cult leaders and not others.

Here's the chart I'm pretty sure you're thinking of: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AH556B_ranso_200...

from the 2008 Wall Street Journal article titled "You Can't Soak the Rich": http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121124460502305693.html

The phenomenon is called Hauser's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser's_Law

and intelligent criticism of the chart can be found here: http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/20/...

I agree that violent felons have shown below-average decision making capability, but as much as I don't necessarily want them having a voice in running the country, whether there are costs to not letting them do so seems to be at least an open question. There is a significant negative correlation between voting and recidivism (http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/...), though it's easy to see how the causation could run mostly in the opposite direction.

Done. Thanks very much :-).

I was thinking of buying some of the Marvelous Marinara (http://couplaguysfoods.foodoro.com/products/marvelous-marina...), but I'm reluctant to buy food if I can't read the ingredient list, and I didn't see one. I'd excited to see how this develops though, since I'm often trying to buy food online.

As a regular user (and big fan) of thesixtyone, I was happy to see this article because now I finally know how to embed songs!

You can email a song link or embed the entire stream on another page. (Although, it is not easy to find these options. You have to click on the tiny “comments” link to open them up). For instance, I’ve embedded “Repetition Kills” by the Black Ghosts below. It would be better if you could embed entire playlists.

Edit: After successfully embedding a song I tried sharing it over twitter, and I have a request. It would be great if clicking Post Song to twitter would automatically convert the link to a tinyurl link.

From the advanced guide:

27 percent of those in social class AB found this unacceptable, increasing to 35 percent of the C2s and Ds, and 45 percent of those in social class E.

I'm sure whoever wrote this was just trying to refer to the different groups in a succinct way, but to me this classification system is amusingly reminiscent of a Brave New World's.

I thought most of the article was pretty standard stuff, but I was interested in this part:

Researchers have found that nodding can be used to 'regulate' conversations. If you make single, brief nods while your partner is speaking, these act as simple signs of attentiveness, which will maintain the flow of communication from the speaker. Double nods will change the rate at which the other person speaks, usually speeding up the flow, while triple nods or single, slow nods often interrupt the flow altogether, confusing speakers so much that they stop in their tracks. So, if you want to express interest and keep your partner chatting with you, stick to brief single nods.

Or, to bastardize Greenspun's Tenth Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_Tenth_Rule):

All programming is either in Lisp or reimplementing it.

I downloaded it, but it quits right after it opens. (Macbook running 10.5.6, if that helps.)