This is a million colors of awesome. Thanks for yet another timewaster^{The Good Kind [not timewastrist]}.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:08 AM on August 8, 2008

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.

Yeah, but you attract more flies with vinegar than with honey.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 3:40 PM on July 31, 2008

Yeah, unfortunately as brilliant as these things are, I kinda think they can only hurt Obama, not help him. Most liberals already think he's smart, and conservatives will look at this and either say "intellectual" or "OMG gay marriage and gay adoption".

Thate being said, I have a new metric for choosing a president: would I want to take a class taught by this guy?

In that sense, Newt Gingrich is at least more... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:51 AM on July 31, 2008

The solution to the whole Israel thing is pretty straightforward:All Arab nations have to recognize that Israel exists as a state (even if they don't like it)Israel has to leave all settlements and return them to Palestinian rule. No more knocking down houses. The Palestinian government, in turn, must completely secure its borders and people. No more rocket attacks, no more bombers. Israel has to sit on its hands; no more retaliatory attacksJerusalem becomes an open city, owned by no one but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:25 AM on July 31, 2008

There's this kinda painful rift between what might be healthiest or "best" for poorer residents vs what they actually want/need. I remember watching a program that talked about a small town where they were deciding whether a chain supermarket or a co-op should take over a building. There was a deep divide between what I guess you could call the intellectual class and the working class. Ultimately the co-op moved in but there were a lot of people who were angry about it. They... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:44 AM on July 31, 2008

Class, people! I will not have my thread devolve into a discussion of penis pans.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:12 PM on July 30, 2008

If you read the story what's really depressing is how cheaply legislators can be bought. One guy caved in for less than $5k in donations plus a $3k summer job for one of his relatives. Really? I thought that was what legislators spent each week for hookers and crack.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 11:22 AM on July 29, 2008

I'm kind of surprised no one has come up to answer the question about what an information architect really is.

Well, you know what a graphic designer is? You tell them the message you want to convey, maybe what images you want on the page. They then take the knowledge that they (hopefully) have about typography, about the layout of a page, about visual stimuli, about visual perception and psychology and all that, and then they make a page.

An... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:32 PM on July 22, 2008

The Tufte books are nowhere near prohibitively expensive

Yeah, I've always been criminally cheap when it comes to buying books. I always buy used, and you can rarely get a used copy of one his books for under $25. I recently went all out and spent around $85 for 4 books (all kinda job related) which is kind of like a record for me, so maybe there's hope for me yet.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 11:17 AM on July 24, 2008

Can't remember, must have been memepool. Back in the days when slashdot was also part of my daily routine.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 4:12 AM on July 11, 2008

It's the same in Egypt. I had a close Egyptian friend who worked with a bunch of deaf people. He was pretty interesting...he basically was able to understand sign language, and rather than learn the whole language, which would have been too difficult, basically he winged it...and somehow the deaf people understood all of his more-or-less made up signs! In any case, one of the deaf men who worked in the shop was unfortunate to have a very wide gap in the front of his... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:06 PM on July 7, 2008

.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 11:46 PM on July 1, 2008

All right, for those of you who still don't get why what Boing Boing is doing is weird: imagine if it were discovered that the board of Peta had a dinner party at a steakhouse.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:01 PM on June 30, 2008

Yeah, the fact that there's no BoingTalk is a real liability in this case, I would say. Merely the fact that MeFi has a place where we can question things is part of the reason why MeFi feels like a community, while Boing Boing does not. Sure, it's a lot easier to post things here than in Boing Boing, and we have AskMe, etc. But ultimately it's the sense that community opinion matters that makes this place feel like a community.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:21 PM on June 30, 2008

Great. Another order to be afraid of.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:02 AM on June 25, 2008

Oh, and let's not forget its cousin, the vampire squid from hell.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:04 AM on June 25, 2008

My grandma has a pig valve in her heart. A pig valve. To be able to live healthily is a blessing so great that frankly I can't imagine any religious obligations that could possible outrank it. I still don't eat pork.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 1:07 AM on June 24, 2008

If you're turning customers away because the anti-homosexual lobby may punish you if you don't then in my mind you're worse than the people who are doing the punishing.

Why?
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 1:52 PM on June 23, 2008

Yeah, I guess here's the thing. The ugly secret of music is there are some people who are frikkin amazing, some people who are really jaw-droppingly bad, but most musicians float in the middle. It's really luck and happenstance and a knack for the local zeitgeist that determines whether one musician succeeds or one fails (I'm guessing that Norah Jones would have fallen flat if she'd emerged just a few years earlier).

So this guy is great. Cool. So are about 100k other... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:31 PM on June 21, 2008

What an incredibly unimportant non-event!

Uh, this is not important. Please no bad info.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:22 PM on June 20, 2008

Is there some way I can die sooner? I don't dig space vacuums at all.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:01 AM on June 12, 2008

According to the UK Vegan Society's page on Vitamin D, soy milk is fortified with vitamin D by law in the UK. This suggests the parents didn't feed the kid soy milk either, which seems crazy to me.

The thing is, suppose that the parents fed their children nothing but meat and bread. The children would quickly get scurvy. They should be prosecuted for failing to feed their children an adequate diet, but no one would criticize the "meat and bread" community (of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 1:47 PM on June 10, 2008

The first link and "there are concerns" are practically identical articles, to save you all some reading time.

On preview: um, no, not really
Well, my point is that the fact that these parents were vegans is sort of incidental to the issue, because what they were doing was giving their child was unhealthy. However, whenever these issues come up veganism as a whole is blamed. This incorrectly frames veganism as a freakish and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 1:57 PM on June 10, 2008

I think the average North American diet is anything but normal for our species.You're right. Far to much grain and vegtables. Not enough hairy elephant you killed with a pointy stick. Not enough sabertoothed cats weeding out the fat and slow either.

Assuming by "North American" diet he meant the diet eaten by most United States and Canadian citizens, which is rich in meat. The amount of vegetables we eat today is... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 3:54 PM on June 10, 2008

3. This post would be better with everything after the "..." omitted or confined to a comment.

Dude, it's called "More Inside" for a reason. A lot of times I don't want to go off to the links. So I liked the summary, and it made me want to click the link.

I hope your head falls offf.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 7:16 AM on June 3, 2008

Absolutely impossible, but the ideal solution would be to have gas be priced differently depending on use and income. So rich people using an SUV to commute to work would pay more than a farmer hauling his crops to town, and there would be a clear economic burden for using gas extravagantly without similarly impacting people who use more gas out of necessity.

I think that if the price of gas goes up tp $8, what will happen immediately is that the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 8:50 PM on May 31, 2008

How many innocents need to go first, in your calculus, before it is OK to take out a person crazy enough to get physical with a Federal agent? 2? 5? 9?

Obviously,it goes without saying that no one wants to see people die while some crazy goes mental and starts shooting. I also think that pretty much anyone would have to be crazy to attempt to enter a government building and balk at the idea of being searched.

But the truth... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 4:33 AM on May 15, 2008

A few of these tips were really stretching it. Use cotton swabs with a paper spindle? Really?

How about a bigger one: choose products with less packaging and plastics, period. When I'm buying things, I try as much as possible to get things with as little packaging as possible (close to impossible these days). Unless it's a loose item, I don't bag my produce, I just put it right in the cart and perhaps use a bag when I get home.

Also: reuse... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:30 AM on May 1, 2008

nax, not to be snarky or overgeneralize, but perhaps there's a reason that GenXers overconsume?

Let's see...in general, boomers were raised by parents who had gone through the depression and thus were notoriously thrifty. On the other hand, many GenXers were raised in families where both parents worked. The solution to the absence of traditional parenting love was purchasing items for their kids. If people are upset that these newer generations are spoiled, well, look at... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 12:37 PM on May 1, 2008

in the war period. in the WWII period.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 12:37 PM on May 1, 2008

I think this is typified by the following humorous interaction:

Me: I think the problem with the United States foreign policy is that we don't send the message that we care about what other nations think about our behavior.
Other guy: Why should we care about what other nations think?
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:36 AM on May 1, 2008

I enjoyed this but kept being distracted by his voice. I couldn't stop thinking, "Mawwage. Mawwage is what bwings us togevew, today."
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 8:49 AM on May 1, 2008

OH great, thank you so much. As you can tell by the view counts, these videos were really unknown and needed further mention.

Am I bitter because the video I took of my adorable first cousin once removed only has a 1000 hits?

Maybe.

Plus, which is funnier, a baby laughing at his dad making a face, or a baby laughing because he finds the sound a plastic water bottle makes when it falls over... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 1:31 PM on April 29, 2008

Looks like Disney beat you to it, CKmti!
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 2:25 PM on April 29, 2008

Hmm...never mind. The video works when you link to it, just doesn't work when you try to view it in MeFi. Hmmm..
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 2:25 PM on April 29, 2008

I thought it was sweet. I guess my taste is lousy :(
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 1:06 PM on April 11, 2008

Hmmm...you know, I've never really bothered all that much to learn the etiquette or customs of other countries (heck, I barely know the etiquette here). In my experience, though, so long as you are friendly, not too loud, open to modeling others' behavior, and refuse things offered at least once (in non-Western countries, at least) then you will come across okay. Remember, the novelty of you being an "ignorant" foreigner goes a long way. They are usually understanding that you don't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:27 AM on April 9, 2008

For even more enjoyment, watch one of these with the sound turned off.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 8:39 PM on April 1, 2008

These are great. They really highlight the kind of visual creativity necessary when you're working with limited colors.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 11:48 AM on March 19, 2008

By the standards of the time, he wasn't much of a racist. He thought blacks were intellectually inferior, but was very careful to say that this was an unproven conjecture. It's probably the best he could have done, given that he depended on slaves for his survival.

This is utter tripe and foolishness. "The best he could have done"? As a historian, you should probably have moved a little past Blahblahblah in theoretical sophistication by now.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 2:00 AM on March 17, 2008

Not being a "morning person"

See, not being a morning person is just something that "morning people" will never understand. Just like I can't understand people who go to sleep before 11pm whatthehelliswrongwithyoupeople
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:41 PM on March 14, 2008

Okay, 3 things.It's Shanghai. It's probably the most western of the cities in China (apart from Hong Kong I guess), and has the most expats. I'm surprised if most Chinese have even heard of Bjork, so it's a safe bet to guess that a lot of the people there were foreigners. The guy going "Yeah! Woo!" was definitely a foreigner.Given that, her speech appeals and seems directed towards her foreigner audience, many of whom are probably sympathetic to the cause of Tibet. I would hazard that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 2:13 PM on March 6, 2008

Of course not. That's never stopped any other poster. I have only the bare scrapings of a surface understanding of it. But pretty much everything I've read on Tibet says that Tibet was largely feudal with an oppressed underclass. Please, if you know more, enlighten me.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 3:31 PM on March 6, 2008

Also, the thrust of my comment still stands. The problem in Tibet isn't that they're not their own state. The problem is that the people in Tibet can't exercise the freedoms they ought to be able to. With the possible exception of Scotland and Quebec, you don't see many places where people enjoy total freedom (as much as can exist in this world) wanting to break off from the state; you mostly see it in countries where a group is oppressed and downtrodden. In those cases, part of the reason they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 3:58 PM on March 6, 2008

Thanks Abiezer. That's exactly the sort of info that I was looking for. I'm off to read the article...
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:40 PM on March 9, 2008

...cool, I did not know that the Dalia Lama is calling for just regional autonomy and not statehood. That sounds a lot more doable, although probably not any time soon with the kind of government in place now. I have to say I find it a bit weird that China is so obsessed both with geographical as well as cultural control of Tibet...it doesn't exactly seem like the most appealing real estate, and the train out there must have cost them a fortune to build.

I think Beijing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:06 PM on March 9, 2008

Oh and yeah, I agree with pollomacho. The Chinese government is honestly nice to no one except its party leaders and foreigners. Some rich Chinese are doing quite well, and obviously those in Tibet are suffering more than average. But these are all symptoms of a larger problem of the lack of fundamental rights in China. If Tibetans were allowed to freely express their religion and live free of fear, discrimination, and military control, they probably would not care so much about their... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 10:12 PM on March 9, 2008

The subtitles are also in Malay
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:27 PM on March 9, 2008

I can't see how this is anything but a good thing. If recording execs start seeing that they can be circumvented, then maybe they'll start taking bands and customers seriously.

As always, I, being a total cheapskate, will continue to buy all of my music used.
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:57 PM on March 2, 2008

No, no no!

It was "Teach a man to fish, and he'll never work again."
posted to MetaFilter by Deathalicious at 9:55 PM on March 2, 2008