Flash? Really? You can surely abuse it, but it's also responsible for some of the best content on the internet.
And most of the wasted time on the Internet. Don't you hate waiting five minutes for flash intros to load so that some web designer person can justify his pay?
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 7:50 PM on May 20, 2008

I signed up but wasn't very happy with the site and disabled my account immediately. For one thing it doesn't seem to let you adjust your goals like Fitday does -- for example, I follow a low-carb diet so I don't really care what my calorie goals are and I'd like to dial my carbohydrate goal way down. Also the selection of foods has the same problem as Fitday and many other sites -- way too many processed foods listed with brand names and many basic ingredients missing. I tried to enter my menu... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 7:28 PM on May 19, 2008

Who pays for a big wedding in India? Is it the Bride's family or a combo of the Bride & Groom's family? If the bride's family, does the groom's family have any input?

If the groom's family are now wanting higher "gifts" due to the groom being college educated with a job, what if the bride is equally educated with a better job - can the bride's family demand a gift?
Generally, the bride's family pays for the whole shebang.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:15 AM on May 19, 2008

Are "parent-chaperoned tea-sessions" really all that torturous? As someone who has never felt comfortable (or been successful) in the modern American rituals of courtship I've occasionally wondered whether I might not have preferred the methods of India, or some other country with very different traditions.

Plus, I like tea.
I used to wonder about this sometimes. My parents don't really believe in arranged marriages, though they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:24 AM on May 19, 2008

That's an awesome all around face saving manuever. I wonder if that's part of the reason for the whole astrology tradition. Is that the sort of generic decline to state reason used for rejection? Does a reason have to be given?
It's possible I'm sure. I remember that excuse was used in a Hindi book I had to read in school as well. A reason doesn't necessarily have to be given but people try to be polite.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 5:59 PM on May 19, 2008

They engineered the embryo to express a green fluorescent protein. Basically glow in the dark embryos.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 6:14 PM on May 13, 2008

Also people seem to be missing the part where they talk about destroying the embryos after five days -- at which point they'd look like nothing more remarkable than a fluorescent green glowing clump of cells.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 6:15 PM on May 13, 2008

GFP does not "glow in the dark" any more than a black-lite poster glows in the dark.
I know, I was just having some fun with it.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 6:22 PM on May 13, 2008

blaming a far-away leader for all the world's problems is politically painless.
politcally painless? It takes a lot of gumption for a government to stand up to Bush and his saber-rattling. No one wants to become the next Iraq or Afghanistan.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 6:13 PM on May 13, 2008

Practicality aside, it is possible to create energy from water...the problem is it still takes more energy/resources to get the job done than its worth. For example, it's possible to "burn" water, but the amount of energy needed to sustain that greatly outweighs the energy you get in return...you might as well use batteries.

Another method I know of is using a magnesium catalyst rods (basically you could drive up to a "gas" station and buy a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 2:57 PM on May 13, 2008

Anyway, HHO (AKA Brown's gas) has been used in many applications as fuel. It's easy to generate, it has a high energy density, and, yeah, if you put some solar panels on your car or used external electricity to crack the water into HHO, you could actually run your car on "water", as long as you have the electricity to convert water to gas.

You just won't get very far on water alone. Yet. Not without plenty of electricity. But you can indeed improve a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 4:30 PM on May 13, 2008

Chinese officials blame that "monster with a human face" Mother Nature and her "splittist clique" for trying to divide China.

General Tsu Head Geologist for the Ruling Communist Party declared, "We do not recognize this fault line, it does not exist. This terriroty is inseparably part of China."

China has repeatedly threatened to use military power against the fault line if it declares independence and has... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:54 AM on May 12, 2008

It sounds like he was an exceptional person.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:06 AM on May 10, 2008

I don't have highly refined legal skillz, but isn't the company breaking their agreement here? I'm guessing when the consumer purchased the license, they were promised that they could play the song on multiple (3? 5?) systems. Now that the servers validating these licenses are shutting down, consumers are not going to be able to play the song on a different computer. It seems that the consumer has paid for a service that they're not receiving.
I think Microsoft's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 2:51 PM on May 7, 2008

No, Forktine, you're wrong.
Oh stop picking on the poor men. They can't help it.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 1:28 PM on May 7, 2008

That's a very cool group. Thanks for the link. I'm also enjoying the pile-on on the lone creationist there.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 1:05 PM on May 7, 2008

I grew up in India and am apparently 52 % Dixie. I did randomly answer a couple questions though.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 12:24 PM on May 2, 2008

What does this mean? I would argue that political affiliation has more to do with how Americans divide themselves up then any notion of class. Assuming by "U" and "non-U" you mean groups you identify with and groups you don't, which isn't all that clear really.
The post linked to uses U and non-U to mean upper class and non-upper class.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:18 PM on April 30, 2008

It's like Housingmaps.com, except a lot slower to load, and with less choices.
Except it shows listings outside major cities too.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 7:01 PM on April 30, 2008

I had it once and am convinced it either contains, or creates once ingested, some sort of drug-like effect similar to an opiate. Certainly one doesn't eat it for the taste (it had none) and the one-time novelty of eating a poisonous fish doesn't explain its repeat clientèle.
The reason fugu is so popular is that it gives you a tingling feeling on your tongue. This is because its skin and organs contain the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin which blocks sodium channels in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:54 AM on April 30, 2008

I loved the part about how they discovered the milky sea. Thanks for this post.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 8:08 PM on April 28, 2008

(via 3 quarks daily)
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 3:28 PM on April 26, 2008

That's interesting Jpfed. In the sciencemag article the authors say that for one group of students they asked them to explicitly compare the different elements of the concrete examples and write down the similarities. What they got was a bimodal distribution, with some (about 44 %) transferring the concepts well after the explicit comparison while the others were not helped.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 3:52 PM on April 26, 2008

@Jpfed, honestly I think there's room for both kinds of teaching. While being given examples of groups, rings and fields is unlikely to be enough to get you to understand what they are, showing those examples to you and then clearly explaining what makes each of those items groups, rings or fields might be. But I think they have a point when they claim that giving examples with no abstraction is not enough. I remember as a kid being given word problem after word problem and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 4:30 PM on April 26, 2008

Llama-lime, I agree with you that the "generic" problem required more learning than the "concrete" problem they gave. I think the authors' conclusion is interesting and quite possibly true but that the study needs more work.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 4:35 PM on April 26, 2008

Interesting discussion on this study going on at Matt Yglesias' blog.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 6:16 PM on April 27, 2008

IIRC this is more likely Kollywood than Bollywood, the Tamil film industry being the one that the people of Mumbai like to point and laugh at.
That's unlikely, the language of the video being Hindi not Tamil.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 3:45 PM on April 27, 2008

Interesting article but I take issue with this line:
as if writing were a hobby, like golf, rather than a calling or a craft.
I think writing is a hobby, like golf, for a lot of people, and that this isn't a new thing. The difference is that today due to much lowered publishing and distribution costs, more of these people are being published.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 3:45 PM on April 26, 2008

If you were just you, one of billions on the ground, one of thousands or millions in that city, and no government was paying millions of dollars to keep you there, I might agree. What you do doesn't matter to anyone but you, and if you want to spend your time watch the curling championships, watch them. If I were orbiting the damned Earth, though, and on someone else's tab, not paying my way, I think I'd feel I owed it to myself and others to focus on where I was for the time I was up... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 12:12 PM on April 26, 2008

I totally agree with their description of The Fountainhead:
Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama... Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job.
Ha.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:55 AM on April 26, 2008

That's far more fun than it has any right to be.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 12:55 PM on April 24, 2008

Wow, I don't read these blogs for a couple weeks and look what happens!
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:26 AM on April 23, 2008

One example would be complaints about an article about Hillary Clinton in TNR about turmoil in her campaign, and the headline was "The voices in her head". Supposedly, this was sexist, even though the article was written by a woman (apparently they didn't bother to read the byline)
Or maybe they actually read the byline and thought that sexism is still sexism even if perpetrated by a woman?
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:28 AM on April 23, 2008

This is a blog, not an academic journal.
No it was not a blog post, it was an article written by Amanda Marcotte for Alternet.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:32 AM on April 23, 2008

You know, I get that it's really sad that rainforests are being destroyed to get more farmland, but if it comes to a choice between people being fed and preserving rainforests I'd have to go for the first option every time.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:01 PM on April 22, 2008

You know, the US could stop converting corn into fuel ethanol, and the problem would vanish. That would only take a few months.
Yes I wish they would, especially since it's been found that it's probably not cost-effective and that ethanol can be produced more cheaply from other sources.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:13 PM on April 22, 2008

I'm not really advocating clearing rainforests here. I get that that's probably a bad thing and will have horrible consequences in the future. In any case, I don't think the problem is so much one of food production but of distribution. In many areas there's actually more than enough food to go around but the starving people don't have enough money to purchase it. For example, India actually has a surplus of food and has grain rotting away in government granaries, but the poorest people can't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:27 PM on April 22, 2008

aeschenkarnos I've already explained that I'm not for cutting down rainforests and that I understand that there are alternatives that should be explored first. It just bothers me when people seem to put environmental concerns before all else, including human survival. I get that in the long run human beings, as a species, will be better off with those rainforests in place. It's just a pattern I see repeated again and again and I can't help calling it out when I see it. For... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:03 PM on April 22, 2008

Stating the problem in those exact terms ought to provide a clue. If the market economy isn't meeting a need, indeed if it is causing the need not to be met, then we need to take meeting the need out of the market economy.
You know you're really preaching to the choir here. I get that, I really do. It's difficult to get governments to agree to such a radical restructuring in practice.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:05 PM on April 22, 2008

I heard a really wonderful lecture by a favorite teacher of mine which all this reminds me of. He drew a big square on the blackboard and divided it up into 100 little squares. Then he said: imagine that there are 100 people. Now each person needs about 1 square to live comfortably. But imagine now that 5 of the 100 people have 95 squares. The remaining 95 people have to squeeze into the 5 squares left. They're rather crowded. The 5 people with 95 squares want to distract attention from the fact... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:17 PM on April 22, 2008

Hard to say, let's wait a 100 years or so.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 11:32 PM on April 22, 2008

bravelittletoaster: Because these two thoughts can be true at the same time!

1). People have a tendancy to hoard all the good for themselves at the expense of others.

2). The world can only support X number of people.

I completely agree that the world can only support X number of people. Does that mean that I think that's problem now? No. Right now the major problem isn't the people in India and China... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:46 AM on April 23, 2008

regicide is good for you
As for overpopulation, well, that tends to become less of a problem where education and material stability rise - which are more likely to happen if impoverished nations and communities aren't being bled dry by wealthy conglomerates or corrupt local governments.
I totally agree. The same teacher who came up with the analogy I shared above also had a game-theoretic way of looking at this that made a lot of sense to me. His... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:19 AM on April 23, 2008

I get so frustrated every time I have this discussion with someone too. How is it ethical to expect one group of people to suddenly stop having children just to make the world a better place when other groups of people could make a bigger impact by consuming less? If you seriously think that asking people to consume less and pollute less is on a par with regulating how many children they can have, I don't think we're going to reach a point of agreement very soon. Yes, if... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 10:57 AM on April 23, 2008

Wow, if this actually works I'll earn serious points with my dad. He's always memorizing thousands of words for Scrabble. And believe me it's bloody hard to keep those words memorized. He's always learning words, any spare time he has and yet they slip out of his memory suddenly.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:47 PM on April 22, 2008

Very interesting article. Thank you for that. I've always felt much more comfortable without shoes than with. Due to my flat, weirdly-shaped feet and my right foot being slightly longer than my left, I've never found a pair of shoes that didn't hurt me in some way. Either they pinched at my heel or made walking torture or I toppled over on them regularly or I got my right toe stubbed or my left foot was swimming in the shoe.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:05 PM on April 22, 2008

I think it's horrifyingly real -- the phone number on the video matches the one at www.barschool.com which seems like a legitimate operation. I agree about the nosewiping. WTF?
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 8:20 PM on April 22, 2008

Anyone know why the article on Canine Reproduction is tenth on the list of most viewed articles between Feb 1st and Feb 23rd?
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 5:16 PM on March 6, 2008

The daughter's mother had died when the daughter was a kid and she thought her mother was her grandmother until she was 21.
Actually the article says she was brought up by her aunt, not her grandmother.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 1:31 PM on January 23, 2008

A recent journal club at my institution discussed this interesting paper: Why most published research findings are false.
posted to MetaFilter by peacheater at 9:47 AM on January 17, 2008