aaronem

81 ms·

691.
by aaronem 13y ago
Not to us, because we don't eat rocks and metal. If there's a planet out there whose apex predator species is silicaceous in the same way we're carbonaceous, then, there, my robot is halfway to being a cricket, and is probabl
692.
by aaronem 13y ago
Well, sure, when there's no traffic against which to have to turn, the cost of making a left is negligible -- especially in American residential neighborhoods, which are often laid out so as to prompt suspicion that they weren't i
693.
by aaronem 13y ago
Low-level programming requires a great deal of knowledge, in exchange for which you get an enormous amount of control over how your efforts behave. High-level programming offers the prospect of a quick start, but, especially with today&#x27
694.
by aaronem 13y ago
I'm curious where he was in the United States that hats weren't de rigeur for very cold weather; I never saw anyone wear a hat in my Mississippi boyhood, but that's because it never dropped below forty (Fahrenheit) there. Her
695.
by aaronem 13y ago
He's got a point about sheets and blankets. I've never understood the appeal of tucking a top sheet in at the foot of the bed; I sleep with my feet sticking out of the covers, lest they sweat. He's also got a point about show
696.
by aaronem 13y ago
Same here. My experience as an expatriate Southron is that everyone understands what is meant by "supper", but using "dinner" to refer to what these people call "lunch" gets you a lot of funny looks.
697.
by aaronem 13y ago
My Neapolitan grandmother taught me similarly, by the simple expedient of not telling me what I was eating until I had already decided I liked it. Smart woman, my grandmother.
698.
by aaronem 13y ago
Farmville and games of like ilk are designed for intermittent play, in short sessions a few times a day. This doesn't strike me as a compelling use case for a head-mounted virtual reality display.
699.
by aaronem 13y ago
Plants, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, are also capable of nociception. In advance of further discussion, my preliminary conclusion is that the vegan line is just as arbitrary as any other, but drawn so as to more tightly circumscri
700.
by aaronem 13y ago
I have a microcontroller, a tiny DC motor, a pair of wheels, and a handful of thermistors. From these I build a robot, autonomous to the limit of its battery charge, which senses the temperature of its surroundings and acts on this informat
701.
by aaronem 13y ago
Does it matter, to a cricket, whether it dies so you can put it on your supper plate, or merely so you can fill said plate with roughage?
702.
by aaronem 13y ago
Good question! The impression I have is that we all, vegans included, draw a line somewhere, and that there's almost never any solid reasoning behind anyone's decision on how to circumscribe his diet. I'd be really interested
703.
by aaronem 13y ago
That's certainly true for most Americans; in the United States, escargot is not a delicacy but a perennial joke. (I don't find it unpleasant, particularly, but I also don't really see the point; it strikes me as one of those
704.
by aaronem 13y ago
I was going to make a vaguely snide comment about difficulty in routing and managing services (air, water, power, data, &c.), but the more I look at the model, the less firmly I'm convinced that there is an intractable topological
705.
by aaronem 13y ago
I'd be interested to hear about the process of reasoning which led to Oculus VR falling into the "social networking" bucket.
706.
by aaronem 13y ago
Okay, I'll bite: who are you talking about here?
707.
by aaronem 13y ago
News is a special case; it implicitly claims to be factual. That it often fails to live up to that claim doesn't put news in the same category as entertainment programming, which makes no such claim to begin with. > ...how are we su
708.
by aaronem 13y ago
> hairlessness seems to have come from porn I've seen a lot of just-so stories on this subject. Has anyone got any evidence to show?
709.
by aaronem 13y ago
Every kid (ideally) learns the difference between "real" and "not real", and, more subtly, the difference between "valid example" and "don't trust this, it lies" (e.g., most television, which is
710.
by aaronem 13y ago
That's what I said, and it's been mumblety-cough years since I was anywhere close to the age of seven.
711.
by aaronem 13y ago
I'd be inclined to wonder, first, whether there are people who "only see &c., &c., through cheaply crafted pornography,", and, second, whether that's the fault of said cheaply crafted pornography, or whether in
712.
by aaronem 13y ago
It would appear so: > Does porn cause harm? That it does is indisputable. > So in the end, I don't know if it causes the harms portrayed. But, hey, what's a little internal inconsistency when you're urging everyone forw
713.
by aaronem 13y ago
Anything that provokes a dopamine dump can be addictive. What's your point?
714.
by aaronem 13y ago
I recently did a brief stint in academia; peripherally so, I grant, but close enough to see that sausage made, and indeed I had the rare privilege of seeing one particular lump of particularly indigestible offal picked apart and analyzed in
715.
by aaronem 13y ago
Oh, I don't know; looking back on my time in the scene, I don't think it unreasonable to say that most of the people I knew who practiced BDSM -- myself included -- were in some way "damaged", if that's the word you
716.
by aaronem 13y ago
Imagine your surprise when it turns out not to be up to you! That sounds flippant, perhaps, but behold: I knew lots of kids growing up whose (usually extreme Southern Baptist) parents tried to prevent them getting hold of porn, but I didn&#
717.
by aaronem 13y ago
Only if it falls on them. Stack your DVDs and magazines carefully, folks. More substantively: When divided into "pro-impact" and "no-impact" groups for the "improvised debate" mentioned in the article, the form
718.
by aaronem 13y ago
I've heard a few versions of that chestnut, but the only one which both rhymes and scans is this: 'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.'
719.
by aaronem 13y ago
Sure. But then you hit a case where your URI scheme doesn't map 1:1 to the part of the filesystem your web server is looking at. Sometimes you can just hang ?id=foo off the end of the URI and be done with it. Sometimes you're doin
720.
by aaronem 13y ago
Does it happen that you've ever read Flatland ?

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