planetguy

8 ms·

121.
by planetguy 14y ago
I revisited the Tate Modern recently and a lot of the permanent exhibits are less bullshit than they used to be. Video Of Naked Guy Punching Himself In The Face Repeatedly While His Genitals Wibble Back And Forth, for instance, has been put
122.
by planetguy 14y ago
Art is simple. It exists to decorate the walls of rich people. It's been that way for thousands of years. I'm not very rich, but I have some art around the place. It's pretty awesome. The problem is that a lot of these artists don't get a
123.
by planetguy 14y ago
So where, in your opinion, is the boundary between philosophy and mathematics? On which side is logic?
124.
by planetguy 14y ago
So the "constituency" map has no actual electoral meaning?
125.
by planetguy 14y ago
Well, it's quite nicely done, though I'm confused as to who it's for. It's in English, suggesting it's for foreigners; also, it explains who all the parties are. That's good for me, I know nothing about Greek politics. But anyone who needs
126.
by planetguy 14y ago
Questions that can be answered aren't the domain of philosophy, and if these questions ever do get answered the question gets retrospectively moved out of the philosophers' domain. Often philosophers do answer questions -- e.g. Russell an
127.
by planetguy 14y ago
The two linked articles http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-fr... being David Alpert's review of Lawrence Kraus's book, and http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/has-ph... being an interview in whic
128.
by planetguy 14y ago
Or to answer that one you can just think "Hey, can I reuse the same calendar two years in a row?" and if the answer is no, then 365 isn't divisible by 7.
129.
by planetguy 14y ago
Hacker News: where we discuss advanced programming and elementary social skills. I wonder if there's somewhere out there where it's the reverse.
130.
by planetguy 14y ago
Some stories exist just to give pleasure to headline writers. I'm not planning to commit murder, but if I ever do I'm going to decapitate the corpse and stash the headless body in a topless bar.
131.
by planetguy 14y ago
Hey, I have a beautiful house and it's filled with beautiful things. Why would I want an ugly person touching them? Seriously, I wouldn't pay extra for a good-looking maid myself, but if I were rich then it would seem appropriate to have
132.
by planetguy 14y ago
For a hundred bucks an hour, maybe they should!
133.
by planetguy 14y ago
Nope, but thanks for the stereotype!
134.
by planetguy 14y ago
Some of them are. Some of them are truly pointless. Neal Stephenson apparently had a giant map of 18th century London on the wall of the room where he wrote it, and as such apparently feels compelled, on certain occasions when a character
135.
by planetguy 14y ago
I stand corrected on the latest one, which I haven't read. I've picked it up in the bookstore a few times but the combination of a thousand pages of thickness and a less-than--compelling blurb on the back ( wasn't this a Michael Douglas mov
136.
by planetguy 14y ago
One of the themes in the book is the adolescent fantasies of male badassitude which follow them well into adulthood, with a diminishing but ever-present sense of possibility. Actually I'm not sure that is a theme. There's a brief medita
137.
by planetguy 14y ago
Snow Crash is an interesting book, but a deeply flawed one. Stephenson's later books are much better (though after Diamond Age they become too long to film anyway). It is a bit of a dumb action movie, in many ways. A guy with a sword take
138.
by planetguy 14y ago
Everyone is so full of simple solutions. My simple solution is to own a house with at least enough toilets for everybody so that you can have your own and don't need to share.
139.
by planetguy 14y ago
Well, that's an interesting perspective. But I don't think it's either desirable in itself or necessary for consistency with any higher principle, so I disagree.
140.
by planetguy 14y ago
Don't you guys remember school at all? The school has the legal right to force you, especially at the age of nine, to obey any number of arbitrary rules and instructions. When you think of it from an adult perspective, the idea that an arbi
141.
by planetguy 14y ago
It helps that Apple stores have an employee density many, many times that of a Best Buy or similar, which means people are unlikely to get away with anything sneaky for too long.
142.
by planetguy 14y ago
Yeah, I find it's easier just to put my brain into Eliza mode and think about something else.
143.
by planetguy 14y ago
shouldn't Microsoft be more interested in, say, shipping Windows 8 sooner and with more features? They could pay engineers $200,000 a year (a very nice salary) and contract FIVE THOUSAND of them for a single year with that billion dollars
144.
by planetguy 14y ago
Now there's an interesting idea. Las Vegas has many things going for it as a potential tech hub, including a large metro area, dirt-cheap real estate, a lax attitude towards regulation, easy access to the big west-coast hubs, and no shortag
145.
by planetguy 14y ago
Much as I hate to stray this far from the topic at hand, AIDS turned out to be a much, much smaller deal than the alarmists of the 1980s would have had you believe. Not that it wasn't worth being concerned about, researching, and educating
146.
by planetguy 14y ago
They've got a Lexus too now, for unclear reasons. http://www.importrpm.com/self-driving-lexus-rxh/ I think most of the test fleet is still Toyotas. But if you're Sergey Brin and you show up with the President of Turkey then they let you b
147.
by planetguy 14y ago
Nobody is seriously discussing a military draft in the US. Nobody actually wants it -- certainly not the generals, who already have all the volunteers they need and have no interest in babysitting a bunch of shiftless eighteen-year-olds who
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by planetguy 14y ago
> Typically service, when used in this context, implies that you do something for somebody else at no or little benefit to yourself And in another context it just means "serving". So it's silly to call it an oxymoron when it's quite eas
149.
by planetguy 14y ago
I must admit that you've surprised me with the numbers on solar vs RTG. (I've learned something today!) But of course you can always strap multiple RTGs together. According to wikipedia's article on RTGs the most efficient ones produce abou
150.
by planetguy 14y ago
Though perhaps if they had killed the Grand Tour then we might have sent an orbital probe to Uranus or Neptune by now, and we might know a lot more about them. We have literally hours of direct observation on both these planets put togeth

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