sethg

73 ms·

721.
by sethg 17y ago
English does not seem to have a single word that means "Good Deed" (like how Sin means "Bad Deed"). "Obligation"?
722.
by sethg 17y ago
When I was a teenager, my parents and I were in a piano store, and I remarked that I could tell that the expensive pianos had better sound quality than the cheap ones. This fact seemed to help the salesman close the deal. Of course, ungrat
723.
by sethg 17y ago
Well, there are also cons, but I hear that the single women at these events are under-represented, and a lot of the single men have good reason to be single....
724.
by sethg 17y ago
I suspect that if getting #1 from an online classroom or other bare-bones service becomes commonplace, then other institutions will evolve to provide 2-5.
725.
College, all you can learn, $99/month(washingtonmonthly.com)
117 points by sethg 17y ago|85 comments
726.
by sethg 17y ago
Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that sleep evolved to optimize animals’ use of time, keeping them safe and hidden when the hunting, fishing or scavenging was scarce and perhaps
727.
by sethg 17y ago
One of the dubious features of business journalism today is that articles tend to privilege the passive investor's point of view. Hence the emphasis on things like stock-market indices. And from an investor's point of view, a successful bu
728.
by sethg 17y ago
As for the numbers, the criticisms I have heard are that there are no ways to validate them. There are demographic statistics on the number of Jews in Europe before and after World War II. These numbers have a margin of error, but if thr
729.
by sethg 17y ago
You have been misinformed. http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/aktion.reinhard/belzec/A... http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/orgs/german/einsatzgruppen/ftp... (there is of course more evidence available for those who seek it, but I just wan
730.
by sethg 17y ago
Also if the killing was planned from the beginning Excerpt from a 1922 magazine interview with Hitler: "Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I wi
731.
by sethg 17y ago
Excerpts from Goebbels's diary: February 14, 1942: The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe tha
732.
by sethg 17y ago
For the specific issue of the Holocaust, I believe the go-to anti-revisionist site on the Internet is the Nizkor Project: http://www.nizkor.org/
733.
by sethg 17y ago
Let's say that in 10% of controversies of this nature, The Scientific Consensus is wrong and the revisionists are actually correct. I personally don't have time to review every controversy in enough depth to decide which ones belong to tha
734.
by sethg 17y ago
If the price of oil were rising steadily over time as reserves were steadily being drawn down, then anyone contemplating an investment in alternatives would have a pretty clear idea what kind of return to expect, and all would be well. What
735.
by sethg 17y ago
"Mom and Dad, I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I'm finally going to college. The bad news is, I'm going to Hamburger University."
736.
by sethg 17y ago
McDonald's has also been selling "Shamrock Shakes", green mint-flavored milkshakes that used to have an Irish mascot, for about forty years.
737.
by sethg 17y ago
I suddenly feel so productive...
738.
by sethg 17y ago
"Excuse me, sir, have you heard the good news about Emacs?"
739.
by sethg 17y ago
My grandmother gave me Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior for my bar mitzvah. The Miss Manners books are not only fun to read and full of rules, but they are also interesting for some of her meta-level essays about ge
740.
by sethg 17y ago
I believe this kind of training is known as "social pragmatics", and may be useful for some non-autism-spectrum children as well.
741.
by sethg 17y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if the health of the average person is not significantly affected by the amount spent on medical care. So what? The whole point of insurance is to protect the policy-holder from the risk of outcomes that are muc
742.
by sethg 17y ago
I think the trick is to define the kg in terms of something that is not only a universal constant but can also be practically measured. If I redefine the gram as the mass of 6e23 atoms of carbon-12, and you give me a big pile of carbon-12 a
743.
by sethg 17y ago
The most significant feature of modern banks is fractional-reserve lending. Your bank borrows $100 from you (e.g. by letting you deposit money in it), lends $90 to your neighbor, and predicts that by the time you want your $100 back, someo
744.
by sethg 17y ago
My impression is that Lego bricks are engineered to very precise tolerances (see comment above re MegaBlocks); I wonder how close RepRap could come to the standard of a real brick.
745.
by sethg 17y ago
From a business point of view, one of the impressive things about this is that all the IP rights protecting Lego's core product lines expired long ago. They can't stop anyone from making plastic bricks with bumps in exactly the right place
746.
by sethg 17y ago
Judah Schwartz, my physics professor at MIT, used to end each lecture by saying "Comments? Questions? Puzzles?" Usually there would be dead silence from the class. And then he would say "I don't believe you." And he waited for someone to
747.
by sethg 17y ago
A good teacher is one who can perceive where the student already is (what skills or interests he or she is bringing into the classroom) and can then lay out paths from that point to whatever the goal of the class is. A mediocre teacher kn
748.
by sethg 17y ago
Income from dividends is taxed at a higher rate than income from capital gains. Therefore, if you're investing in a company and you're not doing it through a retirement plan or a similar tax-sheltered fund, you might rather see profits rei
749.
by sethg 17y ago
Uh-oh.
750.
by sethg 17y ago
When I read about step changes, I think about cell phones. I was studying in Israel during 1997-98, in a school where almost all the students were twentysomethings from the US or UK. At one point, one of the students came in with a cellpho

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