ⓞnor

You forgot Sen. Biden's 14+ lies during the debate. - Paul W. Swansen

You also forgot Sen. Obama and this one...http://obamasgaffes.blogspot.c... - Paul W. Swansen

Please, both sides have lied. We're not electing a "Liar in Chief." It comes down to judgement and experience. - Paul W. Swansen

That's the trick: "Your side does it too, so who can compare, so let's just forget the whole issue": it lets you sweep almost anything under the rug by ignoring differences in magnitude. And when you say "judgement and experience" you kind of leave out the whole "platform" issue, like positions on issues, like for example the regulation of capital markets, energy policy, or foreign policy. These things matter. - ⓞnor

By the way, the "14 lies" (http://minx.cc/?post=274757) includes things like "IRAQ: When Joe Biden lied when he said that John McCain was "dead wrong on Iraq", because Joe Biden shared the same vote to authorize the war", which is sort of a non sequitur. Point is the Republican "war here, war now" and "less regulation, bankers know what they're doing" positions have proven untenable. Yeah, it sucks that Democrats went along, but Obama at least did not authorize that damn stupid war. - ⓞnor

The "14 lies" thing also claims that Obama's four principles from the bailout included that the bailout be "part of a globally coordinated effort with our partners in the G-20", which it certainly did not. (Did they just make that up, or what?) The four principles were executive compensation limits, bipartisan oversight, an equity stake, and assistance to mortgage payers. At least lip service to all of those ended up in the bill. - ⓞnor

lol, sure enough that site really does claim that saying somebody's "dead wrong" is a lie. - j1m

David beat me by 5 seconds... a vote for Statue of Liberty as well. Great photo! - torque

Statue of Liberty is correct. The camera is pointed up. - Gary Burd

Ahh. (Totally wrong guess deleted out of embarrassment.) - ⓞnor

I looked into this a while back. The software is pretty good as these things go, Windows-only of course. The real problem is that it's *expensive*, a small piece of bent metal is like $50, and it goes up from there. - ⓞnor

Oh great, Intelligent Design strikes again! - Gabe

Great article. "Another problem with mackerel is that once a prisoner's sentence is up, there's little to do with it -- the fish can't be redeemed for cash, and has little value on the outside. As a result, says Mr. Levine, prisoners approaching their release must either barter or give away their stockpiles." Reminds me of the parable of the rich fool... http://www.biblegateway.com/pa...; - torque

"The Bureau of Prisons views any bartering among prisoners as fishy." Oh, Wall Street Journal, you're so funny. But I wonder why it's considered an advantage that nobody actually wants it. Is it better for a currency if there is no actual demand for it? People certainly wanted cigarettes. - ⓞnor

Awesome. I love how in any society, some form of currency arises. Fascinating. - Rob Schonberger

The Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose has such an installation, and also makes and sells their model, which looks very similar to what's pictured: http://www.cdm.org/viewPage.as.... I don't think that's actually at the CDM, but it could be an installation of their design. - ⓞnor

The mailboxes have name tags, so I don't think this is a post office. More likely, the hallway of an institution (possibly a university). - Tudor Bosman

It is not this one: http://flickr.com/photos/forma... - Gary Burd

Also, the sign font is TheSerif, not like that helps. - ⓞnor

Some old campus postal unions (essentially contract post offices) have old brass mailboxes like that! …now where? - John Lam

nor, I think it is indeed the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose. The pin screen there is right next to a fake post office (complete with P O Boxes IIRC). - Sanjeev Singh

I decided it wasn't the San Jose CDM based on the picture at http://www.cdm.org/viewPage.as..., but maybe I was misled. More pictures at http://cdmsales.blogspot.com/2... are also inconclusive. Other children's museums with a pinscreen and a post office are the Children's Museum of New Hampshire, the Touchable Children's Museum in Lincoln, NE, and the Children's Discovery Museum in Augusta, ME, among others... - ⓞnor

ⓞnor, your first ftw. - torque

I dunno, writers pretty much always have a problem with near-term political outcomes. I don't think these particular times are more interesting than any other time in the last 150 years, and in many ways this is a period of relative stability - there are no world-engulfing wars, the major powers are at least diplomatically cordial to each other, and it's been a while since a major government utterly failed. - ⓞnor

On the other hand, with respect to technology, William Gibson has commented that it's a lot harder to write SF than it used to be. My take on why is because if readers want to be surprised by new technology ideas that seem like magic, they'll find more of them being launched every day on the internet than showing up as ideas in SF novels. - j1m

I think it's the opposite: We're still sitting on a bunch of unfulfilled sci-fi promises that still seem just as cool and promising as they ever did, we've just given up believing they will ever come true. We never got our flying cars or rocketships or holodecks, so what's the point of hearing about more cool stuff that just isn't going to happen anyway? So if you want to write something people can believe in, you have to write fiction about wi-fi, and fiction about wi-fi is actually kind of boring. - ⓞnor

In particular, the core narrative of classic sci fi was about new transportation technology (from the Nautilus to the Enterprise) opening up new frontiers of exploration for intrepid explorers. After a century (1850-1950) of vast changes in transportation mode (from steam trains to jet planes), we've been stuck for 50 years with incremental improvements to the status quo. And there's no exciting narrative about better communication technology or genomics or any of the frontiers of technology development. - ⓞnor

It's telling that the most successful information age sci-fi focuses on virtual reality, effectively re-creating the "hop on a rocketship, fly to exotic new worlds, sleep with gorgeous aliens" narrative in simulation. But even VR is dead; as far as I can tell it's still technologically plausible, but nobody cares about it. Or they do and it's called World of Warcraft and who's going to write a novel about *that*? (http://www.amazon.com/review/p... notwithstanding.) - ⓞnor

It seems likely given our current rate of technological progress we'll see more books set in a future where the Singularity doesn't happen and instead all we have is what Vernor Vinge called "failed dreams." His books (like "A deepness in the sky") suggest that it's possible to tell interesting and futuristic stories about worlds where FTL doesn't happen and we still don't have flying cars. Instead we get new ways of looking at life and new social structures - Adewale Oshineye

Yeah, there aren't gonna be any new radical transportation modes. (There will be the Tesla. It will be a sports car. It won't feel magical in a way that's useful in a story.) And WoW's not gonna make great novels, and there isn't gonna be a 3D movie comeback, because none of those things provides a transformative user experience. - j1m

But _Deepness_ was big ol' space opera, like with spaceships and arachniform aliens and stuff. You can totally have sci-fi without FTL, but if you take away the spaceships then books like Deepness just turn into Pern, which are effectively alternate-fantasy-history, and that's not really sci-fi any more. - ⓞnor

But why do you say there's no exciting narrative about communication or genomics or tech? Do you just mean that, unlike spacefaring novels, there's no good way to weave these technologies into novels that have the same narrative as swashbucklers of the 1930s? - j1m

Oh, and nobody's gonna go to space, except a few billionaires, because at the end of the day going to space is about as interesting as looking at a high-res photo of the globe. A lot less interesting than using Google Earth, for example. Of course, you also get to be weightless, so in that sense it's as interesting as skydiving, which has been cheap forever and has never gotten popular. - j1m

I don't think those technologies support a replacement narrative sufficiently exciting to sustain a whole genre of fiction. And, uh, I'll take your seat on that spaceship, if you're not gonna use it. - ⓞnor

Go for it. Ok, so your story is basically that the swashbuckling narrative has grown stale because of no actual innovation in transportation. I buy that. Note that there is exciting SF involving the internet (Alias, for example) but it doesn't really play like SF. Me, I think there's plenty of fun SF to be written about biotech, along the lines of the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Blood Music. Let's say a hobbyist does some genetic engineering in his kitchen and produces a batch of kittens with wings - j1m

Anyway, Stross' original point was more about political upheaval, and I really don't think there's particularly more of that now than ever, or that there's any kind of trend of increasing unpredictability in that sense. - ⓞnor

Yeah, I don't see any reason to think he's right about politics. Implicit in his post, if I understand it, is the strong prediction that the US will be a minor power starting in a few weeks. I consider this an idea unlikely to be uttered by a serious person. Also, one of the things that has always made much good fiction good is that it's timeless. If you wrote a screenplay in the 1990s about white terrorists from 'the former ussr' trafficking in missiles, you do not have the gift for writing screenplays that, decades later, will seem timeless. But lots of other authors do. - j1m

I think there's a lot of room between being the world's sole superpower and becoming a minor power. Stross's subtext seems to be the massed ranks of great empires through history that dwindled to regional powers hence the reference to the Paul Kennedy book. I am a little surprised that he didn't mention Gibbon's Decline & Fall though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... - Adewale Oshineye

He was saying that he wasn't certain if the US would even exist as a nation in 15-20 years. That's not decreased global influence, that's the brink of nonexistence. - ⓞnor

You mean this "I am currently guardedly optimistic that the USA will still exist as a political entity in 2023, and that the EU (possibly under a different name; certainly with a different political infrastructure) will do so as well. But in planning the background for that novel set in 2023, I can't rely on the simple assumption that the USA and the EU still exist" - Adewale Oshineye

It might be interesting to see the kind of sci-fi that could be written based on this map of North America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J... - Adewale Oshineye

Yeah, "I am currently guardedly optimistic that the USA will still exist as a political entity in 2023" -- these words are more than a little silly. More to the point, it's foolish to get involved in a lot of handwringing because you want to write about 2023 and worry that the map of the world won't look like what you guess. Does it lessen Orwell's 1984 at all real world in 1984 didn't look much like his novel? Of course not. Indeed, many might call it one of the most prescient novels written, made up empires and all. - j1m

Actually, the fact that _1984_ was set a few months after I was born did date the novel and reduce its impact when I first read it. It implied that the events in the book were ones that ancient people were worried would happen, but that the world was safe now because we had passed through that era without the fulfilling the book's dire predictions. - Melinda Owens

Ref: "The Black Swan" anyone? @j1m Re: interesting sci-fi about biotech, try Richard Morgan stuff (although it's pretty far-future - not as far as Deepness, though) - Nick Lothian

@ade - you've read Morgan's Thirteen/Black Man? It's pretty much based on the Jesus Land map. "In the near future, humanity has to deal with the fallout of the gung-ho genetic engineering in the past few decades, which produced several varieties of humankind. One of these, variant Thirteen, is an atavistic offshoot bred for war purposes and prone to violence and paranoia" http://www.sfsite.com/08a/tt25... - Nick Lothian

Hey, cool. The photo is the Charleston, SC port. I thought I recognized it. - James Williams (willia4)

I think the point is that the math just doesn't add up. Unless it gets a LOT more efficient people are going to be doing a LOT less shipping. - Jason Wehmhoener

This business where people talk about "projected" growth and then try to find enough carbon credits to "go around" to support the project levels seems to be presuming that the point of cap-and-trade is a shell game that magically makes global warming go away without actually changing anything. - ⓞnor

Ya, the language is misleading, but the point is that shipping produces a large amount of carbon emissions. - Jason Wehmhoener

I wonder if those crazy sail powered shipping vessels are workable. - ⓞnor

throw up double F friendfeed gang signs (http://friendfeed.com/e/68b4ca...) ... which look suspiciously like the F in American Sign Language http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... - tiffany

"Like" them? - Rahsheen™

throwing up the ff sign language F will get you shot by crips if you live in la. just sayin' - Monique via fftogo

tiffany, check out Rah's video: http://friendfeed.com/e/12d13a... - Rochelle

Punch the shoulder and give them the finger guns - Outsanity

Mo++, I'm tryina tell em....LOL. - Rahsheen™

Offer bacon? - Cyndy

somehow, never comes up in Winnipeg... - Trent Olson

"Greetings?" - Daniel Schildt

I like Cyndy's suggestion though since one never knows when they are going to randomly chance upon a friendfeeder, should one keep a bacon offering on their person at all times? - Erica Baker

Pass them by with a FF mug. That's what the cool kids do. - Olivier Tharan

"reading messages from electronic devices"? How about my GPS in the car? How about my car itself that has a digital readout to tell me what radio station I'm on or that I need gas? I hope the details of this bill are well written. - Brian Johns

http://www.votesmart.org/issue... - "A person shall not drive a motor vehicle while using an electronic wireless communications device to write, send, or read a text-based communication", which they define as "using an electronic wireless communications device to manually communicate with any person using a text-based communication". - ⓞnor

Good. As long as I'm still free to crash my car while I'm tuning the radio, then I'm fine with it. :-) - Brian Johns

What about emoticons? Do those count as text? - Jim Norris

Don't some cars display text messages on the nav system via bluetooth? Is that illegal too, I wonder? - Robin Barooah

At least this make MUCH more sense than banning talking while driving - brendan

"For purposes of this section, a person shall not be deemed to be writing, reading, or sending a text-based communication if the person reads, selects, or enters a telephone number or name in an electronic wireless communications device for the purpose of making or receiving a telephone call." I'd like to know how the hell they plan to enforce this law. By the time a cop pulls someone over, can't they just exit out of their e-mail or text screen and claim they were attempting to dial a number? - Kevin Scott

Good. - Jason Kaneshiro

Hands-free texting? - Daniel Shaw

This might provide yet another good reason to implement better voice recognition to mobile devices as it could be used to "write" text message. Yes, that might have limited usability and high amount of errors but didn't people also say that about text messages? - Daniel Schildt

Outlawed, eh? I think we now know what steel horse Bon Jovi's cowboy was riding and what he was wanted for. - Scott Loganbill via twhirl

KevinScott, if in good faith a cop witnesses you writing, sending, or reading a text message, or perhaps after a crash even if you are not at fault, i suspect this law would give probable cause to seize your device and scroll your list of messages, and collect it as evidence. Has anyone thought about the ramifications of this law? - John Lam

I've tried doing this on an iPhone. I've nearly got myself in too many accidents... so this will be for my own good. - Dustin

Those sudden spikes are a really inefficient way to trade -- somebody is losing a ton of money every time they do that, just because they can't be bothered to make many small trades instead of a few big trades. - ⓞnor

I was wondering why intrade pricing was so off compared to the other markets. @nor if their goal is to manipulate the price over the short term, then large amounts are the way to go. They *want* the price to be impacted. - Sanjeev Singh

"This is the exact mirror image of the Obama trading" - no, actually, it isn't. Clinton trading has three drops in the marked period; Obama trading has two. Obama peaks at Sep 23 5:54 PMPDT at 50.5/2000; Clinton has 1600 shares traded spread out between 5:17 and 5:32. Yeah, you can talk this into something, but ... - Jutta Degener

Yeah, he's got a lot of weird ones thrown in there. What's with the train of mini-GEMs? - j1m

It's only a Citation Excel? Loser. You can get one of those used for under $9M ;) http://www.avbuyer.com/Aircraf... - Paul Buchheit

I assume the GEMs are for his staff to use in maintaining the estate. - ⓞnor

I failed my first attempt. (You get two tries. I doubt I'll try again unless I'm *really* perfcrastinating.) "IntelligentPeople.com offers you the opportunity to meet and form relationships with people who, like you, have an IQ higher than the average person" seems to imply that your IQ need only exceed 100. - ⓞnor

Intimi-dating - and now they have all your answers. :) - torque

Not too hard, if you're into puzzles and this kind of thing. I'd be curious to see how well this site works if it ever reaches critical mass (there are only 8 women between the ages of 21 and 30 within 50 miles of Mountain View, and none of them logged in after 8/26. Not very promising). - Tudor Bosman

I'm a lapsed Mensa member (they admitted me based on my GRE scores, I never had to take an IQ test for them). I gave up my membership the month after I joined, when I received the first issue of some Mensa periodical. The quality of opinions stated in there didn't seem any higher than what you'd find in any reasonable online community; the smugness factor was much higher. Since then, I've been skeptical of IQ as a measure of, well, just about anything except for your ability to solve puzzles. - Tudor Bosman

I'm normally "into puzzles and this kind of thing", so now I'll have to try again just to scrape my ego off the floor. :) For the questions I could answer, it felt like they were using the same tricks many times. I wonder if ultra-niche dating sites rely on setting up LDR's or what, if this doesn't work in the SFBA 6 months after launch I can't imagine it will ever work anywhere. - ⓞnor

I passed, but their test is arrogant and poorly designed. My wife is at least as smart and intelligent as I am, but she wouldn't even bother to try. - andrei_c

I occasionally daydream about online communities with some sort of entrance exam (though I would not make it an IQ test!) but Tudor's Mensa experience reminds me of how that basically never seems to work. Better to have a place where you can select in/out what you do/don't like, i.e. FF. As far as dating goes, raw smarts is one of the few things I *could* quickly determine from someone's profile or a quick chat, seems like IQ is one of the least interesting pre-filters you could apply. - ⓞnor

Andrei: I agree with you on the "poorly designed" part (they do rely on the same trick over and over again, as egnor said). Arrogant? it's an experiment. Maybe being "into puzzles and this kind of thing" has something to do with the eventual success of a relationship, and if you don't want to give that a try, don't join the site. I don't particularly believe that; if my fiancee was as anal(ytical) as I am, we probably would have killed each other by now :) - Tudor Bosman

What's the gender ratio on this site? - Jim Norris

ⓞnor, if you failed the test, I call BS on their ability to gauge intelligence :) - Karl Rosaen

I "passed" on the first attempt though I've always been good at these sorts of things. I guess there are 9 women between 21 and 30 in a 50 mile radius of MV now? - Erica Baker

This is supposedly a website for intelligent people yet apparently it isn't designed by intelligent people. They just emailed me my password in cleartext. :-L - Erica Baker

Finally a dating community where my otherwise useless ability to rotate shapes and detect obscure patterns will be appreciated! - Alex Mendes da Costa

meh - j1m

Okay, I have redeemed myself by passing on my second try. For some reason my morning brain got their "rotation" trick but not so much their "XOR" trick. Also, I tried to figure out who each of you were. If you got a "flirt" from me, I guessed correctly. Otherwise, some poor person is maybe confused. - ⓞnor

"surreality is the only place I feel safe. wrapped in a blanket of illusions and loosely related visions. Contemplating the transcendence of soul through the dimensions." - Alex Mendes da Costa

Has anyone managed to make contact with any spatially-aware hotties yet? It's only giving me the option to send flirts to you ⓞnor. - Alex Mendes da Costa

Hey, are you insulting my intelligence? - ⓞnor

Thanks guys, although I don't swing that way... - Jim Norris

"Here's a swift test. Be honest. What sentence can you quote from his convention speech in Denver? I thought so. All right, what about his big rally speech in Berlin? Just as I guessed. OK, help me out: Surely you can manage to cite a line or two from his imperishable address on race (compared by some liberal academics to Gettysburg itself) in Philadelphia? No, not the line about his white grandmother. Some other line. Oh, dear. Now do you see what I mean?" - Christopher Galtenberg

"By the end of that grueling campaign season, a lot of us had got the idea that Dukakis actually wanted to lose—or was at the very least scared of winning. Why do I sometimes get the same idea about Obama? To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it." - Christopher Galtenberg

"More people doubted Obama's qualifications for the presidency in September than had told the pollsters they had doubted these credentials in July. "So what he ought to do," smiled this man, "is spend his time closing that gap and less time attacking McCain." Obama's party hacks, increasingly white and even green about the gills, are telling him to do the opposite.' - Christopher Galtenberg

The rally speech: "I come to you as a citizen of the world". The race speech: "Theirs is the immigrant experience". (I didn't watch the convention speech.) This article reads like something that's just trolling for hits with angry words. Stupid. - ⓞnor

I mean, for everyone screaming at Obama to lay out policy, there's someone else screaming at him to attack McCain, and someone else screaming at him to be less angry, and someone else screaming at him to have more fire in the belly. Seriously people, at least have a little humility when you're armchair quarterbacking. "Green about the gills"? What does that even mean? As far as I can tell Obama is doing a great job walking the 10 tightropes at once that his campaign is strung up on. - ⓞnor

Hm, those don't rank particularly high on the rhetoric-o-meter. And Hitchens is an Obama supporter. And he certainly doesn't need to troll for hits -- it's just Hitch being Hitch. - Christopher Galtenberg

I think the Obama campaign is pretty solid. He has measured, thoughtful answers to nearly every question that comes up. He offers substantial policy and attacks those aspects of McCain that deserve attention. The campaign itself seems to be run from a long-term play-book, and it seems to be working. While it might be beneficial to have more memorable sound bites, I welcome the depth that he offers and have no problem with these speeches that are inspiring when heard in their entirety. - Sean O'Maverick

Okay, but what's the point in asking if we remember lines and then saying "see? ha ha!". His point is that Obama's speeches actually suck because (he asserts) we can't remember pithy sound bites? Anyway, I remember Dukakis. Obama is no way, no how, not even a little bit like Dukakis, thank God. - ⓞnor

I've seen his longer-form ads and stump speeches, and there is definitely something missing. I've never thought Obama was an idea-person, but his stuff lately is not much more than simple plain Dem boilerplate, which could be taken from any candidate at really any point in time. - Christopher Galtenberg

I never expected to be referencing, Pat Buchanan, but he describes what's different about Obama's speeches (at least the convention speech) here: http://bit.ly/4lgCAz - Sean O'Maverick

Typical Hitchens. If you're not a total asshole (like Hitchens), he has no respect for you. I think that's why Bush had him fooled back in '03 - steplow is Steve

"Livingston and Judge said there are two possible explanations: Traditional-minded men might negotiate much harder for better salaries, especially when compared with traditional-minded women. Alternatively, it could also be that employers discriminate against women and men who do not subscribe to traditional gender roles." - Jessie

Could causality go the other way? What if having a high-paying job makes men more likely to hold "traditional" attitudes? - Jim Norris

Do they have the groups broken down by occupation? - ⓞnor

Do they correct for age? men with higher incomes are likely older and so more likely to hold traditional values. (EDIT: after reading TFA, it seems that all people surveyed are within 8 years of each other) - Tudor Bosman

Do you people even read the article? =) - Jim Norris