Delicious LiveJournal Links for 1-16-2010

[andrewducker]

• PopCap Games - Haiti Relief
  Any money spent there today goes to Haiti Relief
  (tags: charity Haiti games)
• Avoiding the word 'is' - a quick look at E-Prime
  (tags: science philosophy language)
• More women should be arrogant self-aggrandising jerks
  The response from Eszter is very much worth reading too.
  (tags: women business society)
• Things we don't miss from here in the far flung future of 2010
  (tags: TheFuture)
• Neil Gaiman (and others) tease me about Marvelman.
  Aaaaaargh! Just publish the rest of it already!!!!
  (tags: Marvelman NeilGaiman comics)
• Antitrust Case Against RIAA Reinstated
  They do rather seem to be colluding agains the public interest...
  (tags: monopoly capitalism music law usa)
• Renouncing Islamism - interview with ex-jihadists
  (tags: islam religion politics terrorism)
• Abigail's Big Table Of Latin Phrases
  Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
  (tags: language humor latin)
• Could 'poo power' help heat the country?
  I love the bit at the bottom about changing calorific values at different times of the year...
  (tags: waste energy)

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

By far the most interesting bit in the rant about women & self-promotion came from the comment by Eszter, which goes along with a great deal of what I've seen discussed recently. The reason women don't ask for raises, boast, promote themselves, and suchlike is that the face far more in the way of negative social pressures for doing so and thus doing this won't get them a better job or a raise, in fact it's far more likely to get them fired than it is a man with the exact same qualifications asking for the exact same raise. A number of the people commenting on that rant who talked about how sexism was dead definitely need to be hit with a clue-stick.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

There was some studies about lately about exactly that, weren't there, about how a woman negotiating for pay in the same assertive way as a man (I believe it was at time of hire) was far less liked by men AND women, once in the job,compared to those who didn't. For men it didn't seem to matter.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I think E-prime is just silly. It's an interesting exercise for a wet afternoon's junior school English lesson but beyond that it warrants no attention I think.

CDs are not better than vinyl. They're pretty shit. Digital *may* be better but I still think vinyl has good points to it. You don't need a backup server for starters!


The bit about the bottom, eh? Thought we wouldn't notice that did you? ;)

[andrewducker]

Can't go wrong with bottoms :->

CDs are vastly better than vinyl. The method of playing them isn't intrinsically destructive, and you can skip to the next track from across the room.

E-Prime doesn't really belong in an English lesson - it's not about the syntax, it's about reframing. It's a useful psychological tool. I found it very handy for changing how I thought about several things - particularly morality.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Are we so lazy as a species now we can't cross a damn room? I don't use my CD player that often, so it's not really a fair example, but I have hardly ever used the remote control.

Also, CDs are just crappy. They damage far too easily, and when they are, they're entirely unusable. (That's the digital / analogue problem in general: I tear a page out from a book, I still have a book, but damage a file and it's probably entirely screwed.) And they're ugly. Right from the start, the packaging struck me as all wrong.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Also, CDs are just crappy. They damage far too easily

And vinyl doesnt? ("Broken record" became cliche for a reason.)

I'll point out that CDs are far easier to repair than LPs, as the damage is usually to the coating and not the data-carrying layer; fill in the scratch and polish it out, and the CD's usable again. If vinyl scratches, then you've lost the data and a mere consumer can't recover it.

-- Steve holds no nostalgia for LPs... his college collection was in the form of cassette tapes, and he's glad to see those fragile monstrosities become obsolete.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I completely agree. You actually had to be really careful with vinyl, and even then they wore out, collected dust, and similar nonsense. When I was growing up, there were records and tapes, and they both deeply sucked as recording media.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

CDs can also be backed up easily , and for most damage, they can be repaired. Vinyl can't - all you have is a medium that wears away a bit every time it's played, and if your cat bumps the turntable when it's playing you now have skips to deal with. I didn't like vinyl when it was the only option.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, you get 'the look' for being assertive. You just have to not care.

Maybe the up-talk of your skills acts like NLP - and as a goal-setting challenge to your self that you have to live up to.

One aposite quote from a guy I sailed with: "I didn't start winning dinghy races 'til I stopped trying not to fall in". No-one succeeds at everything, you gotta cock it up sometimes or you aren't stretching yourself.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

The raw sewage comes into the plat and is filtered, with anything that is not excrement or toilet paper removed, leaving a mix of 95% water and 5% solids which is then pumped into industrial 50m (165ft) compressors where the water is squeezed out, leaving solid "poo cakes".

These cakes, which still contain a large amount of water but burn easily, are fed into a gigantic hot furnace which produces steam that drives a large turbine, creating electricity.

"In the same way our domestic boilers work," Mr Singh explained

In what sense, the same? Am I the only person not squezing poo for my domestic boiler? Is this why our bills are so high?

[andrewducker]

I assume he means that they burn things, just like gas boilers burn gas. Or sometihng.