but wanted to point out that the hardwired results of evolution often can't be counteracted simply by explaining to the meat-brain that they are no longer adaptive.

Do you have any evidence of this?

Or, since that is a bit tautological, do you have any evidence that the things we want to change (social interaction fears, for instance) are the unchangable "hardwired results of evolution", and not the malleable program running on top (for want of a better description)?

Let's not forget the converse: Fear that the other person will be creeped out.

I suspect that's not a true answer. You could hypothetically feel pleased when you creep someone out. That's a possible state for a human.

So it may not be "them feeling creeped out" that you avoid, but "you having an obligation to feel bad when you creep someone out", and you avoid that state of feeling bad. Which is slightly different.

Roberts' hypothesis is not about the drinking vegetable oil particularly, it's about the link between flavour intensity, calories and weight gain/loss. He was looking for a way to ingest a sudden high calorie, no taste thing. Flavourless vegetable oil is no-flavour/high-calorie - and so is his previous idea of fructose disolved in water.

A useful followup might be "Just try what?"

Suggestions:

A) Whatever it is you want to try, but are putting off

B) Whatever it is you don't want to do and can't do, but feel like you should be able to in order to be a "proper" adult, or a "real" {your job title}, or an ideal human, or whatever.

It also allows us to anticipate ill consequences which don't happen, and suffer them in advance. Sometimes repeatedly.

(And by "allows us to", I also mean "it often does so automatically").

What government attack vectors against Bitcoin do you deem most likely to work?

From Wikipedia:

In order to prevent double-spending, the network implements some kind of a distributed time server, using the idea of chained proofs of work. Therefore, the whole history of transactions has to be stored inside the database, and in order to reduce the size of this storage, a Merkle tree is used.

So I would transact the heck out of it and make the database huge. IIRC at the moment every user needs a full copy of the database of every transaction, so if the .gov can make a multi-terabyte database a requirement, that would knock it on the head quite hard.

Also, the last time I glanced at the source code it looked quite ropey, and that makes me think it will have lots of exploitable parts lurking for the right skilled people to find and attack.

If you are reading this and want some typing practise:

http://www2.ie.popcap.com/games/free/typershark

It's a "sharks are going to eat you, type the word on the side of them to kill them, get more, faster sharks and longer words as you progress" game.

What do you do with the knowledge of which way North is? Are the motors continuously vibrating or pulsed? When you take it off do you feel the absence (absense?) like an amputation?

Maybe useful - Everyday Looper is an iOS app for recording short looping samples, up to four at a time. That is, you record a sound and it plays it from start to finish over and over in a loop, and you can record another sound up to the same length and play them next to each other, or adjust the volume on them individually.

It's intended for musical use, but might do for what you ask. It is not free, so you might check it out on Youtube to see how it works and why it might be good for quick record-hear-compare feedback.

(iOS / iPhone does have a basic sound recorder in it, as you may know).

keep checking back to the PixelQi site hopefully...

The first batch of Notion Ink Adam tablets have shipped, they have a PixelQi screen and run Android. Can't yet buy one unless you caught the pre-order, but to me that means they've moved out of 'vapourware'.

I do not understand why they do it

I do it (and then correct it, but only when I notice that I've done so) because using an apostrophe to indicate possession is the common case.

Relevant apostrophe comic 1.

You might find this snippet of OKCupid's blog interesting - a correlation between being religious and being unbothered by poor spelling and grammar. It's a graphic because the blog post is long and has no way to link just to that point. Full link.

Still, downvoted because this is not a procedural knowledge gap you think should be filled, it's just ranting and possibly being in the pattern of having a subgroup of people over whom to feel superior.