Even in Europe, places where you don't have to drive in traffic / door zone are incredibly rare. Bike paths are cool, but as currently implemented they mostly serve to annoy both drivers and pedestrians alike, and there is still a default assumption that where there is no bike path, you'll be driving with traffic.
tens of thousands of lives per year
Try hundreds of thousands per year from just accidents, before even counting health benefits of reduced emissions and smog saving more lives.
I suffer from severe case of Akrasia that makes me work at 10% of my capacity most of the time; here's something I discovered that made me believe problem is actually in me: my closest friend. I know her for many years, and I never ever saw her working at less than 110% of her capacity. She worked in groceries, online bookshop, sold LED bulbs and furniture, managed people, did customer relations and even social media marketing. She wants to be a writer; she hated almost every one of those jobs, felt they're hindering her development, and yet no matter how ... (read more)
-- Mother Gaia, I come on behalf of all humans to apologize for destroying nature (...). We never meant to kill nature.
-- You're not killing nature, you're killing yourself. That's what I mean by self-centered. You think that just because you can't live, then nothing can. You're fucking yourself over big time, and won't be missed.
From a surprisingly insightful comic commenting on the whole notion of "saving the planet".
A great article, Eneasz.
Reminds me of something that is sitting in my quotes file, apparently coming from a Navy SEAL:
"Under pressure you don't rise to the occassion, you sink to the level of your training."
It's really, really hard -- I would say impossible -- to prove that variations or changes have not been introduced since the time of a hypothetical original text, copied from handwriting scribe to handwriting scribe.
It might be hard or even borderline impossible, but I do respect people who honestly try. I know for instance, that Jehovah's Witnesses did a lot of work in cross-corelating as many different copies of the scriptures as they could get their hands on to weed out mistranslations, copy errors, etc. when developing their own translation. So for ... (read more)
I'm reminded of movies where people in impossibly tough situations stick to impossibly idealistic principles. The producers of the movie want to hoodwink you into thinking they would stand by their luxurious morality even when the going gets tough.
Strangely, most of the recent movies and TV series I saw pretty much invert this. Protagonists tend to make arguably insanely bad moral choices (like choosing a course of action that will preserve hero's relative at the cost of killing thousands of people). Sometimes this gets unbearable to watch.
I think it's entirely wrong for Americans to sympathize with Boston victims while disregarding and in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes. It's hypocrisy at its finest and especially rich coming from self-proclaimed Christians.
That is exactly the problem with nationalism.
I suspect you're probably saying that it's understandable for Americans only to feel the reality of this kind of cruelty when it affects "their own", and my response is that it may be understandable, but then so are the mechanisms of cancer.
--... (read more)
Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design are full of amazing quotes. My personal favourite:
6) (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.
(See also an interesting note from HN's btilly on this law)
Similar thought:
16) The previous people who did a similar analysis did not have a direct pipeline to the wisdom of the ages. There is therefore no reason to believe their analysis over yours. There is especially no reason to present their analysis as yours.
Relevant link from just yesterday: http://hackaday.com/2013/05/28/shocking-your-brain-and-making-yourself-smarter/ :).
Another n=1: I like the way intoxication feels when I'm intoxicated, but over last couple of months I've gone from wanting to enter that state often to avoiding all alcohol on purpose. What changed was realizing on an emotional level that I have tons of interesting (or necessary) things to do and alcohol limits that by taking aw... (read more)