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So far,  you are my favorite new guy this week.

This week? My ego won't allow that, I'll have to shoot for favorite of the month instead 

You still have 21 days to make that happen, and I believe in you.

Remember that you don't have to achieve this by being awesome yourself, you only have to ensure that everyone else looks worse than you   

Stop corrupting new friends!
Don't listen to her Teddy, be the best you you can be!

I know quite a few cooks here, and it is gruelling work. Long hours, irregular schedules, and horrible bosses. The mandatory weekends tends to cut into your social life as well, especially if you have friends with regular jobs.

On the other hand it is a career that you can put some creativity in and hard work is very much rewarded, so personal fulfillment is practically guaranteed.
On top of that it pays very well and you get to play with knifes and fire.
Your food expenses drop precipitously as well and that is not something to dismiss out of hand. For example: Food is about 1/4 of my monthly expenses, and I make about 20% more than minimum wage. (To be honest, I could spend less on food if I wanted to.)

I was wrong; SSC did a series on "Growth Mindset":

...the belief that people who believe ability doesn't matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn't matter and only hard work does.

Spoiler alert: He doesn't approve.

Can I just say: False dichotomy.

I choose to believe in a soul, because I choose to believe in an afterlife.  I choose to believe in an afterlife, because I refuse to acknowledge a belief system in which something as cool as me disappears forever.

There's no science in that, of course, just a few 55 gallon drums of ego.

Of course, the effect is the same.  If it's your "soul" that gets stained by committing bad acts, or your brain which grows accustomed to them is - to a non-neurologist - irrelevant.  Same as the idea that my love for my wife is just a big pile of oxtossin burbling about in my brain.  The oxytossin thing makes more sense intellectually, because love waxes and wanes over time.

But, again, the end result is the same.  I am all for neurological research into behavior.  But I'm not going to stop thinking of my feelings for Jenn as "love" in favor of "bog-standard brain chemistry".

I feel like that's a slightly different argument; we already have a vocabulary for "love" that pretty much everyone agrees on, even if not everyone agrees on the mechanism that causes it. If we want to study love or write poetry or songs or a philosophical dissertation about love, we can do that, and we can all be understood, because for the most part we all agree on the phenomenon and the language we use to describe it.

What Chelagoras seems to be attempting, if I understand him correctly, is to take a word that is a bit like love except which has a more abstract and nebulous meaning, and define it to mean something it is not generally taken to mean.

I know.  I just don't know enough about any of this to refute either position, so I posted my opinion.

To my mind, my soul is "me".  I am well aware that there is plenty of evidence that "me" is just a meat machine with some interesting quirks.  Doesn't mean I have to like it.

And being 1/2 Good American™, that means I can pull my underwear over my head and bellow "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU".

If I was fully a Good American™, I'd vote to have this sort of Godless nonsense de-funded, because knowledge is BAD and DANGEROUS and can only lead to moral degeneracy.  Why, if I knew how my brain worked, I'd just do something else to spite it!  And that only ends one way.

Meat machines are hella interesting though, please refrain from calling them 'just meat machines'. That is like saying 'just special relativity', or 'just spacetravel' or 'just wasabi'.

The Welsh government has raised eyebrows after responding to a Conservative politician's formal question about UFOs in the Star Trek language Klingon.

Tory Welsh assembly member Darren Millar asked economy minister Edwina Hart whether any alien craft had been spotted over the skies of Cardiff airport since it was brought back into public ownership.

But the Clwyd West AM was surprised when he was given the reply: "jang vIDa je due luq. 'ach ghotvam'e' QI'yaH-devolved qaS."

Which, in English, translates as: "The minister will reply in due course. However, this is a non-devolved matter."

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/10/star-trek-welsh-assembly-ufo-question-prompts-dip-into-trilingualism-with-klingon

I really needed this today. 

And one of my favourite comments in ages!

The Tories have no honour - they speak like Ferengi!

That got me smiling .

Now I want to watch some Star Trek, Klingon usually doesn't do that for me.

For some reason no one else seems to really care that Giant hogweed has completely taken over more and more of my city. The plant has been spreading through Europe for decades but there is a mayor difference between occasionally seeing it when i was a kid and seeing huge fields on every piece of slightly moist soil.

There is something worrying about 2-5 meter(that is about 6-15 feet) high plants that can burn you, blind you and force you to avoid sunlight for a few days. Its sap is phototoxic and getting any on your skin is easy because the damned things are covered in tiny moist hairs. It feels like an acid burn, as if you have a strong acid all over the affected area. It works a bit different though, the molecules get in your cells nucleus and kill the cells by bonding with the DNA. This adds a bit of extra horror to the situation for me, though that doesn't really make sense. Cell death is cell death, what do I care how it happens?



Here, have a pic of the type of injury you get:

That would be after 3-10 days by my estimate.

Luckily city hall is fighting back with sheep and that seems to at least keep them somewhat under control. I would prefer genocide though.

We have a problem with that shit as well!  http://www.oregon.gov/ODA/shared/Documents/Publications/Weeds/PlantPestRiskAssessmentGiantHogweed2013.pdf

People IMPORTED IT ON PURPOSE for their gardens. ASSHOLES, WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?

ASSHOLES! STAB THEM WITH THEIR OWN IMPORTED PLANTS!
I have seen the filthy stuff grow in places I used to play as a kid.
At that place along the water this grew:
Wikipedia tells me you would call it butterbur.
It was a great place to have adventures as a child, there was the occasional giant hogweed but we knew to avoid those and learned a valuable lesson about nature (it can hurt you, listen to your mother!)
About a decade ago the entire field of butterbur was taken over by giant hogweed, after that kids stopped playing there. The entire area is cropped short so no amazing kiddie-adventure-jungles can grow there now.

Now I can't bike anywhere without seeing either fields with full grown plants (9-15 feet) or recently sheep-ed areas (1-2 feet plants). Getting drunk and falling of your bike has some horrible new consequences now. Though to be fair to the demon-plant I haven't heard about anyone actually falling into them.

For some reason no one else seems to really care that Giant hogweed has completely taken over more and more of my city. The plant has been spreading through Europe for decades but there is a mayor difference between occasionally seeing it when i was a kid and seeing huge fields on every piece of slightly moist soil.

There is something worrying about 2-5 meter(that is about 6-15 feet) high plants that can burn you, blind you and force you to avoid sunlight for a few days. Its sap is phototoxic and getting any on your skin is easy because the damned things are covered in tiny moist hairs. It feels like an acid burn, as if you have a strong acid all over the affected area. It works a bit different though, the molecules get in your cells nucleus and kill the cells by bonding with the DNA. This adds a bit of extra horror to the situation for me, though that doesn't really make sense. Cell death is cell death, what do I care how it happens?



Here, have a pic of the type of injury you get:

That would be after 3-10 days by my estimate.

Luckily city hall is fighting back with sheep and that seems to at least keep them somewhat under control. I would prefer genocide though.

Sometimes it's okay to be funny. 

Sometimes it's okay to be nice.  <---if you tell anyone I said that, I'll deny it, and shit in your lungs.

Out of context quotes are the best quotes!

http://imgur.com/a/XWigl

Internet over.  You're welcome.

THANKS!

Thanks for the update, looking forward to it.

I guess I could unpack my original statement a little more: I think it's interesting because it is learning about what to pay attention to based on what visual features are most important to us, as gauged by images that we post on the internet. Therefore, simply by observing the images that we produce, it is doing a fairly good job of mimicking our cortical allocation. This is interesting to me partly because of a phenomenon which I am pretty sure has another name but which I have been calling "persistence" since I was a kid; the idea that that which is is that which is most likely to be. It isn't all that complicated, I'm just expressing it poorly.

Ah, I understand now and I completely agree.
I was communicating at least as badly so thanks for the clarification.

First ammendment of the American constitution means you cannot outlaw it.

There was pressure on South Carolina(?) to stop flying it, and some stores refused to carry the flag or products which contained the flag.  That was it.

Good to hear, so I can safely ignore any whining.
As is quite often the case, a lot of drama over something minor.

How do we stop them from leaving short of marrying them and reverse plantationing them?

I intend to follow them if they try to leave.
I overheard their plans to go to some place called evolvefest.
I'll bring a big rock and hit them over the head with it, then drag them back here.

Evolvefest?

I found where I read it!
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=37429.msg1380524#msg1380524

It needs to be trained on something other than dogs.  It's all dogsdogsdogs.

Maybe dogs were only a small part of its training but the way we have made dogs into all sizes and shapes has made the dog-pattern too broad, combine that with our ability to recognize human faces and the role of dogs in our history and society (dogs are people too!)

The most you could say is that it hasn't seen enough human faces.

It's dogs and eyes. So many eyes.

This is interesting to me because human visual processing also devotes a disproportionate amount of real estate to eyes.

I think that we see the eyes and not the other things because we are so focused on eyes.