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Show posts MenuQuoteAccording to Leary's account, he kept a newspaper clipping of Reagan defending his decision to keep Leary under minimal security and, on the night of his escape, he left the clipping - with Reagan's remarks helpfully underlined in red - so they would be discovered the next morning.
QuoteIn the beginning of June 1964, just months before the Gulf of Tonkin incident inspired standard military action in Southeast Asia, HST offered his services to the President and the American people as the governor of American Samoa and a rational representative in the Pacific.
Quotea team has been tampering with the molecular processes that make up a beak in chickens.
By doing so, they have managed to create a chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout and palate, similar to that of small feathered dinosaurs like Velociraptor. The results are published in the journal Evolution.
The team's aim was to understand how the bird beak evolved, because the beak is such a vital part of bird anatomy. It has been crucial for their success. The 10,000 or more bird species occupy a wide range of habitats, and many have specialised beaks to help them survive.
Quote[Computer Scientist Allen Downey] says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.
QuoteIf this third factor exists, it must have specific characteristics. It would have to be something new that was increasing in prevalence during the 1990s and 2000s, just like the Internet. "It is hard to imagine what that factor might be," says Downey.
QuoteSpeaking to Aeon magazine, Dr Roache said drugs could be developed to distort prisoners' minds into thinking time was passing more slowly.
"There are a number of psychoactive drugs that distort people's sense of time, so you could imagine developing a pill or a liquid that made someone feel like they were serving a 1,000-year sentence," she said.
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A second scenario would be to upload human minds to computers to speed up the rate at which the mind works, she wrote on her blog.
"If the speed-up were a factor of a million, a millennium of thinking would be accomplished in eight and a half hours... Uploading the mind of a convicted criminal and running it a million times faster than normal would enable the uploaded criminal to serve a 1,000 year sentence in eight-and-a-half hours. This would, obviously, be much cheaper for the taxpayer than extending criminals' lifespans to enable them to serve 1,000 years in real time."
Quote from: http://web.psych.utoronto.ca/psy342/Happiness_Disorder.pdf
Both Radden and Edwards imply that irrationality may be demonstrated by the detection of
cognitive deficits and distortions of one sort or another. There is excellent experimental evidence
that happy people are irrational in this sense. It has been shown that happy people, in comparison
with people who are miserable or depressed, are impaired when retrieving negative events from
long-term memory [29]. Happy people have also been shown to exhibit various biases of judgement
that prevent them from acquiring a realistic understanding of their physical and social environment.
Thus, there is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental
events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give
unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their
unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of even-handedness when comparing
themselves to others [30]. Although the lack of these biases in depressed people has led many
psychiatric researchers to focus their attention on what has come to be known as depressive realism
it is the unrealism of happy people that is more noteworthy and surely clear evidence that such
people should be regarded as psychiatrically disordered.
QuoteLego Friends triggered the ire of Joy Pochatila, a scientist and mother of two small girls. Her first reaction to the line was dismissive. "Why can't they just play with regular Legos? Why does it have to be girl-driven?" she wondered.
Quote from: http://news.yahoo.com/t-hacker-andrew-weev-auernheimer-goes-jail-explainer-175300718.html
What are the formal charges, then?
One count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization.
What is his sentence?
41 months in in prison, followed by three years of supervised release. He'll also have to pay $73,000 in damages to AT&T (which, let's remember, wasn't actually damaged in the incident — just embarrassed). Weev tweeted this shortly before the sentence was read: No matter what the outcome, I will not be broken. I am antifragile.
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I realized that it's possible that when we fully expect a good thing to come in the future that our brain begins registering that thing as something we already have. To the extent that this is in fact the case, it might explain why things we never had often feel like things we have lost when we don't get them.
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But insofar as we have a project of thriving and being pleased, it is counterproductive, distracting, and a waste of energy to want what cannot be had. And in the vast majority of cases, we really are wise enough not to. But not when we start expecting it. Because once we start expecting something, I think our brains latch onto it like it's ours already. It is no longer one of the good things our brain accepts it cannot have "because one cannot get everything one could want". Suddenly, this is one of the things we convince ourselves we must have. We perceive it as an entitlement.
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What kills us are the losses, real or imaginary...But however it gets there and however we experience it, having a good thing we believe belongs to us taken away has great power to make us miserable. And I suspect that when we are denied something we expected to have, emotionally and/or cognitively, that thing feels like something we had and lost.
And here's the irrational part. We become so obsessed with that which we feel has been robbed from us that we lose focus of all the other good things that we could have instead.
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And if you have a genuinely good thing and you irretrievably lose it (or if it is best you let it go for the future prospect of something better), don't feel entitled to it. Accept that it is gone. Actively cherish what you had. Celebrate its positive and enduring place in your life. Memorialize it. Keep it. Your hurting brain is going to cast about for explanations of why you're hurting. It's going to be frustrated and terrified by its helplessness to retrieve what it lost and to keep things from being lost. In order to regain your sense of power, you will be tempted to blame yourself because subconsciously you're probably reasoning that if it's your fault, that means you were powerful after all and that means maybe next time you won't blow it and lose something special. But you're not omnipotent. You cannot keep all good things.
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Expectations don't just misdirect our focus so that we waste our energies and squander opportunities. They also corrupt love. Expectations that someone who is wrong for us is the only one who could ever please us keep us trapped in unhealthy relationships. Expectations we can change someone make us resent them when they don't change. Expectations that our love will match some ideal we have built up in our minds make us dissatisfied with the rich reality of an actual love we actually have with actual people.
And even when we are with good people, who we should love, we ruin it if we start putting expectations on them as to how they should feel or express their love. When we decide "my lover will do this great thing for me" we now resent them when they don't do it–even if they never promised it or never should have promised it, given who they are.
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I'm not saying "resign from desire". No. Desire. But remember that your desires can be satisfied a million ways, not just one. Desire kinds of good, not their particular instantiations. Desire love. But don't try to predict or expect or feel entitled to it from any particular person or through any particular gesture. Just constantly seek out good people and offer them your best.