IsolatedGestalt

Recent Actions

• Commented on Visualization of US consumer spending
  Anyone know how consumer debt service would fit in here?...
• Commented on Itzbeen baby-timer remembers four important childcare facts
  @aagblog: Not many fancy baby products are really necessary (diaper wipe warmer? please) but I would have loved to have had this when dealing with sleep deprivation and cranky infants. This serves pretty much the same purpose as that wipe...
• Commented on Kid keeping a lending library of banned books in <s>his</s> her locker
  @Inkstain (@204 or so) -- And you could replace "BB community's" with "people run run religious schools'" and "all of humanity" and you'd be pretty much dead on as well. Unfortunately, this appears to be true; that's what surprised me....
• Commented on Kid keeping a lending library of banned books in <s>his</s> her locker
  @HHYPE (@187 or so), However, I don't know how anyone with internet access these days doesn't start with the basic assumption that everything they read is false until proven otherwise and with multiple sources. Kind of a wikipedia approach to...
• Commented on Greed is an Excuse, Not an Instinct
  Maybe I'm not understanding the terms as used, but "selfish" and "cooperative" seem relatively orthogonal to me (and, it would appear, to several other commenters as well); one deals in motivations, while the refers to actions. For example, the vikings...
• Commented on FEMA Kicking Katrina Survivors Out of Trailers
  @Brainspore: Zuzu: Planning for kids is great, but people who are homeless and jobless through no fault of their own shouldn't have to sacrifice the right to have a family on top of everything else.and also:If a private corporation allowed...
• Commented on Jared Diamond lecture on the evolution of religion
  @~#10 Nanuq, I'd hardly call the entrenched power base of the medieval Catholics the "early Christian church". Also, their success at holding power was probably less driven by the violent dispatch of heretics and more by the basis of "heretic"...
• Commented on Warner Music attacks babies
  This can't be real. Please, someone, tell me this isn't real. Please?...
• Commented on Net Neutrality gave us the Web and saved us from gopher
  Wha? Even ignoring the fact that network admins at the time _did_ have the tools to block/filter this kind of traffic, this would still have little or nothing to do with endpoint computing power. If the claim is that network...
• Commented on Kevin Kelly: Access is better than ownership
  @Arkizzle, I think that the phrase immediately preceding the quoted portion is pretty explicit in that I don't consider paintings specifically, or other museum or gallery art generally, to fall under the same general ownership model as most of the...
• Commented on Kevin Kelly: Access is better than ownership
  @DDERIDEX, Your objection makes my point better than I had in the original post. It is precisely the advance of technology that has enabled the "recent" rise of the "ownership model". I may have been a little unclear as to...
• Commented on Kevin Kelly: Access is better than ownership
  @SG Um...... The phrase: so how many monthly subscriptions can you afford to avoid "owning" stuff? struck me as suggesting that "owning" is cheaper than "subscriptions", with the implication that the hypothetical consumer would be driven to subscribe multiple times,...
• Commented on Kevin Kelly: Access is better than ownership
  @GROGGYJAVA Eh? You lost me somewhere. I'm certainly not rich (the value of family and friends excepted, of course), so I'm missing your point entirely. How many things would you buy to avoid "renting" stuff? From a purely cost standpoint,...
• Commented on Kevin Kelly: Access is better than ownership
  Setting aside the information paranoia blinders (without which it just wouldn't be BB), you'll see that this transition from ownership to access occurred quite a while ago for movies, and is pretty close to complete for music. I'm speaking from...
• Commented on Boob Job piggybank sold as girl's room decor
  Re: #3: it hasn't been taken down, it's still there, under "Weird Stuff". I have to say I'd be pretty disappointed if they had taken it down because "someone bitched loud enough that they realized this MIGHT not be appropriate".Now...
• Commented on Boob Job piggybank sold as girl's room decor
  I think that angstrom (#18 right now) makes a point that bears repeating -- it's the pervasiveness of an expression that makes it a reinforcing social norm, not necessarily the outlandishness of the expression. It isn't the shocking or ironic...
• Commented on Palin hears rally attendee call Obama "n-word" during speech, keeps on truckin'.
  Wow. Just...wow. Another one. I can't wait until this election is over and we can get back to A Directory Of Wonderful Things. By all means, be excited and passionate about what you believe in; call out the liars and...
• Commented on Drew Friedman: McCain/Obama as Kirk/Spock
  @buddy66 Which definition of "middle class" are you using?...
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  @avraamov, Perhaps my sarcasm detector is broken, but that chart doesn't seem very arbitrary, but rather fairly consistent -- most of the selections simply map the visible spectrum to an octave, as coordinating increasing frequencies. It does raise a question,...
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  @sekino (#22) Too true. It looks like the definition I've internalized is a bit too narrow (and I think your phrase, "big messy ball of badly wired neurons", is about the best general description of the normal human brain that...
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  @bardfinn, Thanks for the info -- cool to know. Is there a distinction in the field between a first-order sensory input and something associative (given that I'm not sure what the right terms are here). What I mean, for example,...
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  @glossolalia black, No, but do dark colors sound like babbling to you?...
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  @sekino, Maybe I've missed it completely, but that wouldn't seem like synaesthesia at all, unless the assigned personality traits were triggered by a secondary sense (for example, if I perceived the written numeral '3' as a sarcastic whisper)....
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  @sam c, Much more eloquently said than my ramblings, thanks. Also, it should be noted that the experimenters themselves forced the associations. From the article: "They asked 78 people who considered themselves non-synaesthetes to smell 22 separate odours in glass...
• Commented on You May Be Synaesthetic And Not Know It
  So, is "synaesthesia" a neurological condition having to do with (for lack of a better term) crossed paths in perception, or is it defined more as cross-sense associations? For example, I have a number of cross-sense associations, but they're all,...
• Commented on Richard Dawkins reads his hate-mail aloud
  #25 so he is not cherry picking from ALL letters, he has a small group of letters to select from Are you asserting that Dawkins is not cherrypicking from the set of letters that he has received, and that the...
• Commented on Richard Dawkins reads his hate-mail aloud
  #9 Not one of them has the sense to say, "God made Richard Dawkins, and we have to trust that He had His reasons." "Not one"? That seems like kind of a broad brush. There are most likely quite a...
• Commented on Lettuce in the sky, with diamonds
  #30 - The runoff effect would be an indicator of inefficiency, though; any runoff from the 30th to the 29th floor is just water that was needlessly pumped up the extra 10-15 feet. In irrigating this system, you'd want to...
• Commented on Lettuce in the sky, with diamonds
  Not to pile on too much, but water is heavy. To this layman, it seems like irrigation would be a huge obstacle. Rainwater collection seems right out, given that the available collection surface is so small compared to the overall...
• Commented on (Probably not) doctored photo [from Getty runs] in Washington Post
  @CinemaJay -- Wouldn't "photog takes picture" be simpler than "photog takes picture and then chops it"? (Which is, I think, his original point.)...