Oh FFS.

Lauren O and Sherrold, you're fighting the good fight and you're not alone here.

Yes, the game is misogynistic. No, I don't want to ban it. If misogyny were a condition for banning something, there would be nothing left at all. Hell, if misogyny were a condition for not being able to enjoy a piece of entertainment, I'd live a very boring life. GTA is a lot of fun, and the transgressive actions are part of the fun. It's a power fantasy. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

But let's not pretend like the sexism isn't there and doesn't matter. Feminists don't want to take away your video games. Feminists =/= Jack Thompson, for Christ's sake.

And if someone pulls out the "Feminists think all heterosexual sex is rape!!" card in this thread, I may just go on a real-life GTA killing spree.

It looks more like he's getting an egg salad sandwich.

This thread is awesome.

Your OS sucks, your text editor sucks, your pet sucks, and your political candidate sucks. Does that cover all the major flamewars? Can we move on?

Weas @ 56 nails it, by the way. (I started recounting that comic to my advisor, who broke in to say "Obviously real programmers use emacs!" before I'd even gotten to the emacs part. It is a good thing advisor and I agree on text editors, or there might be bloodshed in the lab.)

Also, my boyfriend the web designer prototypes with GUI tools and actually builds the thing by hand. Also, CSS FTW. (And, if the amount of curse words emanating from his office is any guide, Internet Explorer FTL.)

I worked one summer in a nuclear physics research lab, with a 10 MV tandem accelerator (along with a few lower-energy accelerators). The control room -- yes, they called it that -- looked, and probably still looks, much like this, except industrial green instead of black. It was so fantastically Cold War -- and this was in 2002.

One of the physicists was hankering to replace all the knobs and dials and gauges with one big Labview console. I would cry if that ever happened.

In the long run high gas prices would create the kind of development I would love to see -- walkable, dense, with plenty of public transit options.

In the short run, I live a 10-minute drive away from the closest grocery store, and that's just how it is in the entire area I live. Public transportation is not feasible here. Taking the bus from my house to campus would take at least an hour, and would require me to walk half a mile along a curvy, hilly, high-speed road with no sidewalk or shoulder, to even get to the stop -- it's just not feasible. In the short run, $10/gallon gas would break me. I might not make it to the long run.

Let's see, one "What about the menz?" comment, one "You're just being oversensitive" comment, one "She made it all up" comment....we're working on bingo, here.

(I realize that the "What about the menz?" comment to which I refer, #39, might have been ironic. I apologize if it was. It's really hard to tell, though. My irony meter about this stuff is broken. You would not believe some of the things people say on feminist blogs.)

This could take Gatorade to a whole new level!

(Smart-assery aside, this is really cool and I am definitely going to read up on it.)

Sigh. And again, I'm so proud to be a graduate student here. *rolls eyes*

I totally agree with the premise. I desperately want to live somewhere I don't have to hop in the car for everything. But landlords and lenders don't take transportation costs into account when deciding whether or not they are willing to rent/sell to you. They just take into account how much you make vs. how much the rent or mortgage payment will be.

Maybe you end up spending a combined 60% of your income on mortgage + transportation in the 'burbs, but if you'd have to spend 45% of your income on a mortgage downtown, you won't be approved -- and you'll have to move out to the 'burbs and pay more in the end.

My point is that externalities like this really need to be taken into account more explicitly.

Wow, who turned up the level of ignorance to eleven in here?

What's sad is that I completely believed that someone was saying this, and even that it might get published in some B.S. "journal."

I've heard crazier things, worse pseudoscience, that people actually expected me to believe.

When it comes to this stuff, my irony meter is broken.

Tits McGee, I've only got two -- "On Food and Cooking" and "How to Cook Everything." I think "How to Cook Everything" probably replaces Joy of Cooking, but I'm not sure.

I have other cookbooks -- specifically Indian and Thai -- but if I had to keep just two, those would be the two.

RexRhino @ 19, I encourage you to actually read the comment thread and possibly adjust your assumptions about "the boing boing crowd."

Robert, there's such a thing as realizing that trans people are people, not exhibits for your education.

Catbeller @ 11 -- Am I the only one who remembers Anonymous's campaign against feminist bloggers? All of what you mentioned was done. By Anonymous. I think they're well on top of it.

Anonymous @3, it is reversed. Look at it. The E should be pointing up, not down -- that will tell you it's backwards. (Tilt your head to the right.)

Do Dell monitors have the logo embossed on the bottom? I'm having trouble visualizing where the spill was originally.

I learned from Oliver Sacks's last book (Musicophilia) that research shows that all kids are born with absolute pitch, but kids who don't grow up speaking tonal languages almost always lose it. Whereas kids who grow up speaking, say, Mandarin, retain perfect pitch.

In the same essay is a statement by someone who has absolute pitch, saying that to him, notes are like colors. It would be crazy if you saw a blue paper and said "I can't tell what color that is," and then were shown a red paper (and told it was red) and said "Okay, if that paper is red, this paper must be blue." Everyone has a sense of "absolute color." (This is all paraphrased from the book.)

But, of course, things like this show that we actually don't have a sense of absolute color. Our sense of color is as strongly influenced by language as our sense of pitch. We see a bunch of different wavelengths as "green" -- even if we know they're different shades of green, we see them as fundamentally the same color. We see cyan and navy blue as fundamentally the same color -- "blue" -- while Russians see them as separate colors, like we see orange and yellow.

Fascinating stuff. All our senses are so influenced by our language, the way we communicate those senses to others.

Kirsten, the links you gave reminded me very strongly of an Isaac Asimov story, "The Ugly Little Boy." With that connotation, there's something deeply poignant about these baby dolls. Maybe they are really Neanderthal babies snatched out of time....

I started crying when he made the one lady a balloon wrist corsage. Don't know quite what it was about that. Probably because even though she's in a nursing home, wearing a hospital gown, he placed the corsage on her wrist like a boy greeting his date for the senior prom, and she looks like a girl, happy and flustered at the gesture.

God, I'm such a loser. *goes to get tissues*

Even if torturing someone gets them to spill the truth among a bunch of lies, you're going to waste enough time and manpower sorting through the lies that the truth might be useless. In the mythical "ticking time bomb" scenario, this means you've just made things worse. (And as others have said, if you know that there is a bomb and you know for a fact that this guy knows exactly where it is, then you already know enough to find the bomb.)

But of course the "ticking time bomb" scenario is crap anyway. More likely is that you're torturing someone who doesn't actually have anything to spill. Then you just get a lot of made-up stuff, whatever the victim thinks you want to hear.

There's a reason that torture is generally used to coerce confessions the torturers know to be false. It's good at that.

And the thing is, maybe the guy that you tortured might have been able to tell you something useful, something that would have led you to the actual terrorists. But you tortured him until he told you about some fanciful plot to blow up an apartment building in Peoria, because you wanted to score some points and claim that your agency "foiled a terror plot."

Torture is not only immoral. It's also completely irrational.

Yeah, I'm currently copying all the contact info for my Facebook friends into my address book. Then I'm going to get rid of my Facebook account.

There just aren't enough people that I 1) actually want to keep in touch with and 2) don't keep in touch with any other way to make Facebook worth all the crud.

Who is singing in that video? He sounds so familiar, but I can't place him.

I watched old-fashioned Sesame Street in the early 80s. This new Elmo business? No good.

I didn't watch this video. I cried and almost threw up just watching the video of the kid who got tasered for not leaving the university library -- I know this one would haunt my sleep for months.

If he died of a heart attack, it's likely that the tasering caused it. The high voltage discharge can affect the electrical activation of the heart.

And everyone, I'm afraid you're missing the point of disemvowelling. It's not so much to punish obnoxious people as it is to prevent them from derailing the thread. It's precisely so that you and I can't instantly read what was said, get angry at it, and feel the need to fire off another angry response.

I'm really surprised by the sheer number of giraffe fight videos on YouTube. Who knew it was such a popular video topic?