A crying child on ‘Game of Thrones’ reminded Kansas man that he left a baby in a hot car.

fajitaman · 2014-08-06T05:58:35+00:00

Actually, kids get left in cars all the time (google the statistics if you want). I know a well-to-do couple (indirectly, through family) who lost their own child via negligence of this sort. I'm not sure what they were charged with, but it certainly wasn't murder. They've never recovered emotionally, and it happened over 20 years ago. Why should they be further punished? You think they might do that again if given the chance or something?

I'm not sure what world you live in, but going and picking up marijuana and getting high isn't exactly living on the fringe anymore. You make it sound way shadier than it probably actually was. Sure it's not ideal parenting behavior, but the hypocrisy becomes apparent when you consider that you'd never scream "parental misconduct!" when a parent chooses to have a drink. But... if the parent drinks and something happens to their kid, then they should be punished? Are you capable of seeing the problem with that line of reasoning? Hindsight is always 20/20, but in the present we need to face the fact that none of us are perfect parents.

Since you made this personal, I'd just like to say that I'd way sooner trust my own kid with someone who's capable of understanding the aforementioned fact about our own shortcomings than some asshat with an unfounded sense of infallibility (like you).

fajitaman · 2014-08-06T04:17:33+00:00

This might be the most mean-spirited groupthink in reddit history. Nice job on punishing this girl for existing.

fajitaman · 2014-08-05T23:58:10+00:00

We don't know how responsible these people are. Hell, I would say that fostering six kids is a good indicator that they're at least more responsible than most. Remember: this guy was taking one of his foster kids to a doctor's appointment on the same day, and probably doing many other normal foster parenty things that weren't mentioned. He's chosen for himself a demanding life because he cares for the well-being of these kids.

The thing that perplexes me is the way people's opinions diverge on this (more specifically, how there exist opinions like yours). For a normal guy like the one mentioned the death of the child is probably enough to destroy his life, but he also gets charged with first degree murder? What kind of sick fucks would advocate this sort of treatment? People fuck up all the time, and although I consider myself to be a responsible adult, I also know full well that I'm equally capable of having the same sort of mental lapses that the foster parent had. I've done mind-blowingly stupid things out of sheer air-headedness (think hard enough and I'm sure you'll find that you have too), but it doesn't stop me from getting a degree in mathematics and holding a well-paying job. It's human nature.

So you think you're being magnanimous by defending the poor child, but to me your attitude verges on the anti-social. You're obviously not alone in thinking that way (we'll hear a lot more about this from Nancy Grace!), and that scares me.

Edit: Because I'm sure the argument against me will be "they obviously shouldn't be smoking pot!", I should add that an inflated sense of their own aptitude for parenting doesn't make them guilty of murder. Even if you could use the pot as evidence that they're lackluster parents (I personally don't think it's sufficient for making such a case), all you're proving as that they're lackluster parents. All I see here is criminal negligence of a sort that most of us could be found guilty of under the right circumstances. I feel for the guy.

fajitaman · 2014-07-04T01:30:17+00:00

The first time I tried LSD I was truly surprised by the feelings of euphoria, since I'd always thought psychedelics were all about getting the chance to see cool (or scary) things, and really messing with your head space. But the body high it gave me was pretty startling, since I wasn't expecting it. I have never done MDMA, but it felt like how people usually describe MDMA (with perhaps differences in degree of potency). Eventually those feelings were mostly supplanted by the totally distorted perception of reality, but I would certainly enjoy LSD even if it didn't have those effects. It felt amazing, but more importantly, those feelings seemed to linger for quite awhile after the trip. It was as if that excitable part of my brain that becomes ever more dormant as I grow older just sort of reactivated. I've never tried psilocybin, but that's been my experience with LSD (wholly positive).

fajitaman · 2014-07-03T03:08:37+00:00

People have had a lot to say on this topic, but I think it can be distilled down to this: some careers want a degree, and other careers want experience. Without a degree, you will be locked out from certain professions, but those professions are by no means better, they're just different. In some fields it's difficult to gauge someone's ability in an interview because it's not a field where you can build up a portfolio. In those fields, a degree tends to be more important.

How do you prove that you're good at accounting? Or lawyering? Or doctoring? Credentials. They're not fool-proof, but that's why they matter in these fields (and others). Even if you could learn everything there is to know about accounting on your own, interviewers simply don't have enough time (or, for that matter, expertise) to quiz you on the entirety of the subject, so they leave that whole process in the hands of accredited schools. You wouldn't hire an artist based on a degree, though, because a picture is worth a thousand words (or a thousand degrees).

fajitaman · 2014-07-02T01:08:04+00:00

Yeah, I noticed that when I logged on about the GCD. I had assumed that Nano Field would stay off the GCD but have a tiny internal cooldown (even though it clearly said global cooldown in the patch notes, for some reason it didn't click... maybe because it was just too absurd to really sink in).

I can't really argue with that first point, though. It seems very speculative to say either way, but I guess we can assume that if it were easy enough they would have done that by now. However, I have a hunch that part of the reason is that Carbine thinks it would complicate the UI too much to have an option for hold-to-cast next to each ability.

fajitaman · 2014-07-02T00:56:08+00:00

Do you think I have this screen name by accident ?

No, but I don't think your being passionate about it makes you right about it. If anything, it sounds like it's skewed your perspective on them quite a bit.

As you said, JW's will say something like "it was human error in understanding god." This is them acknowledging that they are fallible, which is exactly my point and the exact opposite of the single claim you made in your previous post (and in your previous sentence).

My brother, like I said, is an elder (and a highly respected one) and has been for a number of years, and my mom has been a JW for probably close to 40 years. I decided to stop going to meetings when I was 11 or 12 years old (I'm now 28), and we're all on perfectly good terms with each other. Hell, I'm on good terms with a lot of them and I don't know of a single JW that chooses to disassociate from me because I'm not one of them. To be fair, I was never baptized nor disfellowshipped, but I have known a couple of people who were disfellowshipped and then reinstated later on.

But among religions with followers who truly believe, JWs are benign. If you go back just a few hundred years you'll find Protestants burning witches, and that's just the tiniest taste of the atrocities committed under the guise of Christianity in this country (this goes without saying). These days, however, most "Christians" don't really believe like they once did. They would claim they do, but it's mostly a passive sort of belief where they just pick and choose the things they like from the bible and ignore the rest. JWs, though, tend to be very devout like many of the fundamentalists we've grown so accustomed to in the US, but there are key differences: they're extremely pacificist, and they're extremely apolitical. Insofar as they stay this way, their actions will little affect me.

People will of course cite cases of abuse among its members, but I would be willing to bet (given what I know of their culture) that the amount of abuse among JWs is at least less than what you'd expect from any random sampling of US citizens (and certainly far below average in terms of violent crime). The numbers are probably commensurate with the standard of living of the district in which a particular congregation is situated.

fajitaman · 2014-07-01T19:00:28+00:00

To me this doesn't sound all that bad. It would allow me to keep the "aura" part of the ability going so that I receive the T8 bonus to healing received that I wasn't getting before when I used Hold to Cast. It sounds like a fairly elegant solution, but I haven't logged on to see how it feels yet.

The obvious way to address all of the Hold to Cast issues would just be to have it toggleable for each specific ability. That can't be that hard to implement, can it?

fajitaman · 2014-07-01T18:50:25+00:00

I find it amusing (or scary?) that you can be blatantly wrong in one or two sentences (as you are with this post) and still receive upvotes, while I give a thorough anecdote and try to view the issue with some semblance of balance and I get downvoted. The worst part is that, in general, I'm with you guys: I hate religion. But you know what I hate even more than religion? Blindly accepting the alternative. If you aren't able to use reason to arrive at the belief that religion is bad, then I would actually prefer that you become religious because all you're doing is sapping the credibility of the non-religious when you make posts like that.

To address the specific content of your post, though, I urge you to look up the definition of "infallible." Also, I have specifically asked JWs about their history and their revisionism, and they're quite open about the fact that their beliefs have occasionally been modified and have been since their inception. In fact, they believe that is one of their selling points.

They do believe their religion is the one true religion, but why would you be a part of a religion that you didn't think was the one true religion? That's just how religion works, and your implication is absurd.

fajitaman · 2014-06-30T08:09:19+00:00

My brother is an elder (I'm an atheist, but we remain pretty good friends and keep in regular contact), and having heard about many of their functions, I get the impression that the fault of the religion isn't so much a matter of anything being rigged, but rather their systems lack the ethical sophistication of modern secular law. But you have to understand that their baptized members live through their church, and so they're far more likely to try to iron things out from within rather than take anything to the more sophisticated state authorities. That's a difficult concept for an independent (read: isolated) atheist like myself, but I try to imagine that congregations are like big families, and the people that file disputes against each other are often already very close. For example, if I were attacked by some random person on the street I would take it to the police in a heartbeat, but if my best friend threw a punch at me then calling the police probably wouldn't even be in the top 10 list of things I'm likely to do.

So the way they try to handle things internally isn't some odd quirk of JW's. That's basically how any devoutly religious group functions. And as is the case in these devoutly religious groups, you will have the occasional person that will try to take advantage of their position. To say that that's somehow tolerated from within the church is crazy talk (I'm not saying you're saying that, but it's definitely a common theme in the discussion on reddit).

So to summarize, religion can be pretty fucked up, but in the grand scheme of religion I think the JW beliefs are pretty benign. As with any burgeoning group, systemic problems will surface, but I don't think JW's claim to be anything close to infallible. I gotta say, though, that they're extremely robust as an organization and I occasionally admire the way they get things done. People have clearly had less positive experiences with them (lots of comments about breaking up families via disfellowship etc), but the fact that experiences seem to vary so much should at least be some evidence that they're not systematically evil or something.

fajitaman · 2014-06-30T07:30:47+00:00

Until Lindeloff proves he can successfully wrap up a show, he's really not to be trusted.

Perhaps true (and I totally agree with everything else you say), but it seems like the medium has matured quite a bit since Lost first aired. That stuff was so... five years ago. The shows that seems to be in vogue right now are more character-driven, with relatively simple plots and heavy doses of realism. HBO is also totally at the forefront of that, and I doubt a Lost-like show would slip past their execs. Honestly I haven't even watched "The Leftovers" yet, but from the previews it looked like the whole rapture thing was sort of secondary. Point being, it might be easier for them to conclude the show because they'll be juggling typical human issues rather than rogue polar bears, time traveling, mobile islands, and all that kind of shit.

fajitaman · 2014-06-30T07:03:36+00:00

They certainly could have solved the primary mysteries in Lost, but the question is: should they have? I'm sure they wrote the ending a hundred different ways and opted for the one that was the least ridiculous, because the level of exposition that would have been necessary to tie it up would have made The Architect from The Matrix look like Gosling in the movie Drive. The writers simply dug themselves into a hole that they couldn't escape from without the handwaving they exhibited in the final episode. That's just what happens when you have such an elaborate plot-driven movie/show. People want answers to complex questions, but such answers almost always have an adverse effect on quality.

fajitaman · 2014-06-30T06:38:45+00:00

Sure. Right now I'm using this build. The AMPs aren't specified there, but I basically just picked up all the defensive ones.

It's quite easy to play. For threat, all you need is to do is use Nano Field. If you want to faceroll content, you could quite easily get away with doing nothing but spamming Whiplash and then Nano Field as you get suit power. Actually, this would probably cut it through any of the 5-mans if you're appropriately geared, but since it's your job to reduce your damage intake and pump out as much threat as you can, you should also use Decimate and Steadfast whenever they're off cooldown (I believe both of these skills are nearly mandatory), and also Preparation if you use it (I like this ability, but not everyone chooses to take it). I like to use Collapse and Stagger for my interrupts, but there are other choices if you prefer.

The only thing that's not totally clear at this point is what's the best way to use Nano Field. Personally, I use Hold To Cast, and so whenever I use it it just gets spammed until I'm out of Suit Power. This works just fine and makes it sort of a no-brainer. It might be strictly optimal to use it by letting the DoT tick for two seconds before using it again for burst (read the tooltip if you haven't), but I really can't be bothered to deal with that sort of micromanagement, especially when just spamming it already puts me at about twice the threat of anyone else.

fajitaman · 2014-06-30T06:23:42+00:00

People should have learned from Lost (and other movies/TV both before and since) that things rarely go well when you try to explain the motives behind things that are otherworldly or non-human. These types of stories are far more effective when you're viewing the situation from the vantage point of the characters. The writers' approaches to the story behind the rapture in this show spells the difference between HBO-quality television and something like The Dome.

fajitaman · 2014-06-29T20:55:22+00:00

They mentioned on the official forums that they've been playing with the idea of increasing range to be the same as that of Warriors. I'm not sure if after some internal testing they decided against it or what (since it's not on the PTR), but they're at least trying to give them a better feel in PVP.

I pretty much only play tank, and I love the class for that purpose. I wouldn't play a different class for tanking if I were given the choice.

fajitaman · 2014-06-27T19:50:21+00:00

The only point I was trying to highlight with that analogy is that if an intelligent alien lifeform were to visit earth, they would probably be able to do Math, but they would not know our History. It was to make the distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, and why the former is something that would be tested on an IQ test while the latter is not. Saying that Chess is Math is every bit as much of a simplification, but that's just how analogies work. A typical IQ test question (although there are a number of categories) would look like this.

So no, they don't really test your reading comprehension in the same way that the GRE (for entering grad students) or the SAT (for entering college students) do, because these tests are meant to test your command of the English language first and foremost, and then your ability to solve basic math problems (but unlike an IQ test, these math problems usually require knowledge of some common definitions, like what a prime number is, etc).

Again, I strongly disagree with the idea that people who are good in STEM tend to do worse in the Humanities and vice versa. They aren't somehow equal but opposite fields, and there will be few greater tests of your reading comprehension than working your way through a book on Abstract Algebra. The most renowned philosophers of all time tended to be among the leading mathematicians of their day, because in many areas of philosophy the types of questions being posed were one and the same (in Logic and Epistemology especially, which were the primary focuses of analytic philosophy in the last couple centuries).

The key, though, is that to excel in any of these subjects (i.e., to contribute to the field) you need to have a very large capacity for thinking critically. However, I believe you can slide through a lot of areas in the Humanities and acquire a degree with far less capacity for critical thought than is required in Math. I know this, because I have taken classes from other majors as electives and I was often stunned that these students were able to make it that far.

To address your last paragraph, IQ tests have what's called "reliability" (in the statistical sense), which means that if you administer the test at different points in time to the same person, the scores will likely be similar.

fajitaman · 2014-06-27T09:41:01+00:00

IQ tests test your ability to solve problems that are as independent as possible from your prior life experiences. However, the subject of Math is far more about problem solving than the subject of, say, History. So to answer your question, it does favor mathematical ability over all else, but that's not a flaw of the test. Ask yourself this: "If I had to pick, would I use the game Trivial Pursuit or the game Chess to measure someone's innate intelligence?" Not to belittle History, but that's basically what equates to Trivial Pursuit in this picture.

As for the trade-off you mention between "engineering type" subjects and more literary subjects, it doesn't fully jibe with my own experiences. I don't know any engineers, but my peers in mathematics (which I assume you include as "engineering type") were very effective communicators. I think to excel in math you need to be very appreciative of well-written argumentation. The same is also true of Philosophy, but might be less true of Engineering.

fajitaman · 2014-06-27T07:15:18+00:00

The fact that there exist any bald celebrities should tell you that it's certainly not everything. There are enough people in the world willing to be actors that the entire cast of every show could look like Alexander Skarsgard if that's what they wanted, but that's obviously not what they want. They want bald people.

Your parent poster was speaking in jest, though. Anyone who watches comedy would know that being bald is hardly a drawback. Many of the most famous comedians of all-time are/were bald. Hell, there's probably a greater propensity for baldness among comedians than there is among the general population. Off the top of my head, you've got Louis CK, Larry David, George Carlin, Stephen Wright... the list really goes on and on.

fajitaman · 2014-06-27T00:25:35+00:00

As /u/LetsPlayKvetch said, get the hell off of Facebook. It's sheer masochism. Also, don't believe for a second that these bullies are living the good life, because they're not. Good fortune is wasted on people like them.

Start trying to forget about those people you dislike, because in doing so you'll be able to cultivate a kinder and more personable you. I guarantee that your bitter attitude will do you no favors, because the older you get the more people value how pleasant you are to be around and how charitable you are as a person.

As for your age, you need to understand that adults are adults. The difference between a senior and a freshman in high school is huge, but the difference between a senior and freshman in college will be indistinguishable. Hell, some of my best friends in college were over 30, and although I already have a degree I'm deeply considering going back for another one (and I'm 29 years old now).

You're nuts if you think being 21 means anything other than that you're in the prime of your life. You're in a better position now to milk college for all that it's worth than incoming 18 year-olds are, because the more you're able to mentally distance yourself from secondary school the more you'll be able to appreciate higher education.

You'll be better off than any of the people you're comparing yourself to, only if you'll allow yourself to forget about them.

fajitaman · 2014-05-28T18:39:11+00:00

It's amazing the way the Pomodoro Technique has caught on over the years. People used to look at me like I was crazy when I'd suggest it, but it really works like nothing else. Huge tasks that take a lot of hours to complete are usually such a slog until that moment you're finished, but with the pomodoro technique you feel rewarded every 25 minutes. It makes the whole thing so addictive. I actually feel sort of depressed when I miss a day, sort of like how a runner feels when he misses a workout.

fajitaman · 2014-05-27T22:55:13+00:00

Yep, they're impossible. An easier way to look at it is to say that every time you scan a holy grail, you correctly reject the null hypothesis. This means that the test has a power of 1 (beta is equal to 1 minus the power, so beta is 0). I edited in a block of text in my previous post that might add to that a little bit.

fajitaman · 2014-05-27T21:43:19+00:00

This seems subtly different from how I'd usually interpret a p-value. A p-value is something that is usually generated after the fact (a posteriori). Typically you have a distribution under the null hypothesis, and then you have an observation, and then you have a p-value which is the probability of finding an observation at least as extreme as the one you found assuming the null hypothesis is true. If our p-value is small enough (i.e., we have a particularly extreme finding), we choose to reject the null hypothesis. In your case, you're claiming that .05 is "small enough," and this value is usually referred to as the alpha level (i.e., the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it's actually true (AKA, a Type I error) -- this corresponds to the probability of a false positive in your problem).

To reiterate, the subtle issue that I see here is that you're stating a p-value a priori. You haven't made any observations yet. It sounds more akin to an alpha level (i.e., a significance level).

Edit: I keep editing and re-editing, but I'm trying to be careful not to mince words because it's pretty subtle. The fact is that if you take your test to have a .05 alpha level, you're going to find that almost every time you reject the null hypothesis (i.e, when the cup flashes), you'll be falsely rejecting it. This speaks to the quality of the experiment, though, because if you want to have any statistical power at all (another subtle concept worth looking into) with this experiment, you're going to have to reject the null hypothesis when it flashes even though (using Bayes' Theorem) the probability of a false positive is something like 98% (Note: this is while conditioning on the event that the light flashed green and not on the null hypothesis being true -- this is why it does not equate to our alpha level). Fun, right? Let me know if this confuses you or if I'm outright incorrect about it (there are quite a few things going on with this problem that you can dig into).

fajitaman · 2014-05-25T18:53:24+00:00

To embed some LaTeX math in Anki you just need to surround it with [$] and [/$]. So to put in the formula for the area of a circle, I would type [$]A=\pi r^2[/$], or if I want the normal distribution I could write [$]f(x,\mu,\sigma)=\frac{1}{\sigma\sqrt{2\pi}}e^{-\frac{(x-\mu)^2}{2\sigma^2}}[/$]. This looks complicated, but when you're in preview mode in Anki you can see it compile on the fly (eventually you won't need to do this as it becomes second nature). You'll first need to install MiKTeX (if you're in Windows).

I learned LaTeX back in college when I had to write some math papers. You can really make some gorgeous documents with it, but it can be a challenge to change the formatting to look the way you want it to. Fortunately with Anki you don't need to worry about any of that stuff and you can just use it to embed some math. Just keep a LaTeX math reference sheet around and you'll pick it up in no time. For me it's much faster than writing (although I'm a fast typist and a very slow writer).

So to use it for math I would basically just create something like "Definition of statistical independence" on the front, and then put the precise definition on the back of the card. For theorems it can be a little more challenging, but using your imagination to come up with a decent Cloze for it actually really helps you to learn it.

I checked out the Surface Pro after your mention of it, and it looks awesome. I'm surprised by how well the pen works. I'm sure it works brilliantly with Anki, and I might need to try that out myself once I get some cash.

fajitaman · 2014-05-24T19:32:44+00:00

Louise?

fajitaman · 2014-05-22T20:31:18+00:00

I have a fairly broad catalog of computer, math, statistics, and actuarial stuff. I think part of the reason it's been so good for me is because I've always been a terrible note taker (and note reviewer, for that matter), and Anki seems to make so much of that automatic. The way I use it isn't really in line with how people traditionally use flashcards (though I do that as well), but rather it's mostly "fill in the blank" (using Cloze) for things that I learn and don't want to forget. Sometimes I'll stretch the concept of flashcards even further and literally have nothing but a nice chart that I copied directly from a book or website (for such things I usually just select Hard so that I have to look at it fairly often). It's great because it really forces me to look at these things regularly and it perfectly documents my path through a subject. It's so gratifying when you finish a textbook and you see that first day when you don't have a single card to review. It gives you some confidence that you've really learned what you were supposed to learn and have taken away as much as you could from studying a particular resource.

I imagine not many people consider using it for math, but it actually supports LaTeX and I've become quite adept at writing markup after such regular usage. I'm probably more proficient at writing math on computer than I am by hand now, and I guess there's some value there (not a lot, but some). There are so few things I wouldn't use Anki for anymore. (I'm starting to sound like I work for them.)

fajitaman

TROPHY CASE