What are /r/todayilearned's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-harvard.html

> I had gone to college planning to become a writer, but early on a scientific tendency appeared. In the English department at Harvard, my writing style was severely criticized and I was receiving grades of C or C+ on my papers. At eighteen, I was vain about my writing and felt it was Harvard, and not I, that was in error, so I decided to make an experiment. The next assignment was a paper on Gulliver’s Travels, and I remembered an essay by George Orwell that might fit. With some hesitation, I retyped Orwell’s essay and submitted it as my own. I hesitated because if I were caught for plagiarism I would be expelled; but I was pretty sure that my instructor was not only wrong about writing styles, but poorly read as well. In any case, George Orwell got a B- at Harvard, which convinced me that the English department was too difficult for me.

I decided to study anthropology instead. But I doubted my desire to continue as a graduate student in anthropology, so I began taking premed courses, just in case.

What...the...fuck?!

"Harrison Okene, the ship’s cook, was in the bathroom when the boat turned over and began to sink. Most of the other crew members were locked in their cabins — a safety precaution necessitated by the pirates who regularly rob and abduct vessels in that area. That safety measure, however, sealed the other crew members’ doom."

Hijacking this comment to help anyone who smokes find a portable ashtray.

I got one from an outdoor camping event, mine is a small foil lined bag that I can put a lit cigarette in and it will snuff it out. It can easilly fit 10+ butts and has a snap for locking it closed.

Its smaller then the palm of my hand and takes up no space in my pocket. There are also hard unfoldable versions.

​

Here's a link to the same one I have, this one has different branding but the bag seems identical.

AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention) made me aware of this story. I've heard this guy talk a couple times. It's amazing. He actually said himself he didn't believe the story until eye witnesses told him after the fact. I guess when you are broken in half drowning you might be thinking about something else. He said he remembers praying and feeling something bump into him thinking it was sharks.

Edit: His book, a great read. Cracked But Not Broken

Edit 2: AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention)

Also check out the Out of The Darkness walk. Check your local chapter on the site to see when the one near you is and support those in need of help and support.

Stallone actually even helped write the song:

Sylvester Stallone loved this song. When he heard the demo, he told the group it was exactly what he was looking for, but requested a mix with louder drums and asked if they could write a new third verse instead of repeating the first as they had done. The group did what Stallone suggested - they went about modifying the first verse and remixed the song.

Suggestions from an actor are usually not what bands are looking for when creating a song, but Stallone knew what he was doing. Jim Peterik said, "Stallone has a good ear for a hook. Just listen to his dialogues - he wrote those scripts. He came up with 'Eye Of The Tiger' for that script and those hook phrases like 'I'm going to knock you into tomorrow.' All that stuff is Stallone, he's a genius with dialogue. Songs are nothing more than dialogue set to music as far as I'm concerned."

Source

He also barely remembered writing Cujo:

>Cujo's name was based on the nom de guerre of Willie Wolfe, one of the men responsible for orchestrating Patty Hearst's kidnapping and indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army. Stephen King discusses Cujo in On Writing, referring to it as a novel he "barely remembers writing at all". The book was written during a period when King was drinking heavily. King goes on to say that he likes the book and that he wishes he could remember enjoying the good parts as he put them down on the page

He also barely remembered writing Cujo:

>Cujo's name was based on the nom de guerre of Willie Wolfe, one of the men responsible for orchestrating Patty Hearst's kidnapping and indoctrination into the Symbionese Liberation Army. Stephen King discusses Cujo in On Writing, referring to it as a novel he "barely remembers writing at all". The book was written during a period when King was drinking heavily. King goes on to say that he likes the book and that he wishes he could remember enjoying the good parts as he put them down on the page

Will provide a picture of my form, give me a sec.

EDIT: Here it is

Another edit: better link

Gold edit: This one goes out to all the drawing teachers who told me my drawing skills would never get me anywhere

Netflix has a multiple episode documentary called The Toys That Made Us and it is really fascinating. They have done episodes on Barbie, He-Man, G-I Joe and a few others so far.

> met coincidentally walking on the beach and decided to force up prices

Adam Smith said about this in The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776):

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Still better than some cancer charities. The following list collectively spent less than 3% of the donated funds on cancer patients, according to the complaint. All 50 states and D.C. joined the Federal Trade Commission in filing the charge — one of the largest charity fraud cases to date, according to the FTC.

1. Cancer Fund of America
2. The Breast Cancer Society
3. Cancer Support Services Inc
   
4. Children's Cancer Fund of America

lol. the Amazon link to the book has an "About the author" section that is the skater.

https://www.amazon.com/Z-Skateboarding-Tony-Hawks-ebook/dp/B07NRXJX9Z

​

edit: the "contains nothing about skateboarding" in OP's title seems to be off too - the descriptions of the book indicate that it's mostly comedian replying to fan mail that was intended for skater, and giving shitty or wrong skating advice.

There was a follow up after the original piece. There were some quotes from the first one that haunted me, but it seems he found some peace after it was published.

Follow up is here.

I mean...

Apparently this holds true for Airheads as well.

My brother and I always argued over what flavor they were. I guess we were both wrong.

EDIT: After doing some googling I happened across this band site. Apparently they named themselves after the flavor.

EDIT 2: Heck my deck! Thanks for the karma reddit! :)

Some people keep commenting about this "beauty pageant". It's not about beauty, it's about finding who best embodies the traditions of the Navajo. The women are expected to know about their heritage and culture and be able to answer questions in both English and Navajo and show proficiency in various skills considered essential in tribal life, hence the sheep butchering.

There's a documentary about it that I watched at some point as an undergrad in Anthropology, it's pretty insightful and talks about the history of the pageant and what it has meant for past winners and the contestants being spotlighted.

Edit: When I commented on this post there were only a few comments, like less than 25. Seeing dialogue spring up on topics such as this is always reassuring to see, everyone likes learning!

Double edit: Some have asked about why they use sheep to highlight "traditional skills" when sheep are not native to the region and were originally imported from Europe. My best answer to this is that sheep eventually became so pervasive in the every day flow of things that raising sheep became a learned aspect of Navajo culture. Just because the Navajo predate sheep in the Americas, does not disallow their use and adoption of them.

Triple edit: Here's an online and free stream of the documentary.

His inspiration from his book "On Writing":

>One day, Harry [the other janitor] and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls' shower. I looked around the locker room with the interest of a Muslim youth who for some reason finds himself deep within the women's quarters. It was the same as the boys locker room, and yet completely different. There were no urinals, of course, and there we two extra metal boxes on the tile walls--unmarked, and the wrong size for paper towels. I asked what was in them. "Pussy-plugs," Harry said. "For them certain days of the month." I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtins, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn't know what it is, and the other girls--grossed out, horrified, amused--start pelting her with sanitary napkins... The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she's dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she's bleeding to death... she reacts... fights back... but how? I'd read an article in LIFE magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena--telekinesis being the ability to move objects just by thinking about them. There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first-- POW. Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea."

Let's not forget that the Scientist who performed the autopsy as well as the woman who processed the photos of the autopsy both say the records in the national archives are nothing like what they performed and processed.

https://www.npr.org/2013/11/10/243981006/inconsistencies-haunt-official-record-of-kennedys-death

> https://www.amazon.com/The-Thrill-Chase-A-Memoir/dp/0967091780

This guy is a ~~genus~~ genius. The book has been out for 7 years and it still has a Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,564. That's a major best seller. For comparison, a recently released book I got from the library from a fairly respected international author was at 170,000.

By selling the book for $68, he's got a chance to come out even or possibly make a profit by selling his book, even if someone happens to find the treasure.

In a later book, you find out that the Tin man was originally a regular lumberjack named Nick Chopper, who fell in love with a woman who one of the Wicked Witches didn't want him to be with. So she cursed his axe so that when he tried to chop down a tree, he would eventually miss and chop off one of his body parts.

So the first time it happened, and he chopped off a foot or whatever, he went to a tinsmith and had a prosthetic replacement made, and went back to work. Only a little while later to accidentally chop off another piece and have it replaced, until he was entirely made out of tin, and no longer had a heart, and could no longer be in love.

Thing is, the tinsmith kept all of the body parts, so in this book they go visit the tinsmith's shop and the tin man is able to have a conversation with his cranky old head, which has been sitting in a cupboard the whole time.

The tinsmith also kept the body parts of a soldier, Captain Fyter, whose body he had also replaced with tin after he had also fallen in love with the same girl. For some reason he decided to make a composite frankenstein's monster out of their combined body parts named Chop-fyt, who did finally get to marry the girl.

Weird shit.

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be start his own religion."

• L. Ron Hubbard, As quoted in the Los Angeles Times (27 August 1978)

A man, Billy Steinberg, wrote the lyrics to the song while driving in a red pickup truck around a vineyard. It is about starting a new relationship after heartbreak.

"Don't trust quotations you read on the Internet" -- Abraham Lincoln

Actually there is one place that has reasonably good sourcing for all their quotes -- Wikiquote. They don't have this quote in their database, so probably no one can confirm that she said it.

One of my most enlightening but depressing college reads was The Men with the Pink Triangle. I’d read a lot of WWII and concentration camp books for school before, but that one was a truly unique perspective.

Available on Android or iOS in case anyone is bored enough. The $.99 goes to charity.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tueidj.DesertBus&hl=en

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desert-bus/id470288016?mt=8

Naomi Klein talks about this style of decisionmaking in her book The Shock Doctrine. When there's a catastrophic event, some governments will rush through radical new laws while people are in a state of shock. The people wouldn't ordinarily approve of such radical decisions. But in that state of shock, they're far less likely to question them.

He was born Wasú Máza, or Iron Hail, in 1858, and fought against Custer as a teenager. He also was in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for 15 years, and spent the last part of his life advocating for his tribe and people. A biography of him was recently written.

EDIT: Typo in the title - the Wounded Knee Massacre occurred in 1890, not 1892.

Not really. However, he was the idiot that came up with the idea that babies are born a "blank slate" as far as gender goes.

Edit: Since my reply to /u/formsofforms is buried below, and his "source" is a book that few of you have access to, I thought I'd edit this post to back up my claim that /u/formsofforms's claims are incorrect.

He is wrong on "gender identity", and somewhat right on "gender role". In the 1950's many psychologists and psychiatrists were theorizing about the concept of gender roles. John Money may have been the first person to use the actual phrase "gender role". He did not "invent" the idea.

The term “gender identity” was coined in the 1960’s by Hooker and Stoller, who defined it as “ a young child’s developing a fundamental sense of belonging to one sex, and not the other”. Source

It seems that some sources do agree that John Money coined the term "gender role". However, he was hardly the first person to discuss the concept. Wiki Article on "Gender Role" for more context.

John Money's behavior during his "research" was abhorrent, but I would hate for anyone to disregard concepts like gender role and gender identity because they are associated with him.

A shameless plug here. Iron Tracker is a free android app that I and a collaboration at my old university designed to allow those that suffer from Haemochromatosis to keep track of their hemoglobin and ferritin levels as well as track appointments. Please give it a shot and feel free to make suggestions and I will pass them on to the current dev team.

edit - IOS version

TIL that he would cut his grapefruit with the dull side of the knife.

>Erdös found a grapefruit. He looked at it and looked at it and got a butter knife. "It can't be by chance," Graham explained, "that he so often used the dull side of the knife, trying to force his way through. It'll be squirting like mad, all over himself and the kitchen. I'd say, 'Paul, don't you think you should use a sharper knife?' He'd say, `It doesn't matter,' as the juice shoots across the room. At that point I give up and cut it for him."

TIL that he would call everything he didn't like "fascist."

>This brush with fascism had a lasting impact on Paul, both politically and linguistically. From this point on, anything was inconvenient or oppressive was "fascist". To illustrate: At one point, a colleague showed Erdős a new litter of kittens. Paul picked up a kitten, but the kitten would have none of it, and scratched him. Paul carefully put the kitten back down, clucked and proclaimed "fascist cat!". Paul's colleague, intrigued, asked Paul how the cat could possibly be fascist. Paul responded, "If you were a mouse, you would know!".

Actually, it's not the BBC that estimates this - that percentage comes from the US Department of Veteran Affairs. In addition to the book mentioned in the article, there's also a documentary on the same subject being released later this month: The Invisible War, by the makers of This Film Is Not Yet Rated.

There is a book by Dr. Thomas Stanley called "The Millionaire Next Door" where he profiled wealthy people in America. He defined wealthy as having a net worth of over $1 million. His findings were that the majority of people who live in large, lavish houses, drive expensive cars, and own yachts are not wealthy, but rather, are pretending to be wealthy by financing and living in debt. Most people worth over $1 million, like Buffett, are worth that much because they save, invest, and reinvest their money compulsively. They don't spend it on Aston Martins, large homes, second homes, or boats. They reinvest it into businesses and other things that will make them more money or will benefit their friends and family, or charities of choice.

Or this one, The SAS Survival Handbook, it’s a great little book to have. It shows you how to skin animals, build a shelter, make tools, which plants and fungi are safe to eat etc.

There’s even a section for a nuclear attack that tells you how to best avoid radioactive contamination and steps to take to stay alive. I highly recommend it.

Sometimes it's divided by a road. Here's a picture near my house that shows a road to slash transition.

I'm facing eastward, so that's the United States of America in the righthand ditch.

https://photos.google.com/photo/AF1QipPEerNMLoAZnY_pcx_YUoaVGxKDGKgsGHpPMCEx

Can confirm.

I was heavily involved in the Houston and Austin raids in 08 / 09, and the Scilons at the Austin one did some really creepy shit - following people home, sending harassing letters to their neighbors, et cetera. Hell, I got shoved and suckerpunched outside the Austin org.

The Houston ones had their tires slashed, lug nuts loosened (one guy had a tire fall off while he was on a freeway doing 60+), and harassed.

EDIT: we got followed a few times in Houston, too. One guy said they followed him from the org to his car, thence to 59, then to 610, then up 45 to the freaking Woodlands. Scared the hell out of him... and the lug nuts falling off his car after the next protest didn't help either. If you're seeing this, Mavie, we haven't forgotten.

EDIT EDIT: pretty sure the local OSA head is reading this thread now. I really hope it's someone other than that brunette with the hatchet face they used to have there (I want to say her name was Cathy). She HATED me for getting a noise permit and blasting hubbard2.mp3 outside the org (which is Hubbard telling the Xenu story. He really goofed the floof with that one. And yes, I'll put up a copy of that when I get home, because fuck it, what are they going to do, sue me?).

REQUESTED AUDIO LINK: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Scientology_cult_Hubbard_Class_VIII_Assists_Xenu_lecture_recording_1968

The fun stuff - the Xenu lecture - starts at 45:58 in.

Yep, that's why most of their flags are made for 25¢/hour by the hard-working men and women of the US prison system. Because nothing says freedom like slave labor for minor drug offenses.

"Everybody reads the first paragraph of The Wealth of Nations where he talks about how wonderful the division of labor is. But not many people get to the point hundreds of pages later, where he says that division of labor will destroy human beings and turn people into creatures as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to be. And therefore in any civilized society the government is going to have to take some measures to prevent division of labor from proceeding to its limits."

Chomsky

https://chomsky.info/warfare02/

the STRATFOR leak was great, "The Stratfor Glossary of Useful, Baffling and Strange Intelligence Terms"(PDF)

FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, aka the Downtown Gang. Very good a breaking up used car rings. Kind of confused on anything more complicated. Fun to jerk with. Not fun when they jerk back.

CIA: Central Intelligence Agency. Also called “Langley” or “up river.” Owns human intelligence (directorate of operations) and analysis (directorate of intelligence). Director, CIA is supposed to oversee all of the intelligence community. Isn’t that a joke? Imagine the Post Office with a foreign policy.

ATF: Alcohol Tobacco and Fire Arms. Rednecks with a license to kill. Never, ever, ever ask for their help on anything

So the fact that this is just a raw CSV makes it kinda painful to read for any period of time, and it's hard to tell where one begins and another ends sometimes.

So I wrote a quick python script to pump it all out to a spreadsheet and formatted it a little to make it more friendly to read.

EDIT: So I saw that there's actually records for the years of 2009-2013 so I went through and revamped my script and made a spreadsheet with a sheet for each fiscal year. Enjoy reading 3,967 incident reports over the course of 5 years. Yay Python.

The reviews for his book on Amazon are gold.

Calling this semi-literate mess a novel is false marketing. I expect he'll come for me with a wine bottle.

October 23, 2014

Format: Kindle Edition

Awful, pompous book written by a pretentious nutbar stalker with delusions of literacy and not a clue in his head. Not many coherent sentences in the book, for that matter; this author loves using big words but hates using them correctly.

Don't quit your day job, Mr. Brittain. (Of course, if your resume was written as well as this book, that's probably not a consideration anyhow. Did the welfare office overlook all the misspellings on your benefits application?)

Oh: I live in the Bay Area, just north of Palo Alto. The supermarket across from my place has a good wine selection; my favorite for drinking is pinot grigio, so presumably it'll also work best for beaning me over the head.

146 people found this helpful.

They still do it.

Cop Tricked Teen With Autism Into Buying Pot, Lawsuit Claims

>An undercover police officer tricked a teenager with autism into buying pot for him, a lawsuit filed by the boy’s parents alleges.

>The 17-year-old, who isn’t named in the lawsuit, was arrested with 21 other high school students on drug-dealing charges as part of a sting operation last December at Chaparral High School in Temecula, Calif., and neighboring schools.

It goes on:

> According to the Snodgrasses, a police officer pretended to be their son’s friend, which pleased them because he has trouble making friends. When the couple suggested inviting this new friend home, the friend “would always have an excuse, saying he couldn’t or he was grounded,”

I have, and I know some national feminist organizations who have asked for it. They generally opposed the draft overall, but if it existed they thought women should be called too.

Edit: Here's some sources:

NOW's highlight--see the 80's

and a newspaper article confirming their opposition to a male only draft

This story is propaganda - the idea that anyone would actually surrender an entire island to an Air Force Sergeant is patently ridiculous.

The surrender was not, as the article implies with obvious relish, some act of grandiose cowardice on the part of the Italians; Mussolini had given the garrison his permission to surrender because it lacked clean water, and the invasion of Sicily was imminent. The island was actually secured, without resistance, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Lookout and ninety-five men of the 2^nd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards. Neither the garrison nor the island actually surrendered to Cohen, who lacked authority; the formal surrender was offered by the island's Governor to combined Army/Navy delegation, and accepted by a Coldstream company commander, Major Bill Harris.

Edit - whoever you are, thanks very much.

Ninite.com is a great alternative to typical software repository sites.

Select all the programs you want, download the installer, then run it to automatically install (or update) all of those programs simultaneously. It also opts out of all the toolbars and bullshit that plague free software.

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

- Anatole France

Also, the period of time when the Roosevelts married was a time when "good girls" were expected to dislike sex, societally. Many women worked around this, of course, with loving partners, but don't underestimate how miserable sex made many women in the early twentieth century and before. There was little to no foreplay, the female orgasm was seen as dirty (if men understood it at all), masturbation was heavily frowned upon, and sex education mainly consisted of older women discussing forbearance.

I have a sex manual written in the late nineteenth century, but published in 1912, and it reminds men that their wedding night will be painful and unenjoyable for their wives. If, the book notes, she has still not recovered from it after several weeks, he should take her to a doctor.

Edit: for those of you interested, this is the book, though this is the 1916 version: https://archive.org/details/naturessecretsre1919shan. Pasted from my phone, so here's hoping this link works!

Fun Fact: When they initially were filming this movie, lots of Indian people were in quite an uproar about an Englishmen playing Gandhi, for obvious reasons. It wasn't until they realized that he was not only in part ethnically Indian, but that his family actually came from the same village as Gandhi, that they gave it the ok.

I can't find a source for this story, as I remember Ben Kingsley talking about it in some interview. But here is the source for the part about his family heritage.

You're welcome:

https://soundcloud.com/robert-gryder/pen-vs-pin

EDIT: Since apparently it's a thing for everyone to say where they're from and I neglected to do so, I've lived in southern Virginia my entire life. However, my mother is from NYC and my father is from Bumfuck Nowhere, North Carolina, so I'd like to think that my accent is fairly neutral. Could be wrong, though.

Could have been in the Margites, Homer's first work, which was lost.

> Before the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was the Margites. Little is known about the plot of the comedic epic poem—Homer’s first work—written around 700 B.C. But a few surviving lines, woven into other works, describe the poem’s foolish hero, Margites.

“He knew many things, but all badly” (from Plato’s Alcibiades). “The gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill; he failed in every craft” (from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics).

Smithsonian

Yep, sounds like Homer.

I pirated the ebooks of the harry potter series, but my copy of "order of the phoenix" turned out to actually be a 500 page fan fiction written by a professor of english at some chinese university. He even forged a title page! It looked utterly authentic!

I read the whole thing, and then quit the series in utter disgust. YEARS later, I told my friends why harry potter started out good but then got idiotic, and they just stared at me.... took forever for them to convince me I hadn't really read the Order Of The Phoenix. And then I never lived it down....

*edit: Alright people, go nuts

Thanks for posting! This needs to be higher up.

For anyone not using ~~an ad-blocker~~ uBlock Origin, the Dallas Observer's website is an absolute disgrace. Still is disgusting, really, it's just slightly more tolerable sans-advertisements.

E: Added link to the official GitHub for posterity. See my comment below as to why I (and many others, read all the comments!) find uBlock Origin superior to ABP.

That's nothing, I found out you can buy a cereal box sized bag of the lucky charm marshmallows. Just the marshmallows. So I did when I was high and then a week later I did what my 10 year old self always wanted to do: I filled a cereal bowl entirely with lucky charm marshmallows and milk and ate the whole thing.

And it wasn't as disgusting as I was expecting, but I immediately went off to brush my teeth forever. Since then I've slowly used up the bag by occasionally putting some charms in my morning coffee, since I normally don't like sugar in my coffee but there's something fun about the way the charms get all gummy in the hot liquid.

I'm a grownup.

Edit: to be clear, they don't look precisely like the actual lucky charms but they taste identical. These are simplified to one dye each, the purple moon one being the closest looking.

They don't need food for a long time. Not sure how accurate this article is...

http://www.ask.com/question/how-long-can-a-spider-live-without-food

>Most species can live for at least a month without food, but there are some that can live for over a year without either food or water. For example, a spider known as a Steatoda bipunctata lived for 18 months without either water or food. Camel spiders can live for up to a month without food. The poisonous brown recluse spiders have lived for up to 6 months without food, water, or AIR; add air to the mix, and the brown recluse can survive for up to 10 months.

So yeah, they can overstay their welcome by quite a bit.

That article was gold.

> Uwe, learning that he wasn't fighting a midget, asked for my age, height, weight, and fighting experience. I e-mailed this information, along with the reassurance that the Holocaust survivors got together and agreed he was the worst thing to come out of Germany.

Not about fragging, but a lot fragging in it. If you're looking for a great book about the insanity happening in Vietnam, check out, Tiger Force. It's amazing. Pulitzer Prize winner as well. Saying it's a dark book would be an understatement.

> The last great secret of the Vietnam War is revealed in a gripping book that is the culmination of efforts for which the authors received a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. TIGER FORCE is the searing story of a group of elite army soldiers in Vietnam who spun dangerously out of control and went on a horrific seven-month rampage. It is also the story of how these crimes, buried by the army for decades, at last came to light through the heroic persistence of a few individuals who could not forget.

It was a CIA experiment.

For those of you with Amazon Prime, check out Azorian: The Raising of the K-129. Stumbled across it by chance a few months ago, it's a pretty good documentary.

> In 1968 the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 sank in the Central North Pacific. American intelligence located it within weeks of its demise. The CIA crafted a secret program to raise the submarine in 1974. Now after much secrecy, this story can be told, by the men who made it happen and with never-before-seen footage of the actual salvage attempt, and new evidence of the project's successes and failures.

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-competitors-open-their-stores-next-to-one-another-jac-de-haan

tl;dr ... or watch...

The stores are so similar that most customers don't care which one they go to, and they may even prefer a familiar area (or route) to a slightly closer location.

If a customer needs to go to "the drug store" and they locations are the same, both stores have a shot at that customer.

If a customer needs to go to "the drug store" and the locations are separate, then the customer may choose the other store initially and never see your store. If this ever gets out of balance, it may not get back into balance without external effects such as the other shops around, and large population changes.

No, it was most definitely the other way around.

“Nearly naked, which is not a style choice for me. ... It wasn't my choice. When [director George Lucas] showed me the outfit, I thought he was kidding and it made me very nervous. I had to sit very straight because I couldn't have lines on my sides, like little creases.”

https://www.npr.org/2016/11/28/503580112/carrie-fisher-opens-up-about-star-wars-the-gold-bikini-and-her-on-set-affair

FYI, this is the same woman who did the "The Artist is Present" exhibit at MoMA a few years back, which featured Abramovic sitting at a table, while audience members were invited to simply sit across from her. During that exhibition, her former lover and artistic collaborator—a german man who goes by the name "Ulay"—showed up as an audience member unannounced and took part, which resulted in her breaking down for the first and only time in the exhibit.

Very sweet clip, but don't let yourself get too sucked in. Ulay is suing Abramovic for allegedly breaching a contract between them and trying to take sole credit for work he claims they created jointly.

Ah, love and war....

When I was a kid, I had a real bad neck and my mom brought me to a chiropractor. The very nice lady clicked one of these clicky placebo sticks all over my neck and said jobdone.

My mom and I gave each other a look as she paid the bill that just said, "Never again."

There's strong evidence that the care and attention of a perceived expert is often enough to relief symptoms (pretty sure Sydney McElroy taught me that). Placebos are great for some but they're just not for me.

He wrote this:

> ‘Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

> Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves; > > First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, > > Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; > > These, as successive generations bloom, > > New powers acquire and larger limbs assume; > > Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, > > And, breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.’

The family castle is now a bed and breakfast run by her parents. According to this TripAdvisor review, Rose makes a lovely chicken dinner.

Chris Sawyer wrote all his games in assembly, including Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Some bloke called Ludvig Strigeus reverse engineered the code and Open TTD was born. It's still in active development and quite fun to play if like Chris Sawyer style games. Best of all, it's free.

Wikipedia

Home Page

I recommend it.

As commented every time this is brought up, the 120V electrical system (vs the 240V one in the UK) makes electric kettles take far more time to boil water.

Based on a quick Google, about twice as long (4 minutes vs 2 minutes for a liter/quart).

Edit:

Sources:

UK 1 liter boil times, Independent review from Dec 2016: Stated times: 2:17, 2:21, 2:12, 2:23, 2:16, 2:20; "the fastest boiling kettle in our test was only 11 seconds quicker than the slowest"

US 1 liter boil times, Consumer Reports from June 2016: Stated times: <4:30, <4:30, 4:30-5:00, 4:30-5:00, 4:30-5:00, >5:00

Edit 2: It would behoove all you people posting your personal experiences to state where you are, or, more generally, what kind of electricity comes out of your outlets.

Other interesting things he did

• wrote towelroot (weaponized public futex syscall exploit to root android devices)
• wrote a chrome os persistent exploit chain (won $150k)
• jailbroke ps3
• won CSAW single-handed
• part of the PPP team that won defcon CTF a few years in a row
• raps under pseudonym tomcr00se

Currently self-employed at comma.ai. Not sure what he's doing there.

he doesn't work for google, they didn't renew his contract. He went to vicarious, and finally comma.ai

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/george-hotz/76/664/b38

That's moronic. There are wired connections with data caps. Man windows 10 is so controlling. It even uninstalls apps without your permission ( I have cpu-z and it uninstalled it automatically), source. That's what you get for it being a "free" upgrade I guess.

If you want to do the "same thing" inside your browser, here is a link to an nifty car generation thingy.

It uses genetic algorithms, which I assume are what is talked about in the article.

I love Ving Rhames, but that story is loosely true. In reality, Junior Rhames (his brother) approached Matt Dillon about whether he had ever worked on broadway with Ving. He introduced himself as Junior Rhames and explained how they'd lost contact. Matt Dillon, naturally, reconnected the two.

Source: http://www.edrive.com/edrive03/celebs/ving-rhames/index.html

http://www.fandango.com/vingrhames/biography/p59836

Again, still a great story, but it's not as if Ving was walking down the streets of New York and recognized his long lost brother. Ving had already been on TV and was, at minimum, a name a lot of people had worked with (thanks in large part to Miami Vice). The fact is, Ving was popular enough that it made it relatively easy for Junior when he happened upon another guy from Hollywood.

A clarification I made the last time this was posted:

>The money was in trusts that were to lend money to budding tradesmen to help them set up their shops in early life. Upon the first 100 year anniversary, a certain percentage was to be released to the city for (IIRC) setting up trade schools. Upon the 200 year anniversary, the remaining funds were to be released in whole to the city treasuries. Franklin set up detailed instructions as to how the loans and releases were to work, and calculated estimated values. Both trusts ended up coming up shorter than Franklin had estimated (usually attributed to less than expected repay percentages on the loans), but still managed to do world's of good to a lot of budding tradesmen. For those of you stating how those are pretty terrible returns on a 200 year trust- that is why. The title is not completely accurate.

This was discussed in more detail in Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson.

I think Cujo is actually a fantastic, well-planned and -executed highly original little book. Most of the time I see it referenced here it's as an example of "the book King wrote while high", which is too bad, because there's a lot in it to talk about. One brief mention of it in On Writing, and a pickup on its Wikipedia page, and it becomes immortalized that way.

ftr I think the book that drugs actually did damage to is The Tommyknockers. (That one King has trashed in much less uncertain terms.)

Because you have this horrible situation where people believe the US is getting the best healthcare in the world, are terrified of socialism to the point where even beneficial things like single-payer healthcare makes USians clutch their pearls in horror, and people fervently believe that the US is subsidising healthcare for the rest of the world despite that being patently untrue.

In short, marketing has made a large percentage of US citizens believe their healthcare system is a good thing.

>Some of the greatest inventions, discoveries, wars, explorations, artwork, etc would have never happened because the men who did them would have been too busy chasing after pussy.

I disagree. All civilization is just an effort to impress the opposite sex...

SCIENCE

SPORTS

TECHNOLOGY

WAR

CRIME

and sometimes the same sex.

DRAMA.

Lots of folks have postulated MLK was killed when he tried to organize not just the black people, but the poor people at large. He wanted to turn it from civil rights into what "they" perceived as a brewing class war.

Info on his Poor People's Campaign, which was carried out despite his assassination the month prior.

And the FBI even urged him to kill himself through supposed "fan" letters, even going as far as blackmailing him to do so by threatening to release evidence of his marital affairs. Source on that.

Edit for sources.

Some parts of the trip had to be done by boat, to cross seas and oceans. About a third of the rest had to be done on foot as there weren't that many roads or the conditions were impractical. The total distance cycled was estimated by him to be around 13500 miles (21700 km).

His story is very interesting, you can get his book about his adventures (in two volumes) for free from Project Gutenberg.

Just in case anyone is interested, Twitch airs a Bob Ross marathon every Monday from 8am - 2am. Each marathon is a single season shown back-to-back three times (8am-2pm ; 2pm-8pm ; 8pm-2am) All times EST

https://www.twitch.tv/bobross

Here's a listing of tracks which have sampled Baby Huey's tracks over the years.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I didn't compile this list. It's a hell of a cool website, though.

They haven't gone anywhere. That's the problem. When you look at them, you should see a giant multi-billion dollar industry with a business model that is completely based on the production and sale of (personal-non-commercial use only) Abacuses.

When slide rulers came out, they sued and lost.

When calculators hit the scene, they sued and lost as well. However, they were successful in lobbying Congress to outlaw the act of looking at someone else's calculator, and also banning the practice of writing down any information obtained from the calculator.

They followed this up with a massive ad campaign that stated "You wouldn't multiply a CAR". Every calculator at the time had a huge FBI warning label on the box.

By the time PC's were common and everyone started getting online, they effectively lost their collective shit. They attempted to patent the number 4. They paid several disinfomation specialists to spread propaganda that division was only something loose women did with their legs.

They are still in court to this day, and 62% of the quarterly profits are lawsuit winnings, and the rest is actual larceny.

I made a short film about this! It played at the Cannes film fest a couple of years back! I grew up in El Paso on the border of Juarez,Mexico and this story became legendary in my hometown. You would hear it all the time and it was always someone's "cousin" or "friend" who was in the restaurant when it happened. I never called him Chapo, because of you know the whole crime lord thing but he was the inspiration...

The film is "Reservado" (spanish word for reserved, obv) ... If y'all are interested check it out!

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/reservado

I can confirm that this is thanks to reseph's open source patch. In addition, we're now using the HTML5 <time> element for these timestamps. You'll find that this works on your user profiles as well... ;)

github commit

A retrospective from a year later

EDIT: Sheriff quit his job with young family in mind. Tells media that beer was involved in the couple's decision to make a tape and that a company reportedly told them that they could have made up to half a million if they sold it. Evidently, they didn't.

Will be hard since I don't remember the names of the authors, but here is some stuff to begin with (one of these cited might even be the actual study I encountered):

https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/news/20090713/go-ahead-and-curse-it-may-ease-your-pain

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-swear/

That's &quot;Christmas on Earth Continued&quot; at Olympia on 22 Dec, 1967. I'm about four back in the middle! The whole 'Christmas on Earth'. was amazing what with all the bands that took part. It was just a pity that the Pink Floyd were crap that night... It was the night that people first realised that Barret had started to loose it :-(

Black people don't like the water because it not only messes up their hair but extremely dries out our skin. Also there is a negative connotation associated with swimming. During segregation black swimming pools were available but people used lye, other chemicals, and violence (incl. drowning) to deter African Americans from using pools.

Given the above, a long with socioeconomic status, it is not merely the act of going to swimming lessons but a history of being denied access to swimming that makes up this demographic.

<http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1734&amp;dat=19640708&amp;id=wHEcAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=a1EEAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=4493,418231>

> The German military was brilliant on the ground

It wasn't any better than its opponents.

> The Art Of War is a short read and a lot of it will seem obvious, but that's only because many nations have adopted its philosophy. It's why we don't line up in a field and shoot at each other like retards anymore.

No, it's not. Line battles had more to do with the military technology at the time than the development of military strategy. The Art of War wasn't even translated to English until the 20th century and not printed for US officers until 1944. Military theoreticians like Clausewitz did more to develop military strategy and our understanding of war at this point than Sun Tzu. The things Sun Tzu wrote about are all things western generals knew about from thousands years experience of warfare, the book just serves as a good primer to basic strategy theory which is why it's used in officer schools. Hell, let someone play a Total War game for a couple of weeks and he'd have discovered a lot of the tactics parts on his own.

The reason we can't vanquish militias in the Middle East with our clearly superior military is much more nuanced than just "it's because they spent an afternoon reading a pocket book saying you should harass your opponent and feign weakness". It has more to do with the nature of war in the late-capitalist globalised world changing from being a conflict between states to something else and is something political scientists spend a lot of time studying and discussing.

Correct. He also made it a point to donate at least 10% of every dollar he made from youth and made good on it. He is one of the fathers of modern philanthropy.

He was a ruthless businessman, BUT prior to taking out/absorbing a competitor he would meet with them, offer them fair value for their business or stock in Standard Oil, and would go as far as to simply open his company's book for them so they can see the futility of competition. Very interesting life. If anyone wants to learn more about him, they should really read Chernow's "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller" Excellent book.

https://www.amazon.com/Titan-Life-John-Rockefeller-Sr/dp/1400077303

Picture of Mark Twain posing topless

EDIT: It's believed that this photo may have been taken as a reference for a sculptor making a bust of Twain, in case anyone was wondering why it exists.

For Android users:

IMSI-Catcher Detector

or

SnoopSnitch

more accurately this quote "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children."

• Hillary Clinton

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton

> After the deletion and restoration of Toy Story 2, the team was likely hoping for an uneventful path to release, but it was not to be.

> In the Christmas of ’98, after the release of A Bug’s Life and the promotional tour was done, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and legendary story man Joe Ranft all came to the production team to take a look at Toy Story 2.

>It was not a good film. They dedicated the winter vacation to re-writing the project almost entirely from the ground up. Production shut down on December 15th and came back after New Year’s in January, when the story team re-pitched the movie.

>Lasseter and Lee Unkrich ended up co-directing the film along with Ash Brannon as it was seen in the theaters.

>Among the things that stayed? The main characters, of course. Buzz, Woody, Hamm, Potato Head, Rexx. Andy’s room stayed. The Al’s Toy Barn sequence stayed. That’s it, nearly everything else you see in the film as it is new.

Source

I don't find any reliable source for this claim. The Online Etymology Dictionary doesn't support this origin at all.

Randomhouse, one of the world's biggest publishers, also doesn't support this origin.

Literally, the only source is this slang dictionary, which is not reliable at all.

This is a passage from Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning describing how concentration camp prisoners would fight each other and betray each other to stay alive at any cost.

"On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return."

When I first read that it gave me chills.

I found a scholarly source that claims it to be true: https://books.google.com/books?id=ssrmAAAAIAAJ&amp;pg=PA65&amp;dq=Frank+Wisner+condom&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=29xCVZjUNYa0ggSE9YDoAQ&amp;ved=0CDgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&amp;q=condoms&amp;f=false

Edit: Okay, only kind of true. "These were not serious proposals, just a way of 'letting off steam'":

https://books.google.com/books?id=oZU7u0GiMEUC&amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;dq=the+very+best+men&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=Z95CVbCiF4WvggSdmYCwAw&amp;ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=condoms&amp;f=false

No, not the same problem at all.

Flash's problem (the one people hate Flash for) isn't compatibility. It's security.

Flash requires access to resources on your computer that normally a website doesn't get access to. That's the problem.

There's a downside to the 'no Flash' rule though, and it's directly attached to the 'problem': Flash can do things that web-browsers can't. For instance, every time you've ever clicked something to 'copy this to your clipboard' in a website, that was an SWF (Flash) object. Flash/Silverlight are the only things that can do that.

HTML5 video is perfectly safe to use, it's just not completely compatible. It's compatible enough to use now though.

Source: Am webdeveloper wasting time at work.

Edit: Lots of people chiming in to tell me that 'Copy to Clipboard' links aren't SWF. In most cases, yes they are.

Here's just one example. Note the 'Copy' link at the bottom-right corner of the CSS code. Right click it. That's a Flash object.

Here's the most popular answer on StackOverflow regarding copy-to-clipboard and javascript. You'll note it directs people to use SWF. Which is Flash.

I understand HTML5 has Clipboard API built in now, ~~but until IE starts playing ball with it properly (it doesn't yet), the best solution to that is SWF/Flash Objects.~~ Edit: No, this isn't an IE issue, it's strictly the limits of that Clipboard API: HTML5 Clipboard still can't do all the things Flash can. This is all of course a very minor example, but it's the little things that we come to rely on over time.

Link to the song and the sample.

Also some relevant info from a Guardian article about the issue.

>Aphex Twin’s Avril 14th is a plaintive keyboard instrumental which first appeared on 2001’s Drukqs. Used on West’s Blame Game, the sample is un-missable: a looped piano figure under West and John Legend’s verses. Then again, it may not technically be a sample: James admitted that he doesn’t know “what it ended up being in the end”, and instead of using the original recording, West’s collaborators may have re-recorded the piano part. The liner notes for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy do however state that Blame Game “contains elements of Avril 14 by Richard James”, so there is an acknowledgement and therefore a possibility that West did comply and compensate James. The Guardian have contacted Kanye West’s team but a spokesperson has yet to respond to requests regarding this recent claim.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/26/aphex-twin-kanye-west-avril-14th-sample-blame-game

This is better stated as an example of diffusion of responsibility.

The term Bystander Effect is usually reserved for crime/emergency cases.

That's not why he submitted it

http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-got-a-b-at-harvard.html

This article explains it better. He did it for himself because he thought he had a superior writing style then what they were teaching him. Orwell got a B- and that proved to himself that he could still be successful or that other writing styles were still valid. At least that's what I took from the context.

My wife works with the American, Jim Nalepka, who's a super-nice guy. It's an open secret around the office and she didn't talk to him about it until a year or so ago.

He wrote a book about it: https://www.amazon.com/Capsized-True-Story-Four-Adrift/dp/0060179619/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=james+nalepka&amp;qid=1575749936&amp;sr=8-1

Edited for updates and to make SsouthPole less unhappy.

No. You can retail an American made FUCKING car at that price.

It's more like ~$1140

edit: The source article reasoning is also retarded.

American workers make 30times more than Chinese workers. Hence, a $499 iPad will retail for $14,970 ($499x30). ಠ_ಠ

This thread beautifully demonstrates what's wrong with political discourse in America. So many people are making absurd comments and insulting Einstein because communism and socialism are such a fucking trigger word. Not only does your average American not know anything about communist or socialist history, but they fervently and passionately disavow it as if it were the devil incarnate. I guess this shows just how well the post WWII propaganda machine worked. Instead of name calling and blind hatred of anything different or divergent from western Capitalism, why can't we have an honest and objective discussion? Especially since I'm willing to bet that the people leaving the most hateful comments have never read The Communist Manifesto, The Wealth of Nations, Kapital, or any other pivotal work regarding Capitalism and Socialism. Einstein showed he was open minded and willing to examine people and subjects on a deeper and more objective level rather than painting with a broad brush and dismissing people without thought. Maybe we can all learn something form this man, who happened to be one of the most talented mathematicians ever born?

A buddy of mine urged me to read "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt" (which is the first of 3 books, and only covers his life until he became president).

I was like okay, I'm sure it's inspirational and shit, and how hard work can pay off.

My buddy was like naw. By the time he was your age, Teddy Roosevelt had already accomplished 2 lives worth of awesome shit. No matter how hard you work or how lucky you get, you'll never be a quarter as awesome as him.