Off-Topic Discussion Thread: April 2009

Hey, did you know that a duck's quack doesn't echo?

I strongly suspect that's an urban legend, and I think I remember reading a debunking somewhere.

By the way, what does "ETA" stand for? (Besides "Estimated Time of Arrival", or the Basque paramilitary group.) I can discern from context that it denotes a later edit, but what do the letters actually mean?

I'll resist my urge to dump every blog in my feed reader, and just give the five that LW readers might not be aware of:

• The Endeavour: Math, programming, statistics, and productivity.
• The Universe of Discourse: Math, programming, science. Humorous and very high quality, although infrequently updated. The author really needs to be subsidized to post more often.
• Acephalous: Travails of a young English professor.
• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science: Andrew Gelman's blog.
• Seth Roberts: Self-experimentation, health, and musings about the state of modern science.

If you enjoy FiveThirtyEight, Andrew Tanenbaum's electoral-vote.com is in a somewhat similar vein (and for the CS nerds here, yes, that's the Dr. Tanenbaum you're thinking of). It's currently somewhat inactive though, as he only actively updates it during major election cycles.

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/ <---- Blog of David Brin, science fiction writer. Talks a lot about politics. http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/ <---- also recommended

I'm not great at socialization in a context like this either, but I think these threads are a chance for those of us too sparsely distributed to meetup to get to know each other.

So what are good non-rationality related topics? On other forums I see discussion of: fiction, movies, tv, food, jokes, relationships, love, sex, school, work, requests for advice, silly polls, anecdotes, games, forum games, music, current events, diet, exercise, gadgets, software, comics, quotes, hobbies, science, politics, etc.

Even though this thread is off-topic, should there be any restrictions on what goes down here?

People with eerie pastimes generally talk to other people with eerie pastimes, about their eerie pastimes. If for some reason you have to talk to a normal person, try asking stuff about the person you're talking to, the theory being that people like to talk about themselves.

We want you to feel comfortable. Maybe we'll start yet another thread for off-topic Creepy chatting. All the subjects you dare not discuss outside the halls of Miskatonic University.

.. I think you chat about anything. That's what makes it chat. Here's something I found interesting, the new PS3 firmware update is going to revolutionize the PS3 by including text chat. . . . a technology that has been readily available on computers since the 1990's. http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/04/01/ps3-firmware-v270-update/

This is supposed to be a next gen system. It costs lots of money. And it is just incorporating chat... and that chat is textual? In case you want to plug in a keyboard and pretend it's the nineties. They even used a video to explain the update. ugh.

I am easily distracted while reading long works. That doesn't stop me from reading long comment threads, forum topics, or blog post after blog post, though. As best I can tell, the relevant difference is that the latter are broken up into small, easily processed chunks. Because I know I'll be done with the chunk I'm reading soon, my mind doesn't have reason to wander off. The commitment doesn't feel as large, so I have less reason to subconsciously question it. Just like with food, just one more small chunk won't matter....

My book-reading strategy lately is to discretize the material and be actively involved in the text. I scan each page, and if it looks interesting, I read it. I then try to write a couple lines of notes on the page or section I am considering. Focusing on what is worth writing down also keeps me from wandering off.

This strategy probably wouldn't work as well for fiction, but that usually requires less motivation. I hope my personal observations are of some help.

I humbly propose that being a slow reader makes your mind wander (which is mitigated when reading bite size chunks on the Internet). Using your finger as a pacer will probably give you a 10-20% speed improvement. If that helps, consider a speed reading course (I did Evelyn Wood Dynamic Reading and found it excellent).

Do you actually want to read faster in those situations? I find the mind-wondering process essential to deeper understanding of the material, creativity on the issues I'm pondering in the background viewed in a new light, and aesthetic appreciation of the writing.

I have the opposite problem, I tend to really zip through stuff on screen, which I have discovered makes it harder to remember details later. So I basically just read fiction and do general "fishing" type reading on screen.

Interesting. I have the reverse effect - it's much easier to concentrate on the physical books, which don't need to constantly compete for attention with all the distractions of the web, like the impulse to check your e-mail every five minutes.

That's mostly just for long books, though - reading comment threads such as on LW isn't a problem. The hypothesis below, that it's because of their discretized nature, sounds quite plausible.

I find my mind tends to wander when I read dead-tree books.

Interesting. I have the opposite problem My mind tends to wander when reading stuff on the internet. To truly comprehend what I see on my computer screen, I have to print it and read it from a piece of paper.

Perhaps this is because I need to highlight passages and make notes in the margins. If it was easy to do this with anything I read on the internet, maybe my ability to comprehend from the computer screen would be just as good?

IAWYC but this comment is off-topic because it's not off-topic.

The CIA World Factbook isn't exactly a database per se, but the text version might be regular enough to be machine-readable.

Not really an answer either, but along the lines of the other replies, nationmaster.com and statemaster.com are good resources.

How many do you need; is it more like 50 or 5000?

It seems Wikipedia could easily be data-mined. Look at country statistics, for example, make up a different number, and ask for over-under probabilities

I love that game--and in particular, I love the variety of new units that you can discover by leveling up ones you already know about.

The wine culture is, in my opinion, all about status signaling. I wouldn't be surprised if wine enthusiasts are also over-cynical: a common intellectual status signal.

Select-all, copy, paste somewhere else sometimes works (depending on how the pdf is created; this is what makes it a difficult process - some pdfs are internally organized to be small otherwise unordered text snippets absolutely positioned on the page).

How do you get voted down for posting in the off-topic thread?

I guess "I want to see more comments like this one" doesn't apply here.

OK, I'm curious: what prompted this choice? What gains did you hope to realize, and have you realized them?

so you've mentioned...

I played a few games, long ago in the distant past.

I played a few games about 8 years ago. Soon I encountered a situation where my opponent's combination of cards gave him infinite power via some sort of feedback loop or something, and I decided the rules of the game were wrong.

I have, but not extensively - get Race for the Galaxy and play it instead+. It's cheaper, not a CCG, and better. Then if you start missing some of the deck construction aspects get the expansion and draft.

+Okay, play it also, if you insist.

still play casually every now and then. Never too serious. Great fun, just never had friends who were as interested in the game as me.

I played online drafts fairly regularly until around when 10th edition released.

long ago, never seriously

I used to play. My cards are in boxes, collecting dust; I plan to sell them when I have the time and inclination.