James

I first encountered that a couple of years ago, and it led to my learning 64 digits of pi just so I could sing along. I'm suitably ashamed.

It eventually snowed some more on Friday. People at work got worried about trains being cancelled or something (which didn't actually happen), so we finished early and I spent the rest of the day taking rubbish photos. Here are a few of them: EDIT: Warmed up the gull

Indeed. That actually makes me think of how some people born with birth defects are very vocally opposed to screening for such birth defects. I believe the reasoning is that to do so undermines their humanity. It's obviously a very complicated issue, but a very direct thing that can be drawn from it is that people can have a very strong desire for life regardless of all manner of difficulties (or, conversely, a lack of both the former and the latter). To say that we shouldn't have children because the world is shitty seems like someone imposing their gloomy world-view on the entire species.

But shooting people is illegal, too. The point is that by banning drink driving, you're not denying the public the ability to drink drive, you're merely telling them not to. If they want to, people can still do it, and countless do. They might get caught, they might run someone over, or they might get to their destination safely. The argument for banning guns is that people shouldn't even have the opportunity to shoot anyone, because obviously its being illegal isn't deterrent enough for everyone. To deny people the ability to drink drive, you'd have to restrict their access to one or other of the necessary components. A better analogue for drink driving law would be for guns and bullets to be legal, but for it to be illegal to load your weapon. It's probably easier to catch people driving drunk than loading weapons, though. That's true. I guess some people are worried a "prohibition" on guns would be just as bad. I don't buy it, though.

I guess if you're going to bring art into it it's bound to get messy. I think the thing I really reacted to was this part of your original post: "whether you need to physically look like a character to cosplay them". I know you were just reporting on a portion of the cosplay community, so my response is thus directed. One can judge whether or not a costume worked in their eyes or according to a certain ideal, but one can't really make any comment on whether or not the cosplayer should have bothered in the first place. Who's to say which people are after creating a very specific and precise effect, and which are just expressing themselves and having good time or whatever? Again, that's not directed at you, Rodi.

Although I lean towards being for gun control, I don't think the drink driving analogy works entirely in your favour. The point is that banning guns because people can commit crimes (homicide) with them is like banning either cars or alcohol because people can commit crimes (drink driving) with them. That would be how you deny the tools required to cause the damage. It's a messy analogy, though, because the main thing we're concerned with when it comes to drink driving is accidental death, whereas the main thing we're concerned with when it comes to firearms is deliberate killing, so all the reasoning for one argument doesn't necessarily carry over to the other: if someone is set on drink driving, they're being irresponsible, but if all goes according to plan, nobody dies; if someone is set on shooting people, if all goes according to plan, people will die. Still, how many deaths a year are alcohol-related? Even if we exclude self-inflicted mortalities, it must be a fair number. Can what pleasure we derive from it really justify that? It's by no means a necessity. Should we ban alcohol, too? I wouldn't like that, but am I a hypocrite for not supporting it?

What's with all this prescriptive nonsense? Don't people primarily do cosplay for their own enjoyment? I personally have no interest in it, but if people want to dress up, they can do so however they damn well please. Or do these rule-making people think the not-entirely-matching people are making a mistake about how to enjoy themselves the most? And you only suggest the GoldenEye costume is a comedy one? He has a cartridge on his head! The glasses are clearly appropriate.

Hahahaha, that's brilliant. I imagine it's 100% medically accurate in both content and tone.

I'll trade a magic trick for a vase.

Potentially getting stuck at work day! It's unlikely, though. It only started snowing an hour or so ago, and not heavily: If the station's going to close, it generally happens in the morning. I've never yet been stranded at work.

I think I made my point poorly. That wasn't an argument for or against gun control. I was getting caught up on jeremywc's whole "people will keep killing each other" thing, and trying to illustrate that that doesn't really have much bearing on whether or not gun control is a good idea, which I took to be the purpose of this thread. I personally think that it is.

Is anyone actually saying that, though? I don't know, I guess I think it's pretty sensible to tackle things one things at a time. Perhaps gun control would save a lot of lives, perhaps it wouldn't. Then there's another discussion to be had about other stuff like mental health issues and security and whatever.

Hilarious. I love it.

Whilst accurate, this sort of point (which is made often in discussions on varied topics, and which I've been guilty of making in the past) isn't really relevant. If we reject everything that doesn't completely solve all instances of a particular class of problem, we would never improve anything at all. I sometimes wonder if there's a mentality that all risk is equal, and that all things fall into one of three categories: impossible, possible, and certain, and that any gradation finer than that is irrelevant. By this thinking, if your action doesn't move the probability from one of these categories to another, you might as well not have bothered. Which is clearly nonsense. Of course changing gun law won't stop people killing each other, or even stop them killing each other with guns, but it might very well reduce it a whole lot. It's relevant to try to ascertain what sort of reduction that might be, and whether it's worth the costs of the change (mainly the personal liberty issue, I'd say). That people will still be crazy and still kill one another doesn't really matter if the total death rate is cut by, say, 75%, or the total number of deaths is reduced by 5000, or whatever. I'm not saying those are remotely realistic figures – I have no idea one way or the other – but these are the things that matter. Those, and working out some way of comparing that with the financial costs of gun control, and the ideological principles it would violate. That can be a difficult comparison to make, and even harder to agree on, because you're comparing entirely different category of thing, but that's the essence of the issue. The inevitability of some crime is, in my view, nothing but a distraction. I hope that wasn't too confrontational. I wasn't having a go or anything – I just think it's a bit of a trap. And, to be fair, perhaps the point is that we shouldn't obsess over the gun control issue to the exclusion of other important issues. But if that's the case, say that, and start that conversation.

Rover drew what he imagines he looks like. Coloured pencils.

OH GOD WHAT HAPPENED

Could it more accurately be described as "kitsch"? I don't mean in any way to defend or make excuses for the thing (it's vile); it just struck me that that might be a more appropriate term for low art aping high art (probably the wrong terms – I'm not well-versed on this stuff) without having anything to say about it. To be clear, I think that thing is horrible and stupid.

Yeah, it's a campaign against mandatory Swedish in Finnish schools. I can see how that could be a rather contentious political issue. Anyway, lest we derail the thread too much, I actually have a contribution for once: My flatmate and I have been struggling with sorting out the distribution of bills, with lovely complications like different recurring rates, discounts from council tax for being a student, and so on. We'd been flinging it all at an increasingly hectic Google Docs spreadsheet, but he got fed up with that and declared that we should instead use Splitwise. I have no idea how well-known it is – perhaps you're all already familiar with it – but with e-mail reminders and in-built recurrence and various ways of splitting bills, it seems like a much easier way of managing things, and it's certainly a lot less of an eyesore. So if you have someone you're splitting bills with, it might be worth a look. And even if you don't, you can use it to keep track of IOUs (both in– and outbound). I've never been very good at staying on top of all that stuff.

Learning's no fun when someone else is telling you to do it. I'm reminded of this graphic I saw on Wikipedia:

I was impressed with the Chinese menu thing, so I took a look at the rest of the site, and found there were a few courses on basic Swedish. In theory I've been trying to learn for a while, but I've been shamefully lax in my efforts, so any new way to get me at least doing something is welcome. Obviously Swedish uses largely the same alphabet as English, so the visual metaphor thing isn't as significant a factor, but there are still several user-contributed mnemonics for each word or phrase. Some of them are quite a stretch, but it seems to me that mnemonics don't actually have to be particularly close matches, as long as they stick in the mind somehow. That said, already having some experience of Swedish, I'm really using it as more of a tool for giving me bite-sized lessons and tests, which I find much more digestible than reading through a book (although that's obviously necessary to properly understand grammar and so on). Also, every phrase is recorded, which is obviously very handy for pronunciation. Anyway, it's a nice way of structuring your learning and practice. It's not really anything you couldn't do yourself, but it's so much easier when it's all presented to you, and you can do it on your computer, and they'll prompt you by e-mail when it's time to come back and test your memory. Hopefully that should help me maintain some forward momentum. That's even cooler than the thing where they automatically add MP3 purchases to your Cloud Drive, but like that, it looks like it's a "USA first, wherever you live if and when we get around to it" affair. Which is understandable, given the legal wranglings and infrastructure and all that stuff they probably have to get through for every territory, but it's still frustrating. I think the MP3 thing did eventually reach UK accounts, though, so I look forward to AutoRip.

This guy is experimenting along those lines.

Nice. That would fit quite well in the life-improvement thread, too.

I knew it was based on similar ratings, and had seen that page, but I guess I wasn't thinking very clearly when I wrote the post. For some reason I thought it might have been based on some sort of statistical analysis of how certain scores tended to coincide, rather than finding your individual neighbours and deriving score predictions from other scores they've awarded (presumably based on an average weighted by TCI). My mind is disorganized and bad. Anyway, my actual point still sort of stands: whether you hated or merely disliked a film could factor into how precisely your tastes align with another user's. Also, if you give a film a really low score, it will presumably bring down your neighbours' predicted scores for that film, which will matter to them, if not you. Yeah, it is rather drab and unintuitive. Still, I like the site.

When it comes to public-facing reviews, I think that a five-star system is probably the way to go. As you say, it summarizes the adjectives people would actually use to describe quality. I only decided on a more precise scale for Criticker because it's a personal thing. For the purposes of generating a profile of my tastes, it might matter if I prefer good film A to good film B, but in absolute terms it means a lot less. But if you want to use a five-point scale, you could restrict yourself to multiples of twenty, of course (as you may already be doing). I honestly probably should have gone with multiples of ten; as you said, once it's bad, who really cares how bad it is? That said, I'm not sure how their recommendation system works, but perhaps it could factor into it. If I disliked film A, but hated film B, there may be a better chance of my liking films close (but not too close) to film A than film B. Anyway, I wouldn't pay too much attention to the labels it gives the scores. I imagine it'll ultimately boil down to it picking recommendations "similar" to your top-rated films.

... which, in turn, reminded me of this: Nice. It reminds me of a few things, such as Labradford. It also made me think of by Mogwai, but when actually compared they're not really all that similar (Close Encounters is perkier and less sparse): It's generally the case that when one piece reminds me of another, they're not actually that similar.