xkcd

aldonius

The obvious candidates to my mind are the futuresynth/synthwave/retrowave/outrun/whatever-they're-calling-it-this-week tracks. That whole 80s neon/noir aesthetic, much like that Starcadian track Mikeski posted. ... So the canonical 'driving' song from that genre-cloud, for me, is The Road To Alpha C...

aldonius

Assuming they're playing basketball, that appears to be an easy cruise to victory for the 1988 Lakers.

aldonius

The leaders have safe seats high up on the party list, so it doesn't matter if they lose their districts. If you're willing to commit to a preferential ballot, then mixed-member proportional is possible with a single ballot: ⋅ Run a preferential-voting local-district election as per norma...

aldonius

This is weird. Why would you have 'local' MPs if they can be elected by people from outside your riding? If you're willing to coalesce ridings into a region, why not just use some variant of STV or MMP? Key idiocy IMHO: as a candidate, you can lose the election even if your party wins an absolute ma...

aldonius

Interesting things going on with that Signal/iMessage intersection.

aldonius

I think that as memes have matured over the last decade, we've undergone a paradigm shift: memes are now memes not because they are funny but simply because everybody agrees they're memes. Somewhat like fiat currency, only without government force to back it up. Overall, this is a good thing, becaus...

aldonius

I can also suggest finding a community choir and joining it. Usually a little less stressful (and shaky hands are almost irrelevant for choristers!) and many choirs are super social, especially if you can get one attached to your university.

aldonius

Yeah, that looks like it, although I'm not sure how they are dealing with the quotas in that case. There aren't any quotas in that CFES system, just "top N are winners". (Single-winner) Approval, range and FPTP all have that problem. The CFES system also has BattleMoose's problem: minor-c...

aldonius

I suggest that under any system that isn't FPTP, these so-called 'heavily partisan districts' will see minor-party or independent candidates coming out of the woodwork within a couple of election cycles, which should partially solve the uneven-representation problem. Also, to clarify, the scrutineer...

aldonius

Most ballots in the US are machine-read. I can imagine hand-written ballots with STV would lead to a lot of errors when counting. We hand-count everything here (Australia) for the lower house, at least initially; for the majority of seats a result is clear within 48 hours. Upper house gets hand-cou...

aldonius

Approval Voting can be done with the same ballots voters are used to. You just remove the rule that says “vote for only one”. IRV, on the other hand, requires a new ballot. Because ranking all candidates would take up too much space, the ballots are typically limited to ranking three choices. Say w...

aldonius

Here in Australia we've recently finished the post-election submissions to our Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters; the general consensus is that we should introduce ticket-level optional-preferential voting and completely eliminate the Group Voting Tickets. The end result of that is a mas...

aldonius

I'm currently reading the Tactics of Mistake , the first in the Dorsai trilogy by Gordon Dickinson. I haven't read them before, and I'm quite enjoying it so far. The scheming is complicated enough to be interesting, without being so complex it becomes confusing. Sheesh, I haven't read anything in t...

aldonius

Pretty much all my courses have their lecture slides available as pdfs. Sadly, PDFs and code examples do not mix well. So if you ever have code examples in the text or lecture slides, for the love of $DEITY make them available in their source format before the first class that uses each example. Exp...

aldonius

Last: Seether (Brisbane, couple months back)

Tomorrow night (squee!): The Jezabels

aldonius

2. Assume you're right that the Democrats and Republicans are controlled by corporate lobbyists and are hostile to individual rights (a claim which I do not believe to be accurate, though I might be over reading into what you said in your first post). Why would replacing 10-15% of those Members* wi...

aldonius

But then why are original paintings worth so much more than prints? (compared with original master tracks vs. high fidelity copies) I think a better analogy there (on the music side) would be a live performance vs any recording. I guess for me, music and maths are both a subset of 'patterns'. Music...

aldonius

Saw in the FF.net reviews: New theory - Professor Quirrell is really Black Hat Guy (I couldn't resist). Also, added 'Black' for accuracy. Also: Are there any characters so far in MoR who've been identified as Slytherins and contemporary with Riddle? If this is accurate, there...

aldonius

@ ledahulavogyre: white balance aside, it looks the same on my mobile now as it does in the picture above...

aldonius

On my mobile I get a square image, black edges sketch-line-fading in to a white, centered, circle.

Edit: Here it is:

aldonius

Rythoka found it - there's a bunch of javascript magic. I saw it in the source, but I was after image links and assumed it was some (irrelevant) analytics type thing.

aldonius

JimsMaher: I can't see your image within the forum thread (though I can if I right-click). I don't think the forum software is playing nicely with your image host. Or possibly there's another explanation. Probably the image host is changing the URL...

aldonius

Curiouser and curiouser. I'm a Mac guy; Chrome gets the above, Firefox gets: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7243561/Screenshots/Umwelt-Firefox-Mac.png Safari as mentioned gets nothing, and for me, neither does Opera. I guess it's screenshot time... Windows and Linux people, what are you seeing? QuickiEdit:...

aldonius

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7243561/Screenshots/Umwelt.png Alt-text: Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your gl...

aldonius

Most songs by the B-52's.

Most songs by the Cat Empire - 'How to Explain', 'Hello' in particular.

Blues Brothers - 'Everybody Needs Somebody to Love'

Ben Folds - 'There's Always Someone Cooler than You'

aldonius

Three from Ben Folds Five:
Magic
Smoke
And of course Brick

aldonius

Fresher ~o~ Engineering/Science dual degree, plan to be EE and Maths majors respectively. Courses (semester-length and all of an introductory nature, obviously): Calculus & Linear Algebra 1 (compulsory, formal recap of highschool level topics ... vectors and matrices up to eigenvectors/values, c...

aldonius

Well, much is explained.

aldonius

Indeed. Though half the time I find myself writing it like that anyway. For my part, I finished at a smallish independent highschool in Brisbane last year; our textbooks usually seemed pretty good. Occasional numerical error in the answers. Granted, in most subjects we often used ~30pg booklets (for...

aldonius

I call mod madness on element 13. Though I see the international spelling in both cases, except for as quoted by Proginoskes.
Test: aluminum (I wrote the standard US spelling)
aluminium (used everywhere else)

QuickieEdit: Yup, US version -> international version.

aldonius

... Indeed. Also, if you haven't yet read the update, be aware that the two most-recently-prior-to-this chapters (76 and 77) have had their order swapped.

aldonius

Joeldi wrote: Unless he gets knifed in favour of Turnbull, who might be able to slip something past a left-wing Upper House. That'd be hilarious.

There is this.
(quickie edit: google "rob oakeshott would switch allegiance but only for malcolm turnbull" to see the full article).

aldonius

Holy mother of Necro! I now have three similar background images (OS X Lion and a need to have a visually quiet zone for Geektool ...) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7243561/Screenshots/Bokeh%20Rainbow.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7243561/Screenshots/Pointillate%20Rainbow.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7243561...

aldonius

WarDaft wrote:Hmm... I don't remember this being in chapter 6 before:
like the "Dementor Exposure Treatment", which looked and smelled like ordinary chocolate.

IIRC it's been there for quite some time, probably since at least this time last year. But then again, memory is awfully fallible.

aldonius

Little Richie wrote:I'm helping out at my old high schools Calc class.
Him: *in a serious voice* aw thanks, my mom picked it out this morning.

And if you (I) assume the existence of a uniform, it gets even better!

aldonius

Hybrid cutlery is most definitely a menace.

aldonius

Shake It Out - Florence and the Machine

aldonius

This is why I firmly believe that every scientific laboratory should have no less than a .357 in one of those "In case of emergency, break the glass" cases. I'm pretty sure that guy has nothing more than a 9mm. We can clearly see it lacks the necessary stopping power to take down your ave...

aldonius

Forgive me for being an Australian with little knowledge of the situation, but do we have precedents with encrypted paper documents? And if so, were the suspects required to divulge the contents of those papers (or how to decrypt it)?

aldonius

Different Marx, sherlip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_Brothers

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