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Today is a good day for sharing. Take a moment to overcome trivial obstacles which may be preventing you from sharing useful endeavors, insights, or wisdom with those around you. Alternatively, offer something useful to a friend, or give something away.
I'll admit that after I first read that comment, I was about to make this mistake:
"When faced with a choice between doing a task and attempting to prove that it's unnecessary, most people immediately begin on the latter."
(I'm probably misremembering that quote. I tried googling but didn't find the original quote, and I don't remember where it's from.)
So a more appropriate course of action would be for me to at least check how much effort would be required to set up a github account. And so I did. I discovered that it was more complex than I expected, but I started to set up a github account and the project repository anyway. After about an hour of setting stuff up, I got to the step where I need to choose the project name. Another hour later, I still hadn't thought of an obviously correct choice for the project name. "Rationalist Horoscopes" wouldn't be an appropriate name for the project, because there's nothing especially rationalist about it without the database of good horoscopes, except the scoring system. There is already another project on github titled "horoscope". Other names I considered were "Scored Horoscopes", "Rated Horoscopes", or "Weighted Horoscopes", but none of these seemed clearly better than the others. I have lots of trouble making decisions like this, and github doesn't let you change the project name after it has been created. And so I decided to post a comment here asking if anyone can think of a better name, or if any of the names I thought of so far sounds better than the others.
Th inconvenience of posting this to github ended up being a lot less trivial than I expected.
Why not put it on github (or similar service)?
I still haven't bothered to set up a github account. But if someone else wants to put it oh github, they're welcome to.
In response to
Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator.
I think making it depend to the birthday is also rational. Otherwise there is more possibility of some sort of resource congestion if horoscope compels every user (rather than 1/12th of the users) to do same thing. This is not a big concern in the Internet with few thousands users spread all over the world - but imagine a small village, where there's just 1 horoscope, and it tells everyone to think about failure modes of their plans - they are all farmers, they all think what they're gonna do if crops fail, they all try to buy same equipment at same day.
one idea is to have 12 separate tumblr accounts, one for each zodiac sign, then the users subscribe to the tumblr account for their own zodiac sign.
In response to
Rationalist horoscopes: A low-hanging utility generator.
The code for this project can be downloaded here
The code is written in PHP, and uses a MySQL database. A cron job is set up to post each day's horoscope to the Tumblr account.
This is completely free software, so you're welcome to do whatever you like with it.
Contributions and feedback are appreciated.
Update:
A git repository for this project is online now at https://github.com/PeerInfinity/Weighted-Horoscopes
It seems you area assuming that donating to a church = donating to a good cause which i am not sure is always if most of the time right.
sorry, I should have stated explicitly that I'm NOT assuming that "donating to a church = donating to a good cause".
What I am assuming is that the christians think that "donating to a church = donating to a good cause"
In response to
A survey of anti-cryonics writing
I recently found this article, that attempts to survey the arguments against cryonics. It only finds two arguments that don't contain any obvious flaws:
Memory and identity are encoded in such a fragile and delicate manner that cerebral ischemia, ice formation or cryoprotectant toxicity irreversibly destroy it.
The cell repair technologies that are required for cryonics are not technically feasible.
Generally, it is mainly chicken that one needs to be careful about, because it is sometimes contaminated with unhealthy bacteria, even when bought "fresh". A general procedure with all meat, and especially chicken, is to wash any surface that raw chicken comes in contact with when you are done preparing it and have started to cook it, then wash any utensils you used that touched the chicken, and wash you hands. To be extra cautious, you can do that for any raw meat. Raw meat should be refrigerated soon after purchase and now allowed to stand uncooked at room temperature for more than the time it takes to prepare it.
Thanks for explaining that! But, um... I still have more questions... What is the procedure for washing the surfaces, the utensils, and my hands? How do I know when the meat is cooked enough to not qualify as raw? And for stir-frying raw meat, do I need to pause the stir-frying process to wash the stir-frying utensils, so that I don't contaminate the cooked food with any raw juices that happen to still be on the utensils?
In response to
Procedural Knowledge Gaps
I think I have lots of gaps to report, but I'm having lots of trouble trying to write a coherent comment about them... so I'm going to just report this trouble as a gap, for now.
Oh, and I also have lots of trouble even noticing these gaps. I have a habit of avoiding doing things that I haven't already established as "safe". Unfortunately, this often results in gaps continuing to be not detected or corrected.
Anyway, the first gap that comes to mind is... I don't dare to cook anything that involves handling raw meat, because I'm afraid that I lack the knowledge necessary to avoid giving myself food poisoning. Maybe if I tried, I would be able to do it with little or no problem, but I don't dare to try.
In response to
Knowledge doesn't just happen
An obvious implication of this post is that if someone tells you that you "should have known better", then rather than getting upset and instantly trying to defend yourself, it might be a better idea to calmly ask the person "How should I have known better?".
Possible answers include:
1) "using this simple and/or obvious method that I recommend as a general strategy" 2) "using this not simple and/or not obvious method that I didn't think of until just now" 3) "I don't know" 4) "how dare you ask that!"
The first two of those answers are useful information about how to do things, and thus valuable. You can then perform a quick cost/benefit analysis to check if the cost of implementing the suggested strategy outweighs the cost of risking another instance of whatever mistake you just made.
The third is a result of a successful use of the technique, generally. The speaker now realizes that maybe you didn't have any way to know better, and so maybe it would be inappropriate to blame you for whatever went wrong.
The fourth is a sign that the person you're talking to is probably someone you would be better off not interacting with if you can help it (and thus is useful information). There are ways of dealing with that kind of person, but they involve social skills that not everyone has.
Another obvious implication of this post is, if you're about to tell someone else that they "should have known better", then it might be a good idea to take a moment to think how they should have known better.
The same 4 possible answers apply here.
Again, in cases 1 and 2, you might want to take a moment to perform a quick cost/benefit analysis to check if the cost of implementing the suggested strategy outweighs the cost of risking another instance of whatever mistake the person just made. If your proposed solution makes sense as a general strategy, then you can tell the person so, and recommend that they implement it. If your proposed solution doesn't make sense as a general strategy, then you can admit this, and admit that you don't really blame the person for whatever went wrong. Or you can let the other person do this analysis themself.
In case 3, you can admit that you don't know, and admit that you don't blame the person for whatever went wrong. Or you can just not tell the person that you think they "should have known better", skipping this whole conversation.
In case 4, you obviously need to take a moment to calm down until you can give one of the other answers.
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Thank you for putting in the effort! I like "Weighted Horoscopes".
The git repository is online now at https://github.com/PeerInfinity/Weighted-Horoscopes