First, the horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation leap out at me immediately.
Me too. Good thing they're not trying to improve writing ability!
I just read that grant in its entirety. I noticed one possible typo, but did not find other bad grammar or spelling.
The VERY FIRST SENTENCE has minor punctuation issues and refers to "Excellence in Leaning (sp) Through Technology" - I refuse to believe that the original Senate bill being referred to failed to spell the word "Learning" correctly in its title. :-)
The second sentence pu...
Reciting the litany may or may not actually be useful for this, especially in group settings. I actually lean towards it NOT being that useful, but being harmless and fun.
I thought the Litany worked really well as a running gag, especially with the addition of the meta-litany as a punchline.
If reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is valuable, I desire to BELIEVE that reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is valuable. If reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is NOT valuable, I desire to believe that reciting the Litany of Tarski in a group setting is NOT valuable. Let me not become too attached to beliefs I may not want.
I remember once saying, "Well, have we ever tried blindly throwing lots of money at the educational system?"
Kansas City was one of the more notable examples of having tried that; it didn't work out well: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html
I'm struggling to think of any actual examples of this behavior in action
If you've ever said or thought "Okay, just for the sake of argument, I'll assume your point X is correct..." you were holding a position back in reserve.
One typical example is arguing with a religious nut that what he's saying is incompatible with the teachings in his own holy book. Suppose he wins this argument (unlikely, I know, but bear with me...) and demonstrates that you were mistaken and no, his holy book really does teach that we should burn scientists as witches....
The number of global warming skeptics who jumped straight from "it's not happening" to "well we didn't do it" to "well we can't do anything about it without doing more harm than good" should also...give us a bit of pause.
Actually, that move is perfectly consistent with real skepticism applied to a complex assertion.
To see why, let's consider a different argument. Suppose a True Believer says we should punish gays or disallow gay marriage "because God hates homosexuality". You and I are skeptical that this assertio...
As I understand it, ECA pills that contain actual ephedrine in amounts as high as you used can no longer be sold either in the US or in the EU - even the link you gave is now invalid because they've reformulated your pill. (The new Forza has "30 mg of Ephedra Extract" instead of 60 mg of ephedrine HCL; they recommend you take twice as many pills as before to get a similar effect.)
The good news for Americans is that we can still legally buy 25 mg Ephedrine. It can't be sold with weight-loss/bodybuilding claims but it's a legal over-the-counter tre...
Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn't.
Society used to teach some of this explicitly in the form of cotillion classes. One modern analogue for adults is PUA workshops. I took The Art of Attraction class from Pickup101 a few years ago and found it extremely worthwhile. My favorite part of the class was learning how to improve my body language in various ways. Confidence is a lot about physical behaviour - how to stand, how to walk, how to ...
Robotics is not advanced enough for a robot to look scary, though military robotics is getting there fast.
Shakey the Robot was funded by DARPA; according to my dad, the grant proposals were usually written in such a way as to imply robot soldiers were right around the corner...in 1967. So it only took about 40 years.
I took ECA Extreme which is claimed to contain 25 mg "ephedra extract", 200mg caffeine, and a few "woo" ingredients. So perhaps I just need a more ephedra-heavy mix.
I was just about stable in terms of fat, neither increasing nor decreasing.
Oops, my mistake - my bodyfat percentage is ~23% (measured by electronic resistance scale); my bmi is actually ~27(corrected in the post) . I don't really care about BMI - I expect that to be on the high side because BMI is a silly measurement and I'm trying for an "athletic" build. But
There is one way to lose weight[...] - one ECA pill every morning until you're done.
I'm 86 kg (bmi ~27). I took your advice and tried taking one ECA pill every morning for the last few weeks and...I was gaining weight on it. I think I had a little loss of appetite right at first - along with a feeling of being "wired" - but the effect wore off after a day or two.
One confounding factor is that I normally consume a lot of caffeine (~200 mg) daily in the form of Diet Coke. I cut back a bit on the soda while taking ECA, so the change in my caffein...
Let's have some examples to help those like me get what you're talking about.
I'll bite.
"Get (back) in shape" is one of my big specific goals. If I can significantly improve (and then maintain!) my physical condition this year there is a good chance I will have the opportunity to perform in an off-Broadway show. Which would be a significant-to-me artistic achievement - and there's a looming deadline. One difficulty there is forcing myself to exercise as much as is appropriate to the situation.
"Create and publish my first iPhone applicatio...
I'm unable to find any good statistics on the reliability of weighted dice, but 84% sounds about right.
here is a set of loaded dice for sale that are advertised to roll a seven (6 on one, 1 on the other, I think) 80% of the time.
1000 is extremely conservative. Every time you play any game with an element of chance - risk, backgammon, poker, scrabble, blackjack, or even just flipping a coin - the odds against you getting the exact sequence of outcomes you do get will be astronomical. So the limiting factor on how many unbelievable outcomes you perceive in a lifetime is how good you are at recognizing patterns as "unusual". Somebody who studied numerology or had "lucky numbers" or paid attention to "lucky streaks" would see them all the time.
In the case...
When you say "that is unbelievable control", you seem to be assuming the exact outcome with trick dice would be exactly and entirely predetermined. But there's no reason to think that. The trick dice would only have to make winning much more likely to pull your "impossible" odds down into the realm of the possible. What you describe as a die that "occasionally rolled every number except a 1" is what you would expect to see if the "1" side were weighted a bit - it would often roll a 6, sometimes roll a number adjacen...
FWIW, one of the reasons Shangri-la didn't quite work for me at first is that I had acid reflux issues. My reflux belches apparently count as "a taste" and after I started taking Zantac to control them - and also drinking less carbonated soda - it worked much better. Another problem I had is an issue S-L has in common with some other diet systems such as Eat-Stop-Eat - any encouragement to "eat whatever you want" when on the diet/regimen is counterproductive if you're eating for any reason other than hunger. I sometimes eat due to bored...
Putting on my magician's hat for a moment, that sounds like a magic trick to me.
Given your description, the simplest answer consistent with the laws of physics is that another player switched the dice when you weren't looking. Perhaps you stopped the game briefly to take a restroom break or answer the phone or deal with some other interruption. Your memory tends to edit breaks like that out of the narrative flow, especially if they don't seem relevant to the story. Somehow, the other player had the opportunity to switch the dice. Dice can be gimmicked in ...
The book Licit and Illicit Drugs points out that one of the founders of Johns Hopkins was a heroin addict. Being a doctor, he was able to take it in pill form for many years and nobody was the wiser in terms of his productivity.
what is the most rational belief in God that you can think of?
One could imagine someone with a suitable archeological background reaching the conclusion that there used to be one or more interventionist gods around. These gods either lost interest in us or died out prior to modern times. If you take testimony from Biblical times seriously, it doesn't prove beings exist now who are immortal or omnipotent or able to perform magic, but it does suggest some people thought such beings existed in the past and if you take their testimony as more than good stor...
Also, fat cells are biologically active. Obesity is caused by hormone activity and fat cells provide inputs into that biological process as well as being part of the outcome of it.
Rats that overproduce insulin can die of starvation despite being obese - the body gets energy by breaking down muscle - including heart muscle - in order to preserve the fat.
The phrase "the consensus" is slippery as there is a large gap between what the science tells us and what is claimed about it in third-hand accounts - even large, well-funded, and well-intentioned summaries of summaries. As we go from published scientific papers to what's in the IPCC main report to what's in the IPCC "Summary for Policymakers" to what's in the press release that accompanies it to what's in the news articles written from that press release, at each step the level of doom-mongering increases and the amount of visible unce...
I have often thought new laws at the federal level should be treated much like new drugs are treated by the FDA. They should go through rigorous testing according to clear criteria. The proposer of a new law should specify in advance what effect they hope this law would have on the world and how we might measure this effect. Then when the law gets passed, a few small states (or perhaps counties) are initially chosen as the test group - the law only takes effect in those areas. To control for the placebo effect, we should also have a few regions in which th...
What evidence makes you think the US has lower levels of alcohol abuse than Europe? The US has relatively high rates of alcohol-caused liver disease and has more teenage drinking than many countries in which alcohol is more freely available and partaken of. Contrast the US with the United Kingdom on these two charts:
current national alcohol consumption per capita alcoholic liver disease per capital
Another issue is how to reduce fat weight per se. One of the eye-opening parts of Gary Taubes' talk was the fact that somebody can be simultaneously emaciated and obese. Fat cells want to survive and sometimes will do so to the detriment of their host.
Another Taubes insight: when it comes to vertical growth, we posit one causal direction. We say that a teenager eats a lot because he's a growing boy; we do not say he's growing taller because he eats a lot. It's accepted that the body of a teenager has somehow decided for itself that it wants to get taller a...
Weight loss efforts provide much opportunity for magical thinking and drawing false conclusions about causality. You mention a half-dozen factors you had to "tweak" in order to lose weight. So suppose I tweak factor A with no affect. Then I tweak B, then C, then D, and eventually I get up to tweak F and then... I start losing weight for a while! What can I usefully conclude from this? Nearly nothing! Most people conclude that Tweak F must have been an important factor. But perhaps Tweak C was what mattered and it merely took a long time for resul...
What makes "higher than 600 on ONE section" a cutoff above which counts as an "eminently respectable" score?
Would you accept "mediocre"? ;-)