Nicholas Husher

The Truth About 'Class War' in America | Richard Wolff | Truthout | 22 September 2011

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:55:27 -0400

The Truth About 'Class War' in America | Richard Wolff | Truthout | 22 September 2011

The End Of Growth | Anonymous | European | 05 September 2011

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:10:46 -0400

The End Of Growth | Anonymous | European | 05 September 2011

A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:19:32 -0400

A Hard Thing is Done by Figuring Out How to Start

P.Z. Myers on nearly dying: And then I felt myself going. My guts went all watery, and I felt...

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 10:25:23 -0400

P.Z. Myers on nearly dying:

And then I felt myself going. My guts went all watery, and I felt the unpleasantness of nausea with a flabby feeling that no, I wasn’t even going to have the strength to vomit. My limbs went all rubbery and limp. I kept sweating — a cold, clammy sweat. There was a roaring whisper in my ears, and all I heard as the doctors milled about was a distant “waa waa waa” sound. My peripheral vision faded, and it seemed like I was staring down a narrow tunnel.

And I was alone.

My wife was there, there were a couple of doctors and nurses present — let me tell you, if you ever have a cardiac event, do it while in a hospital while wired to every instrument that goes ping you can find — but they all felt distant and remote. And I thought, “So this is what dying feels like.” I felt no panic or fear, just a little sad about ceasing to exist, and I thought about the important things in my life.

I had married the love of my life, and she was standing there with me. We had had three kids, and I could see them all in my mind’s eye, and they were strong and smart and good, and I could trust that they’d be all right — my only wish was that I could see them one last time. I did not see my whole life flash past my eyes, but I did recollect a brief and simple happy moment, remembering when my children were small and they’d lift their hands to hold mine. There were no regrets, my job was done.

link

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 17:48:50 -0400

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the...

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:55:42 -0400

They are not new lessons. Never owe any money you can’t pay tomorrow morning. Never let the markets dictate your actions. Always be in a position to play your own game. Never take on more risks than you can handle…Good businesses, good management, plenty of liquidity, always having a loaded gun; if you play by those principles you will do fine no matter what happens. And you don’t ever know what’s going to happen…

I mean, when times are good, it is kind of like Cinderella at the ball. She knew at midnight that everything was going to turn into pumpkins and mice, but it was just so much damn fun, dancing there, the guys looked better and the drinks got more frequent and there were no clocks on the wall.

And that’s what happened with capitalism. We have a lot of fun as the bubble blows up, and we all think we are going to get out five minutes before midnight, but there are no clocks on the wall.

— Warren Buffet (via)

A lot of life is being prepared for a lucky break.

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:27:10 -0500

A lot of life is being prepared for a lucky break.

Lost in Thought

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 13:34:08 -0500

Sam Harris, who has been my favorite secular thinker for a few years now, wrote an excellent response to the question, “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?”

We are Lost in Thought

If the lives of your children depended on it, you could not focus on anything — even the feeling of a knife at your throat — for more than a few seconds, before your awareness would be submerged again by the flow of thought. This forced plunge into unreality is a problem. In fact, it is the problem from which every other problem in human life appears to be made.

While most of us go through life feeling that we are the thinker of our thoughts and the experiencer of our experience, from the perspective of science we know that this is a distorted view. There is no discrete self or ego lurking like a minotaur in the labyrinth of the brain. There is no region of cortex or pathway of neural processing that occupies a privileged position with respect to our personhood. There is no unchanging “center of narrative gravity” (to use Daniel Dennett’s phrase). In subjective terms, however, there seems to be one — to most of us, most of the time.

If we want to actually understand the mind, and overcome some of the most dangerous and enduring sources of conflict in our world, we must begin thinking about the full spectrum of human experience in the context of science.

But we must first realize that we are lost in thought.

"Once a problem is described in sufficient detail, its solution is obvious."

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:55:33 -0500

“Once a problem is described in sufficient detail, its solution is obvious.”

Updating and configuring Office for my work machine was an annoying experience that makes me...

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 11:53:59 -0500

Updating and configuring Office for my work machine was an annoying experience that makes me distrustful of it. I was trying to open a docx file from an email in Outlook. It’s the first time I’ve tried to use Office since getting the machine from my employer, and it inflicted the following disjointed workflow on me:

Run the auto-updater.
Quit Outlook. What? Okay. I hope it remembers to open my file when we’re all done, because I’ll probably forget
Let the updates download. I guess I’ll open Chrome and futz around on the internets
Close Firefox. Close Chrome. Close Microsoft Updater. Oh what now? I can’t browse the web while waiting for it to install updates? Okay. Fine. Whatever. It’s funny that it has to close the updater to install the updates… Wait. What is it doing to my web browsers? Why does it need to touch Chrome or Firefox? What mystery meat is it stuffing into /Library or ~/Library?
Watch updates install. Slowly.
Updater completes and closes itself. The file I probably wanted to see is nowhere to be found. What was I doing again? I was reading the news. Wait, no, that was what I was doing while it updates. What were the updates for? Something in Outlook… I want a sandwich.

Dinosaurier part1 | Free Movies Videos - Watch Movies Videos Online | Veoh

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 10:57:26 -0500

Dinosaurier part1 | Free Movies Videos - Watch Movies Videos Online | Veoh

2011

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:54:00 -0500

1. Listen to yourself

2. Listen to others

3. Follow through

4. Ask questions

The Blast Shack

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:29:04 -0500

The Blast Shack:

The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe melancholia.

But it sure does.

"Being your fullest self is a lot of work"

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:54:53 -0500

“Being your fullest self is a lot of work”

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on...

Thu, 23 Dec 2010 13:47:00 -0500

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. … Time to die.

The future isn’t going to feel futuristic. It’s simply going to feel weird and...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 13:47:53 -0500

The future isn’t going to feel futuristic. It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

Giving Good Design Feedback

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 13:15:46 -0500

Anyone who has had to provide feedback to a design agency they’ve hired should read this piece.

First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue, don’t ask yourself whether you like blue. Ask yourself if blue is going to help you sell sprockets.

If I had a dollar for every time a client said some variation of, “I don’t like…” when talking about a design, I’d probably be able to buy myself a Wraith in cash.

Bonus quote:

There is nothing less helpful than getting feedback in the form of a comp (whether committed in Photoshop, Powerpoint, or Word). Nothing. I mean it.

All right, here, instead of using those keys, you should take this extremely convoluted and...

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:53:52 -0500

All right, here, instead of using those keys, you should take this extremely convoluted and foreign-looking mobile phone, into which you have to insert all of your keys, type in a special password, and then oh, well, it works on most locks but not all of them, so you’ll only be able to replace some of your keys with it, so now you should carry this new weird mobile phone on your keyring too. Also, it doesn’t work as a phone.

On the importance of control groups

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 09:55:08 -0500

One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.

At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”

God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”

— Dr. E. E. Peacock

IF ATTACKED, FIGHT BACK.

Sat, 04 Dec 2010 15:39:13 -0500

IF ATTACKED, FIGHT BACK.