Have you developed your own commonsense protocols for working in your home lab environment or do you follow established protocols from professional labs. I live in a high density metropolitan area and don't own anything other than a bbq that could create unpleasant externalities for my neighbours, and, I find working in a necessarily protocol heavy lab environment tiring YMMV. I prefer to maybe murder cats in gedenken gas chambers.

Lying a lot helps a lot. Try, say, cheating on your S.O. with a disastrous divorce as a consequence and just keep track of all the particulars of the lies you tell. It's as much or more conditioning and impetus as it is genes.

Much like the initial debate over the existence of black holes there seems to be lots of wiggle room when it comes to declaring whether the Universe is in a runaway state, whether it's just expanding, or, whether it will collapse. This Standford Uni link gives a quick overview and suggests in ~15bn years it'll collapse to the size of a proton. The Yale Astrophysics Course, IIRC, is strongly steeped in black hole theory and so speaks to the same issues.

Transcranial Magnetic Stmulation is used to ameliorate auditory hallucinations in schizophrenics.

Keys, plus a Swiss army knife and a couple of key cards. Invariably they eat a hole in a pants pocket. I tried wearing a photographers vest with rugged Velcro, lock down pockets but found it overly warm and bulky. I tried wearing the clutter around my neck, but again it was awkward, especially as a just so length to the necklace was never amenable to a Goldilocks' Solution. It even prompted me to look into the market for a type of light weight yoke with removable features like pockets and clips (ammo and otherwise :)). If you factor in all the wifi gear it's begs for a geeky, money making solution. I really think a pliable, extensible yoke with an extended capability for addons would be a good solution.

A handful of years ago I gave some thought to some business ideas that could make use of phone booths. I wondered if they could be viably transformed into secure, internet transaction booths, keeping the coin payment system as an option to CC payment. Phone booths have a high profile/key location thing going for them that's just waiting for the right entrepreneurial insight.

It's unlikely to do any good lobbying Harper. Harper's unfulfilled dream is to be President of the U.S.A. He's as much big business, especially big oil business, as any American President could be. Further Harper's modus operandi demands he serve the wishes of the copyright lobby. His use of the media to cast his opponents in the worst possible light is his guiding star as a politician. He's a consummate sophist, seemingly utterly without any philosophy, other than to win and hold onto power. He has done cameos in various popular TV shows in slick, self deprecating clips. A politician who relies as heavily on superficial, mass media self promotion as does Harper will cut a wink 'n nod, tacit deal with big media companies. I think it's critically important to note the heavy use politicians in all countries make of mass media to further their political agendas. In the U.S.A. a loop is closing around the American citizenry. Big government, the military industrial complex and big, mass media corporations comprise an unholy trinity. In Canada the military industrial complex is missing but the possible crippling of the rights of individual citizens remains as much of a threat as corporations are given greater entitlements while being able to shield themselves from just punishments for their wrong doings. Two main problems come from the need to create jobs and compete internationally. Politicians need job creation programmes to bring home the bacon to their constituents and big business can deliver massive job creation programmes as well as threaten massive job losses. Further the majority of advanced, industrialized countries seemed to have opted for promoting mega corporations as a new, privileged class akin to medieval knights whose resources better ensure successful international competition.

My reading of your post coupled to my understanding prompting my post suggests the issue could get very tricksy, very quickly, but be interesting nonetheless. IIRC the context in which Bacon made his remark, I'm unable to source it, addressed the idea that physical law trumped idle conjecture and placed constraints on the possible. When I commented on privacy in nature I wasn't referring to a sort of J-J Rousseau theory of social contract but rather to the state in the wild as it exists between all animals. In nature territory defended against competing life forms may be the closest analogy to privacy, but like I said this could all get very tricky. Mill (the younger?) and Locke spoke to government and private property. Private property and privacy are social constructs, as is government. I've a bad feeling I'm missing an obvious premise here but at least I'd like to point out my comment on privacy was directed to the much broader context of nature rather than human artifacts and artifice.

cheers

You can, if you're wreckless. :)

"While all things are possible, not all things are permitted."Francis Bacon (17th C)

Bacon made his remark in a different context but I think it's germane in that privacy is legislated and enforced, and not naturally occurring.

Britain, at least from my POV, has undertaken a huge, perhaps unprecedented social experiment in immigration and mosaic, cultural restructuring. Significant immigration is necessary to bolster a competitive country's domestic workforce and it's international competitiveness, but, as everyone knows, it almost always brings with it social problems. The hue and cry historical precedent, in a skewed way speaks to a more European openness to a community policing itself whether by a sort of neighbourhood watch or a ring of cameras monitoring the streets. It's possible that North Americans, especially in the U.S.A. and Canada, are more sensitive to privacy concerns because development of the new world permitted far greater degree of privacy.

The above aside, I'm deeply vested in the concerns of the article because I'm interested in statistical modeling of political decisions and ways of abstracting inferences from personal data. I was fairly well schooled in statistics and probability to an undergraduate level but don't pretend to as wide an understanding of the field as I once had. While my interest is keyed to the problems of the individual in relation to the group, the relationship between an individual to the social unit speaks directly to privacy concerns. If my fledgling hypotheses are in any way indicative of what might be on the horizon then it's likely that along with the milieu that has spawned our current privacy concerns there are new tools that will let data be abstracted from the new milieu in a way that not only safeguards the privacy of individuals but might enhance one's privacy. Without blurting out my tentative ideas, possibly lucrative, and getting bitch slapped by some stats prof, I still think it's fair to say there's lots of room and time for the data that is now available to spawn a new tool set that will correct any current incursions into personal privacy.

Is there a better commentary on the west's general inability to grok zen than our endless bastardization of the word, zen?

i really didn't know so many jerk off little moderators were paying so much attention to me. you can fuck off too or just go fuck yourselves collectively.

really, why the hell did you post? i'm not looking for any guidance from an asshole like you so why don't you just fuck off.

"The mind is just the brain doing its job." is a quote from an American neuroscientist, S. Levy (i think). The brain is stupefyingly complex. It seems to be widely distributed in terms of nodes and massively parallel processed. For example, a well known experiment had subjects meet a potential significant other in two settings. In one setting the meeting took place in mundane surroundings. In another setting the meeting took place on a high suspension bridge. In the second instance the same potential significant other was seen as much more attractive. The conclusion was drawn that the brain layers experiences and stuff leaks from one layer to another. If your in an exciting circumstance it's likely someone you meet there will appear more interesting. Just from this one experiment and the known complexity of our brains it should be at least likely that attempts to quantify our existentialist experience is doomed, happily in my opinion. It's not unlikely that if you subscribe to such a method and submit to a data driven religious experience then, more likely in the company of others who share your methods and beliefs, you'll get a rewarding experience, but it'll be a belief driven quasi religious experience none the less.

no, i did not RTFA.

I'm currently trying to arrive at a rational, fairly large computer investment in terms of what an individual might pay out. My thinking runs along some blurred lines only because the issues seem to be essentially unclear. Overall, is an individual as a heavy, personal computer user better off making a major long term investment in general computing power in terms of 32 bit architecture and, more or less, disposable units like the dual core, system on a chip, intel Pineview units; or, better off staying with the curve and building 64 bit multi core towers and waiting on the software to catch up to the 64 bit platforms? Say the prospective purchaser is thinking of what a "Beowulf cluster of these" could do. :) I've made an earnest effort to understand PCs as a "power user" since the mid 80's and I think I understand the issues. In terms of software if, today, you were to make a decision to buy either system on a chip 32 bit stuff (or 64 bit SOC stuff running 32 bit software) then 32 bit stuff should be the way to go because of reams of time tested software. I run R and Octave, but like most geeks want to be able to start out with an electronic sketch of an idea and work it, hopefully, up to more abstract but rigorous and formal levels of thought.

More than 5 years ago I frequently said the tower was destined for the basement to share space with water heaters, freezers and furnaces. I still think that's the case. I think every home will have a server, maintained mostly by outside technicians and the house residents will use personal laptop/netbook units.