...their advertisers drive themselves into a panic by vastly overestimating the worth of social media.

FTFY.

Seriously, I think we old codgers are right. It's not that social media is bad; it's that relying on it too much is bad. It's become a social crutch. It's replaced getting drunk with your friends, and is possibly more shallow.

I have the odd account or two, but if they all vanished tomorrow, the only thing I'd lose is an easy way of keeping track of distant friends and past acquaintances. I wouldn't lose anything personal or otherwise-useful.

I feel like such a n00b!!

And I've noticed that the usefulness of the results gets markedly worse every time they "improve" their search algorithm. Stuff that's mainstream for a topic and used to be easy to find is now often buried beyond recall.

When I was a kid and IQ tests were part of the routine, they DID consist mainly of puzzles. My favorite part was folding up the virtual boxes, which of course was a visualization-logic puzzle.

I still have a CRC handbook on my shelf, you insensitive clod! ...I haven't opened it in 40 years, but I still have it.

Also, I misread part of your comment as "Newton's law of cooking" ... not that it made any difference! :D

There's a lawyer in Los Angeles (at least one I know of, maybe more) who is in cahoots with someone in a wheelchair... they make a nice living suing businesses for being insufficiently ADA-compliant. Specifically, they target businesses that are grandfathered and not required to be compliant, or that have a variance because compliance would be excessively burdensome. Doesn't stop 'em from being the object of a lawsuit, or that it's usually cheaper to pay them to go away than to fight it in court.

Why Netflix? Because some lawyer thought Netflix's pockets were deep enough and that they looked like a low-hanging fruit.

Only two lines? That means they didn't have to pay him SAG rates! Tho he'd be due a bump for 'special business'.

I'd go further and say the best acting is more body language than facial expressions or speech. Body language brings the *whole* character to life even when there's no face or dialog. Without that, Chewbacca would have indeed been a walking carpet; with it, he's an enduring character.

As an extreme example, remember Star Trek's horta? it worked as a character (at least as well as it could for what it was) because the director understood that the way it moved was a good deal of how it conveyed itself to we-the-audience.

You are right, but I think what the comment about 'em being hidden so he can use non-actors is getting at, is that Lucas mistakes the costume for the character. The reason those 'hidden actor' characters in the first three films were so successful is that they were a character first and a costume second. Conversely when Lucas is left to his own devices, we get a talking costume with no character in it regardless of whether the actor is any good or not.

Actually, Lucas is terrible at worldbuilding -- when he's in charge of that, we get Jar Jar and mitocloridians [sp?]. Trouble is he really doesn't have the SF mindset that extrapolates whatever into a universe. What he does have is a toymaker mindset that thinks the more weirdness you stuff into it, the better, and he doesn't know when to stop. His universe isn't built; it's cluttered.

He's pretty good at whizbang scripts and throwing out concepts when that's all he does with it (I say, having seen early SW4 iterations). He's not good at exploring the people beyond their surface reactions, or the world beyond throwing toys at it. Again, that's why we get crap like Jar Jar, who shows us how (Lucas thinks) we're supposed to react to all this clutter.

And he's not getting better; he's getting worse, because he's successful enough to be "uneditable" and can afford to totally indulge himself... something he couldn't yet do with the first three films. Plus back then he had real SF authors involved.

"I am your father" was character depth? Er, well, yeah, but SW fanfic explored that immediately after the first film, and IMO Lucas stole that idea straight from fanfic regardless of whatever he may claim. It sure isn't where the early concepts were going with the Vader character.

And about the first film, he originally insisted: "There will never be a Star Wars sequel. Sequels are made by people who can't think up new material." (That's from memory but it's real close to an exact quote.) Then when it became such a howling success, first there had always been three, and then there had always been nine...

Oh, the irony.

I'm with you. I've seen it on LinkedIn when people boast about the amazing lunch at the amazing convention/tradeshow full of amazing people.

Facebook: Actual friends and interests you have.
LinkedIn: Keep it strictly business.
Twitter: To follow the odd interest.
Google+: So you can say "I'm on Google+!"

I hate it when you see someone posting the same tripe across all their social networks. No one on LinkedIn cares what you ate for lunch.

Too little or too much iodine can fuck up your thyroid (only because it uses iodine directly), but otherwise it's not real sensitive to lifestyle or diet... however it can influence what you want to do and eat (low thyroid causes sugar craving and lack of motivation/energy to do anything). TSH levels fluctuate depending on iron, selenium, and sugar intake, but there's no strong evidence that any of these will cause more than transient deficiency; indeed, low thyroid is a known cause of poor iron absorption, so it's rather the reverse -- eat well and you still won't get good use of it. At least one gene has been identified that causes poor T4-to-T3 conversion, IOW the DNA that controls the required enzyme is defective. Anyway, if you try treating hypothyroid with diet and exercise you won't get far. I can point at myself as a good example -- I'm more active than most folks (I've done physical work my whole life) and I eat almost entirely home-cooked, nutrient-dense food, but that doesn't do a thing for my Hashimoto's.