Seriously, I rode a bike for years, and had a few encounters with cars (and their inattentive drivers) that could have ended fatally if I didn't have quick reflexes.

Did you miss the part where you're supposed to do something to raise your heartbeat? A near-fatal accident will do the trick.

More seriously, though, reflexes and attention to surroundings are like anything else. If you don't use them, you lose them. If you want to keep those skills, you want to ride in (or at least near) traffic.

I presented an analogical story about why simpler thinking could be better for survival because it allowed faster reaction times. ... Like everything, intelligence can have diminishing returns depending on the level and the context -- although it might also have threshold where exceeding some level may change the nature of the survival game entirely too.

You would be interested in a fiction book called Blindsight, by Peter Watts. Check it out!

http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/

One dinosaur-killer every few days.

In Canada, shouldn't they be measuring snow in meters?

In general, if you give a homeless guy $10, he'll spend it immediately. If you give a homeless guy $100, he'll call his friends and spend it immediately.

There's good reason for both these behaviors.

For the first, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You've heard of that experiment with kids and delayed gratification? The ones who don't force themselves to wait for the extra cookie are the ones who got burned in the past. They, and the homeless, know the score. When you can't count on promised payment, you stop taking chances like that.

For the second, of course he's going to spend the money with his friends. His friends were there for him; they helped him in the past. He's got to repay that generosity, otherwise he won't have friends next time trouble comes.

Dresden Codak has great art. But...Ashley Cope somehow manages two or three pages a week of this, this, and this.

That's respectable.

Lisp and Dylan use something called conditions. The signal() function (equiv. to throw) calls condition handlers; the stack is not unwound. You get a perfectly understandable stack trace that looks like normal function calls.

Even better, the code can retry operations, since the stack is not unwound so the context is preserved.

Here is a brief overview: http://opendylan.org/documentation/intro-dylan/conditions.html

The man's got a 5-digit user ID. You hooligans better sit up straight and pay attention.

So, maybe a dollar?

The listener doesn't really need to look the speaker in the face from the listener's perspective. The listener knows he's listening. This is something the listener has to do for the benefit of the speaker.

The speaker doesn't have the inner perspective of the listener. He doesn't know if the listener is paying attention. The speaker needs the listener to respond or at least make eye contact so he'll know if he needs to repeat something or continue speaking at all.

If you, as a listener, care about what the speaker is saying, then you ought to be giving him that feedback. If you don't care, then acting uninterested is the accurate way to go, but don't be surprised if it pisses someone off.

Do you really want the gubmint to know enough about your personal finances, assets, and living situation to calculate the exact withholding?

Is it fine? No. Is it due process? Yes.

You must always be careful to separate the concepts of "legal" and "moral." They are not the same.

The rest of the world is filled with idiots, like the rest of the country, and they will screw things up so that you cannot live as you choose.

O brave new world, that has such people in it

See, here's the thing. Brave New World is mostly a dystopian book, but that society had several good ideas among the dross. One of them was that people should be allowed to do the work that they like to do.

In the book, what people liked to do was programmed into them from birth, but that isn't the case with these surveys. So, seems fine to me.

For those not in the US, Oregon is a state in the Northwest (i.e., sane) portion of the country.

Come on, you know it's true.