• Announcements

    • Robin

      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

Vorlonagent

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    1,848

  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    17

Posts posted by Vorlonagent

  4. Posted

    28 minutes ago, CritterKeeper said:

    The medications used to treat ADD/ADHD aren't sedatives, to make an unruly child sit quietly.  They are stimulants, given at a carefully calibrated dose, to compensate for a lack of activity in certain regulatory centers in the brain.  Giving them to a child who does not have ADD/ADHD will not make that child magically behave like a little angel.  If their control centers aren't underactive in the first place, or if the dose isn't adjusted correctly, then a stimulant will more likely do what stimulants are usually expected to do.  That's why this whole idea of drugging kids to make them behave is so crazy, because these drugs just don't work that way!

    I never claimed it was rational, just that ADHD meds were over-prescribed..

  5. Posted

    1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

    This has been true of medicine as long as it has existed. The opinions of those directly involved don't count. I remember reading about how Dr. Semmelweiss became the laughingstock of medical professionals in Austria because he recommended that you start washing your hands before assisting with births. He had learned this from observing midwives deliver babies, noticed that the fatality rate in births they oversaw was much lower and determined that it was the hand washing and clean environment that made the difference. This was clearly ridiculous because he had learned it from women and after all, what do women know about giving birth?

    There is the opposite side of the coin today.  The patient sometimes, rightly or wrongly, demands the medication.  Sometimes that's good for exactly the arguments made above.  Other times, not.  If a kid is genuinely affected by ADHD, sure.  But normal healthy kids are active, energetic, and pushing boundaries every minute of every hour or every day.  Sometimes the kid is medicated because the *parent* can't cope...

  10. Posted

    1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

    Foxes can be surprisingly gnomic. I know of one nearby who communicates entirely in Zen koans.

    They're also rather gmoneic.  Very few stand as tall as your average human.

    The really skinny ones are the agnomics...

  11. Posted

    3 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

    Yeah, it can be a real bitch when you've gone through the fifth ergonomic mouse in less than a week. I wouldn't be surprised if more foxes didn't switch to trackballs.

    Ergonomic is sadly not foxonomic.  The world biased against the fox-handed.  Especially those who are nomic when it comes to mice...

  14. Posted

    1 hour ago, Scotty said:

    Arthur had to have been surprised about Tedd doing reasearch because he had to ask "You need to figure out?" rather than "of course, your father had mentioned that you've had a desire for making magic public."

    The fact that Arthur had to ask about it meant that he didn't know, one doesn't have to be all  "You've been WHAT?!" about it. He is, however, taking this new knowledge and trying to use it to deal with the situation at hand, which would make complete sense given that it's probably a good asset to have in his position at the FBI.

    It would be interesting to hear Arthur tell Ed Verres how he knows about Tedd's research.  And perhaps other more personal things he learned about Tedd...

  15. Posted

    32 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

    I always did wonder about that kind of survey. My problem with it was twofold: one, that happiness is such a nebulous thing that I have NO idea of how to quantify it -- seriously, how do you do that? Pour it into a cup and weigh it? And two, I wonder how much good this sort of thing did for unhappy people in the 'winning' countries. It was like they were essentially being told, "Shut up, you live in a 'good' country so you don't get to have an opinion."

    I think that instead of trying to measure something that is essentially an argument about the weight of a shadow you should focus a bit more on hard numbers. Number of alcoholics and those dependent on them. It is a safe bet that they probably aren't happy. Number of homeless people. Number of sick people. And so forth. And even that won't yield accurate numbers as they will only be able to detect physical causes that prevent the possibility of happiness. So frankly speaking, don't ask me, I don't know how to do this shit either.

    There's still a lot of factors to control for.  And that's before the possibility of bias rears its head.  

    The things I'd look for in developed countries would be return on various advertising strategies.  Are strategies that appeal to the unhappy more or less successful?  Especially useful if the same ad campaign is localized into a number of different countries.

    Also take advantage of the ubiquity of Google.  People type the craziest things into google's search bar.  Sometimes their darkest fears and angriest feelings.  It's as if Google is the confessor of the 21st century.  I just use it for searches myself...

  16. Posted

    22 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

    I would take it even further. I would say that elites and elitism are both actively harmful. They accept members regardless of the actual quality in many cases and in others keep extremely talented people out based on some irrelevant criteria of family, social standing, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. In Danish schools working class children were discouraged from seeking scientific or artistic occupations because they weren't good enough. It took most of the 20th Century to beat this attitude even partly down.

    "There you go, Dennis, bringing class into it again..."

    Elitism is a creeping crud that the US currently has entirely too much of.

  17. Posted

    Just now, The Old Hack said:

    Mind you, in exactly Hitchhiker's, the secret to unpowered human flight was to throw yourself at the ground -- and miss.

    Nonetheless, I'd hesitate before trying that in the real world. :icon_eek:

    The Guide does state that missing is the hard part...

    1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

    I know, right? Cheaters. :P

    It is amazing how useful a little math can be. I wish I had had fewer idiots for math teachers in school, I might have learned some more.

    It's one of those rare "proud to be an American" moments.  Not that the airplane is listed as a US invention but that a couple of nobody bike shop owners from middle-America beat university professors and other better-funded world luminaries to powered flight.  One of the US signature attitudes is that regular people rock and elites and elitism is overrated.  The Wrights are a case in point.

  18. Posted

    1 minute ago, The Old Hack said:

    I agree 100%. Mind you, I personally feel an urge to at least attempt to do the math before doing something dangerous, like trying heavier-than-air flight by jumping off a cliff. This may stem from my conviction that the Wright brothers did a good deal of theory before building their aircraft.

    And gilder testing.  And inventing the wind tunnel...

    Just jumping off a cliff straight away?  To quote Zaphod Beeblebrox, "!0 out of 10 for style but minus several million for clear thinking"

  19. Posted

    15 hours ago, hkmaly said:

    To try ... or to publish it? :)

    Of course. Next time it will possibly be just 200 attempts. I don't think we are READY to try on humans.

    ... of course, there were lot of researchers who didn't waited until being ready. Some even succeed.

    You've covered about any reply I could make...

  20. Posted

    5 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

    But... but then he won't ever meet his Madamleck so they can have their happily ever after :(

    I wonder what they might read.

    "Battlefront 2 Loot Box."

    "Stored by request of Pandora*, please return unopened."

    *The actual one, not one of the 243243243423423 Immortals calling themselves that.

    A sign reading "This side up", right at the bottom.

    "Do Not Open On Any Account. No Really Don't. We Mean It. We Are Serious. Don't Come Afterwards And Tell Us We Didn't Warn You."

    "Odd tape containing 18½ minutes of some guy named Richard rambling about how much he hates stuff."

    And so forth.

    A lantern carved out of a strange green meteoric material and matching ring...

    Drasvin, The Old Hack and wanderingmagus reacted to this

  21. Posted

    1 hour ago, CritterKeeper said:

    Been there, done that, over a decade ago!

    Not surprised in the least.  Just waiting for them to try it with people....

    4 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    People's capacity to work together and unite against shared enemy is only surpassed by their ability to forget about it and start infighting the moment the shared enemy is destroyed. I can see the people with various ethnicities, after solving some hard problem together, celebrate together that they are big step closer to the time they finally won't need to be together.

    IIRC, 19th Century Germany was really good at uniting against A. anybody trying to attack them and B. any German leader who tried to unify them permanently...

    11 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    It's the suspension of disbelief stuff. FTL travel, replicators, colonization of galaxy, telepathy, fine, but you can't expect average viewer just 50 years ago to believe people of different color can kiss. That was too much.

    (Some still thinks it's too much.)

    There's SF fans and then there's the muggles of the general public...   :)

    13 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    I didn't said it will SOLVE the religion issue. I'm not even sure it will HELP with it.

    It also won't completely solve gender issue, as gender is not just question of physical body.

    I thought to myself, "Being mutually telepathic would help, right?  Improved communication can't be a bad thing..."

    Then I remembered the internet...  :)

    15 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    One success from 460 attempts ...

    The first time through is always going to be the hardest.  Lots of trial and error, with the emphasis on the error, maybe the occasional creation of a hellish mutant monster as nature's punishment for human arrogance... 

    History shows again and again how Nature points out the folly of Man...Godzilla!

    CritterKeeper reacted to this

  22. Posted

    59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    ... what makes you think that we can't leave this rock still divided? In fact, people of different nationality / ethnicity / whatever colonizing different planets makes VERY good sense.

    I was hoping for the whole "working together to save humanity" thing...

    There are stories of exactly that happening.  different parts of Earth blasting off for different parts of the cosmos.  I think it was the co Dominium universe where everybody had to get off Earth and the white South Africans secretly outfitted the entire city of Cape Town for space travel and went to find their own world, which turned out to be really, REALLY monster infested.  They made a go of it and they're holding their own, but whenever the co-Dominium has spare unwanted people, they get sent to that world.   "Crunch all you want, we'll make more."

    59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    (People of different sex / gender colonizing different planets does not, although I wouldn't be THAT much surprised if, say, lesbians would take some medical research and want to try that live without men. Depending on how good that research would be, it may even WORK.)

    We shouldn't be too far off from attempting to fuse 2 ovum or extract the genetics from one and put it in the other....

    59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

    That SHOULD at least take care of the skin color problem, yes. It might also have big influence on the religion issue.

    That's what I thought too, though ideology divides might still exist.

  23. Posted

    3 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

    Another box label:

    1492 burned into the wood. There is a red plastic button next to the label set into rusting steel housing. There is enough clearance between the button and the housing to suggest the button is some kind of catch; there are hinges on the opposite side of that face that indicate the box should open outward. Pressing the button will not open the box unless no one is else is watching; then the person pressing the button will vanish and the label will change to 1493.

    Over 1492 served

    3 minutes ago, Tom Sewell said:

    I'm afraid you've been fooled by a homonym. A BFG is a Big Fowling Gun.

    It's one of those chicken guns used to test airplane cockpit glass for bird impacts.  Remember to defrost your bird before firing...

  24. Posted

    2 hours ago, Tom Sewell said:

    No, it's a reference to Doom. Also a naughty anagram, like MILF before it became milf, SNAFU before it became snafu, FUBAR... I think all of you can guess what the friggin Fs stand for if you don't already know.

    "Fouled", of course.  :)