A really good friend of mine committed suicide last night. He was outgoing, smart, hilarious, and in a relationship. I have no idea what the cause was.

If you're ever about to do something you know is wrong, something harmful to yourself because you don't feel any hope, please talk to someone. All of your friends and family will be wishing they'd had the chance to talk to you again.

People care about you.

I'm from AZ where we put rocks in our yard instead of grass because watering is so expensive and it has to be reseeded often because it dies in the summer. I moved to Florida and the house I'm renting has a really shitty yard, and I'm interested in growing a lawn for my dog to enjoy. I've looked up some basic guides and it doesn't seem too complicated, but if you've done it before or know anything about landscaping, drop some tips my way.

The name he came with is Charlie. My wife's main nickname for me is Charlie, for reasons. In just one night it's already gotten really confusing having her calling for him all the time.

Anyways, Hitler's off the list apparently (lame wife), so come up with some alternatives.

He's awesome. Pretty shy right now but he's adjusting alright.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-basic-science-1445613954

If you have any sort of decent attention span, I urge you to stop right now and read the entire article. I've pulled out specific sections that I thought were particularly interesting, but I've copied less than a third of the article. It's very thorough and insightful.

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science. Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

[...]

As Kevin Kelly documents in his book “What Technology Wants,” we know of six different inventors of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, four of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, four of photography, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is “one endless chain of parallel instances.”

It is just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Russel Wallace, who had precisely the same idea after reading precisely the same book, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.”

Increasingly, technology is developing the kind of autonomy that hitherto characterized biological entities. The Stanford economist Brian Arthur argues that technology is self-organizing and can, in effect, reproduce and adapt to its environment. It thus qualifies as a living organism, at least in the sense that a coral reef is a living thing. Sure, it could not exist without animals (that is, people) to build and maintain it, but then that is true of a coral reef, too.

[...]

Indeed, the history of technological prohibitions is revealing. The Ming Chinese prohibited large ships; the Shogun Japanese, firearms; the medieval Italians, silk-spinning; Americans in the 1920s, alcohol. Such prohibitions can last a long time—three centuries in the case of the Chinese and Japanese examples—but eventually they come to an end, so long as there is competition. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, these technologies continued to grow.

[...]

Patents and copyright laws grant too much credit and reward to individuals and imply that technology evolves by jerks. Recall that the original rationale for granting patents was not to reward inventors with monopoly profits but to encourage them to share their inventions. A certain amount of intellectual property law is plainly necessary to achieve this. But it has gone too far. Most patents are now as much about defending monopoly and deterring rivals as about sharing ideas. And that discourages innovation.

Even the most explicit paper or patent application fails to reveal nearly enough to help another to retrace the steps through the maze of possible experiments. One study of lasers found that blueprints and written reports were quite inadequate to help others copy a laser design: You had to go and talk to the people who had done it. So a patent often does not achieve the openness that it is supposed to but instead hinders progress.

[...]

Like most innovation, Portugal’s navigational advances came about by trial and error among sailors, not by speculation among astronomers and cartographers. If anything, the scientists were driven by the needs of the explorers rather than the other way around.

[...]

In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

In 2007, the economist Leo Sveikauskas of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded that returns from many forms of publicly financed R&D are near zero and that “many elements of university and government research have very low returns, overwhelmingly contribute to economic growth only indirectly, if at all.”

I'm not going to tl;dr this, because I think this is a really fantastic essay that anybody with an interest in science, economics, or politics ought to read. What it asserts, however, is that the development of technology is an organic, evolutionary process that drives scientific understanding, not the other way around. We understand more about astrophysics because we went to the moon; we didn't go to the moon because we already knew what it could teach us. The article is chock-full of other historical examples.

It'd be interesting to see further discussion about the implications of this theory for early hominids; did they develop tools and society as a result of higher intelligence and larger brains, or did they evolve larger brains and higher intelligence in response to the development of tools and societies? Maybe I'm mischaracterizing it, but I'd be interested to see the discussion. I think the author's reasoning is flawed, and his credible citations of economic impact of private versus state funding for science don't accurately parallel his theses about the reversed relationship between scientific understanding and tangible innovation.

Anyway, post your thoughts after reading the article.
 

http://www.vice.com/read/toure-talking-to-white-people-about-their-white-privilege-1021

A bit of a thought experiment, I guess. The comments are a lot more interesting than the article itself, I'd say.

I'm going to preface this by saying I have never experienced clinical depression or the need for self harm. However, my sister has bipolar disorder and I grew up with her attempting suicide multiple times and using cutting as a tool to cope.

So, many depressed individuals use self harm as a way of taking control of pain they feel is uncontrollable and insurmountable; it's not a means of failed suicide, it's a form of coping. Do you think someday controlled methods of self harm will be utilized for victims of depression? I'm talking about using doctor-recommended (not necessarily prescribed), safe methods of self-harm to control symptoms. Cutting itself is a non-lethal methods that could potentially be used.

It sounds ridiculous, but I've recently been looking at it from a new light. In my adolescence I suffered from chronic migraines: almost every day during middle school I'd come home and lay in a dark, quiet place waiting for my daily migraine to pass. A technique my neurologist taught me was to pinch a nerve between my thumb and pointer finger, in the webbing of your hand, to dull the pain since your body only registers one significant pain at a time. I still use that technique today, and I don't really see how it's at all different from some other forms of self harm, except that a doctor told me it was okay. (Not to conflate migraines with depression; I'm merely talking about the function of each action.)

Share your thoughts on this. I apologize for typos; I did this all on mobile without proofreading.

I have a brain.

Or:

I am a brain.

I joined a month after TTK came out and now everyone on the LFG site requires experience and gear I can't get without doing the raid. I'm free any time today, and could do tomorrow. If you're down to do the raid (on normal), let me know. Titan, any subclass, LL291 so it should be fine. On Xbox One.

Plus, I don't think I've ever played Live with any of you so it'd be cool to get that chance.

Watching old sitcoms and ensuring ISIS doesn't commandeer the airfield.

What's your excuse for being up?

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/24/9183525/gun-violence-statistics

Vox is pretty biased to the left, but this is a decent article with quite a bit of easily-processed information. Quoting the article would be difficult because of its format, so just read it via the link.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/lionsgate-wins-rights-fantasy-book-828557

Nothing concrete about plans, but the deal they negotiated with the author comprises TV, movies, and games. So it doesn't seem like they're just buying up the rights to sell at a later time.

The first book, The Name of the Wind, was first published in 2007 and since then, the second novel as well as three novellas have sold more that 10 million copies. The books are said to be only behind Game of Thrones in terms of best-sellers in modern epic fantasy.

“Honestly, I've never been very interested in a straight-up movie deal,” said Rothfuss. “But Lionsgate was willing to work out something different, a multi-platform deal where they develop the films, TV series, and games simultaneously. That will give us the screen time to develop the characters and show off the world. What's more, through this whole process, they've treated me with amazing respect. I never thought a studio would approach me as a creative partner who understands how stories work."

Pretty great news. They're some of my favorite books.

 

http://www.barkaussies.org/portfolio/polly-bark-245/

6 year old Aussie Shepherd. A bit old but still young enough to have 4-5 years of activity. Seems pretty chill and I really like her colors. We've got a home inspection coming up and she'll be coming with the foster owner, so I'll see her in a few days.

Decided to check out Destiny again because my Xbox Live membership is about to expire and figured I'd see if it's worth renewing. All my legendaries and exotics are shittier than greens I picked up, and I need a bunch of materials to make them better. Several of my exotic upgrades were reset too, which blows ass.

What are the new exploits? Which guns are good and which suck now?