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randominality  ·  4340 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Welcome to hubski!

    It's really okay to talk about any topic on hubski, but remember that hate and disrespect will be follow up with people ignoring you. If you like a topic, feel free to start a conversation about it.

Frankly, I feel this is all that hubski needs as an intro, its up to a user to get what they want out of the site. Each user interacts with other users and if you post things you find interesting, people you find interesting should follow you and vice versa. If you are not interested in anything then don't expect anyone else to be interested in you.

randominality  ·  4311 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sixth Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

Safar Barlik - PasPourMoi is a lovely bit of chillwave that has really captured me and has caused me to dive in to a bunch of other lovely Lebanese stuff I'd never heard of before like Funny Death (shoegaze) and Lumi (electropop) as well as revisiting one of my old favourites, Ibrahim Maalouf.

randominality  ·  4037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Forty-Fourth Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

Games by Angelina is one of the most fascinating gaming blogs around. It mainly covers the current research that is occurring into procedural game creation and other smart uses of AI in gaming.

randominality  ·  4338 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Turntable.fm room

Are there any equivalents to this that work outside the US?

randominality  ·  4346 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Order of the Occult Hand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Haha, I'm not sure if its because of this post but apparently that article has a 383,952% increased viewcount this week.

randominality  ·  4347 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Bowie fest -What would be on your list?

All of your picks are fantastic but I would add Velvet Goldmine to that. I absolutely love that song.

randominality  ·  4353 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Experiment: What's YOUR most controversial opinion, Hubski?

I agree with what you say but I personally take that train of logic slightly further. I believe that the younger the human is, the less of a person they are, they have had fewer experiences and have had less time to form a self (so an early foetus is barely a person and thus not a great shame if the life is ended). As a result I also think that when children die it is less of a tragedy (still obviously a bad thing though) than when an adult dies.

When the Sandy Hook shooting news broke I realised how differently I valued human life to most people. I felt most angry about the teachers that died than the children, in their 30-some years of existence think how many thoughts they had thought, how many experiences and interactions they had which all contributed to a complex and sentient, interesting being. Compare this with the young children who had spent less than 7 or 8 years alive. Sure they had potential, but potential doesn't contribute to what kind of person you are.

So that's probably my most controversial opinion.

randominality  ·  4037 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: While We're On The Subject Of First Lines...

Oxford (home of the Bodleian) is rather far away from Oxford street (in London) I assume you mean you went to Blackwells on Broad Street, Oxford?

randominality  ·  4178 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A personal triumph in pizza

This is fantastic; hazardous fire and tasty pizza!

randominality  ·  4212 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What odds and ends do you have in your music collection?

I'm not particularly into Grime, but a friend showed me this album and I love it:

Bowza - The Time is Now

randominality  ·  4215 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Science Will Save The Planet (If We Let It)

Eh, its pretty much the same article I'm sure you've read elsewhere:

tl;dr: Global population will increase by 2 billion by 2050. More people and more 3rd world development leads to a need for greater global agriculture and energy production. We can achieve this with GMOs and nuclear energy. Unfortunately these are controversial despite few scientific counter-arguments for their use.

randominality  ·  4215 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Exuma - Baal

Of the 4 albums I've listened to, Exuma I and Exuma II are definitely the best. I can also recommend Snake though.

These are some lovely chillout summer songs:

Morcheeba - The Sea

Chrome Sparks - Marijuana

Also can't have summer without some afrobeat in my opinion:

Orchestra Baobab - Liti Liti

randominality  ·  4227 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Kessler Syndrome

I would think that massive slabs of sticky foam could do a good job of absorbing high speed debris without also releasing particulate.

randominality  ·  4242 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: From Non-Life to Life

    Thermodynamics shows that a) RNA is the only pre-protein nucleotide that fulfill the thermodynamic bound for replicators, b) a random strand 'gas' population of RNA _will_ crystallize to a replicator within ~ 30 000 years in the phosphate activating environment of alkaline hydrothermal vents.

Could you link to any papers or discussions about this point? The work to establish this seems like it would be really interesting.

randominality  ·  4242 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What are some *personal* essential readings?

I've only read Metamagical Themas by Hofstadter, is it worth reading GEB;EGB as well or does it just cover very similar thoughts.

randominality  ·  4242 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 30 abandoned places that look truly beautiful

I'm from London actually but I just had no idea that any parts of Germany look like that. The only bits of Germany I've ever been to are mostly just rolling hills or forested. I might have to make a trip out to Bavaria though, seems like one could combine it with a trip to Vienna quite nicely.

randominality  ·  4242 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 30 abandoned places that look truly beautiful

Does anyone know which bit of Germany has terrain like that in picture #6? That place looks beautiful.

randominality  ·  4307 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sixth Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately" Thread

The rest of that Safar Barlik EP is absolutely great as well, definitely give it a listen if you have the time and appropriate mood.

randominality  ·  4342 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pain of the New: The Hobbit at 48 fps

I think you probably hit on a great counter-argument with the mention of HDTV. I don't know anyone who was anti HDTV when it came out, everyone thought that it was simply better or at worst a pointless addition.

So when lelandbatey talks about the emotional connection to 24fps that was created by all the emotional moments that one has seen in that format, I'm not sure it actually holds up. If that was the case, why aren't we emotionally connected to SDTV in the same way?

randominality  ·  4343 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Kraken wakes: first images of the Giant Squid

Do any of the photos come with scale bars or with some sort of size comparison superimposed? At the moment it just looks like a close up of a normal sized squid.

randominality  ·  4346 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Most viewed Wikipedia pages by language

Good spot. Somehow I completely missed this fact when writing the post title.

randominality  ·  4348 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Werner Herzog: On the Asolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

His opinion on damn near everything is usually brilliant. Even his views on chickens are great to listen to with his magnificent turn of phrase.

randominality  ·  4353 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How do you discover new music?

r/listentous is a wonderful community that has a somewhat user-centric contribution system. Only people who have proven to have an interesting music taste in the 2-weekly elections are allowed to post content. It leads to a wonderful mix of good stuff.

randominality  ·  4515 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How much Force power can Yoda output?
I really enjoyed how the end result was actually quite a small number. The Force is actually quite humble in its powers, it turns out.