I love the opening line in Thomas Bernhard's Woodcutters:

While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation.

In German:

Während alle auf den Schauspieler warteten, der ihnen versprochen hatte, nach der Aufführung der Wildente gegen halbzwölf zu ihrem Abendessen in die Gentzgasse zu kommen, beobachtete ich die Eheleute Auersberger genau von jenem Ohrensessel aus, in welchem ich in den frühen Fünfzigerjahren beinahe täglich gesessen war und dachte, dass es ein gravierender Fehler gewesen ist, die Einladung der Auersberger anzunehmen.

I have a quite simple system for my simple finances. When my cash runs out, I get around 200€ from an ATM. Then I look up when my last withdrawal was. If it was under two months, I'll be more frugal until next time. No receipts or calculations. So I only use cash and have 50€ to 150€ on me with some more at home. I'm not even sure how to use a card to buy something. :-)

There is also this neat comic: Rat Park.

I use http://www.passwordstore.org/ - security is outsourced to gpg (and that is the most important point), uses directories/plain files for storing instead of a database and has already some plugins and scripts for browsers, wms, etc.

Add me (also 'xash') on OGS and we can play some games once you get comfortable with the rules. :-)

I played Go on and (mostly) off for some years, but I never left the beginner realm. Then I found Go Quest, where you can have matches of 3-6 minutes on a 9x9 board. I started to play daily in early summer and had the goal to lift my ELO from 1500 to 1600 on this site before university started again. That's the difference of being on place 9500 or 6500 on the sites ranking list. And I did it last week, just in time! Comparative ratings are difficult to translate to words, but I'll just call me a weak intermediate player on a 9x9 Go board.

Plain physicalism and determinism are so well accepted, it is boring. So I want you to take a look at Panpsychism: souls are/the soul is everywhere. The variation I like the most is called Panexperimantalism: every physical particle has a soul part. If the physical particles form a connection, the mind-dust of single souls merge to a bigger soul, more capable of feeling, more conscious and more of the other things a soul can do. So the soul of a person would be like dust before the person is born, would emerge inside the mother and would grow with the age. Also, stones, houses and trees would have a soul, but their souls may or may not be smaller than ours. And an answer with this theory to OP's question could be: „Yes, as everything has a free will.“

German here. Born and still living in Hamburg, the city most famous for its red-light district. I'm very glad to see the Außenalster on my way to university:

As of

Edit: of course I talk about the time before all of this happened.

If anyone wants to learn about the historical background to the fundamentals of modern mathematics (last ~100 years) I can only second the recommendation on reading the well made comic Logicomix. Believe me, the story is really interesting.

You could even build a messenger with it.

A good friend of many years just said „I don't like Turks”, following with common racist justifications. I was shocked. I tried to convince her that „most Turks cause trouble" is just plain racism. With the current situation here in Germany in mind, that we discussed beforehand, I wasn't quite friendly. She quickly felt offended about my accusations and left me confused about her, the friendship and how to approach this topic in the future.

Also: the better motherfucking website.

At least in Philosophy, where a lot of debates evolved around subjectivity and objectivity (art, rights, moral, mathematics etc.), if some culture is involved in a judgement, it is a subjective. To roughly get an idea what objectivity (in Philosophy) is all about: imagine, there are no living things in this universe. Would be To Pimp a Butterfly still be good music?

Note: I'm into heraldry and not vexillologie. And I exaggerate. :-)

I think flags shouldn't have detailed figures like kiwis or stars, but should instead consist of geometric figures like bars, lines, or spirals. Here is why: Imagine a waving flag as on the image. But you usually see flags from far away, so the details get blurry for the viewer. Plus, you rarely see one straight from the front, so the waving flag partially hinders the view on itself. It may look like this to you (bad quality and over the top photoshopping intended):

The stars of the hemisphere will get unrecognizable from a less then ideal perspective, if you do not know them and will just appear to be some stars … or circles, dots? Also, can you tell whether this is a spiral or a kiwi on the right flag? Stick to the easy design.

I like the top right flag and I cannot think of any country's flag that is just black and white, so I would take that. The bottom left fern design would also be nice if the number of leaves is not fixed (so smaller variants don't look bad because of too many tiny things - I'm looking at you USA!)

Any idea on which keys to use instead for navigation? My first idea was to split HJKL onto both hands. So the index fingers handle Up/Down and the middle fingers Left/Right. This would be a bit more comfortable than HJKL because there isn't the strength imbalance on the same axis between the index and small finger … but maybe this isn't the problem at all. I'm open for suggestions!

You are right; the way it works now has a low speed limit. Even when in ~70% the cases you can switch hands and don't need to wait releasing all your fingers. When using your suggestion, the implementation has a hard time figuring out, if you wanted to press AS, or press A and then AS. Keyboard inputs are sequential and not simultaneous.

But I'm playing around with some timers right now; if a press comes in you have a time window of some milliseconds before the chord is registered. This has a nice effect on bi- and trigrams; in English you often have to type "th". Making this a roll from your index to middle finger, things should speed up. So e.g. J would become 't' and K 'h', then you can press J, wait some milliseconds and press K.

Elm. It is very different to JavaScript, as it is a functional reactive language, but it compiles down to JS, can interact with it and is quite powerful. Check out some examples to see the syntax. As objects are immutable, you describe everything as-it-is, instead of how-it-changes. That means, once you get the functional way of programming, you will have way less headaches with coding and debugging.

I don't have a particular route to suggest, but a resource: a good introduction to any topic or philosopher you want to dive in deeper is probably found on the Stanford Encyclopedia. These rather short articles are written by well known experts on their field, explaining the context, terms and ideas of a topic/philosopher/philosophical work, so you get a better understanding on whats going.