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Hakodate July 2014 Walmart Many Canadians love to hate Walmart, but I want Walmart to come to Metrotown to compete with Superstore. Hating on Walmart (in most cases) can't really be justified anyways. Penn and Teller Bullshit S05E02 Walmart Healthy Lifestyle I don't understand why people keep reading books and articles about healthy lifestyle habits. Truth is, we don't know a whole lot about what exactly makes us healthy, so we really shouldn't be focusing on things other than thorough scientific journalism like Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories and nutrition research initiatives like NUSI. To do good science, we need good data first. Monster I thoroughly enjoyed Naoki Urasawa's Monster. Munch-much, chomp-chomp, gobble-gobble, gulp. Local Cats Are you having a hard time finding local cats in your area? Activism Most people seem to think activists are working for their cause every moment of their waking hours. I don't know where this idea comes from. Nobody does anything every moment of their waking hours. I don't see why you can't be an activist 2 hours a day and spend the rest of time knitting or something. Canadian (Non-)Intelligence Canadian intelligence tried to hire Jacob Appelbaum. Traveling the World I'm not entirely sure if traveling the world a lot is worth the cost. Of course, if you want to live in a place you like to live in, you first need to move there, but "one week here, 2 weeks there"-kind of travel doesn't seem as valuable as some people claim. For example, you don't need go to another continent to do shopping (unless you live in an impoverished land where there's nothing to shop). Save that money and go to a local supermarket or mall or use sites like Amazon and buy a fuck ton of valuable stuff with that money. If you care about things like enjoying diverse people and food cultures, move to a cosmopolitan city with lots of immigrants so that you don't have to travel much. Spotify to launch in Canada It's cool, but Jamendo, Youtube, and Bitrorrent sites meet all of my music needs (which is not much). Same goes for video contents. Youtube, other video hosting sites, and Bittorrent. Netflix isn't that appealing to me. Private Security When I see private security guards in shopping malls and other places, I wonder how much of what the police does can be replaced by private security companies. Worthwhile Problems Richard Feynman: "The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to. A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems until you find some you can really solve easily, no matter how trivial. You will get the pleasure of success, and of helping your fellow man, even if it is only to answer a question in the mind of a colleague less able than you. You must not take away from yourself these pleasures because you have some erroneous idea of what is worthwhile." 10K Hour Rule It should probably called the "10,000 hour plus innate talent" rule. Your Big Doubts About the 10,000 Hour Rule Are Well-Founded: "Fortunately, we can salvage most of the original research behind the 10,000 Hour Rule. Instead of thinking of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice as a mandatory minimum for expertise, take it as a rule of thumb: On average, a world-class expert has to practice for about 10,000 hours to reach the top. Instead of thinking of 10,000 hours as a guarantee of expertise, adopt a pluralistic and probabilistic approach: 10,000 hours combined with lots of innate talent will usually take you to the top." Cal Newport also talks about how little deliberate practice knowledge workers do. SNES and N64 To play Super Nintendo on Linux (I use Lubuntu), install snes9x-gtk (Linux Mint community reviews). ZSNES works well for 30 minutes and then freezes, and bsnes is unusabe, so avoid those. For Nintendo64, install mupen64plus *and* its GUI frontend called m64py which includes controller settings. This required some tweaks for my Logitech F310 controller (See m64py controller configuration issues for details). Mupen/M64py seems to play most games, but some games for N64 (e.g. Fuurai no Shiren) don't seem to work well on mupen/m64py. Someone on the Internet said there's another N64 emulator called Daedalusx64 which can run (at least) Shiren without any problems. I haven't tested, but it may be worth a try. Free Your Milk FreeYourMilk.ca: "As the voice of Canada’s restaurant industry, we’re concerned that the price of basic dairy products is being kept artificially high by government dairy policy. As a result, Canadians are paying as much as double the international market price for dairy products. " Redshift It's the open-source alternative to f.lux (flux). It changes the color of the computer screen depending on the time of the day. The screen looks bright during the day and it looks darker and gets more reddish during the night, to kind of mimic the sun. This apparently reduces eye strains and helps you sleep better at night. I wonder if it actually works as advertised. I probably should spend less time on staring at the computer screen.
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