Disqus - Latest Comments for moritheil

Re: Wayward Sons: Legends - Sci-Fi Full Page Webcomic - Updates Daily

moritheil — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 06:04:41 -0000

In this case, he actually wrote the playbook. So yeah, it would actually be strange if Suras's tactics all worked.

Re: Wayward Sons: Legends - Sci-Fi Full Page Webcomic - Updates Daily

moritheil — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 01:03:16 -0000

That was a pretty terrifying incident of casual dismemberment, though the dialogue has improved dramatically over early strips.

Re: Wayward Sons - An Online Comic Following The Lives of Modern Myths

moritheil — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 20:27:38 -0000

An odd choice of dialogue, but it certainly shows us something interesting about Kronos's personality.

Re: Important News of an Important Nature

moritheil — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 20:23:35 -0000

You should definitely look at doing a kickstarter for the money side of things, though of course that won't help you with your artistic vision issues. Those, I suspect, should be settled first, and then the money.

Re: What Your Klout Score Really Means

moritheil — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:50:09 -0000

Apparently my Klout score is higher than Craig Venter's. That's hilarious.

On a more serious note, this is always the problem society faces: how do we rank people? We've moved past concepts of inherited nobility and so forth, but this just means we've adopted new metrics. GPA, college admissions test scores, GREs, and everything all boil down to the excuse of having a numerical reason people can point to to justify their decisions to accept or reject.

"You are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet." And no, neither are you your test performance or Klout score.

But for 90% of your daily interactions, you might as well be.

Re: Having a Low Klout Score Can Now Ruin Your Life | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.

moritheil — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:44:26 -0000

To be fair, 34 is pretty terrible, assuming someone is actually putting time into social media. If he's in marketing, and if the terms of the job specifically involved twitter presence, I could see the boss checking up on his ability to deliver on a twitter presence - in short, his ability to do the job.

And as other people have pointed out, while Klout may feel like a "fake" score, your GPA from two decades ago can be an equally arbitrary measure of your current ability to do a job, yet it continues to be widely used by companies. In this respect the problem isn't the existence of numbers, but the reflexive desire to be able to put a number on things so as to be able to justify decisions.

Re: Struggling Waitress Sues Police For Confiscating $12,000 Tip

moritheil — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 19:23:38 -0000

In the USA, over 90% of bills that have been in circulation for over a few years can be tested and found positive for some kind of drugs. Therefore, while the police technically have the power to seize the bills as evidence, they generally don't use that power without having more specific reasons (or else they'd have to regularly go to every bank and clean it out.)

EDIT: Snopes notes the percentage of money that can be shown to have cocaine traces on it, alone, is already 80% of all bills. http://www.snopes.com/busin...

Re: The truth behind Siri (honest, this totally isn’t made up)

moritheil — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 00:20:44 -0000

A very clever take on Siri's name as an acronym!

Re: Energy saving light bulbs 'contain cancer causing chemicals'

moritheil — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:21:51 -0000

"BY EPA regulations a cola burning facility can not allow anything into the air other then carbon."

The EPA is categorically not in the business of making perfect, 100% restrictions. Rather, the EPA sets "safe levels" and limits how much material is allowed into the air. There is not a perfect limit that allows only carbon into the air; such a limit would be impossible to obey from a practical standpoint, as it would mean coal would have to undergo a lot of processing to remove trace amounts of metals.

See: http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonh...

Re: Energy saving light bulbs 'contain cancer causing chemicals'

moritheil — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:10:26 -0000

To put it in perspective, those chemicals are also in Listerine, moth balls, and styrofoam cups. They may have carcinogenic properties, but without numbers on the release levels, it's impossible to say whether there is a health risk caused by their normal use or not.

Either this study is not scientific, or the writer here has omitted the most important part of the study.

Re: http://www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/ghostlightning/~HpnEd

moritheil — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 16:51:23 -0000

Ah, anime hipsterism.

Re: Buying A New Car? There’s An App In That, And Soon It Could Be Twitter - AllTwitter

moritheil — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:43:55 -0000

Do we really need it to be any easier for people to be texting/tweeting while they should be driving?

Re: The Humanities and Scientist Testimonials

moritheil — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 16:23:06 -0000

It is precisely because he might have a stake in this (as a humanities professor) that an outsider voice may be more believable and carry more weight. The hermeneutics of suspicion would cause many people to dismiss out of hand any direct argument for his own benefit - or at the very least, to frown upon it as egotistical.

Re: Anime Distributor Dubs Using ‘Pirated’ Subs

moritheil — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:14:22 -0000

"There is no doubt that Funimation is using ‘pirated’ subtitles, but it seems unlikely that they failed to secure the appropriate rights."

There are at least two separate legal issues here. First off, it's fine for FUNi to download fansubs if they have the legal rights to distribute the thing to begin with. But it does not follow that FUNimation automatically has zero obligation to reimburse or acknowledge the fansubbers who did the translations, assuming it can be proven that their dubs are a derivative work of those translations.

Now, if they are only using subs done by CR, and CR says it's OK, then there is never going to be any legal action, and this is a nonissue. But if they are using subs by fansub groups, without getting their OK, then there is potentially a problem.

It would be an ironic twist to see a fansub group sue FUNimation in court for using their intellectual property.

Re: Radiation health risks in Japan

moritheil — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 20:19:11 -0000

Actually, KI only offers any benefit if radioactive iodide is in your immediate environment. When you take KI you are flooding your system with nonradioactive iodide to minimize the amount of radioactive iodide your body absorbs. KI is not a magic pill that protects you from other forms of radiation or benefits you if you take it outside of the presence of radioactivity.

"Nuts" might be unkind, but for Americans, taking KI now - or indeed, at any other time when there is no reason to believe that you are specifically facing radioactive iodide - is utterly without merit.

Re: Web Shames Magazine for Plagiarizing Blogger’s Article

moritheil — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 04:36:40 -0000

After that answer, there is very little outrage that wouldn't be justified.

What I find interesting, however, is the 10 cent per word rate. Of course they should have paid it, as they were caught red-handed, but I wonder how many people who read about the incident are aware that at most web sites, that is 5-10 times the going rate. It would be nice if the public picked up some awareness of how little writers make - a fact which surely compounds the outrageousness of the response.

Re: Find Photos For Your Blog In Three Easy Steps

moritheil — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 19:01:36 -0000

It looks nice, but it's hardly a complete solution for truly breaking events - most of which won't have Flickr images yet.

Re: http://scarletmonochrome.tumblr.com/post/1490774884

moritheil — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 18:22:26 -0000

That seems rather mechanical. What about albums that work very well as a whole but whose individual parts might be kind of bland?

Re: "Understand Psychosomatic Medicine Through Manga"

moritheil — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:47:02 -0000

Well, you're going to get what you wished for, but possibly not in the way you want it. Japan, as you probably know, often medicalizes deviance. So it's entirely possible that this understanding will fall under the category of "scientific curiosity" instead of "understanding otaku as equals."

Re: Question: How Should You Learn Kanji?

moritheil — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:02:10 -0000

It's fascinating to see everyone's take on this. I note that the different needs play a part - obviously a translator who needs to be converting business letters into Japanese needs writing much more than someone who primarily wants to be able to read the news in Japanese, or something similar.

Re: Brent's P. Newhall's Home(page) - Role-playing - Jan 2010

moritheil — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:08:14 -0000

I find that everyone who starts modifying systems to do what they want better eventually winds up making their own systems. Every system can only do so much, especially if we want to keep it simple.

Re: iWeb of Lies

moritheil — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:54:42 -0000

That's the thing - I think that while there are a lot of neat technologies, at least on the web, the model of getting the end user to pay for everything may be somewhat flawed.

Rupert Murdoch has announced that he will try to make readers pay for his content on sites like WSJ.com. This will be an interesting test of the old business model vs. the Internet business model.

Re: Who Gets to Be an Online Book Reviewer? - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat

moritheil — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:20:29 -0000

Broadly, it seems to be fear that drives this distinction between bloggers and "real" journalists. Journalistic education has not prevented some spectacular failures of journalistic integrity, but people invariably feel more comfortable with trained journalists.

Similarly, by sheer virtue of name recognition, the largest, most prominent entities are exempted from suspicion. This trend extends far beyond journalism and into all public perceptions (anyone remember when Arthur Andersen had an impeccable reputation?)

Back to the immediate point, I suppose there could be an assertion that untrained bloggers are more likely to be corrupted, but I am not sure the numbers actually bear that out - there are a tremendous number of bloggers now. What are the odds the NYT would be willing to just start running the byline "Full disclosure: this journalist received a free copy" on all their columns?

Re: On Revelation

moritheil — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:16:50 -0000

Well, the problem is, in essence, people want that simple certainty. Even if you aren't really empowered to give it, it can be tempting to just give people what they want.

Re: Kanye on Hatoyama

moritheil — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:32:33 -0000

I guess if I were more into Japanese rap, I could name some artists that would technically be closer to his sphere. Any entertainment would do, though, really.

Hmm. "Miyazaki, I'm really happy for you, I'mma let you finish, but Disney has some of the best animated films of all time. ALL TIME."