Then protocol suggests you upvote it :)

(To upvote, click the show link between the arrows and you'll see the choices for this community. After you upvote, check out your Wallet Register to see the details. Mods can customize them to whatever they want. To see the defaults for your community, click on the Moderate dropdown in the navigation bar and start typing karma.)

Ah Digg... Remember when...

If you don't mind sharing, I'm very interested to hear what you think about the changes being made at Digg. Also, based on your beta experience so far, how does it compare to reddit, voat, etc.?

And yet another incredible story: Only Six Days After Starting Cannabis Oil, This Little Girl’s Leukemia Went into Remission.

Looks like the link is dead - try here instead.

Good to know. Sometimes these freebies can immediately spread so quickly and become so popular that the company pulls the promotion due to overwhelming response. I just added a reminder to "act fast" to the community's description.

As an aside, you have to put a /u/ in front of a username for the user tagging to work (e.g., /u/somedude). Otherwise, the username won't be picked up (which then automatically creates the link and notifies the user with a PM).

One of your best ones yet.

The math is correct... and it's not a bug :)

And here are 3 upvotes - worth 3 cents - to reflect intelligence, agreement, and gratitude. Also worth it.

Conceptually, I agree with his view that without a better understanding and appreciation for philosophy, humanity is limited by the progress science makes. But if I'm understanding his reasoning, he wants more philosophy so that scientists can become well-rounded generalists, reduce competitiveness, and better communicate to voters and politicians. These might be valuable benefits but, to me, humanity could benefit most if scientists had a much better understanding of rational ethics. IMO, universities are churning out too many unethical scientists and, for proof, I offer how much money goes into government-related projects (e.g., weapons, surveillance, control). A rational understanding of ethics is needed to reduce the research and funding of the plethora of destructive and control-oriented efforts. Not to mention that if scientists ever truly learned rational ethics, they'd no longer ask for government grants as they'd know it's wrong to take stolen money.

Thank you for your opinion. Here's a karma.

My face was soaked with tears while watching this. That was incredibly beautiful. The video that father took will likely be one of the family's most valuable possessions. Thank you so much for posting this.

As an aside, you can easily embed videos like this directly to the post. To embed a video, click on the icon that looks like  (either when creating or editing the post), enter the URL of the YouTube video (not the blog URL), and click OK.

And I do feel sorry for them, who have lost their RL for SL

Why feel sorry for them? It's their own choice. Not only that, but I've heard plenty of stories of SL relationships turning into RL relationships.

We are all in it for a different reason.

I think it depends on the level of abstraction. I'd argue a good many people are there for very similar reasons, a primary one being escapism. But anyone who claims that relationships developed online only are less powerful or less "real" hasn't spent much time in SL. (And wait until Linden Labs comes out with their new virtual reality!)

"Pixel sex" is no different in some respects than watching porn. But from what I've heard from others, it can be just as emotionally stimulating as physical sex. Although I've never tried pixel sex, I would seriously consider giving virtual reality sex a whirl... just to test it, of course. ;)

As an aside, thought you might find this article useful: How to Switch from Graphic to UI/UX Design. A few important points from it:

These days, UI/UX designers are in a great demand, and numerous graphic designers increasingly switch from graphic to UI/UX design. Transitioning between these fields, however, isn’t a piece of cake, as they are fundamentally different on almost all levels.

Unlike graphic design, UI/UX design has nothing to do with art or offbeat visual ideas. It’s pure science, and graphic designers must understand that designing UI/UX is all about helping users to accomplish tasks and interact with the product in the most convenient way.

...

Act like a product manager, not an artist

Being a UI/UX designer, you must embrace product thinking. It’s basically where design overlaps with product management, as no one can design an intuitive user interface for a product that they don’t have a clue about.

User reseach and testing is a big part of UI/UX design [sic], and intuition as well as all kinds of biases should never get in the way of the design process. That means you’ll have to conduct interviews, diary studies, contextual inquiries, usability testing as well as define personas and user flows to validate your design and ensure it’s intuitive to your users.

It’s a scientific approach, and you should understand that in UI/UX design the definition of beautiful is what makes users feel good while navigating through your interfaces rather than what is just nice on the eyes.

...

Think of design as a guidebook

Unlike graphic designers who are concerned with how the design looks, UI/UX designers care only about how it works, and feels. They are responsible for designing each screen or page and ensuring that a UI is concise and clear to the user.

If you are stepping into UI/UX design, one of your main focuses will be clear visual hierarchy. In other words, the size, color, and placement of each element should create a logical path that influences the order in which the human eye perceives what it sees.

That is being said, your primary goal as a UI/UX designer is to ensure your design guides your users through your product and clearly leads them towards whatever they are looking for. Eveything [sic] else plays a second fiddle.

...

Like programming, UI/UX design has guidelines, such as Google’s Material Design for Android or Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines. And following those is critical to ensure your design doesn’t cause any cognitive dissonance.

I tune you out and hear a country song playing across my conscious.

Why does country music have such a bad reputation when it comes to depressing songs? I refuse to blame it on Whitney Houston.

Whenever I'm drained or feel feeble, I read two books that replenish my soul. It works every time. My first unsolicited suggestion is to find something that replenishes your soul so that, when you recognize you need strength, you know where to go and what to do. My second unsolicited suggestion?

Make sure that "something" isn't another person because the only person you can ever count on is yourself.

Some terrific work here! Thank you!

I really like the valME.io design and I also like #2 and #3 of the symbols. I'm not sure why but #3 reminds me a bit of an elephant, which might be reason to go with #2 :)

Mixed feelings on the colors and the front page design. Can you tell me please the .css colors you used (all shades of green)? I want to try a few of them in the development environment.

Thought /u/Clarisse88 and /u/TattooedWanderer might appreciate this:

Artist Draws Nine Portraits on LSD During 1950s Research Experiment

I do - I use Adblock Plus but it didn't remove the YouTube annotations (which is what blocked the screen). If you look at the comments on YouTube for the video, you'll see I'm not the only one frustrated with the annotations.

That you didn't see the annotations led me to do some research, which brought me to this thread. I just added the following as a Adblock Plus custom filter:

||youtube.com/annotations_

All annoying annotations are now gone :)

The advertising popups/annotations on the video in that link are really annoying because their overlap makes them difficult to turn off. :(

We played with a variant as kids. They're called snakes and sold in fireworks stores:

I wear blue shorts with a green shirt all the time. Are you saying this is why I'm having problems finding dates?

So what if /u/operadevil put the comment icon around the ME instead of the .io?

Actually, I kind of like the green /u/operadevil chose, and I definitely like it better than the green in the current logo. But I don't know how it would look against the blue background. That brings up another important point: the logo has to look good both on a dark (e.g., blue) background as well as a white one. There are times when the logo will be placed on each. (Or the logo could have different colors depending on background.)

I'm not against getting rid of the blue color at the top for the header, but the benefit of using the blue is it separates the header/navigation bar from the rest of the page. I think being able to differentiate the header bar (and the associated dropdowns on it) is important from a usability perspective. Then again, I'm far from a usability/user experience expert.

Also, I can't replace the current logo unless I have something small/compact to use as a stand-alone image (whether it has the valME name in it or not). For example, I couldn't use the logo as-is to replace the default user images because it would be too big (or look odd/be difficult to see when I miniaturized it). Similarly, I need something to replace the favicon (the little image in the browser tab).

This is one of the difficulties with having limited funds - there are so many things on which it would be useful to do user testing. And, speaking of limited funds, now I'll have to buy all new business cards! :)

Also, I noticed there are two [PROJECT] references in the title of your post. Did you add the second one or did it add it after you did something? If it added it, that's probably a bug I'd like to fix, as there should be only one [PROJECT] in the title when you select the post as a project.

Edit: Never mind. I determined the problem and fixed the bug as well as the title.

OK, OK. Yes, I know the logo stinks, and you're not the first to suggest it :) (glances at /u/Clarisse88) I REALLY like what you did with the comment icon around the .io. That's brilliant.

Not being a graphic design expert, I wanted the logo to incorporate a few different ideas:

1. One of the taglines for valME, and one of the reasons it's valME.io instead of valME.com (other than valME.com being taken) is "Put value in. Get value out." The down arrow and up arrow in the "M" was supposed to help symbolize that.
2. valME is short for "value for me," with an emphasis on the me. Philosophically, we'd love to see more people acknowledge value with real/tangible values (e.g., money). When you upvote something, you're giving someone money (albeit small amounts) for the value you received. So I wanted the logo to communicate that idea, but was always unhappy that I couldn't visually accomplish it. The best I could do was trying to get the v and/or m into the logo. Combining the v and m was difficult, but the middle of a capital M looks like a v, which is why the M is the image.
3. The color was chosen as green because it's often thought as the color of (some) money.
4. The .io diagonally in the M was to remind people not to go to valme.com.

So that's a bit of the history of the current logo. Candidly, I'm not sure what makes a logo "good" in that I don't know exactly what standards to apply. In my untrained mind:

1. It should be recognizable and distinguishable, especially when standing on its own (e.g., it's the default image for users who don't choose a image for themselves).
2. It should communicate ideas important about the company.
3. It should be simplistic yet "timeless" so it doesn't turn people off.
4. It should be able to look clear and "clean" even when small (we are dealing with mobile devices after all).

I really like what you did here and, as I said, especially the comment icon because it communicates a key part of what valME is about. If this was the logo, what would be used for the default user images? Do you have other ideas for incorporating some of the other goals we're trying to accomplish?

Though quoting from it, it's hard to agree with some of the Commentary Magazine article as the author's claims aren't always logical

It was an interesting article nonetheless. So I went to the About page to learn more before adding it to my feeds, where I found:

Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970s...

Never mind. I won't be subscribing. Neocons are all about illogic.

I agree with everything in this video. Modern art disgusts me.

IMO, you should add a tag of philosophy to this as, again IMO, poor philosophy is at the heart of bad art (which he addresses directly in the video - e.g., "how can art be objectively measured?" what are the artistic results as measured by "universal standards versus artistic relativism?" "without aesthetic standards, we have no way to determine quality or inferiority!" "who will determine quality?" how do you determine what is "worthy of value?" what are the "objective standards?").

There's a great quote in the book The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand that sums up this philosophical and artistic tragedy beautifully:

Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.

I upvoted funny because, in addition to learning about the stupidity of a 340-ton rock as art, the Holy Virgin Mary covered with glitter and elephant dung, and a "prize-winning" police woman squatting while urinating (all of which I looked up to verify they weren't satires from The Onion), and on top of his graduate students thinking the paint drippings on his art studio apron are "good" because they are "bold," "evocative," "unconventional," and "perfectly balanced in its randomness," his last comment about the "white painting" by Robert Rauschenberg is absolutely hysterical as a perfect representation of how ludicrous modern art is.

As a spokeswoman for the Academy of Fine Arts said about the "overwhelmingly positive" public response of the police woman urinating:

"The artist is exploring a taboo zone. 'Petra' is not a provocation," she said. "It is an observation of society."

Indeed.

More amazing success stories: Since Oklahoma Legalized Cannabis Oil, These Two Children Have Been Seizure Free

That's a great story. It's amazing they only took 3 years to learn. I was under the impression you needed far more experience to circumnavigate the globe. Skimming their blog, it's not clear how they learned to sail that quickly.

I have dreams to do it as well. My books... my guitar... the open water... ahhhh... Now I just need to learn to sail :)

I disagree. It depends on how your define success. For example, if your standard for success is accumulating wealth, you can achieve it dishonestly and still claim success (and a false sense of self). However, if your standard for success is earning wealth by honest trade, no matter how much you accumulate, you will never succeed as long as you're stealing it.

The principles (or rules, as he calls them) defined in the article don't explicitly state all of his standards. Many of those are assumed or can be inferred (especially if you're familiar with many of his other articles that describe his religious and libertarian values).

It's not America that tortures people. It's monsters in the American government and their supporters. Not everyone in America has gone mad. He's putting it in terms and in places where it will get more exposure. That's not a bad thing, especially if it increases awareness.

I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out too. :) Very glad you like it. Thanks for being valME's first demonstration of its custom domain capabilities. And the artwork is fabulous!

I don't follow all his suggestions exactly, but directionally I do.

Believe it or not, this formatting fail was useful. After having a bit of a think around this, it's clear that complex HTML and css can still cause potential problems on the page (even after our revised guidance to only allow .css styling at an individual element level). Even the most proficient users are going to make mistakes, and moderators need to be able to deal with those problems.

We just rolled out a few changes to help deal with these potential problems. The first is a "plaintext" link that will be on each comment. Clicking this link will remove the "first layer" of HTML and .css formatting. (I say "first layer" because if the comment has code in it using the <pre> tag, that code is the second layer. To remove the second layer, click the plaintext link again.)

The plaintext link will allow users and moderators to identify which comment is potentially messing up the page's formatting. (If turning off the comment's HTML and .css by switching to plaintext corrects the page layout, you now know where the offending HTML/css is.)

This leads to the second change: we've added a flag called "bad HTML/css" and an associated option in /mod/modqueue to remove a comment for "formatting: broken HTML/css." When a moderator uses this option on a flagged comment, the comment will be moved to the comment graveyard with other removed comments, but displayed in such a way that it will no longer cause problems.

That's a bit of messed-up code. :)

Looks like there's a missing <div> and an <a href> in the wrong place. I always find it better to indent code to help determine when there are misplaced tags. Please try this:

<div id="user_id_digdug_comment_picture-carousel" class="carousel slide carousel" data-ride="carousel" style="height:200px;">

  <div class="carousel-inner">

    <div class="item active">
      <div class="thumbnail">
        <a data-lightbox='lightbox-digdug_comment' href='http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-marquee.gif'>
          <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-marquee.gif" alt="" style="max-height:200px;" />
        </a>
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        <a data-lightbox='lightbox-digdug_comment' href='http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-fygar-2a.gif'>
          <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-fygar-2a.gif" alt="" style="max-height:200px;" />
            <div class="carousel-caption">
              <p>Fygar</p>
            </div>
        </a>
      </div>
    </div>

    <div class="item">
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        <a data-lightbox='lightbox-digdug_comment' href='http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-guy1b.gif'>
          <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-guy1b.gif" alt="" style="max-height:200px;" />
            <div class="carousel-caption">
              <p>Dig Dug</p>
            </div>
        </a>
      </div>
    </div>

    <div class="item">
      <div class="thumbnail">
        <a data-lightbox='lightbox-digdug_comment' href='http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-pooka.gif'>
          <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-pooka.gif" alt="" style="max-height:200px;" />
            <div class="carousel-caption">
              <p>Pooka</p>
            </div>
        </a>
      </div>
    </div>

    <div class="item">
      <div class="thumbnail">
        <a data-lightbox='lightbox-digdug_comment' href='http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-veg-1.gif'>
          <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-veg-1.gif" alt="" style="max-height:200px;" />
        </a>
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    <div class="item">
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        <a data-lightbox='lightbox-digdug_comment' href='http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-00.gif'>
          <img class="img-responsive center-block" src="http://www.edcollins.com/digdug/digdug-00.gif" alt="" style="max-height:200px;" />
        </a>
      </div>
    </div>

  </div>

  <a class="left carousel-control" href="#user_id_digdug_comment_picture-carousel" role="button" data-slide="prev">
    <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-left"></span>
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  <a class="right carousel-control" href="#user_id_digdug_comment_picture-carousel" role="button" data-slide="next">
    <span class="glyphicon glyphicon-chevron-right"></span>
  </a>

</div>

Edit: After ignoring my own advice to avoid conflicts by not using "lightbox-my-post" for data-lightbox, updated lightbox name to lightbox-digdug_comment.

Correction: Ancestry.com Did Not Share Customer Data With Police Without a Warrant

As such, I'm deleting this post.

Done - enjoy.

How terribly sad.

Next on my list :)

You 'da man! As always, thanks for finding and reporting bugs. The overlap was due to a recent Bootstrap upgrade and the latest activity was a clumsy oversight on my part. Both should be fixed now.

how can you claim an absolute when everything is not known

/u/Clarisse88 wrote about it, including the consequences of relativism on individuals: Absolutism vs. relativism - is truth subjective?

When I first got wind of this a few weeks ago, I immediately went to the website to check out citizenship requirements. It was basically a shell, with lots of "coming soon" text. Last week, Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute met with Vit Jedlicka. (Hard-core Objectivists typically dislike and don't get along with libertarians, so the meeting is curious.) It brought a huge smile to my face when I later saw how many had applied for citizenship. To be able to live in an area with others who really value and respect freedom... (heavy sigh) Well, one can dream.

I think projects like the Free State Project and The Seasteading Institute have more chance for success for peaceful co-existence because of funding, location, and the talented people working on them. But, in the end, I don't have hope for any of these projects. Living in peaceful co-existence isn't held back by lack of a patch of land (or sea) that some government tyrants haven't yet claimed. It's held back by a lack of good philosophy. Poor philosophy is the problem - not space.

A terrible state of affairs (no pun intended). Don't get me started.

As a follow-up to this article, The Intercept just posted Emails Reveal Close Relationship Between Psychology Group and CIA:

Newly released emails show a close relationship between the American Psychological Association and the psychologists who helped create the architecture of the CIA’s torture program.

The post Dick Cheney's "A Few Good Men" moment - Bush knew all about CIA interrogation methods... "Did you order the torture?" "You're God-damn right I did!" should be amended with "...and with support of the APA.

Update: Another related article published by The Intercept - For American Psychological Association, National Security Trumped Torture Concerns:

A new report disclosed by James Risen of the New York Times on Friday tells in greater detail than ever before the story of how members of the American Psychological Association colluded with the CIA when it came to the application of brutal interrogation techniques.

The report describes how repeated expressions of concern from within the CIA itself that psychologists had no place in the abusive treatment of detainees were brushed asided by leaders of what was supposed to be a highly ethical professional association. Psychologists with close ties to the CIA, in some cases even involving financial relationships, cited national security as the reason to ignore their fundamental oaths to do no harm.

This is a great idea, and I think we can take it even further. Maybe we'll also include filters for other activities (e.g., votes, comments). Should be straight-forward, but it has to go into the queue right now. Currently working on new functionality for custom domains.

I cringed with every hit.

That might be my first downvote ever.

Not sure why, but I walked away from listening to this OceanLab tune with Lita Ford/Ozzy Osbourne - Close Your Eyes Forever playing in my head:

This shouldn't be titled "Incomplete." It should be titled "Regret." With every line, I can feel the pain. The searching. The self-doubt. The procrastination. The fear. The assumed missed opportunities. The sadness... no... The sorrow.

But then I read the "other side" of these sentences, almost as if there was a second author. There's a person... no... a soul... writing in the white space between the lines. That soul is grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking vigorously: "STOP IT." "That you are acknowledging regrets means you see the better direction. You see what you can change. Maybe you don't know how to approach the change... but you see it."

That's what I read, as if what's between the lines is in bold type. My unsolicited advice? Write down - formally - everything you want. Write down everything you want to change. Write down all the mistakes you need to fix. Make the list as large as you can. Get it all down. Turn that jar over and bang on the bottom, making sure every last thought comes out.

Then work with family, friends, and professionals to organize them into groups of achievements and formalize plans to start accomplishing them. Again, write it all down. Make it formal. As you take actions on the plan, write down the date you took the action. As you reach a milestone or achievement, write down the date of the achievement. And then cross it off the list. Use a dark marker. Make it a bold statement when you draw a line through it. "This is done. I'm one step closer."

My sister used this technique. She had all sorts of lists. She used to love crossing stuff off. I would sometimes ask her why she didn't occasionally throw pages away when they were all complete or consolidate the list when most of it was done. (The notebook she carried them in was bulky, and she carried it everywhere, even while walking with a cane. I thought it would help lighten her load.)

Absolutely not, she'd tell me. She liked having all those crumpled, worn-out pages. It showed progress. Those marked-up pieces of paper were constant reminders of how far she'd come. They reminded her that, no matter how many items were still on those lists, as long as she kept at it, her record of taking action was historically good. They reminded her that she had taken action against even the hardest tasks on that list.

She followed the adage of how to eat an elephant. One small bite at a time.

All humor aside, you have to build yourself up to it. As I mentioned here, I have asthma and yet was still able to train myself to run in multiple marathons. Don't give up.

When I first started, if I remember correctly, it took 6 months just to work myself up to 3 miles (and at a very slow pace). I was trying to run in a popular 5k (~3.5 miles) in Central Park (NY). But I was motivated because running in Central Park is really a great experience. (I think my time in that race was 30 minutes, which I was proud of.) After that, it took many, many more months to get to 5 miles. Then, just getting to 6 was very difficult.

But after I hit 6, getting to 7 wasn't bad. Then 8 didn't take too much extra effort. Getting to 12 was difficult but no longer seemed impossible. And so on... It helps if you are working toward a goal (e.g., running a race in a particular city or place you enjoy).

I'm shy? :)