In "Breakfast breads"

'Brioches' is correct. It's a French word, so they would just add the 's' as well. If it helps, when you pronounce it, you would still say it the same as you say 'brioche', because final consonants are not pronounced. And those are lovely breads.

In "TED: Ideas worth spreading."

I've enjoyed many of the TED Talks I've heard on their podcast, but no, I've never attended. It'll be a while before I'd be willing to put up the $6k for a ticket, and probably at least as long before they'd be all, "Yes, you are the sort of person that we want at our conference!" At that point, I might have to Groucho Marx the invite in any case.

In "Some scientists are reconsidering the "common sense" about autism,"

The purpose behind an IQ test is to predict how well someone will do in school. If you "break" an IQ test by modifying how it's performed, then you will show significant increases in IQ in children with Autism. By the same token, if you change how children with Autism are socialized and taught, then they can be taught useful skills. There are a range of personality disorders grouped with autism, of which Asperbergers is one. Rett's Disorder, Childhood Degenerative Disorder, and a similar catch-all disorder are all grouped together as a "Pervasive Developmental Disorder." The big problem of Autism is one of motivation, rather than one of learning, per se. Children with Autism are not intrinsically inclined to try to please other people, which prevents them from, well, wanting to learn things like language. If this is allowed to continue for too long, then the neurons responsible for the learning start to harden, which makes it harder to learn. Teach early, and it's easy. Teach late, and it's very difficult. The societal problem with autism is that it's exceptionally prone to trends in both treatment and analysis. For an example, look up "facilitated communication." Mind you, I'm only about 40% of the way through my Autism course, but these are some of the things I've picked up so far.

In "Curious, George:"

If you don't have the keychain password, you're out of luck. They try to keep that as secure as possible. If it's a password for an individual site, you can unlock that with the main keychain password, and change from there. But, if you've lost the keychain password, the only thing you can do is reset the keychain and give it a new password, then try not to lose that. It'll clear out all the old passwords, but not much you can do about that.

In "2006 Roll Call:"

56. Woo!

In "October 23, 1989:"

Perhaps "not meant to be humorous." That was really fascinating, thank you, brundlefly. That's probably the most interesting thing to come of the strip proper. Garfield is far better as a dramatic strip than as a humor strip, it would seem.

In "Curious George: New Design Business"

When you talk to the lawyers, have a specific set of questions for them to answer. Do not ask anything open-ended, such as, "So what do I need to know?" That will drain any money that you might have for actual business running. The same may or may not be true for the accountant, but generally they know that they'll make more money in the long-run if they don't drive you out of business with initial consulting fees, so you're probably better off there. So, if you need legal forms, find some examples from the internet, write up a description of what you're hoping to achieve with it in normal-person-speak, and have the lawyer turn it into a proper document. If you need a search for a trademark on a name, have everything ready and say, "I need to register this name for a business in California as an LLC, and I'd like to get the trademark on it as well, as well as a trademark for this logo." That sort of thing. Be prepared for expenses, and make the business the top time and financial responsibility (short, perhaps, of responsibilities to people such as a wife, fiancee, or child. Ideally, have them help out, as applicable). Listen to your CPA. As mentioned before, that will be your primary source of caution for business purposes, but don't lose your sense of risk. You need to balance risk with reward, whereas your CPA will probably work to minimize risk. Charge what the market will bear, buy low sell high, that sort of thing. And good luck!

In "Curious George: mofi, I've broken my computer again. This time I've screwed up my widgets"

Oh, and actually finishing reading your explanation, so yeah, just move stuff back to the widgets folder, trash the plist file, and see if that helps.

Your available widgets should be stored in ~/Library/Widgets or /Library/Widgets. If your widgets are in there, then delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plist. If your widgets are not in there, then your widget manager is managing by moving widgets to other folders. Find the widgets, move them to the proper folders, and go. You might consider leaving out your 3rd party widget managers, though.

In "Web Site Takes a Happy Approach to News."

But "real news" has to fight with the establishment's "sensational news", whereas "good news" can ride the backlash. Of course, they're not entirely successful with their only good news, as evidenced by some of the example articles listed above, but the internet is a big place. Having a thoroughly niche product like this is not a bad thing, and it doesn't prevent any other type of news from being reported. I can understand why you wouldn't want to make it your primary news source, or perhaps even any of your news source, but there's a big line between something being not right for you and it being bad for the world, and I just don't see this being bad for the world. Personally, if I were editor in chief for a proper newspaper, I would make it practical news rather than good or bad. Fluff feel-good pieces, or watch the fiery wreck at the side of the road, would not make it in. It would be news that you could, if you were so inclined, use as a guide to changing your habits in order to affect either yourself or others. Voting, personal finance, well being, what have you. But not for warm fuzzies, and not for schadenfreude.

Yup, cause Brazillian Mayor Proposes to Outlaw Death is far more important for me to know. Shame on them for covering a web site (with the secret santa story) that might make a process that millions go through every year a simpler one. It's arguable (i.e. generally accepted as fact, and for a good reason) that there's a tremendous bias in the mainstream media towards sensationalistic and tragic stories. I have no problem with a site that wants to try to balance that out. Do I think that it should be someone's only news source? No. Do I think that there's any reason it should make one ashamed to be human, not to want to get news that focuses primarily on how terrible the world is? Again, no. Also, their site is relatively new, as I understand it (though I heard about them through On The Media a couple of months ago). If their business model is reasonably successful, then they will likely be able to get more stories of substance that still have a positive focus, hopefully well written, researched, and maybe even of general use to the everyday person. Oh, look, here's a fire in New Jersey, killed three people. That's vital right there. I'm sure nobody has died in a fire before, and somehow, this is going to change the way I live, aside from perhaps feeling badly that people that I don't know have died? If Happy News dot com had an RSS feed, I might actually read it, but I don't get any news that doesn't flow either from The Daily Show or my RSS reader, so that seems unlikely. Still, I like their spirit, and I hope they do well.

In "Air Marshalls kill mentally ill man,"

Last I heard it's on a news blackout because of, if I remember correctly, the Official Secrets Act. I don't think we'll hear more until it's all over.

I likely would have made the same decision. Strangely, it says, "Authorities did not immediately say whether any bomb was found," not, "Authorities did not say whether any bomb was found by the time we went to press." Though it only happened, what, 2 hours ago, that could be the reason. Hopefully that will be clarified, though I'd imagine that he did not have a bomb.

In "Curious George: share your RPG memories"

Exactly what I was referring to, MCT. Although I first heard of it through the Summoner Geeks short, it apparently started as an audio-only skit by The Dead Alewives, and had a great intro about how there's this new danger to today's youth from the dangerous and satanic D&D. Great stuff.

Yeah, if you're such a powerful sorcerer, MCT, why are you casting Magic Missile?

So we were playing Car Wars, where you design a car and attempt to destroy all the other competitors in the arena. The cars, naturally, have weapons and armor etc. Two of the players, N. and K., were experienced at Car Wars, Ken was the GM, and D. and I were the new players. D. and I, incidentally, were not particularly friends. My car was primarily designed for ramming, which I thought would be a good and fun strategy. Unfortunately, I didn't have fireproof armor, and K. and N. both had flamethrowers, so I couldn't get near their cars. That reduced my effective targets to 1, at least until they ran out of juice or their weapons were damaged. The early parts of the game were rampant with lucky dice throws, so people were getting overconfident. D. went after K. and attempted some maneuvers which were ill-considered (especially after he was warned of the riskiness by the GM) unless he could pull off some miraculous throws. He failed those throws, and basically had his car mostly destroyed and in a spin to hit the arena wall. It just so happened that I was behind this whole scene, and I was in range to be able to hit his car from the front just when the rear of his car hit the wall. Now, to be fair, his car was out of commission anyways, it's just that I would get to do nothing else that entire game other than this, so I figured I'd live for the moment. As we were working out the details, D. kept getting more and more angry. Thinking, perhaps, that we were picking on him, rather than he having just made a series of bad choices. So he hits the wall, and I tear through his car, and he's basically left with a few tires that go bouncing off into the distance. Then, and this is the point of this story, he freaks. He takes his yellow, transparent 20 sided die, and he throws it at the wall of the room. It rebounded three or four times, while he storms out of the room. SLAM! goes the door to the room. STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP down the hall SLAM of the door to the stairwell STOMP STOMP stomp stomp stomp slam stomp sto... out of the building. Apparently, D. has an anger management issue. Anyways, we were all stunned, and the GM, who didn't know D. as well as the rest of us did, says, "How is he going to face us tomorrow?" We found the die, and it had a chip taken out of it from the impact of the wall. That die is a holy object to this day.

In "Curious George- How to get people to go to your website?"

I hear MySpace is good for that sort of thing. And if you have a podcast, it'll drive some traffic to your site just by its existence, but of course that's extra work.

In "Bread"

I especially like 6. Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis. It is clever and insidious.

If I were teaching a class on statistics, logic, or anything else remotely similar, I would start the class with a test making each student write out what was "wrong" with each one of those statements, with bonus points going towards people who could point out a real-world example of that tactic being used seriously. Nice link, Skrik. ))

In "Kid Blurs Line."

Back in my day, it was kids dressing up as ninjas and committing ritual suicide because of D&D. With some satanism thrown in for good measure. See, his mistake was that he was too low-level. If he'd grinded up to level 26 or so, he would have only lost a few hundred HP and survived easily.

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