considerables

leftists, incentives, virtue

When you enjoy loving your neighbor it ceases to be a virtue. - Kahlil Gibran, (1883-1931)

the left doesn’t want to work with incentives because they are obsessed with virtue. and there is virtue in something only if people do not enjoy doing it.

the essence of religion

The evolution of religious doctrine is like sculpture. You chip off the non-essential parts until you are left with the core. And what where is religion once we are done? It is the debris lying on the floor.

ugly proof

edit: corrected a few mistakes and polished up presentation

html fragment from opera into html clipboard

I’m a user of Supermemo and lately Evernote, and of course Opera. Now as with many softwares i use they work great alone, but their lack of cooperation is severely cripling to their ultimate usefulness together. Wouldnt it be great if (like with Firefox, which i don’t use simply because it is too slow) a selected html fragment from Opera can be copied to the clipboard into the windows HTML Clipboard format so that it can be pasted to any supported application, with the formatting mostly intact? Yes, but no I don’t have a user friendly solution, since I am myself an amateur programmer I can only give you amateurish javascript and python scripts to deal with this problem. Sorry.

first place this piece of Opera command somewhere, either as a shortcut or a menu command. (for example, in preferences -> advanced -> shortcuts -> edit (either mouse or keyboard setup)

Copy & Go to Page, “javascript:(function(){var html_selection=document.createElement(‘div’); html_selection.appendChild(window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0).cloneContents()); document.location=’data:text/cwf;charset=UTF-8,’+encodeURIComponent(document.location+’\r\n’+html_selection.innerHTML);})()”“

also add a mime type “text/cwf” which opens a python script with the following code

from sys import argv as arguments
import htmlclipboard # the module to deal with “HTML Format” (a clipboard format for formatted text)

tempfile=arguments[1] # the file opera places the copied content into
f=open(tempfile,’r’)
source=f.readline()[:-1] #source url
content=f.read() #html fragment
f.close()

cb=htmlclipboard.HtmlClipboard()
cb.PutFragment(content,None,None,source)

get the htmlclipboard module from here. if you dont have pywin32, get it here

and you are done! to copy text you just execute the Opera command with your set keyboard or mouse or menu shortcut or whatever. The formatted text will be in your clipboard.

EDITED: to include source url so that you can paste it in Evernote with the source url attribute set

references:

http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=182633&t=1233471387&page=1

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/474121/

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Traversal-Range/ranges.html

http://web.archive.org/web/20070827011520/http://forum.evernote.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=195

idiotization aversion (by anology to loss aversion)

Loss aversion is a cognitive bias where we are more afraid of losing what we already have than failing to achieve an equal magnitude gain (provided the quantity in consideration is a small proportion of total wealth).

Becoming stupider or becoming smarter by the same degree should have the same cost/benefit. Lack of intelligence is equivalent to loss of intelligence. Yet people shudder at the thought of being stupider, but think nothing of not being smarter. They think they would make all sort of horrible and stupid decisions were they less intelligent, but would never imagine themselves acting differently in a better way if they were smarter.

As Eliezer Yudkowsky said, “only knowledge can fortell the cost of ignorance”, so “only intelligence can fortell the cost of stupidity”.

Application to life? Be very very careful of simply dismissing what you do not understand.