The whole premise for this worthless idea is based on the author's ignorance of how water softeners work.

Of course, if this article was written 10 years ago, suggesting olive or coconut oil is preferable to margarine would have been the height of esoteric heretical quackery.

You are right, your teacher is wrong. My grandmother's maiden name is "MacDanald," a variant of MacDonald, and the "Mac" is always pronounced "mack" in Scottish names. The restaurant is actually McDonalds, but "Mc" is just an abbreviation of "Mac."

It's proper to chasten those who hasten to mispronounce "often" by failing to soften the "t."

Turns out we're both right:

"Oft" is not a shorter version, it's the original Old English word. When it developed into "often," the "t" was not pronounced in accordance with other words with two consonants in a row, like "soften" (or handsome).

That's ironic; I've always thought "of-ten" sounded ignorant.

Word: Kiln

Dictionaries list either pronunciation as accepted because if something is mispronounced enough times, it becomes acceptable. Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. Google dictionary considers figurative as an acceptable meaning of the word "literal," when used for emphasis. Does that make it correct? No, it…

When I gave up all hope on RTM (I knew it was finally over when I had an overwhelming urge to punch that stupid cow face) I tried any.do, but ended up with todoist (premium). For an app to be as simple as any.do (and I like that approach), it has to do what it does very well, and it just doesn't. For example, if you…

Meh. I love the combination of Amazon Prime and Subscribe and Save, especially for some of the things we'd otherwise have to get at Whole Foods or Sprouts for many items, and for things like paper towels, Amazon subscriptions are usually cheaper and always easier. No interest in even trying out Prime Pantry to see if…

I think a clear definition of cynicism would help. Cynicism in the modern sense of pessimism or irritability should be a avoided or overcome, but cynicism as distrusting people's motives or disregarding conventional wisdom (which is more in line with the ancient Greek philosophy of Cynicism) can be valuable. I won't…

With very young / young children, I think is this 100% correct. Parents too often impute self-serving motivations and moral codes on children who are simply too young to have them. What kids want is to be loved, and they are likely to interpret being punished as not being loved anymore unless parents go out of the way…

This is all awesome, especially the Xeni quotes. You're one of the reasons I make lifehacker a priority to read on my rss reader, Alan (though I don't like feedly). I'm curious about how you use Asana as an "idea bank" - no to dos, just the place where you record and review ideas? I use evernote for this, but it's…

I do the press in and pull forward, and don't have any problems without going through the rhythmic pelvic tilting. It does come close to crossing into "shake it more than three times and you're playing with it" territory, but it gets the job done.

I can't see any benefit to using Evernote's tagging system and sticking an "X" at the end of the tag, as the lifehacker article suggests. The idea in the original article is to not use the Evernote's tagging system, and instead stick your own tags in the text, identified by the "X" at the end.

Unfortunately, 50% of all games started end with:

First, this is a great topic. But, I think there are two potential dangers here.

Do you get in the same kind of snit when passing a bottle of milk of magnesia in a pharmacy?

For me, nothing beats homemade coconut milk. Put water and coconut flakes (preferably a high quality organic variety with nothing added) in a blender (there are lots of recipes online), blend, and strain through cheesecloth or a fine mesh strainer. Or, in a vitamix, just blend on high and don't worry about straining.