hugh4

6 ms·

1.
by hugh4 10y ago
But proofs always come back to axioms, and on what basis do we accept axioms? That they sound intuitively right. So we've just kicked the problem upstairs a bit, we can't avoid using our intuition. Personally I'm more likely
2.
by hugh4 10y ago
But are people more likely to accept the axioms of Principia Mathematica (and the soundness of every logical step from page 1 to 300) than they are to accept the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 based on intuitive notions of what twoness, fourness and
3.
by hugh4 10y ago
But they could have extradited him before he ever went into the embassy. They didn't. Only Sweden is currently attempting to extradite him.
4.
by hugh4 10y ago
Angkor Wat was built in the twelfth century AD, and is well within the known technological capabilities of the Khmer empire at the time. A vimana, which from googling appears to be some kind of flying temple in Sanskrit myths, does not appe
5.
by hugh4 10y ago
> Today, we can kill everyone off with an exchange of the already existing nuclear weapon inventory I'm not convinced we can. For starters, the nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it was back in the 80s when those sorts o
6.
by hugh4 10y ago
Oh, right, now I understand.
7.
by hugh4 10y ago
Agreeing to do something impossible is easy. Committing to doing something impossible is no harder. It's just that doing something impossible is tricky.
8.
by hugh4 10y ago
Wait, you just got $44 million in funding and you don't have 100 users yet?
9.
by hugh4 10y ago
It's not about portrayal, it's about actual physiology. The percentage of alcohol users (ie almost everybody) who become alcoholic is quite low. The percentage of heroin or meth users who become heroin or meth addicts is very high
10.
by hugh4 10y ago
Indeed they do, because the guards' union want to maintain their monopoly on the contraband smuggling business.
11.
by hugh4 10y ago
True, although I'd guess that the massive decrease in mortality in infants under 1 (who are still massively more likely to die than older children) is probably due to improved medical intervention. For older children and teenagers it&#
12.
by hugh4 10y ago
> If you think about it logically for the era, it's incredibly unlikely that Jesus was actually unmarried Only on the assumption that "being married" is uncorrelated with "starting some weird travelling hippie Jewish
13.
by hugh4 10y ago
Has SpaceX actually cleaned out and reused any of their recovered rockets yet? I'm guessing no, they're still analysing them, but it'll be interesting when they do. (Damned if I'd want my payload on the first recycled ro
14.
by hugh4 10y ago
Or, y'know, Paris. Or Brussels. Or Paris, the time before. Or Paris, the time before that. Or Madrid. Or London. Or...
15.
by hugh4 10y ago
What a ridiculous single data point to cherry-pick. It's true, when terrorists attack Israel (as they so regularly do) they don't usually use guns. But nor do they use knives. They use explosives.
16.
by hugh4 10y ago
An engine doesn't get 100 mpg, a vehicle does. Attach it to a normal-sized vehicle and get 100 mpg under realistic driving conditions, and I'll be impressed. ('til then I'll be internet-snarky!)
17.
by hugh4 10y ago
> Heck, so are single farms. There's single farms bigger than a lot of countries.
18.
by hugh4 10y ago
That's not even a word.
19.
by hugh4 10y ago
Maybe, but if the new cross-pollination just confuses the issue rather than clarifying it, what's the point? "Suppose you have a bunch of flowers in a field, and they're planted so that the east-west direction corresponds to
20.
by hugh4 10y ago
If there's always someone saying there's a bubble, regardless of whether there is or not, does it mean there's never a bubble? If my watch always says it's 3:22, regardless of whether it is or not, does that mean it&#x27
21.
by hugh4 10y ago
True. On the other hand, nobody was trying to build them fifty years ago.
22.
by hugh4 10y ago
I was actually thinking about this earlier in the day. Could we derive the law of universal gravitation if all we had was a bunch of data about the positions of objects at times plus a bunch of machine learning algorithms, and were otherwis
23.
by hugh4 10y ago
> my wife has no fear of getting shot in China As long as she doesn't say anything nice about democracy or anything. Have we really forgotten the Tiananmen Square Massacre so quickly?
24.
by hugh4 10y ago
> What libertarian could possibly support Trump? A pragmatic one.
25.
by hugh4 10y ago
And that's just one universe. Just think how many more there might be...
26.
by hugh4 10y ago
Indeed. Either the people 10,000 years from now will be smart enough to figure out something better, or they'll be hunter-gatherers who won't be too deterred by a little sea level rise on the very edge of their territory.
27.
by hugh4 10y ago
But what language do true Scotsmen use?
28.
by hugh4 10y ago
Exactly.
29.
by hugh4 10y ago
Maybe, but I'm not convinced that they're anything other than some lucky coincidences. >He said his people were forbidden from going near the craters, as that was where the fire-devil ran down from the sun and set the land abla
30.
by hugh4 10y ago
What's wrong with entrenching the existing social order?

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