hughprime

7 ms·

1.
by hughprime 17y ago
Since I had a look at a couple of them, I suppose I might as well provide reviews. "Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university
2.
by hughprime 17y ago
Which textbook are you talking about? I have a moderate hatred for most entry-level physics textbooks, which manage to pad about 100 pages' worth of information into a thousand-page tome full of glossy photographs in order to justify the $1
3.
by hughprime 17y ago
The first four are good general advice. The fifth and sixth are good ideas some of the time, the seventh is a bit platitudinous but possibly good advice some of the time, and the eighth is more like "a guide to writing like Kurt Vonnegut".
4.
by hughprime 17y ago
I assume "it looks AMAZING" is perfectly within the usual editorial standards of "omgbuntu", but wouldn't mind seeing a different headline here. How about "it looks REASONABLY GOOD" or "it looks ABOUT LIKE YOU MIGHT EXPECT"?
5.
by hughprime 17y ago
That's great, but I wonder how heavy the nuclear reactor would need to be that provides the 2 MW to power this thing. Is this something we could practically loft into orbit with present-day rockets? (Ignoring the not-entirely-unreasonable-i
6.
by hughprime 17y ago
Works great for me, but only if the music in question has no lyrics. Baroque, bebop or pretentious Philip Glass-y stuff seems to work best.
7.
by hughprime 17y ago
It obviously can't do very much to a truck, but I wonder what it would do to a human. Nothing very good, obviously, but how long would you need to keep it focused on someone before they dropped down, brain cooked? (I can't help but notice t
8.
by hughprime 17y ago
Is the single word really necessary? I mean, it already says "google.com" up in the URL bar, so you know what you're looking at.
9.
by hughprime 17y ago
You're probably taking it too seriously then. Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in every
10.
by hughprime 17y ago
The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would
11.
by hughprime 17y ago
The second sentence is a straw man. Is there some kind of competition I don't know about to mention the words "straw man" in as many threads as possible? It seems to pop up in just about every thread, along with the words "correlation doe
12.
by hughprime 17y ago
Those sorts of questions always bothered me in IQ tests too. I was also always bothered by questions like: "What comes next in this sequence? 1,4,9,16,25," Sure, the answer might be 36, but then again maybe we're looking at some subtler s
13.
by hughprime 17y ago
Probably. Hell, we could all just start using Euros (or whatever) for cash, and then exchange our Euros for plastic-only US dollars at changing booths (which would suddenly become a lot more common). This, of course, doesn't make life any e
14.
by hughprime 17y ago
Because, while it doesn't provide particularly useful advice, it is at least a good starting point for discussion on an interesting subject? Also, because people upvoted it before taking time to read it carefully and think about whether the
15.
by hughprime 17y ago
Straw man. Who the hell uses their todo list like that? Who are those "proponents" who suggest playing this sort of silly "estimate the task and match it to a time slot" game? I've never met one. You've never seen a Gantt chart? You're lu
16.
by hughprime 17y ago
This is the "makers' schedule" vs "managers' schedule" again. Donald Trump doesn't need a "To do" list because he (presumably) works on a manager's schedule -- if he decides he needs to do something he'll tell his assistant to set up a meet
17.
by hughprime 17y ago
I agree. How about six months? All the major issues have been festering for years, what's an extra six months of delay? Remember, the government can't build a new road without three years of planning, community consultation, environmental i
18.
by hughprime 17y ago
What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly because they didn't have to. That bugs you? I'm pretty grateful for it, personally. The jiha
19.
by hughprime 17y ago
Aside from that, they do realize that the internet is an international medium and the vast majority of it isn't subject to FCC rules, right? Speaking of which, as a non-US citizen, I'd like to invite companies to send me free products so
20.
by hughprime 17y ago
What about surgically implanted bombs in fat people? (Like in that movie I won't name just to avoid spoiling it for the small number of people who haven't seen it.) Does anyone have a good idea of whether that's a severe risk? Can anyone ha
21.
by hughprime 17y ago
It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked. I think you need to look up how their "match %" is compu
22.
by hughprime 17y ago
There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of sense as an
23.
by hughprime 17y ago
There are a zillion factors which haven't been corrected for. As well as class, they include message length, message quality, profile quality, number of messages received on average by each class of respondee, income, education, number of c
24.
by hughprime 17y ago
Gender preference is certainly non-equivalent to race preference. On the other hand, it does show that certain forms of discrimination which would be wrong (and just plain illegal) in other settings are perfectly okay in a dating setting. A
25.
by hughprime 17y ago
Actually I find the nationalities of the winners to be the least interesting part of Nobel Prize season. Apart from opportunities for nationalist chest-thumping, brow-beating and/or hand-wringing, who cares? On the other hand, I bet if you
26.
by hughprime 17y ago
I have nothing against golf as a game, and I've played it a few times myself, but the idea that there's this much money floating around just in sticking logos on the shirts of guys who hit balls into holes to persuade other guys to buy n
27.
by hughprime 17y ago
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with the term "polymath" -- too many people seem far too keen to apply it to themselves. I think the best strategy at this stage in history is the "know everything about something and something
28.
by hughprime 17y ago
To save me the hours and hours of curiosity, does someone want to give a brief and work-safe summary of what this particular activity is?
29.
by hughprime 17y ago
Oakland is really lacking in a few ways though. Aside from the fact that you can't walk for more than a mile without seeing something really depressing, the thing that really creeps me out about Oakland (and I'm an East Bay resident) is the
30.
by hughprime 17y ago
Only one million? Cheaper than I thought! Actually I do see a few houses in the $1 million range on that page, but none of them seem to have yards. With no backyard and no reasonable parks in the neighbourhood, where would your children pla

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