kurtosis

8 ms·

1.
by kurtosis 15y ago
I'm too lazy to look up the ref, but someone told me that the preference for average faces was actually an artifact of the averaging process. It turns out that averaging images of faces also makes the skin look a lot younger and smoother,
2.
by kurtosis 15y ago
Essential question: send and receive telephone calls play music with headphones and podcasts nice maps with gps basic internet I have never owned a smartphone before, I like the maps on ipad, and want something more portable
3.
by kurtosis 15y ago
This review is pretty fluffy, what is the best android phone right now?
4.
by kurtosis 16y ago
I actually kind of like it - true "ugliness" can just as elusive as beauty or elegance. See this interesting book - http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/Finnerty-t.ht...
5.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Are you really sure about this? It sounds equally plausible to me that not knowing both the source and target languages would give one an advantage of not relying on ad-hoc, hard-to-model, human judgements. Being monolingual is more lik
6.
by kurtosis 16y ago
if I was in that situation I would have likely just melted the gold and poured it into a hallowed out brick or something..
7.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Well the deactivation page did automatically say that the users "friends" would "miss" them. Did they actually check with these users to see if they would want their image and identity to be used in this way? If not, then it seems pretty
8.
by kurtosis 16y ago
"my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change." Shouldn't the definition of terrorism include the fact that they are violently targeting civilians? Eco
9.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Yes but isn't the possibility that your communications will be disclosed to the public by an anonymous insider already a part of this game? I don't see the naivety or idealism here - It just looks like standard journalism to me. WL has do
10.
by kurtosis 16y ago
why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy? Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact
11.
by kurtosis 16y ago
This confuses me. If it is impossible to time the market, then why does he think it is "pretty clear that the market is getting overheated"? [edit: in the comments he explains that he's looking at "revenues and cash flow and discounted cas
12.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Read "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" by Larry Bartels. He gives some evidence of the harmful political effects of income inequality. I don't know why it matters whether the scale is increasing - I think it
13.
by kurtosis 16y ago
The logic is simple: Money buys political influence. Income inequality thus leads to political inequality. The government is corrupted to serve the interests of the superrich. Sounds like systemic damage to me.
14.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Just a guess, The city I live in, Berlin has an area of ~821 km^2 Let's suppose that one city block is about 0.2 km x 0.2 km This implies that there are on the order of 10 km of road per km^2 of area. Thus the length of road is O(10^4) km
15.
2010 Physics Nobel Prize (Graphene)(nobelprize.org)
94 points by kurtosis 16y ago|28 comments
16.
Later: What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?(newyorker.com)
22 points by kurtosis 16y ago|0 comments
17.
by kurtosis 16y ago
I think so. At any one point in time, at the frontier of human knowledge, there are many research proposals floating around for what direction we should next expand the frontier. Some of these proposals will lead to valuable gains in know
18.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Another issue: perhaps the increase in happiness with income (I) reported for I < 75k is due to the fact that jobs with higher income have nicer work conditions and colleagues. If this is true it should be possible to make people happi
19.
by kurtosis 16y ago
I don't understand what you are saying. Who is marginalizing the ambitions of others? Why is it easy? I take it you think that the study is invalid because you called it "crap" and a "joke". I'm honestly not sure - why is it a joke or cra
20.
by kurtosis 16y ago
I found this article to be completely unintelligible. It was about as reasonable as a horoscope.
21.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Yeah but what about the long term side effects of "lack of attention, anxiety and other issues", which aren't just possible, but probable!
22.
by kurtosis 16y ago
I would Love it if referee reports were published with papers. Why waste all of the unpaid time and research of the referees by compressing their opinions into a yes/no/revise decision? This would improve the quality of the reports, and m
23.
X-Ray Laser Resurrects a Laboratory No Longer in the Vanguard(nytimes.com)
4 points by kurtosis 16y ago|0 comments
24.
by kurtosis 16y ago
"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge." Discovering new solutions and ideas often involves a lot of naivety - Making progress often requires a willingness to approach a problem with a truly fresh perspective,
25.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Honest Criticism: Too slow. I don't like being put on hold. Please just make it fast.
26.
by kurtosis 16y ago
It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european! Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a native speaker! The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone witho
27.
by kurtosis 16y ago
The standard advice I've heard is: Work for defense companies to learn the technology, and then leave to transfer this technology toward peaceful (and often lucrative) applications. Swords into Ploughshares.
28.
by kurtosis 16y ago
While I believe that this advice is technically true - it avoids a very critical issue and is thus misleading. The more important questions are: How "good" do you have to be to get an outcome comparable to the average lawyer or physician (
29.
by kurtosis 16y ago
If this technology becomes more widespread, I would expect to see people wearing clothing in public that covers their faces: hoods, hats, and thick sunglasses. I've heard the widespread presence of surveillance cameras cited as one reason
30.
by kurtosis 16y ago
Perhaps the sad fact is that being entertaining and being accurate are conflicting goals. Who wants to listen to a complex explanation for why the "fifteen minutes of videotaped conversation" method ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottm

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