nerd_stuff

6 ms·

31.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Perhaps you should learn something from Kuhn and consider that attachment to your pet paradigm is holding you back. When a scientist wants to build up the self-image of science they do the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. T
32.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
> Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different? They're so different that I'm surprised it&#x
33.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
I've given you a corrective upvote. I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket l
34.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
The General Sholium[0] was an addendum , not a set of corrections to The Principia. And what book doesn't have some corrections between the first and second edition? > There are sociological reasons why students of science are not
35.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like
36.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before. Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been plac
37.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton&#
38.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
I don't think what Feynman said was any more belligerent than kicking an unwanted guest out of one's house.
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Not to nitpick but because this is really cool: petrified wood is actually stone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_wood
40.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the spinning arrows are Phasors. Ironically the spinning arrows might make more sense than the math that describes them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasors
41.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
I think the title isn't overstated but awkward in a way that we're all translating it into an overstatement. Between the quotes and not knowing what a language universal was I assumed they meant a universal language, apparently I&
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
By the way if you ever want a great set of tools to play with language check out Python's Natural Language Toolkit: http://www.nltk.org/
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
I read it hoping to make a Lisp/Esperanto joke but alas, they only found one universal aspect of all languages, they did not find a universal language. The universal tendency is to bundle words together: > You can see this effect b
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
If you design a city, and then design a slightly better or worse city, and repeat that process until every new modification only creates a worse city, is that not at least a locally ideal city evolved through design?
45.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Twilight Princess takes 50+ hours to beat the first time and that's with being shepherded through by game mechanics. Even then a couple of things take forever to find. I like what the author says but when you have to find something an
46.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
This book by James Scott has a very interesting perspective on the mapping of unmapped cities. The TL;DR is that an unmapped or unmappable city can't be managed from afar. In an unmapped city you must go there to manage it, in a mapp
47.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
One derivation starts with E = mc^2, which is a special case of E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2 but with velocity set to zero. In the second equation if you instead set the mass to zero you get p = E/c (momentum equals energy divided by the spe
48.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
So they "build up" momentum out of nowhere? I think that just moves the breaking of conservation of momentum to a different place. I'm glad they're testing this until it's proven one way or the other but if it some
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
From a glance I wouldn't expect this "western ceremonial magic" to bring anything but confusion and maybe the illusion of not-confusion. But if it works for you do your thing. I've been around enough to reject the notio
50.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
> Terence McKenna has literally volumes to say about this argument. So now that we've moved beyond this simpleton back-and-forth, what say you about his position vis a vis meditation? If somebody makes a living telling people things
51.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
In addition we live on a (mostly) 2-dimensional plane so we can't scale transportation capacity indefinitely, which means even if the roads were owned privately it's nearly impossible for a market to form that would force them to
52.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Neurochemistry and the experience of consciousness are very astonishing, I just think it's a bit egocentric to assume they're the most astonishing things in the universe.
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
> ...and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you. I'm only making the assumption o
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
By all accounts NASA's getting ready to announce they've found an earth-like planet and you guys are like "yeah but I'm sure it won't compare the experience of taking my favorite drug." That's a sad and c
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Some useful background for the story: Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in QED. That being said taking shots at Feynman is a public act of rebellion these days, like running up and touchi
56.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
What about the POWerwheel lacing pattern? Remove some of those retarding spokes for extreme power gains! It may have dominated the other solutions so hard your computer tossed it out as an outlier and was too ashamed to report the error.
57.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
In the author's language, Clojure, it's trivial to print the intermediate value at every stage of a threading macro so you can watch your data as it transforms and pinpoint the problem, ex: (defn debug-it [x] (
58.
by nerd_stuff 11y ago
He's apparently talking about Clojure's thread macro specifically. If you're not familiar it can be a way to organize code in a straightforward, human-readable, easily debuggable syntax. Ex: (~> (sha1 in) (
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
Diffusers do a similar (but different) thing while looking slightly cooler than dimples :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuser_%28automotive%29
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by nerd_stuff 11y ago
To expand on this: If you're familiar with Python Leiningen takes the place of both pip and virtualenv. Every project has a project.clj file where you declare your project dependencies and running "lein deps" from your proje

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