tjradcliffe

6 ms·

1.
by tjradcliffe 8y ago
"Maybe people intuitively figured out what was up (one of the parameters of the Drake Equation must be much lower than our estimate) but stopped there and didn’t bother explaining the formal probability argument." There's no
2.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
This story is a textbook example of bad reporting. The headline and opening paragraph combine two completely different categories of error--"wrong" and "late"--so that it is possible to say "most Americans". Th
3.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question under the carpet, which is, "Why is t
4.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The creation of science depended on a large number of random factors, from Judeic monotheism (or something like it) to the disasters of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and even (plausibly) the English Civil War and its aftermath. T
5.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Sure you can, unless you're shuffling a perfectly ordered deck. OP was deleted so there may be some context missing?
6.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
That's a very odd observation, because religious people as a population show very slight deviations from non-religious people. It is extremely difficult to tell by observation whether or not someone is religious, beyond church/t
7.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
It's a mediocre article. It glosses a bunch of history adequately and then points out a completely different anomaly. By "completely different" I mean "has all the signatures of an instrumental or analysis artefact.&quot
8.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Their results may be significant to VCs, but likely aren't to anyone else. They get about a 4% increase in good outcomes, from 23% to 27%, for a 1 sigma increase in expert positive response. This is significant at the 5% level. It&#x27
9.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
We find it because that's what we're looking for, or inventing. Here's a comparable question: "How is it that we can find an unfathomably small sub-set of possible symbols--a mere 26!--that are capable of encoding any id
10.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Reality is continuous. Human categories--like cancer--only have sharp edges because we draw them with an act of selective attention. The edge of our attention is discontinuous. Nothing else (that doesn't involved quantum mechanics or
11.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The meaning is not the same because it's very difficult for poor and less educated parents to give their children what rich and more educated parents give them. My kids went to a high school that had a considerable socio-economic range
12.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.) Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty
13.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
For comparison, the Great Lakes are about 60 m above sea level (Kingston, at the junction of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, is at 200 ft). Salt water inundation has not been a problem. However, invasive species (zebra mussels, for exampl
14.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
These are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign language as a way of discovering his own voice is fasci
15.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
All knowledge is probability-based. The question is: are the probabilities in this case low (or high) enough to be very interesting?
16.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
My first thought on reading the headline was: hadn't they better get printing working first? I just assumed it still doesn't because after five years or so of not being able to print anything but postscript files to a postscript p
17.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
I have long suspected that the story of "The Aristocrats" is a hoax, although I've never bothered to pursue the question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats_%28film%29 My reasons for this are
18.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
We could call it cfront: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront
19.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Yeah, and by the mid-1990's no one was using them, which is the adoption curve that's characteristic of a fad, not an effective method of doing anything useful. Now 20 years later the fad is back, right on schedule. Expect it to l
20.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
No worse than normal, at least for me. I found the experience dull. Always having some internal auditory stimulation may have been part of the cause of that. Also, I meditate very easily and prefer a whitenoise environment for meditation. A
21.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
This is fairly boring because the "incompleteness" is built in to the Navier-Stokes equation from the off, and we (physicists) have been well-aware of it for over a century. Solutions to the Navier-Stokes equation are turbulent on
22.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
One might as well say we are hardwired to social stratification (which we almost certainly are) and our language reflects that. Every human society has more-or-less arbitrary rules or fashions, and how closely our behaviour conforms to thos
23.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
What is meant here is an ordinary empirical claim that is false, which is unsurprising because it is made independently of any empirical investigation into how we form our notion of space. Observational studies in developmental psychology--
24.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
There is a certain type of mind that delights in paradoxes, to the extent that even after an explanation has been clearly produced, the person will continue to insist there is a paradox. Naming things paradoxes attracts this sort of individ
25.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> It seems given the sheer amount of it, that the universe should be taking a radiation bath from the past history of insane amounts of dark matter anihilating. The industry of dark matter modelling in cosmology involves attempting to fi
26.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
You don't have to break 'em, just put them in casts. I realize you're joking, but it reminded me of this story: one of my ex-girlfriends actually did something like this as part of her PhD: she signed up half a dozen voluntee
27.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
This is a really interesting comparison. I've done the startup thing (unsuccessfully) and know a fair number of other people who have as well (including one who came within one business decision of being a millionaire but who couldn&#x
28.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The problem is that it is politically impossible to implement the only solution that would take them to zero emissions. It is a solution that uses existing, proven, decades-old technology, but thanks to extremely powerful anti-science lobby
29.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> Why do I need a mortgage? If you want to see what life is like without access to modern financial tools, got visit an Indian Reserve in Canada. Housing is cheap there. Lack of access to modern financial instruments--municipal bonds in
30.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Many years ago I did a comprehensive analysis of Canadian mutual fund returns over about 20 years, and found that the average return per year was dead on the market. The distribuiton of returns was Guassian and had a width of about 1%. I co

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