"To what extent can xkcd be credited?" Not a great extent. Most of us knew the math already
There is a difference between knowing the math and applying it. A nice, easy to remember story can make that difference.
but it only works well when you really select randomly from a dictionary instead of making grammatically correct sentences
Grammatically correct is not that much of a reduction in key space. I would imagine that "Adjective" "Noun" "Transitive verb" "Adjective" "Noun" yields a larger keyphrase than four random words, and it is probably easier to remember than "Noun" "Noun" "Adjective" "Noun", even for rare words.
IIRC, a malevolent USB device can access everything going on on the bus. Do you use a USB keyboard? That is every key-stroke recorded and sent to the CIA.
Remember, if AZT was in trials during the time period - if it had been found to have fatal side effects, there wouldn't be an oscar-winning movie about the guy... or if there were, he would be the bad guy. He wanted to make money, he got lucky. It happens.
Woodruff WAS the bad guy who smuggled non-effective medicine. He SHOULD have been the bad guy of the movie: "Worse, the real Woodruff rejected the one truly promising drug at the time, AZT, as hopelessly toxic and instead smuggled drugs like Peptide T, which never panned out. " (from Science Based Medicine).
That view makes the word "unique" close to meaningless. Disregarding objects where quantum mechanics are the dominant theory, everything is unique. No two LEGO bricks are completely identical at the atomic level, so they are all at least a little unique. If there are no degrees of unique, they are all unique, and as unique as this spacecraft, or the moon, or the George Washington. So it merely becomes a word for "a thing that we can distinguish from other things given enough effort", which is another way to say "a thing that is not primarily controlled by quantum mechanics". We don't need a word for that concept.
The metric system only simplifies a few grade-school problems.
The metric system makes calculations where you combine units easier. These tends to occur in science, particularly (in my experience) when calculating energy (because so many different formulas give energy, or because J=N*m=kg*m^2/s^2=Pa*m^3=W*s).
Not all forms of the foms of punishment that satisfies the need for venegeance will be equally bad at rehabilitating. Both needs exist and there certainly is a tendency for them to run counter to each other, but you don't necessarily have to choose either one or the other.
In addition to the possibility that you could be lying that other posters have pointed out, the possibility of punishment could also works as a deterrent to keep other people from doing their first crime.
It isn't a dichotomy, legal punishment is part vengeance by proxy, part rehabilitation, part keeping the criminals off the streets, and part deterrent.
To keep vigilantism to a minimum. Part of the social contract for our societies is that we have given up our possibility for vengeance, on the promise that the state will punish the people who should be punished. If the public does not feel that this bargain is being held up by the state, they might take the matter into their own hands.
Socioeconomic status of the parents, including stock portfolio and presumably correlating with political connections, is worse than IQ tests in predicting success. However, so few people have large amounts of stock and many political connections that it could be a better predictor for this subpopulation, but still lose out over the general public.
IQ tests are [...] not applicable for general usage
Childhood IQ tests is one of the best predictions we have of adult success, in whatever terms we have tried to measure that. They aren't good, but they are better than, say, socio-economic status of the home.
Quite possibly, each and every person is similarly intelligent, only adapted to different environments.
You haven't been teaching much, I can hear. It seems that some people are just faster at understanding and applying information than others. In what environment is it an advantage to be slow to understand new information? Even within the same social strata, there still seem to be quite a spread, which wouldn't be expected if it was simply adaption.
people have tried choose-your-own-price experiments before, and it turns out that almost no-one pays anything.
You have better tell that to Humble Indie Bundle, where the average (mean, I guess) payment is nearly 4 dollars at the moment. While I don't know what the median is, the top 10 contributors is only responsible for less than 1% of that, so "nearly no-one" paying anything doesn't seem to fit the pattern.
Firstly she says that her code was deleted/reverted without explanation, or with hostile comments left.
But we don't know whether this is a fair representation of the events. Especially with hostile comments, that is a subjective call, and it is easy to mistake " harsh criticism" for "hostilily". If we imagine a world were she were a bad coder, it could look exactly the same to us, so we have no way to tell whether we are in the world where she is a good coder and the company has a bad working environment, or we are in the world were she is a bad coder who can't take criticism (at least from just this story. There might be prior information that could help us make an educated guess).
Only if you don't get more from it via food into your body
The original post I commented on talked about bioaccumulation. Your original post calculated how much was left after certain amounts of time. But now you were suddenly always talking about something else? Please stop moving the goalposts.
Simple math: 1mg * 2^10 (for easy calculation) equals 1 gram. 1gram * 2^10 (now we are at 2^20, which equals 20 years) equals 1kg... 1kg is far away from multiple tons, isn't it?
Are you assuming that the biological half-life is 1 year? Because it isn't. Which I said earlier. And which year acknowledged in your previous post. It is 70 days. That means that 20 years is roughly 100 half-lifes. So after 20 years, the proportion of the original material that is left is 2^-100, which is approaximately 10^-30. Or roughly 1/(10 millions * Avogardos number). Which means we need top start out with 10 million moles to have 1 atom left after 20 years. 10 million moles of something that weighs around 100 g/mole is a billion grams. Or a million kg. Or a thousand tons. So no, the correct answer is not "far away from multiple tons". Your answer is, but "Your mass is unfortunately way off:D"
Both of your examples have independent central banks, and so are not examples of what happens if we let politicians control of the printing press. I am not sure how they are relevant to the discussion of what happens if we do.
After around 15 years, the proportion of cesium that is left in the body is close to Avogrado's number. After 20 years, you need to start out with millions of moles, or thousands of tons, of cesium in the body for there to be one atom left. You are not even technically correct.
Plutonium (pu-239) presents as Iron. Iron is highly sought after in oceanic metabolisms and therefore complete uptake of pu-239 into the food chain is guaranteed. This is the nature of bio-accumulation and the effects are cumulative.
Plutonium would be present in the ocean as PuO2, right? Which is highly insoluble. Do we have any measurements on the bioavailability of plutonium in ocean environments?
pu-239 has a half life of 25,000 years and is fatal to humans at a dose of around 1-10 micrograms [oppenheimer].
That depends highly on the form. If it is ingested as PuO2, only 0.04% is taken up, the rest is excreted. Granted, it might be much more bioavalable if it is bioaccumulated.
When the person is buried the isotope will eventually make it's way into the water table, if cremated the ashes will carry the radioisotope back into the air.
Not if it is present as the oxide, which it will surely be after cremation. The oxide is unreactive (unless it is reduced), and heavy, so dust will settle relatively quickly.
The main problematic isotopes from Fukushima seem to be I-131, which decays too fast to bioaccumulate, and Te-129m and Cs-137, neither of which bioaccumulate. In particular, caesium has a biological half life of app. 70 days, so it will not sit in the body for years or decades.
IIRC, dumping in sea water would not only kill the commercial life of the reactor. Sea water becomes much more radioactive than non-saline water when radiated with neutrons (I think the neutron capture of Cl-35 is to blame, but I am in no way sure), so the cleanup also becomes much more elaborate.
But they will have different physico-chemical properties (polarity etc.) and different reactivities, so they will have different pharmacokinetics and different pharmacodynamics. This is a good thing, because it means that the treatment can (to some degree) be tailor-made to the problem, but it means that talking about "identical" effects of different compounds is close to being meaningless.
They seem to have similar effects, but these things are notoriously hard to study objectively, so anecdotal evidence is not enough to establish that they have identical effects (and it would be really weird if they did. How should such different molecules get identical pharmacokinetics and pharmarkodynamics?).
Slashdot Mirror
"To what extent can xkcd be credited?" Not a great extent. Most of us knew the math already
There is a difference between knowing the math and applying it. A nice, easy to remember story can make that difference.
but it only works well when you really select randomly from a dictionary instead of making grammatically correct sentences
Grammatically correct is not that much of a reduction in key space. I would imagine that "Adjective" "Noun" "Transitive verb" "Adjective" "Noun" yields a larger keyphrase than four random words, and it is probably easier to remember than "Noun" "Noun" "Adjective" "Noun", even for rare words.
IIRC, a malevolent USB device can access everything going on on the bus. Do you use a USB keyboard? That is every key-stroke recorded and sent to the CIA.
The original question was "Why should this exist?", so direct your complaint to the GPP.
Remember, if AZT was in trials during the time period - if it had been found to have fatal side effects, there wouldn't be an oscar-winning movie about the guy... or if there were, he would be the bad guy. He wanted to make money, he got lucky. It happens.
Woodruff WAS the bad guy who smuggled non-effective medicine. He SHOULD have been the bad guy of the movie: "Worse, the real Woodruff rejected the one truly promising drug at the time, AZT, as hopelessly toxic and instead smuggled drugs like Peptide T, which never panned out. " (from Science Based Medicine).
That view makes the word "unique" close to meaningless.
Disregarding objects where quantum mechanics are the dominant theory, everything is unique. No two LEGO bricks are completely identical at the atomic level, so they are all at least a little unique. If there are no degrees of unique, they are all unique, and as unique as this spacecraft, or the moon, or the George Washington.
So it merely becomes a word for "a thing that we can distinguish from other things given enough effort", which is another way to say "a thing that is not primarily controlled by quantum mechanics".
We don't need a word for that concept.
The metric system only simplifies a few grade-school problems.
The metric system makes calculations where you combine units easier. These tends to occur in science, particularly (in my experience) when calculating energy (because so many different formulas give energy, or because J=N*m=kg*m^2/s^2=Pa*m^3=W*s).
Not all forms of the foms of punishment that satisfies the need for venegeance will be equally bad at rehabilitating. Both needs exist and there certainly is a tendency for them to run counter to each other, but you don't necessarily have to choose either one or the other.
In addition to the possibility that you could be lying that other posters have pointed out, the possibility of punishment could also works as a deterrent to keep other people from doing their first crime.
It isn't a dichotomy, legal punishment is part vengeance by proxy, part rehabilitation, part keeping the criminals off the streets, and part deterrent.
To keep vigilantism to a minimum. Part of the social contract for our societies is that we have given up our possibility for vengeance, on the promise that the state will punish the people who should be punished. If the public does not feel that this bargain is being held up by the state, they might take the matter into their own hands.
the idea that if you make someone suffer enough they will not commit any more crimes for fear of more.
I think you give the author too much credit. As I read it, it is steeped in pure lust for vengeance, no rational thought required.
Socioeconomic status of the parents, including stock portfolio and presumably correlating with political connections, is worse than IQ tests in predicting success. However, so few people have large amounts of stock and many political connections that it could be a better predictor for this subpopulation, but still lose out over the general public.
IQ tests are [...] not applicable for general usage
Childhood IQ tests is one of the best predictions we have of adult success, in whatever terms we have tried to measure that. They aren't good, but they are better than, say, socio-economic status of the home.
Quite possibly, each and every person is similarly intelligent, only adapted to different environments.
You haven't been teaching much, I can hear. It seems that some people are just faster at understanding and applying information than others. In what environment is it an advantage to be slow to understand new information? Even within the same social strata, there still seem to be quite a spread, which wouldn't be expected if it was simply adaption.
I'm not saying it has to be that way. I am merely pointing out that we can't distinguish the different scenarios based on the evidence at this point.
people have tried choose-your-own-price experiments before, and it turns out that almost no-one pays anything.
You have better tell that to Humble Indie Bundle, where the average (mean, I guess) payment is nearly 4 dollars at the moment. While I don't know what the median is, the top 10 contributors is only responsible for less than 1% of that, so "nearly no-one" paying anything doesn't seem to fit the pattern.
Do we know that the women were encouraged to hula hoop?
Firstly she says that her code was deleted/reverted without explanation, or with hostile comments left.
But we don't know whether this is a fair representation of the events. Especially with hostile comments, that is a subjective call, and it is easy to mistake " harsh criticism" for "hostilily". If we imagine a world were she were a bad coder, it could look exactly the same to us, so we have no way to tell whether we are in the world where she is a good coder and the company has a bad working environment, or we are in the world were she is a bad coder who can't take criticism (at least from just this story. There might be prior information that could help us make an educated guess).
Only if you don't get more from it via food into your body
The original post I commented on talked about bioaccumulation. Your original post calculated how much was left after certain amounts of time. But now you were suddenly always talking about something else? Please stop moving the goalposts.
Simple math: 1mg * 2^10 (for easy calculation) equals 1 gram. 1gram * 2^10 (now we are at 2^20, which equals 20 years) equals 1kg ... 1kg is far away from multiple tons, isn't it?
Are you assuming that the biological half-life is 1 year? Because it isn't. Which I said earlier. And which year acknowledged in your previous post. It is 70 days. That means that 20 years is roughly 100 half-lifes. So after 20 years, the proportion of the original material that is left is 2^-100, which is approaximately 10^-30. Or roughly 1/(10 millions * Avogardos number). Which means we need top start out with 10 million moles to have 1 atom left after 20 years. 10 million moles of something that weighs around 100 g/mole is a billion grams. Or a million kg. Or a thousand tons. So no, the correct answer is not "far away from multiple tons". Your answer is, but "Your mass is unfortunately way off :D"
Both of your examples have independent central banks, and so are not examples of what happens if we let politicians control of the printing press. I am not sure how they are relevant to the discussion of what happens if we do.
If it was so obvious, why didn't anyone use it before iOS demonstrated it?
Because it is only a good idea on a phone with a capacitive touchscreen as its main input device. How many devices had that before the iPhone?
After around 15 years, the proportion of cesium that is left in the body is close to Avogrado's number. After 20 years, you need to start out with millions of moles, or thousands of tons, of cesium in the body for there to be one atom left. You are not even technically correct.
Plutonium (pu-239) presents as Iron. Iron is highly sought after in oceanic metabolisms and therefore complete uptake of pu-239 into the food chain is guaranteed. This is the nature of bio-accumulation and the effects are cumulative.
Plutonium would be present in the ocean as PuO2, right? Which is highly insoluble. Do we have any measurements on the bioavailability of plutonium in ocean environments?
pu-239 has a half life of 25,000 years and is fatal to humans at a dose of around 1-10 micrograms [oppenheimer].
That depends highly on the form. If it is ingested as PuO2, only 0.04% is taken up, the rest is excreted. Granted, it might be much more bioavalable if it is bioaccumulated.
When the person is buried the isotope will eventually make it's way into the water table, if cremated the ashes will carry the radioisotope back into the air.
Not if it is present as the oxide, which it will surely be after cremation. The oxide is unreactive (unless it is reduced), and heavy, so dust will settle relatively quickly.
The main problematic isotopes from Fukushima seem to be I-131, which decays too fast to bioaccumulate, and Te-129m and Cs-137, neither of which bioaccumulate. In particular, caesium has a biological half life of app. 70 days, so it will not sit in the body for years or decades.
IIRC, dumping in sea water would not only kill the commercial life of the reactor. Sea water becomes much more radioactive than non-saline water when radiated with neutrons (I think the neutron capture of Cl-35 is to blame, but I am in no way sure), so the cleanup also becomes much more elaborate.
But they will have different physico-chemical properties (polarity etc.) and different reactivities, so they will have different pharmacokinetics and different pharmacodynamics. This is a good thing, because it means that the treatment can (to some degree) be tailor-made to the problem, but it means that talking about "identical" effects of different compounds is close to being meaningless.
They seem to have similar effects, but these things are notoriously hard to study objectively, so anecdotal evidence is not enough to establish that they have identical effects (and it would be really weird if they did. How should such different molecules get identical pharmacokinetics and pharmarkodynamics?).