An interesting argument, but apparently Aristotle thought that heavy objects only fall faster than light ones if identically shaped. This is because the heavier object must contain a higher ratio of the heavier elements (Earth and Water vs Fire and Air). See
Aristotle on falling.
If you tied a lighter object to a heavier one, it obviously won't necessarily increase the Earth density of the resulting compound object.
Can someone explain how this isn't silly? He wants it backed by intrinsic value, which I think may be missing the point of Bitcoin, and his example of the perfect thing with intrinsic value is "stocks"?
Stocks do have intrinsic value because owning a stock is equivalent to owning a company, and all the company owns (factories, farmland, guns, whatever). Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no intrinsic value.
Partly because of this, stocks are also much less volatile than bitcoin and are better at being a store of value. For instance, compare this recent bitcoin chart with this S&P500 chart over the same period. As you can see, the difference between the min and max stock is about 4%, while bitcoin is about 40%. That's 10x worse.
Is there a way of transferring stock (for instance an S&P500 ETF) as easily as bitcoins can be transferred? I don't know, but it would be very cool, and definitely much better than Bitcoin. So anyway, his idea is probably unworkable, but it's not silly or ridiculous IMHO.
Stocks have no more intrinsic value than our paper currency.
A stock means that you own part of a company. The company itself may own land, computers, factories, etc. (It could even own guns and gold! yeehaw!) Those have intrinsic value, so the stock does also.
This is why stocks are recommended for people concerned about inflation. A fall in the value of paper money typically does not affect stocks as much as most other instruments.
Below is the Sherlock Holmes quote for people that don't know what OP is referencing. My personal favorite quote of his.
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
I then kept moving in the tube and five other Korean men also were knocked to the ground in their effort to stop my tube from going off a 100 foot cliff that was located at the bottom of the bunny slope.
Let me guess, the water park slides all end in shark tanks?
When the price of paperbacks went over $5 in the early 1990s, rising at more than double the rate of inflation, it seemed like sheer greed to me.
Not saying your wrong, but it seems funny to me that $5-$10 for a full novel would seem greedy. I guess I'm just on the other side of the scale. I'm always amazed at some level when I read a good novel—it feels like I should have had to have paid $1000 for the experience because of the hundreds of hours of talented work that went into it.
Untrue. Let us take a car example. I as CEO want to move our product from place A to place B. I also want to move myself from place A to place B.
You're picking a case where you're assuming that transport is independent of everything else. If everything were like that then, sure, managers wouldn't have to know anything, and MBAs might actually make the best executives.
In many real cases, parts of the business are all connected and there aren't necessarily dividing lines. For instance, if you're having labor trouble, perhaps a fleet of trucks will be more vulnerable to strikes than rail. But perhaps your product will spend more time sitting in a hot car with real, which could be an issue if it's heat sensitive.
These are just example to fit in with your car analogy and may not be plausible. But in real life there are often cases where there aren't clean interfaces between problems, and a CEO who knows the details can ask better questions and better anticipate problems.
And that is often the problem: People who think they know something about the technology will ask for the wrong things and then are surprised they get the wrong answers.
Maybe you are right about the psychology in some cases, but there seems to be a simple response to this. The ideal is to know (not just think you know) the techology AND ask the right questions.
Very few CEOs get this. Very few are able to let go and just trust the people in their team to be qualified in their field.
Trust should be rational. If you have no idea what your people are doing it'll be harder to trust them.
There is basically no inefficient way to generate heat. It's just energy. One hundred 10 watt speakers are the same as ten 100 watt lightbulbs are the same as 1 kilowatt heater. The only way you lose energy is if it leaves your home. This is basic stuff.
But there are inefficient ways of heating your home with electricity. Excess heat from lighting has a coefficient of performance (COP) of only 1, compared to 2-3 for many practical alternatives.
Sorry to reply to myself, but this CDC report says that the main reason the US does poorly is that it has a larger proportion of preterm births.
Why does the US have more preterm births? This article mentions a few factors: a greater percentage of mothers may be teenagers or older than 35, mothers may have worse preventative health care, and/or mothers have higher risk factors like diabetes and obesity.
So anyway it seems like a complex situation; I'm sure there's plenty in here anyone can cherrypick to support their political views.
The normal quoted newborn survival statistics are in fact from the CIA world fact book [cia.gov], which is quoted as "the number of deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year", thus not really warped at all.
All statistics are warped in some way. The issue isn't whether the baby is 100 days old as GP said, but what counts as a "live birth". This page has some discussion of the complexities. Apparently some, but not most, of the US's poor record is due to these issues.
As other people have pointed out, this isn't necessarily a good measure. If two animals have the same brain size and one is smaller, it doesn't mean the smaller one is smarter.
A better measure may just be the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. See this list for example. Humans come out on top by this definition, even though whales have much bigger brains.
This seems to conflate dynamic vs static typing and functional vs procedural. The problem you discuss comes up in procedural languages all the time:
if (TEST) return bar();
else return baz();
That's more a "problem" with dynamic typing. Statically typed functional languages like Haskell or the ML family use type inferencing systems to detect these types of problems at compile-time. There's been a lot of progress made on type systems since C/C++ were developed. As the previous poster mentioned, Haskell has a particularly nice type system that can catch at compile-time issues that would generate run-time errors in C-like languages.
Re:Just read proposed legislation
on
Hacking the Law
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· Score: 1
Wow, thanks for the thoughtful and constructive post that is a refreshing change from the kneejerk cynicism/fatalism that is the usual Slashdot groupthink.
I once was on a plane and sat next to a state legislator. I brought up the concept of gerrymandering electoral districts, and argued that it's unfair to moderate voters and creates a less responsive, more divisive political culture. I think he honestly hadn't thought much about these issues before and I hopefully influenced his opinion a bit. Also it's not hopeless—quite a few states have moved to a fairer process recently.
But anyway, if I can be the typical Slashdot cynic for a moment, how do we know that the politicians actually pay attention to these letters or conversations? Do you have any specific stories or evidence which let you to believe you made a difference?
You could use a client-side program with encryption that's designed to work with untrusted servers. A simple OSS example is duplicity; it supports backends like WebDAV and Amazon S3.
I wish I had mod points, parent post is actually a pretty interesting list of topics that the scientific consensus has reversed course on. He's not saying that all science is garbage or even saying that this list should make you doubt science (maybe it should instill faith in science that it catches its mistakes). Anyway it's an interesting list.
But because he's on the wrong end of the mob on this topic he get's modded to 0 and a couple replies that basically say "Wrong, you're an idiot" get +5.
Also, how is the 3d effect in general? Even worth it? Last 3d thing I owned was the (lol) iglasses in like 1996, with an amazing resolution of like 320x200 or something ridiculous. it was fucking horrible. =/
My current computer has version 1 of the Nvidia 3D vision. I only used it a few days for novelty's sake and have no intention of using it again. Here are my reasons:
1. Most importantly, bad eyestrain. I can handle 3D movies, but 3D on a monitor is much "worse" because it is only 2 feet away from your head. I think I get a headache because my eyes are trying to focus on something far away (e.g. binocular angle) and close up (lens focusing) simultaneously. I don't see any way of fixing this; it's just the nature of the technology.
2. I already wear glasses, so wearing the Nvidia 3D glasses over my current glasses isn't very comfortable. These new glasses are supposed to be lighter so that might help.
3. Finally, I had no problems getting immersed in traditional non-stereoscopic 3D games. Sure, if you go back and forth, then for the first 3 minutes the 3D games will seem awesome and traditional displays will seem lacking, but your brain quickly compensates. Once someone has been playing a game 15 minutes, I think the 3D and non-3D experience is basically identical, and the gamer is thinking about the art design, gameplay, etc. For the same reason better graphics haven't made games for fun in the last 3 years (for me), neither did the 3D glasses.
Anyway, above are my experiences with 3D gaming, and why I won't be doing any more of it. However, all my reasons are pretty specific to me. The stuff does work pretty much as advertised and it's probably a good product for some people.
Re:I haven't read the article, but hear me out her
on
Who Killed Videogames?
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· Score: 1
Apart from the occasional idiot who never learns, you can only take people for a ride so often. Eventually people are going to get a feel for these cash-sucking parasites
is that we have to sue our own government in an attempt to force them to tell us about the laws they are enforcing against us. That alone indicates a huge problem with the system, regardless of the nature of the laws themselves.
Totally agree, but that may be just how messed up our system is. I think it's an example of why at least some of the money that traditionally went to newspapers was helpful. If the NY Times didn't do this I doubt there'd be a long line of bloggers and community news aggregators with the money and ability to sue the government for this information.
People just dismiss the problem and say "the press needs to adapt or die". I hope they don't just die and take with them a vital source of pressure on the government.
I guess I still don't get your point that it's "insane" that food isn't part of the CPI.
True, it is not part of core inflation. However, it's not insane to have a separate measure that excludes food and energy. For some purposes (e.g. some monetary analyses) you want to factor out the effects of, for instance, a bad harvest or an oil refinery explosion. It's OK to have a separate measure that excludes these things as long as you don't use it to index important payments, such as Social Security. But as mentioned above, those are based on the CPI, not core inflation.
Oh, but I forgot... food is no longer part of the official government Consumer Price Index. How insane is that? The fact is that the "inflation" figures being fed to you by the government don't even remotely reflect reality.
Actually, food, energy, and medical expenses are all part of the CPI. (Food is 17% of it according to wikipedia.) Somehow the government gets blamed for substituting hamburger for steak AND for not including food at all.
Some of the confusion is because there is another index called core inflation which doesn't include food or gas. This is useful for some purposes, but the CPI is more important because it is intended to reflect actual spending, and because inflation-adjusted payments (such as Social Security checks and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities coupons) are generally keyed off the CPI.
That wikipedia article you linked to said that the new type of cone that some women may have "lies between the standard red and green cones". It has nothing to do with seeing ultraviolet.
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting argument, but apparently Aristotle thought that heavy objects only fall faster than light ones if identically shaped. This is because the heavier object must contain a higher ratio of the heavier elements (Earth and Water vs Fire and Air). See Aristotle on falling.
If you tied a lighter object to a heavier one, it obviously won't necessarily increase the Earth density of the resulting compound object.
Stocks do have intrinsic value because owning a stock is equivalent to owning a company, and all the company owns (factories, farmland, guns, whatever). Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no intrinsic value.
Partly because of this, stocks are also much less volatile than bitcoin and are better at being a store of value. For instance, compare this recent bitcoin chart with this S&P500 chart over the same period. As you can see, the difference between the min and max stock is about 4%, while bitcoin is about 40%. That's 10x worse.
Is there a way of transferring stock (for instance an S&P500 ETF) as easily as bitcoins can be transferred? I don't know, but it would be very cool, and definitely much better than Bitcoin. So anyway, his idea is probably unworkable, but it's not silly or ridiculous IMHO.
A stock means that you own part of a company. The company itself may own land, computers, factories, etc. (It could even own guns and gold! yeehaw!) Those have intrinsic value, so the stock does also.
This is why stocks are recommended for people concerned about inflation. A fall in the value of paper money typically does not affect stocks as much as most other instruments.
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
Let me guess, the water park slides all end in shark tanks?
Not saying your wrong, but it seems funny to me that $5-$10 for a full novel would seem greedy. I guess I'm just on the other side of the scale. I'm always amazed at some level when I read a good novel—it feels like I should have had to have paid $1000 for the experience because of the hundreds of hours of talented work that went into it.
You're picking a case where you're assuming that transport is independent of everything else. If everything were like that then, sure, managers wouldn't have to know anything, and MBAs might actually make the best executives.
In many real cases, parts of the business are all connected and there aren't necessarily dividing lines. For instance, if you're having labor trouble, perhaps a fleet of trucks will be more vulnerable to strikes than rail. But perhaps your product will spend more time sitting in a hot car with real, which could be an issue if it's heat sensitive.
These are just example to fit in with your car analogy and may not be plausible. But in real life there are often cases where there aren't clean interfaces between problems, and a CEO who knows the details can ask better questions and better anticipate problems.
Maybe you are right about the psychology in some cases, but there seems to be a simple response to this. The ideal is to know (not just think you know) the techology AND ask the right questions.
Trust should be rational. If you have no idea what your people are doing it'll be harder to trust them.
To me parent, not GP, should be the +5 comment.
But there are inefficient ways of heating your home with electricity. Excess heat from lighting has a coefficient of performance (COP) of only 1, compared to 2-3 for many practical alternatives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
Sorry to reply to myself, but this CDC report says that the main reason the US does poorly is that it has a larger proportion of preterm births.
Why does the US have more preterm births? This article mentions a few factors: a greater percentage of mothers may be teenagers or older than 35, mothers may have worse preventative health care, and/or mothers have higher risk factors like diabetes and obesity.
So anyway it seems like a complex situation; I'm sure there's plenty in here anyone can cherrypick to support their political views.
All statistics are warped in some way. The issue isn't whether the baby is 100 days old as GP said, but what counts as a "live birth". This page has some discussion of the complexities. Apparently some, but not most, of the US's poor record is due to these issues.
That looks interesting but they really need to make a bluetooth version. That cord looks annoying even in the picture.
As other people have pointed out, this isn't necessarily a good measure. If two animals have the same brain size and one is smaller, it doesn't mean the smaller one is smarter.
A better measure may just be the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. See this list for example. Humans come out on top by this definition, even though whales have much bigger brains.
That's more a "problem" with dynamic typing. Statically typed functional languages like Haskell or the ML family use type inferencing systems to detect these types of problems at compile-time. There's been a lot of progress made on type systems since C/C++ were developed. As the previous poster mentioned, Haskell has a particularly nice type system that can catch at compile-time issues that would generate run-time errors in C-like languages.
Wow, thanks for the thoughtful and constructive post that is a refreshing change from the kneejerk cynicism/fatalism that is the usual Slashdot groupthink.
I once was on a plane and sat next to a state legislator. I brought up the concept of gerrymandering electoral districts, and argued that it's unfair to moderate voters and creates a less responsive, more divisive political culture. I think he honestly hadn't thought much about these issues before and I hopefully influenced his opinion a bit. Also it's not hopeless—quite a few states have moved to a fairer process recently.
But anyway, if I can be the typical Slashdot cynic for a moment, how do we know that the politicians actually pay attention to these letters or conversations? Do you have any specific stories or evidence which let you to believe you made a difference?
You could use a client-side program with encryption that's designed to work with untrusted servers. A simple OSS example is duplicity; it supports backends like WebDAV and Amazon S3.
Social security and medicare/medicade are both individually more expensive than defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
No way, it's totally ridiculous to try to understand someone's post before you publicly call them a moron.
I wish I had mod points, parent post is actually a pretty interesting list of topics that the scientific consensus has reversed course on. He's not saying that all science is garbage or even saying that this list should make you doubt science (maybe it should instill faith in science that it catches its mistakes). Anyway it's an interesting list.
But because he's on the wrong end of the mob on this topic he get's modded to 0 and a couple replies that basically say "Wrong, you're an idiot" get +5.
My current computer has version 1 of the Nvidia 3D vision. I only used it a few days for novelty's sake and have no intention of using it again. Here are my reasons:
Anyway, above are my experiences with 3D gaming, and why I won't be doing any more of it. However, all my reasons are pretty specific to me. The stuff does work pretty much as advertised and it's probably a good product for some people.
Yep, that's why no one does hard drugs today.
Totally agree, but that may be just how messed up our system is. I think it's an example of why at least some of the money that traditionally went to newspapers was helpful. If the NY Times didn't do this I doubt there'd be a long line of bloggers and community news aggregators with the money and ability to sue the government for this information.
People just dismiss the problem and say "the press needs to adapt or die". I hope they don't just die and take with them a vital source of pressure on the government.
I guess I still don't get your point that it's "insane" that food isn't part of the CPI.
True, it is not part of core inflation. However, it's not insane to have a separate measure that excludes food and energy. For some purposes (e.g. some monetary analyses) you want to factor out the effects of, for instance, a bad harvest or an oil refinery explosion. It's OK to have a separate measure that excludes these things as long as you don't use it to index important payments, such as Social Security. But as mentioned above, those are based on the CPI, not core inflation.
Actually, food, energy, and medical expenses are all part of the CPI. (Food is 17% of it according to wikipedia.) Somehow the government gets blamed for substituting hamburger for steak AND for not including food at all.
Some of the confusion is because there is another index called core inflation which doesn't include food or gas. This is useful for some purposes, but the CPI is more important because it is intended to reflect actual spending, and because inflation-adjusted payments (such as Social Security checks and Treasury Inflation Protected Securities coupons) are generally keyed off the CPI.
That wikipedia article you linked to said that the new type of cone that some women may have "lies between the standard red and green cones". It has nothing to do with seeing ultraviolet.