Oh come on. This post is so clearly wrong and makes me so upset that I just have to reply to it. I could show you a logical proof that refutes it, and based upon my vast experience I know that it surely isn't true. I await your reply so that I may provide a more detailed, point by point explanation that will convince you that my position is the correct one.
You are not even wrong. Measure-theoretic probability has proven itself as an exceptionally accurate model of highly complex, yet fully deterministic, phenomena that cannot be predicted well using other means. Such as the shuffling of a deck of cards, slightly different each time, but similar enough to be able to build a model of its behavior.
You called it "random," not me. I would call it "\underset {A\subset S_n} {sup} |Q^{*k}(A) - U(A)|" and then label it as "random" because that is what most laypeople would recognize as being like "randomness". If you have a different definition of "random" that's fine, but you can't argue against the proof that 7 shuffles is sufficient to reduce the total variation distance to stationarity from about 1.0 to about 0.33. If you disagree, please show your work.
I just bought a brand new car last month with 4 doors, performance, reliability, and reasonably priced. It has all sorts of driver aids like backup and blind spot cameras, hill assist, traction and stability control, and an emergency stop brake assist. But it has the best manual shifter I have ever had in 2 decades of driving, which includes everything from American muscle to a turbo import. There is nothing that says that a new automotive technology must necessarily diminish the fun of driving a stick shift, and I see no sign that manufacturers intend to eliminate a manual transmission as an option except in sofamobiles which you and I wouldn't want to buy anyways.
The Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model of shuffling is a textbook example precisely because it is both mathematically tractable and a pretty good model of how a riffle shuffle actually distributes cards. It is so good a model, that I would argue that if your shuffling technique isn't well-approximated by the model, then you aren't doing a riffle shuffle.
And his definition of "random" is not "outright blasphemy." To the contrary, the definition is basically "the greatest difference in probability of any particular subset of the universe of possible distributions between a perfectly uniform distribution (the distribution of an infinite number of shuffles) and the distribution you actually have after a finite number of shuffles." As the Wikipedia article mentions, another alternative would be to use a measure of entropy instead of the statistical distance, but nevertheless statistical distance is a pretty good way to do it.
Cats aren't taking pleasure in tormenting prey, or playing with the mouse, they are tiring out an animal that has teeth and claws and could potentially hurt the cat. In the wild, even if a predator manages to kill the prey, if that prey manages to wound the predator so that the next time it goes on the hunt, it is not so strong or sharp, the predator is in trouble.
Have you ever gone fishing? The best way to catch many kinds of fish is to fight it for a while and tire it out. That's the hunting methodology that cats have evolved to use.
That means the plane, big building, parking lot, etc. gets paid for before taxes. Same with salaries
Not exactly. There are rules about how big your expenses can be for things like executive compensation. For example, when a company pays for business lunches for its executives to dine out, it can't reduce income by the entire amount. And a firm can't deduct the entire amount of, say salary ($1,000,000 cap) or stock options (cap on deductible amount on incentive stock options, which is why they also offer "non-quals", i.e., non-qualified stock options).
In general, if the choice is between the firm paying a tax or an executive paying the tax, the firm will generally pay the tax (in the US), since corporate rates are lower than the highest personal income tax rate. But if they can defer taxes altogether, by giving the executive something that will appreciate in value (like equity) but avoids immediate income tax, they will do that.
After an apocalyptic event, the definition of "safe" would change. Unlimited energy for weapons production and agriculture versus the possibility of a meltdown? In a world where might makes right and food shortages are a major problem, nuclear power, no matter how unsafe, becomes incredibly safe relative to the alternative. If such an event ever happened, manhattan project level nuclear technology would be the the most valuable thing to salvage in terms of rebooting civilization.
I have kids and a cat and yes, mistakes have been made. But a dining room table? I guess it depends on the table. Mine doesn't have a good sealant so if you were to drop oil or food coloring on it it would definitely stain. And while I can live with a hairball stain on the carpet, I wouldn't want to live with a s#*! stain on the table where I eat.
I think you have the ordering wrong. If someone defecated on my dinner table I would never eat off that table again. He might as well have set fire to it. And since the table is worth more than the iPad, I think the first scenario is actually the worst.
It seems like a small thing, but it does highlight how something like theft is easy to judge the seriousness of; namely, stealing a $2 candy bar isn't as bad as stealing a $20 shirt, which isn't as bad as stealing a $20,000 car. But sometimes it can be difficult to judge the damage of vandalism, and the vandal almost always thinks it is a smaller deal than the vandalized. So let's say someone is going to slash somebody's tire. The vandal might think that it is no big deal, like a $50 tire that needs to be replaced. But the vandalized is thinking "I'm going to be late to work to deal with this, so I'm losing pay, and I have to make sure that the tire salesman gives me a good price on an equivalent tire, etc etc"
Having said all that, it certainly seems like calling the police for this particular incident of vandalism is way overkill, but (playing devil's advocate a little), what if the administration is totally technologically ignorant, and think that this kind of situation requires a $300/hour consultant to come in and "clean" the "infected" machine? Stupid people have all types of higher costs, and if you make them incur those costs, they will blame you, not themselves.
Not after he has already been convicted. "Criminal" is the right term for the appeals process that determines if there was unfairness in the trial here.
They could say, "You can have your 'stoning gays act of 1304' or your iCool 7, but you can't have both." They don't do that. If they did, then I'd be the first one to say, "great job apple" but if they take a "stand" that wasn't really going to cost them anything to begin with then I don't see why everybody is getting in line to pat Apple on the back.
They are a company, and care about money first and foremost. I expect that of them so I'm ok with that. But if you want my applause, then do something that hurts, at least a little.
a company taking a foreign policy stance has no effect other than simply giving up the market altogether. It's on the domestic side that they have a lot more influence.
But if a company believes in a goal so much that they are willing to influence on the domestic side, then shouldn't they also care enough about it to be willing to give up on the foreign market? The fact that they don't makes it seem like it's just another publicity stunt. Not that there is anything wrong with a company doing a publicity stunt, but we shouldn't give them any moral *credit* for doing so.
Anybody can push the price of a stock up 1%, you don't have to be a brokerage house. All you have to do is place a buy limit at 1% above the current stock price. But then you would have just spent $101 on a share of stock that you could have bought for $100. That's kind of what happened here - computers that thought the joke was a real product were willing to spend $101 on a stock that everyone else know was still just $100. So the point is that they didn't make money off this, they lost money off this. Which is exactly how it should be.
And as for how broken this system of trading is, a 1% change based on a joke is nothing compared to the 600 point drop in 5 minutes, which was reversed just as quickly as it dropped. Even humans could have fallen for a good April fool's day joke, but it takes computers to mess up a system that much.
create a leisure society for all, by sending people to school longer and longer
FTFY. Most of the people I know who are going to school for "longer and longer" have more leisure time than ever before in the history of humanity. Not all, but most.
Isn't this complaint similar to someone in the 1800's complaining about how the big industrial machines make it so that hobbyists who craft a small engine in their barn are no longer competitive, or in the mid 1900's complaining about electrical technology, or the 1980's complaining about circuitry, or ten years ago you couldn't build a competitive laptop? We have been in a golden age of hobbyist software since the personal computer allowed large numbers of people to own computers at home, but maybe that technology has run its course.
But there will always be "hackers" - the tools and technology will be different, but that's ok. In 20 years I bet people will be complaining about something new, like how the makerbot 24.5 is so locked down it's hardly worth using, but hey, look at my cool new dna sequencing kit! I can clone a small dinosaur!
For serious data analysis and development a laptop isn't the right tool. You want a really good keyboard and a large display (or 2) so get a desktop. For general data analysis you will still want a pretty beefy workstation (e.g. >16Gb memory) and to get those specs in a laptop gets pretty expensive. For heavy duty work she is going to ssh or vnc to a big server/cluster and she will really appreciate the extra real estate on the display(s).
She can get any laptop for general email, web surfing, etc while out and about (or maybe a tablet?). But it is much easier to query huge amounts of data or write serious code at a nice desk setup in her room (or office if she gets one).
The problem with that study is that it focuses on the HPV vaccine, where the conservative based objections revolve around the believe that giving the vaccine is akin to tacit approval of teenage sex (not dissimilar to the conservative objection to safe sex campaigns).
It is not an anti-science view, in that they believe that the vaccine does, in fact, prevent HPV transmission, and they do not believe in totally debunked theories such as the MMR/autism link. It does not appear that the survey attempted to break out the resistance to, say the MMR vaccine, which is clearly based on junk/psuedo science stoked by the Lancet article, versus Guardacil, where the resistance is based on moral objections.
I think one of the biggest problems that our modern democracies face is the confusion between science and morality. These are orthogonal bases but more and more they are being conflated into a single dimension where pro-science == moral and anti-science == immoral. There are lots of people who are anti-evolution, anti-climate change, yet perfectly good and decent people, and there are lots of people who are big supporters of all fields of scientific endeavors who are complete a$$holes. And they both have things to say, and in a democracy, get to have a voice in our joint decisionmaking process called politics. To paraphrase Churchill, it sucks but it's better than the alternative.
The whole point of Duchamp's Fountain is that it forces the observer to ask the question "What is art?" Can something be art despite the fact that the object itself has no artistic merit at all, and only could be art as a result of being in an art show? Which satisfies the definition of art, the object's artistic merit, or the opinion of the community (of artists and museum curators and patrons)?
I think you are confusing yourself by overthinking things. A 20% exponential growth function doesn't have a slope of 1.2x, it has a slope of ln(1.2)*exp(ln(1.2)*x). But if you miswrote and didn't mean to use the word "slope" and just meant "Y" then actually Y=X^2 is a closer way of thinking about exponential growth than Y=1.2X. I'm assuming your background is computer science, so think of big O notation. If someone mistook O(exp(n)) for O(n^2) you would think they were overly simplifying but for small n it probably not too bad. But if the mistook O(exp(n)) for O(n) (linear) then you would know they are totally off the mark. In the same way, mistaking an exponential for a quadratic is a silly, stupid error, but mistaking it for a linear function is really wrong
The process that gives you that fish size is in fact an exponential process, so in your example, fish size grows exponentially. It is because you say "bigger each year", which implies the recursive relationship S(t+1) = 1.2 * S(t) where S(t) is the size of the fish caught in year t. So if you catch a 1 pound fish in year 0, then you catch a 1.2 pound fish in year 1, and a 1.44 pound in year 2, a 1.728 pound in year 3, etc. S(t+1) = 1.2 * S(t) can in fact be represented as the exponential growth model S(t) = S0 * exp(lambda * t), but that is an exercise left to the reader.
It's not trickery, it's just a label for the particular math used to model the process. And if a process satisfies that model then there is nothing wrong with using that term. But if you are pointing something else out then please reply.
Rx = revenue in year x
R0 = revenue in base year (year 0)
then 20% growth means: Rx = R0 * (1 +.2)^x
represented as:
Rx = R0 * exp[(log(base e)(1 +.2)) * x]
Which is exponential growth as seen at Wolfram where lambda = log(base e)(1.2) (and every mathematician I have ever known). Not sure what you mean when you say exponential growth, but it's not the mathematical definition.
A depression is a TERRIBLE time to own any asset. You can move to follow a job if you own a house by simply selling your house. You will probably do so at a loss during a depression, but if you were renting you wouldn't get any money out when you move either. And if you were renting, and saving money on the side, whatever you invested in would also have also gone down because *it's a depression*.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on. This post is so clearly wrong and makes me so upset that I just have to reply to it. I could show you a logical proof that refutes it, and based upon my vast experience I know that it surely isn't true. I await your reply so that I may provide a more detailed, point by point explanation that will convince you that my position is the correct one.
You are not even wrong. Measure-theoretic probability has proven itself as an exceptionally accurate model of highly complex, yet fully deterministic, phenomena that cannot be predicted well using other means. Such as the shuffling of a deck of cards, slightly different each time, but similar enough to be able to build a model of its behavior.
You called it "random," not me. I would call it "\underset {A\subset S_n} {sup} |Q^{*k}(A) - U(A)|" and then label it as "random" because that is what most laypeople would recognize as being like "randomness". If you have a different definition of "random" that's fine, but you can't argue against the proof that 7 shuffles is sufficient to reduce the total variation distance to stationarity from about 1.0 to about 0.33. If you disagree, please show your work.
I just bought a brand new car last month with 4 doors, performance, reliability, and reasonably priced. It has all sorts of driver aids like backup and blind spot cameras, hill assist, traction and stability control, and an emergency stop brake assist. But it has the best manual shifter I have ever had in 2 decades of driving, which includes everything from American muscle to a turbo import. There is nothing that says that a new automotive technology must necessarily diminish the fun of driving a stick shift, and I see no sign that manufacturers intend to eliminate a manual transmission as an option except in sofamobiles which you and I wouldn't want to buy anyways.
The Gilbert-Shannon-Reeds model of shuffling is a textbook example precisely because it is both mathematically tractable and a pretty good model of how a riffle shuffle actually distributes cards. It is so good a model, that I would argue that if your shuffling technique isn't well-approximated by the model, then you aren't doing a riffle shuffle.
And his definition of "random" is not "outright blasphemy." To the contrary, the definition is basically "the greatest difference in probability of any particular subset of the universe of possible distributions between a perfectly uniform distribution (the distribution of an infinite number of shuffles) and the distribution you actually have after a finite number of shuffles." As the Wikipedia article mentions, another alternative would be to use a measure of entropy instead of the statistical distance, but nevertheless statistical distance is a pretty good way to do it.
Cats aren't taking pleasure in tormenting prey, or playing with the mouse, they are tiring out an animal that has teeth and claws and could potentially hurt the cat. In the wild, even if a predator manages to kill the prey, if that prey manages to wound the predator so that the next time it goes on the hunt, it is not so strong or sharp, the predator is in trouble.
Have you ever gone fishing? The best way to catch many kinds of fish is to fight it for a while and tire it out. That's the hunting methodology that cats have evolved to use.
That means the plane, big building, parking lot, etc. gets paid for before taxes. Same with salaries
Not exactly. There are rules about how big your expenses can be for things like executive compensation. For example, when a company pays for business lunches for its executives to dine out, it can't reduce income by the entire amount. And a firm can't deduct the entire amount of, say salary ($1,000,000 cap) or stock options (cap on deductible amount on incentive stock options, which is why they also offer "non-quals", i.e., non-qualified stock options).
In general, if the choice is between the firm paying a tax or an executive paying the tax, the firm will generally pay the tax (in the US), since corporate rates are lower than the highest personal income tax rate. But if they can defer taxes altogether, by giving the executive something that will appreciate in value (like equity) but avoids immediate income tax, they will do that.
After an apocalyptic event, the definition of "safe" would change. Unlimited energy for weapons production and agriculture versus the possibility of a meltdown? In a world where might makes right and food shortages are a major problem, nuclear power, no matter how unsafe, becomes incredibly safe relative to the alternative. If such an event ever happened, manhattan project level nuclear technology would be the the most valuable thing to salvage in terms of rebooting civilization.
I have kids and a cat and yes, mistakes have been made. But a dining room table? I guess it depends on the table. Mine doesn't have a good sealant so if you were to drop oil or food coloring on it it would definitely stain. And while I can live with a hairball stain on the carpet, I wouldn't want to live with a s#*! stain on the table where I eat.
I think you have the ordering wrong. If someone defecated on my dinner table I would never eat off that table again. He might as well have set fire to it. And since the table is worth more than the iPad, I think the first scenario is actually the worst.
It seems like a small thing, but it does highlight how something like theft is easy to judge the seriousness of; namely, stealing a $2 candy bar isn't as bad as stealing a $20 shirt, which isn't as bad as stealing a $20,000 car. But sometimes it can be difficult to judge the damage of vandalism, and the vandal almost always thinks it is a smaller deal than the vandalized. So let's say someone is going to slash somebody's tire. The vandal might think that it is no big deal, like a $50 tire that needs to be replaced. But the vandalized is thinking "I'm going to be late to work to deal with this, so I'm losing pay, and I have to make sure that the tire salesman gives me a good price on an equivalent tire, etc etc"
Having said all that, it certainly seems like calling the police for this particular incident of vandalism is way overkill, but (playing devil's advocate a little), what if the administration is totally technologically ignorant, and think that this kind of situation requires a $300/hour consultant to come in and "clean" the "infected" machine? Stupid people have all types of higher costs, and if you make them incur those costs, they will blame you, not themselves.
Not after he has already been convicted. "Criminal" is the right term for the appeals process that determines if there was unfairness in the trial here.
They could say, "You can have your 'stoning gays act of 1304' or your iCool 7, but you can't have both." They don't do that. If they did, then I'd be the first one to say, "great job apple" but if they take a "stand" that wasn't really going to cost them anything to begin with then I don't see why everybody is getting in line to pat Apple on the back.
They are a company, and care about money first and foremost. I expect that of them so I'm ok with that. But if you want my applause, then do something that hurts, at least a little.
a company taking a foreign policy stance has no effect other than simply giving up the market altogether. It's on the domestic side that they have a lot more influence.
But if a company believes in a goal so much that they are willing to influence on the domestic side, then shouldn't they also care enough about it to be willing to give up on the foreign market? The fact that they don't makes it seem like it's just another publicity stunt. Not that there is anything wrong with a company doing a publicity stunt, but we shouldn't give them any moral *credit* for doing so.
Anybody can push the price of a stock up 1%, you don't have to be a brokerage house. All you have to do is place a buy limit at 1% above the current stock price. But then you would have just spent $101 on a share of stock that you could have bought for $100. That's kind of what happened here - computers that thought the joke was a real product were willing to spend $101 on a stock that everyone else know was still just $100. So the point is that they didn't make money off this, they lost money off this. Which is exactly how it should be.
And as for how broken this system of trading is, a 1% change based on a joke is nothing compared to the 600 point drop in 5 minutes, which was reversed just as quickly as it dropped. Even humans could have fallen for a good April fool's day joke, but it takes computers to mess up a system that much.
create a leisure society for all, by sending people to school longer and longer
FTFY. Most of the people I know who are going to school for "longer and longer" have more leisure time than ever before in the history of humanity. Not all, but most.
Isn't this complaint similar to someone in the 1800's complaining about how the big industrial machines make it so that hobbyists who craft a small engine in their barn are no longer competitive, or in the mid 1900's complaining about electrical technology, or the 1980's complaining about circuitry, or ten years ago you couldn't build a competitive laptop? We have been in a golden age of hobbyist software since the personal computer allowed large numbers of people to own computers at home, but maybe that technology has run its course.
But there will always be "hackers" - the tools and technology will be different, but that's ok. In 20 years I bet people will be complaining about something new, like how the makerbot 24.5 is so locked down it's hardly worth using, but hey, look at my cool new dna sequencing kit! I can clone a small dinosaur!
Every other animal on this planet eats about as much as it can, whenever it can get it, because it doesn't know when the next meal will come by.
We evolved to do that too and so our brain (or at least the lizard part of it) is screaming at us to "EAT THAT ALL NOW!!!" and that is the problem.
For serious data analysis and development a laptop isn't the right tool. You want a really good keyboard and a large display (or 2) so get a desktop. For general data analysis you will still want a pretty beefy workstation (e.g. >16Gb memory) and to get those specs in a laptop gets pretty expensive. For heavy duty work she is going to ssh or vnc to a big server/cluster and she will really appreciate the extra real estate on the display(s).
She can get any laptop for general email, web surfing, etc while out and about (or maybe a tablet?). But it is much easier to query huge amounts of data or write serious code at a nice desk setup in her room (or office if she gets one).
The problem with that study is that it focuses on the HPV vaccine, where the conservative based objections revolve around the believe that giving the vaccine is akin to tacit approval of teenage sex (not dissimilar to the conservative objection to safe sex campaigns).
It is not an anti-science view, in that they believe that the vaccine does, in fact, prevent HPV transmission, and they do not believe in totally debunked theories such as the MMR/autism link. It does not appear that the survey attempted to break out the resistance to, say the MMR vaccine, which is clearly based on junk/psuedo science stoked by the Lancet article, versus Guardacil, where the resistance is based on moral objections.
I think one of the biggest problems that our modern democracies face is the confusion between science and morality. These are orthogonal bases but more and more they are being conflated into a single dimension where pro-science == moral and anti-science == immoral. There are lots of people who are anti-evolution, anti-climate change, yet perfectly good and decent people, and there are lots of people who are big supporters of all fields of scientific endeavors who are complete a$$holes. And they both have things to say, and in a democracy, get to have a voice in our joint decisionmaking process called politics. To paraphrase Churchill, it sucks but it's better than the alternative.
The whole point of Duchamp's Fountain is that it forces the observer to ask the question "What is art?" Can something be art despite the fact that the object itself has no artistic merit at all, and only could be art as a result of being in an art show? Which satisfies the definition of art, the object's artistic merit, or the opinion of the community (of artists and museum curators and patrons)?
Well you don't even need drones for that. Just a big enough slingshot. The office drones in gp post would probably be really good at it
I think you are confusing yourself by overthinking things. A 20% exponential growth function doesn't have a slope of 1.2x, it has a slope of ln(1.2)*exp(ln(1.2)*x). But if you miswrote and didn't mean to use the word "slope" and just meant "Y" then actually Y=X^2 is a closer way of thinking about exponential growth than Y=1.2X. I'm assuming your background is computer science, so think of big O notation. If someone mistook O(exp(n)) for O(n^2) you would think they were overly simplifying but for small n it probably not too bad. But if the mistook O(exp(n)) for O(n) (linear) then you would know they are totally off the mark. In the same way, mistaking an exponential for a quadratic is a silly, stupid error, but mistaking it for a linear function is really wrong
The process that gives you that fish size is in fact an exponential process, so in your example, fish size grows exponentially. It is because you say "bigger each year", which implies the recursive relationship S(t+1) = 1.2 * S(t) where S(t) is the size of the fish caught in year t. So if you catch a 1 pound fish in year 0, then you catch a 1.2 pound fish in year 1, and a 1.44 pound in year 2, a 1.728 pound in year 3, etc. S(t+1) = 1.2 * S(t) can in fact be represented as the exponential growth model S(t) = S0 * exp(lambda * t), but that is an exercise left to the reader.
It's not trickery, it's just a label for the particular math used to model the process. And if a process satisfies that model then there is nothing wrong with using that term. But if you are pointing something else out then please reply.
If
.2)^x
.2)) * x]
Rx = revenue in year x
R0 = revenue in base year (year 0)
then 20% growth means: Rx = R0 * (1 +
represented as:
Rx = R0 * exp[(log(base e)(1 +
Which is exponential growth as seen at Wolfram where lambda = log(base e)(1.2) (and every mathematician I have ever known). Not sure what you mean when you say exponential growth, but it's not the mathematical definition.
Your soap box is quite misinformed.
Calgary and Edmonton have more than doubled in value since 2000. Not quadrupuling, but still pretty good.
A depression is a TERRIBLE time to own any asset. You can move to follow a job if you own a house by simply selling your house. You will probably do so at a loss during a depression, but if you were renting you wouldn't get any money out when you move either. And if you were renting, and saving money on the side, whatever you invested in would also have also gone down because *it's a depression*.