A particular bird not being able to reproduce is so vastly different than two species of birds not being able to reproduce with one another. An analogous situation with humans would be, for instance, if Asians and Hispanics weren't able to reproduce with one another, while members of each ethnic group can among themselves. This is significantly different from what you described.
What my argument states is that, if you were to flip 10,000 coins twice, then the two experiments would be equivalent. If you pick two civilizations at random, they're each values from *the same* random variable. You misinterpreted my argument.
I actually like the 50/50 odds. Here's why. Pick two civilizations at random. Assuming a continuous distribution of sophistication, the probability of them being the same is zero. Thus one will be more sophisticated than the other. By the symmetry of a random choice, the probability must be 50/50.
The [major] thing to get around here is that we are hardly a random choice of civilization. We are picked specifically by our presumed ability to observe another civilization. However, I'm willing to overlook this and believe the estimate's right.
In short, this is not a simple problem to prove/disprove.
There is no bijective mapping from any finite set to a smaller finite set. QED. The only way to create a good compression scheme is to restrict the domain of "likely" strings; exploit relative frequencies. Although it's creative and amusing, your compression scheme cannot work in general, and I'd expect it to actually inflate file sizes significantly in general.
Likewise. The first two lines of the parent's post were in quotes, as they were taken directly from its parent's post. He was criticizing the same thing you were, but he was correcting the right person.
Occurences: a - 5940 b - 0 c - 1946 d - 238 e - 3210 f - 0 g - 2738 h - 1192 i - 2666 j - 0 k - 0 l - 14645 m - 1938 n - 3195 o - 1457 p - 1398 q - 0 r - 2771 s - 3069 t - 3575 u - 3273 v - 430 w - 0 x - 0 y - 10379 z - 0
The reason we shouldn't redefine the gram to be what is now the kilogram is that -- besides massive relabelling issues -- nobody wants to talk about micrograms of salt in their food. Mu is a funny symbol to draw, and it would only cause problems.
Re:Touch pads in the future NEED to be "one button
on
The Hundred-Buck PC
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Although this is obviously a troll, I need to comment on one point:
"even the NexT computer by steve jobs had two buttons but BOTH were set to the same action by default for intuitive simplicity."
It is NOT intuitive for two buttons right next to each other to serve the same purpose.
I had the same kind of science education as you had. I know that evolution is a theory, and I agree that it is important to understand that it is fallable. As another poster noted, most (all?) K-12 science textbooks include a chapter explaining this. However, I think that making this point on the cover of the book absolutely screams to an elementary school student not to believe what is inside of the book *at all*.
Imagine if the president (any president) announced in a speech that relativity was just a theory, and that one should exercise caution before using it. While what he is announcing is the truth, it sends a strong signal that relativity is not useful because it is so likely to be flawed. For this reason -- because of the signal sent by these stickers -- I believe that they are a bad idea.
Einstein did not disprove Newton; rather Einstein's Relativity is a special case of Newtonian physics, an extension, not a contradiction. It is not an accident this is so; the reason Einstein could extend Newton's work is that Newton's work is logically consistent with reality.
This is untrue. Relativistic physics show that Newtonian physics are wrong -- but still very good approximations at low velocities.
I do understand logic. I understand your point. But the parent was certainly pointing the truth: Bertrand Russell began his proof with axioms. He had to. Without axioms, there is no ability to prove. So what Russell proved was that, given his initial axioms (probably about the set definition of natural numbers?), 1+1 must be equal to 2. He did not -- nor was it possible for him to -- prove his axioms. Therefore, belief that 1+1=2 lies in ones belief in the absolute truth of his axioms.
The stickers state simple fact; evolution is a theory. It would be closed-minded and unscientific to state that no other theories could be made, or should be heard. While it is certainly true that evolution is a theory, introducing a topic with a statement pretty much saying "everything I'm going to present might be wrong" -- which I claim this is equivalent to -- is not a way to get students to think they are learning something important. This is like putting a sticker on a math book saying "1+1=2 is only true according to some beliefs. Proceed with caution."
Bad analogy. Try keeping a Windows machine running for two weeks working on not-so-intensive computations. Now try keeping the same machine running for 1 day with very heavy workload for the entire day. Which is more likely to crash? Probably the latter. Plus, if there's a bug in the former early on in the process, it can still be fixed and run without much disturbance. An hour of downtime is much less critical in a two-week setting than a 1-day setting.
Never came close to winning?!?!
With 5,962,657 votes cast in Florida, the final count had Al Gore losing by 537 votes. That is less than 1/10,000th of the votes. How is this not close?
With a "stateside release date of November 1," this is coming out just in time to distract the young voters from performing their civic duty. We're being repressed!!
Whoa, okay. Too much medication...
Luckily, very few power tools will keep going when you let go to drop it on your leg. Also, of the tools shown, none of them are portable (table saw, band saw, chop saw) so that's not really an issue. This, of course, doesn't mean people won't just strike the spinning blade with their hand quickly, or push their friends into it as it's moving (still leaving a significant cut).
Well, if you trigger it you have to stop your work and go buy a new cartridge, which kinda seems like a PITA.
While I'm sure you're right that it would be a pain to have to stop working to get it to work again, don't you think it might be less cumbersome than having to stop because you lost your finger, hand, or other various appendage?
By computers, he most certainly did not mean what we today count as a computer.
Yes, clearly he was talking about room-filling, power-hogging, cripplingly-expensive computers like ENIAC, as no one in 1949 could imagine having as much (or significantly more) computing power in anything as small as our current PCs. The reason this statement has been so often quoted is that it reminds skeptics that just because something isn't feasible now, there's no telling what the future will bring.
I completely disagree. This car can travel arbitrarily large distances independent of how much gas you pour on it. The same goes for if you add no gas at all (which happens to be the preferred method for getting it to work). So this case is infinity/x, where x is the amount of gas. If you set x to be one, then you see that it gets infinite miles per gallon.
Slashdot Mirror
A particular bird not being able to reproduce is so vastly different than two species of birds not being able to reproduce with one another. An analogous situation with humans would be, for instance, if Asians and Hispanics weren't able to reproduce with one another, while members of each ethnic group can among themselves. This is significantly different from what you described.
What my argument states is that, if you were to flip 10,000 coins twice, then the two experiments would be equivalent. If you pick two civilizations at random, they're each values from *the same* random variable. You misinterpreted my argument.
I actually like the 50/50 odds. Here's why. Pick two civilizations at random. Assuming a continuous distribution of sophistication, the probability of them being the same is zero. Thus one will be more sophisticated than the other. By the symmetry of a random choice, the probability must be 50/50.
The [major] thing to get around here is that we are hardly a random choice of civilization. We are picked specifically by our presumed ability to observe another civilization. However, I'm willing to overlook this and believe the estimate's right.
There is no bijective mapping from any finite set to a smaller finite set. QED. The only way to create a good compression scheme is to restrict the domain of "likely" strings; exploit relative frequencies. Although it's creative and amusing, your compression scheme cannot work in general, and I'd expect it to actually inflate file sizes significantly in general.
Umm...I don't know about you, but I can only get up to 1023 with my 10 bits. Don't forget to count 2^0!
Amen. I just dusted off my copy yesterday, and it's still a fantastic game.
Likewise.
The first two lines of the parent's post were in quotes, as they were taken directly from its parent's post. He was criticizing the same thing you were, but he was correcting the right person.
No he didn't.
Occurences:
a - 5940
b - 0
c - 1946
d - 238
e - 3210
f - 0
g - 2738
h - 1192
i - 2666
j - 0
k - 0
l - 14645
m - 1938
n - 3195
o - 1457
p - 1398
q - 0
r - 2771
s - 3069
t - 3575
u - 3273
v - 430
w - 0
x - 0
y - 10379
z - 0
Nope...it's probably not random.
The reason we shouldn't redefine the gram to be what is now the kilogram is that -- besides massive relabelling issues -- nobody wants to talk about micrograms of salt in their food. Mu is a funny symbol to draw, and it would only cause problems.
Although this is obviously a troll, I need to comment on one point:
"even the NexT computer by steve jobs had two buttons but BOTH were set to the same action by default for intuitive simplicity."
It is NOT intuitive for two buttons right next to each other to serve the same purpose.
That is all.
Imagine if the president (any president) announced in a speech that relativity was just a theory, and that one should exercise caution before using it. While what he is announcing is the truth, it sends a strong signal that relativity is not useful because it is so likely to be flawed. For this reason -- because of the signal sent by these stickers -- I believe that they are a bad idea.
This is untrue. Relativistic physics show that Newtonian physics are wrong -- but still very good approximations at low velocities.
I do understand logic. I understand your point. But the parent was certainly pointing the truth: Bertrand Russell began his proof with axioms. He had to. Without axioms, there is no ability to prove. So what Russell proved was that, given his initial axioms (probably about the set definition of natural numbers?), 1+1 must be equal to 2. He did not -- nor was it possible for him to -- prove his axioms. Therefore, belief that 1+1=2 lies in ones belief in the absolute truth of his axioms.
The stickers state simple fact; evolution is a theory. It would be closed-minded and unscientific to state that no other theories could be made, or should be heard.
While it is certainly true that evolution is a theory, introducing a topic with a statement pretty much saying "everything I'm going to present might be wrong" -- which I claim this is equivalent to -- is not a way to get students to think they are learning something important. This is like putting a sticker on a math book saying "1+1=2 is only true according to some beliefs. Proceed with caution."
Bad analogy. Try keeping a Windows machine running for two weeks working on not-so-intensive computations. Now try keeping the same machine running for 1 day with very heavy workload for the entire day. Which is more likely to crash? Probably the latter. Plus, if there's a bug in the former early on in the process, it can still be fixed and run without much disturbance. An hour of downtime is much less critical in a two-week setting than a 1-day setting.
If Santa and the Easter Bunny announced that they exist, I would probably believe them...
That's all well and good, but what if we actually want to read the election results?
Never came close to winning?!?! With 5,962,657 votes cast in Florida, the final count had Al Gore losing by 537 votes. That is less than 1/10,000th of the votes. How is this not close?
True perhaps, but I think that issues shaping the future of American civil rights certainly qualify as "stuff that matters."
With a "stateside release date of November 1," this is coming out just in time to distract the young voters from performing their civic duty. We're being repressed!! Whoa, okay. Too much medication...
Luckily, very few power tools will keep going when you let go to drop it on your leg. Also, of the tools shown, none of them are portable (table saw, band saw, chop saw) so that's not really an issue. This, of course, doesn't mean people won't just strike the spinning blade with their hand quickly, or push their friends into it as it's moving (still leaving a significant cut).
While I'm sure you're right that it would be a pain to have to stop working to get it to work again, don't you think it might be less cumbersome than having to stop because you lost your finger, hand, or other various appendage?
Yes, clearly he was talking about room-filling, power-hogging, cripplingly-expensive computers like ENIAC, as no one in 1949 could imagine having as much (or significantly more) computing power in anything as small as our current PCs. The reason this statement has been so often quoted is that it reminds skeptics that just because something isn't feasible now, there's no telling what the future will bring.
I completely disagree. This car can travel arbitrarily large distances independent of how much gas you pour on it. The same goes for if you add no gas at all (which happens to be the preferred method for getting it to work). So this case is infinity/x, where x is the amount of gas. If you set x to be one, then you see that it gets infinite miles per gallon.