I know you're trying to be polite, but you sound sort of gullible here. You should doubt *everyone*, especially if they're trying to make a political point.
The actual plan is to limit the value of charitable tax deductions to 28% of the amount given, even if the giver is in a higher tax bracket (tax brackets max out at 35%). Plus, it's just a plan at this point and hasn't been passed by Congress.
Yeah, nothing stands out as being obviously bad science here. The result is basically that on average, the right ear is slightly better at hearing things in a naturalistic setting. Only the first page of the article is available online, but the authors explain that this right-ear advantage has been fairly well-studied in the laboratory and they were attempting to confirm it in a less artificial environment.
Note that this advantage is apparently small, and may be only an average thing; could be that 60% of people hear better with their right ear, 40% of people with their left, I can't tell from the available information. The crap about "amenable parts of the brain" was most likely invented by journalists.
The quote from the not-really-worth-reading article is:
Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes' computer use).
So they might be measuring the energy needed to turn on a computer and mess around on the Internet for 15 minutes. Or they might just be making stuff up.
No one can argue against home media servers driving innovation into the household, especially around automation and media management - but to displace software as a service? GoogleApps? I don't even in the slightest see where these two things correlate.
Actually, if you read the article, Glenn would seem to agree with you completely; his suggested uses for home servers are pretty much identical to yours. He only brings up Google Apps and.MAC as an argument against home servers. As is so often the case, the article title and summary are wrong.
I'd like to see both differential pricing and all on-selling restrictions made illegal. This would promote a more free, fair and optimal market. Not simple to implement though.
How would that be more optimal? The result would be that the hypothetical company sells the software for $1 million only, and the 10,000 other potential customers never get to see it.
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
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· Score: 1
Most good programmers are not physicsts... Which one do you want implementing the program? Fast and inaccurate or slow and accurate?
If research physicists with any grant money need programming done on a regular basis, they hire programmers to implement their simulations. This sort of science hasn't been done by loners for a hundred years.
Large programs written in the early 80s may not be written in a manner that executes well on today's deeply pipelined superscalar processors.... [use of linked lists, etc, etc].
Grandparent was talking about orders of magnitude, not processor-level optimizations. Besides, you're not seriously suggesting that such a program would execute faster on 80s processors than on today's...!
Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman!
on
Gadgets, Then & Now
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· Score: 1
I think part of that is these "scientists" salivate too much on how many nodes they can build and don't give much thought into making their algorithms more efficient, lower complexity, etc, etc....
They are still using parallel processing to do REDUNDANT calculations... Just like the old days.
That's hard to believe... decent programmers are pretty easy to find, these days. I think it's more that lots of problems which once would have been too hard to bother computing have been upgraded to "manageable but slow", the level at which scientists must essentially always operate. (Easier problems have generally been solved by someone else already.) So they make their simulations one level more complex and closer to reality, or try their computations at all possible values of a couple of extra parameters.
That line isn't actually a function of his variables - it's just there to provide a slightly better visual approximation of the trend. (No, it doesn't work very well for the purpose.) A linear regression would have been a poor idea, because commute time is surely a nonmonotonic and therefore nonlinear function of departure time; leaving very early and very late will both produce fast commutes. He didn't bother with a statistical analysis of the influence of departure time at all, which I think was the right call. With a smallish and non-uniform sample like this, no statistically fitted curve would have told us any more than we could see from the scatterplot.
Yeah, Wiki is typically good for consolidating information from people who don't know each other. But most scientific papers aren't primarily about gathering known information from multiple sources; they're about presenting and interpreting the results of some new experiment. People might disagree about the interpretation and background, but the disagreement will often be real in the sense that the right answer is not trivially arrived at, and won't be accepted without understanding the debate that led up to it. Cooperation between authors doesn't really add anything here.
Price discrimination only "works" on monopolistic situations
That's a bit too strong! It works anytime there's some incentive not to just go to another store to find a lower price, right? While this could be because few alternative stores exist, it's more likely to be because you don't really want to bother driving to a different supermarket or movie theater. Or because you don't really know the difference in value (to you) between the cheap and expensive versions of an item.
Exactly. It's a mistake to think of unredeemed rebates as "free money" for a company; the expected non-redemption rate gets factored into the price.
Suppose Best Buy sells a drive for $100, with a $50 rebate that half their customers send in. Then they take in $75 per sale, on average.
Alternatively, they could sell it to everybody for $75 in the first place, with no rebates.
Or, they could implement an online rebate system. If this leads 3/4 of their customers to get the rebate, the offered rebate could only be $33 instead of $50 to get the same average revenue per system.
It's an empirical question for the company which setup will allow them to make the most sales. (Note that this is somewhat independent from the base amount of profit they make per unit; if they decided a drive only needed to sell for $60 on average, they'd still be faced with the same set of choices.) It's a separate question which system an individual buyer prefers. If you're allergic to rebate checks, or if your time is extremely valuable, you'd prefer #2. If you just want the best price, it's in your interest to have a system like #1 where few other people bother to obtain the rebate, allowing the company to make the discount quite large.
One conclusion you could draw from this plan, then, is that Best Buy has decided to cater more toward relatively well-off customers who value their time highly, and less toward customers who shop on price.
It may not make much difference in their personal lives, but that doesn't mean they won't strive for more money. You can make a heck of a lot more difference in the world with $5 billion than with $1 billion. I doubt that the founders' primary goal is just to sit back and live large on an island.
The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification.
That's completely not true. You don't think that people's immune systems in any given generation just luckily happen to be attuned to exactly the germs which will be around during their lifetimes? The immune system is extremely adaptable and will effectively attack nearly any foreign menace. We don't have to rely on it evolving to match specific germs that go through a million times as many evolutionary generations as we do.
(As a side note, it's typically not advantageous for infectious agents to evolve to kill their hosts anyway, except under crowded and unsanitary conditions where they can spread very quickly. Many germs could well evolve to be less deadly as world sanitation improves.)
You're probably thinking of the (extremely plausible) argument that the main evolutionary purpose of sex is to "change the locks" against such parasites. But the point of this is more that a genetically uniform population would be vulnerable, so lineages that could vary their genetic makeup would gain an advantage; not that genetic change is the primary line of defense against parasites. Luckily for all of us, it isn't.
I don't disagree, but the article does -- it devotes seven (short) paragraphs to saying that in the process of moving between states (or just moving forward), the fish actually has to raise the water level. I think it's saying that when a fish pushes itself from point x to point y, the water it displaces from y doesn't just zap directly into x, but actually moves upward against gravity. The linked article doesn't attempt to explain the researchers' evidence for this, so I don't think there's much room for argument unless someone's read one of the researchers' papers and can explain more...
Are birds buoyant in their fluid? That right there is a big difference.
The article explains that swimmers still have to fight gravity proportional to their body size, because the water they push out of the way while swimming effectively raises the surface of the fluid. I don't know that I entirely understand this, but that seems to be the authors' argument that it isn't such a big difference at all.
UltraEdit lets you put comments in italics (as well as choice of color, etc-- all the usual syntax highlighting). Not sure if that is what you mean though. It is a text editor, so the actual font can't be controlled from within the file.
Hmm, thanks. What Notepad++ does for Python that I haven't seen elsewhere, is basically an extension of syntax highlighting -- instead of just being able to choose comment color, you can choose the entire font. The big benefit is that you can make this font small and narrow. Since the affected Python comments always extend to the end of a line, there's no reason they have to be in a fixed-width font; so Notepad++ comments take up less room in the code, and you can see more things at once. I think it's great. The (considerable) downside to this is that the lines will look terrible in most other editors.
I've been using it for Python for a while -- I like it quite a lot, too, although I always wonder if there aren't even better Python editors out there I just don't know about. In particular, I miss the better auto-indentation of Emacs, and might try switching back someday.
Are there other editors that can put comments in a different font? I love being able to write long comment lines, even though now anyone reading the code in some other editor is going to think I'm nuts.
And what 'economic freedoms' did we have in 1900 that we don't have today?
Plenty. In 1900 you could hire children, maintain monopolies, fix prices, break unions using hired goons, and ignore worker safety, to name a few. It wasn't called laissez-faire capitalism for nothing, you know.
What's less clear is why the grandparent seems to think such economic regulation has made it more difficult for people to make ends meet.
Except that would be foolish, because the person who went through the whole Microsoft-sponsored contest would more than likely choose to work for Microsoft, and what kind of publicity would that be?
Besides, immediately trying to poach an employee which Microsoft had gone to all this trouble to attract would probably count as evil, not to mention bad PR in itself.
I'm not sure, but it seems like you may have misinterpreted the findings. Keep in mind that more intelligent people tend to demonstrate less brain activity when problem solving. The belief is that their brains are simply more efficient, rather than "working harder". So, if the findings suggest anything about intelligence (the article is so vague it's really hard to tell one way or the other), its that introverts are on average less intelligent.
Excellent post. I'm glad somebody realizes this. The one- or two-sentence finding quoted in the article was certainly filtered through enough reporters and editors that it won't bear any predictable relation to whatever scientific finding it might have come from, though. Journalists are notorious for completely misunderstanding things like this.
Re:I've got news for them...
on
Yahoo's Geek Statue
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you look at standalone mail programs, they don't delete the mail, they send it to a "Trash" folder. That way, you can undo that action easily. When you need space, you have to explicitly empty that folder. The problem is that now you lose that "undelete" operation. You might say you don't need it, but the reason that they have it is that people use it. The problem with common approaches to the trash bin, in my opinion, is that it's not clear for the user _when_ you actually lose the "undelete" option, specially if you have filters that delete messages older than _X_ days. With a new name for the trash folder ("archived"), Google keeps the functionality (one-button move-to-trash) but fixes it a bit (naming it "archive" helps understanding the importance of apparently unimportant mail.
So if Google feels that it's valuable to keep apparently unimportant mail, why not simply cease to expunge old messages from the trash?
The alternative they've chosen, as you say, is to use the archive folder as a trash can. Which makes it a rather strange place to keep messages I know I actually want to archive, since all the chaff interferes with search. Wouldn't three folders -- archive (never delete), trash (also never delete, and exclude from search by default), and spam (delete after n days, and exclude from search by default -- have been more elegant?
Personally, I don't have a need for the archive folder at all; my messages pretty much stick in my inbox forever, and it appears to have exactly the same properties as the archive (never delete, search by default). But I also have no objection, as the feature requires no extra clicks out of me, and I understand some people like keeping their inboxes small as a kind of to-do list.
That said, I do like basically everything else about GMail. Labels and rules work very well for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're trying to be polite, but you sound sort of gullible here. You should doubt *everyone*, especially if they're trying to make a political point.
The actual plan is to limit the value of charitable tax deductions to 28% of the amount given, even if the giver is in a higher tax bracket (tax brackets max out at 35%). Plus, it's just a plan at this point and hasn't been passed by Congress.
http://philanthropy.com/news/updates/7244/obama-plans-to-reduce-charitable-deduction-for-wealthy-donors
Yeah, nothing stands out as being obviously bad science here. The result is basically that on average, the right ear is slightly better at hearing things in a naturalistic setting. Only the first page of the article is available online, but the authors explain that this right-ear advantage has been fairly well-studied in the laboratory and they were attempting to confirm it in a less artificial environment.
Note that this advantage is apparently small, and may be only an average thing; could be that 60% of people hear better with their right ear, 40% of people with their left, I can't tell from the available information. The crap about "amenable parts of the brain" was most likely invented by journalists.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/123t3782704t876v/
That story is about Dallas, not Houston, and 3.15 seconds is a lot more than 2. Ancestor post seems to have invented their facts.
Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes' computer use).
So they might be measuring the energy needed to turn on a computer and mess around on the Internet for 15 minutes. Or they might just be making stuff up.
No one can argue against home media servers driving innovation into the household, especially around automation and media management - but to displace software as a service? GoogleApps? I don't even in the slightest see where these two things correlate.
.MAC as an argument against home servers. As is so often the case, the article title and summary are wrong.
Actually, if you read the article, Glenn would seem to agree with you completely; his suggested uses for home servers are pretty much identical to yours. He only brings up Google Apps and
I'd like to see both differential pricing and all on-selling restrictions made illegal. This would promote a more free, fair and optimal market. Not simple to implement though.
How would that be more optimal? The result would be that the hypothetical company sells the software for $1 million only, and the 10,000 other potential customers never get to see it.
Most good programmers are not physicsts... Which one do you want implementing the program? Fast and inaccurate or slow and accurate?
If research physicists with any grant money need programming done on a regular basis, they hire programmers to implement their simulations. This sort of science hasn't been done by loners for a hundred years.
Large programs written in the early 80s may not be written in a manner that executes well on today's deeply pipelined superscalar processors.... [use of linked lists, etc, etc].
Grandparent was talking about orders of magnitude, not processor-level optimizations. Besides, you're not seriously suggesting that such a program would execute faster on 80s processors than on today's...!
I think part of that is these "scientists" salivate too much on how many nodes they can build and don't give much thought into making their algorithms more efficient, lower complexity, etc, etc....
They are still using parallel processing to do REDUNDANT calculations... Just like the old days.
That's hard to believe... decent programmers are pretty easy to find, these days. I think it's more that lots of problems which once would have been too hard to bother computing have been upgraded to "manageable but slow", the level at which scientists must essentially always operate. (Easier problems have generally been solved by someone else already.) So they make their simulations one level more complex and closer to reality, or try their computations at all possible values of a couple of extra parameters.
That line isn't actually a function of his variables - it's just there to provide a slightly better visual approximation of the trend. (No, it doesn't work very well for the purpose.) A linear regression would have been a poor idea, because commute time is surely a nonmonotonic and therefore nonlinear function of departure time; leaving very early and very late will both produce fast commutes. He didn't bother with a statistical analysis of the influence of departure time at all, which I think was the right call. With a smallish and non-uniform sample like this, no statistically fitted curve would have told us any more than we could see from the scatterplot.
Yeah, Wiki is typically good for consolidating information from people who don't know each other. But most scientific papers aren't primarily about gathering known information from multiple sources; they're about presenting and interpreting the results of some new experiment. People might disagree about the interpretation and background, but the disagreement will often be real in the sense that the right answer is not trivially arrived at, and won't be accepted without understanding the debate that led up to it. Cooperation between authors doesn't really add anything here.
Also, that looks like a Sideshow Bob wanted poster on the door of the store.
Price discrimination only "works" on monopolistic situations
That's a bit too strong! It works anytime there's some incentive not to just go to another store to find a lower price, right? While this could be because few alternative stores exist, it's more likely to be because you don't really want to bother driving to a different supermarket or movie theater. Or because you don't really know the difference in value (to you) between the cheap and expensive versions of an item.
Exactly. It's a mistake to think of unredeemed rebates as "free money" for a company; the expected non-redemption rate gets factored into the price.
Suppose Best Buy sells a drive for $100, with a $50 rebate that half their customers send in. Then they take in $75 per sale, on average.
Alternatively, they could sell it to everybody for $75 in the first place, with no rebates.
Or, they could implement an online rebate system. If this leads 3/4 of their customers to get the rebate, the offered rebate could only be $33 instead of $50 to get the same average revenue per system.
It's an empirical question for the company which setup will allow them to make the most sales. (Note that this is somewhat independent from the base amount of profit they make per unit; if they decided a drive only needed to sell for $60 on average, they'd still be faced with the same set of choices.) It's a separate question which system an individual buyer prefers. If you're allergic to rebate checks, or if your time is extremely valuable, you'd prefer #2. If you just want the best price, it's in your interest to have a system like #1 where few other people bother to obtain the rebate, allowing the company to make the discount quite large.
One conclusion you could draw from this plan, then, is that Best Buy has decided to cater more toward relatively well-off customers who value their time highly, and less toward customers who shop on price.
It may not make much difference in their personal lives, but that doesn't mean they won't strive for more money. You can make a heck of a lot more difference in the world with $5 billion than with $1 billion. I doubt that the founders' primary goal is just to sit back and live large on an island.
Presumably that is exactly why the man is going to some trouble to work out the legal details with his estate planners.
The cold and flu that you and I shrug off today would kill our great grandparents (at an age of young adulthood) in an instant because of sex and diversification.
That's completely not true. You don't think that people's immune systems in any given generation just luckily happen to be attuned to exactly the germs which will be around during their lifetimes? The immune system is extremely adaptable and will effectively attack nearly any foreign menace. We don't have to rely on it evolving to match specific germs that go through a million times as many evolutionary generations as we do.
(As a side note, it's typically not advantageous for infectious agents to evolve to kill their hosts anyway, except under crowded and unsanitary conditions where they can spread very quickly. Many germs could well evolve to be less deadly as world sanitation improves.)
You're probably thinking of the (extremely plausible) argument that the main evolutionary purpose of sex is to "change the locks" against such parasites. But the point of this is more that a genetically uniform population would be vulnerable, so lineages that could vary their genetic makeup would gain an advantage; not that genetic change is the primary line of defense against parasites. Luckily for all of us, it isn't.
Huh, that makes sense. Thanks!
I don't disagree, but the article does -- it devotes seven (short) paragraphs to saying that in the process of moving between states (or just moving forward), the fish actually has to raise the water level. I think it's saying that when a fish pushes itself from point x to point y, the water it displaces from y doesn't just zap directly into x, but actually moves upward against gravity. The linked article doesn't attempt to explain the researchers' evidence for this, so I don't think there's much room for argument unless someone's read one of the researchers' papers and can explain more...
Are birds buoyant in their fluid?
That right there is a big difference.
The article explains that swimmers still have to fight gravity proportional to their body size, because the water they push out of the way while swimming effectively raises the surface of the fluid. I don't know that I entirely understand this, but that seems to be the authors' argument that it isn't such a big difference at all.
UltraEdit lets you put comments in italics (as well as choice of color, etc-- all the usual syntax highlighting). Not sure if that is what you mean though. It is a text editor, so the actual font can't be controlled from within the file.
Hmm, thanks. What Notepad++ does for Python that I haven't seen elsewhere, is basically an extension of syntax highlighting -- instead of just being able to choose comment color, you can choose the entire font. The big benefit is that you can make this font small and narrow. Since the affected Python comments always extend to the end of a line, there's no reason they have to be in a fixed-width font; so Notepad++ comments take up less room in the code, and you can see more things at once. I think it's great. The (considerable) downside to this is that the lines will look terrible in most other editors.
I've been using it for Python for a while -- I like it quite a lot, too, although I always wonder if there aren't even better Python editors out there I just don't know about. In particular, I miss the better auto-indentation of Emacs, and might try switching back someday.
Are there other editors that can put comments in a different font? I love being able to write long comment lines, even though now anyone reading the code in some other editor is going to think I'm nuts.
What the hell is an 'economic freedom'?
And what 'economic freedoms' did we have in 1900 that we don't have today?
Plenty. In 1900 you could hire children, maintain monopolies, fix prices, break unions using hired goons, and ignore worker safety, to name a few. It wasn't called laissez-faire capitalism for nothing, you know.
What's less clear is why the grandparent seems to think such economic regulation has made it more difficult for people to make ends meet.
Except that would be foolish, because the person who went through the whole Microsoft-sponsored contest would more than likely choose to work for Microsoft, and what kind of publicity would that be?
Besides, immediately trying to poach an employee which Microsoft had gone to all this trouble to attract would probably count as evil, not to mention bad PR in itself.
I'm not sure, but it seems like you may have misinterpreted the findings. Keep in mind that more intelligent people tend to demonstrate less brain activity when problem solving. The belief is that their brains are simply more efficient, rather than "working harder". So, if the findings suggest anything about intelligence (the article is so vague it's really hard to tell one way or the other), its that introverts are on average less intelligent.
Excellent post. I'm glad somebody realizes this. The one- or two-sentence finding quoted in the article was certainly filtered through enough reporters and editors that it won't bear any predictable relation to whatever scientific finding it might have come from, though. Journalists are notorious for completely misunderstanding things like this.
If you look at standalone mail programs, they don't delete the mail, they send it to a "Trash" folder. That way, you can undo that action easily. When you need space, you have to explicitly empty that folder. The problem is that now you lose that "undelete" operation. You might say you don't need it, but the reason that they have it is that people use it. The problem with common approaches to the trash bin, in my opinion, is that it's not clear for the user _when_ you actually lose the "undelete" option, specially if you have filters that delete messages older than _X_ days.
With a new name for the trash folder ("archived"), Google keeps the functionality (one-button move-to-trash) but fixes it a bit (naming it "archive" helps understanding the importance of apparently unimportant mail.
So if Google feels that it's valuable to keep apparently unimportant mail, why not simply cease to expunge old messages from the trash?
The alternative they've chosen, as you say, is to use the archive folder as a trash can. Which makes it a rather strange place to keep messages I know I actually want to archive, since all the chaff interferes with search. Wouldn't three folders -- archive (never delete), trash (also never delete, and exclude from search by default), and spam (delete after n days, and exclude from search by default -- have been more elegant?
Personally, I don't have a need for the archive folder at all; my messages pretty much stick in my inbox forever, and it appears to have exactly the same properties as the archive (never delete, search by default). But I also have no objection, as the feature requires no extra clicks out of me, and I understand some people like keeping their inboxes small as a kind of to-do list.
That said, I do like basically everything else about GMail. Labels and rules work very well for me.