Not even the sun is phase-locked to mean solar time. There's this little detail called the Equation of time whose discovery dates back to the Babylonians, which governs annual variation in apparent solar time. Apparent solar time just happens to be the primary zeitgeber on circadian rhythmicity in all mammals (that I've heard of) and a great deal more.
The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea and want it to stop.
Majority of what population? People living north of the 49th? I doubt it.
Majority of people who wish pi was equal to 3 and that the earth's orbit were circular? Almost certainly, even though I don't think these two simplicity boners are conceptually compatible.
When you begin counting the cost of nuclear, you've got to count ALL the costs. Including, as at Fukushima, basic engineering errors that ultimately cost astronomical amounts years after construction.
Do you know what the lead engineer of the GE design team for the original Fukushima reactor drove around town? A 1959 Edsel Ranger.
Certain mistakes were made back then in the heyday of mature industries like OS/360 and the Boeing 707 that we no longer make. Even the outlandish and highly inflated AI claims from the same era (which were held against the entire discipline for 50 years) are now almost becoming reality with deep learning. Times change. Even for AI. Even for nuclear.
Semi-retraction: Although I just made up that bit about the Edsel, I can't actually claim it's a false statement.
You're somewhat delusional if you believe this was pure fat loss. I regard it as a disservice to give people the impression that this kind of fat loss is either possible or healthy.
At the level of exercise required to sustain a caloric balance of -2700 calories per day over four months, the body would become severely protein challenged. Even converting fat to energy increases protein demand, as those organelles burn hard and wear out.
What happens with formerly fit individuals who then become obese is that these individuals actually have extremely large reserves of skeletal muscle (obese people tend to have extremely strong legs for practical reasons, it just doesn't seem like it as hefting their own body weight consumes most of their strength). As this kind of person goes into an endurance exercise program, he or she actually needs far less muscle mass than they have starting out.
If his story is true, I bet he lost a great deal of skeletal muscle mass in addition to a lot of fat. The muscle that remained would be extremely fit and efficient, but less strong.
A similarly obese person without the muscular reserve would be flirting with death in attempting to replicate these figures. If his story is even true. And if it is true, why did he quit and put all those pounds back on again? Could it be that his body figured out that the stress of the program was unreasonable to begin with?
Did he actually measure his body composition before and after, or did he just take a weight difference and presume that anyone who exercises that much couldn't possibly have shed any muscle mass?
I don't feel like digging up particulars I last read five years ago, but I distinctly do not recall having ever read anything credible which suggests this level of weight loss can be achieved on a pure fat-burning basis.
You can always find another language that is better at it on every single aspect you look at. Jack of all trades master of none.
Master of Jack is the one thing where no other compiled language triumphs over C++.
If you're sure on day one that there are language features your project will never need (on any project fork)—cross my heart and hope to die—then go ahead and pick a less cluttered language better suited to your constrained subdomain.
What you're really saying here is that you'd rather work in a constrained subdomain—pretty much any constrained subdomain—than hump around on crowded streets hulked up with a universal camera bag (source Mumbai-based photojournalist Dilish Parekh).
It appears to me as blue and black. Definitively. First viewed as a whole image, full screen on a tall portrait IPS and then checked on a second landscape IPS (these two screens long ago adjusted to show matched colours).
Both the black and blue appear to me somewhat blown out. Actually, the mottled black almost appears as a mutant non-colour unlike anything one sees in real life (the colour balance algorithm of a digital camera subtracting blue from the black is a perfect explanation for this).
If I scroll so that I can only see the top of the dress (down to just past the horizontal black band across her upper back) I can almost conceive of how some people see this dress as white and gold. What I actually perceive is an ambiguous image under false, untrustworthy light.
In my bedroom I have several unusual light sources which I regularly use. In addition to an incandescent lamp, there an extremely yellow bug lamp and a bright and narrow-spectrum blue LED light intended to shift circadian rhythm.
I love the yellow bug lamp because it's initially so dim I can turn it on briefly while my wife sleeps to find my socks, plus I often use it for reading late in my day so as not to expose myself to blue light. I also had red and green light sources for a while, before I discovered yellow bug-light perfection (the red and green bulbs were 40 W coloured-glass bulbs that constantly smelled bad because they instantly baked any stray dust—a failed experiment).
I have pretty good sense in my bedroom of which colours are more or less trustworthy under vastly different lighting conditions. Even under my narrow-spectrum blue light (in an otherwise dark bedroom) I can't make anything white look like this photograph. In my bedroom under a pure blue illumination (75% between 450 and 480 nm, centered at 464 nm; with 490 nm attenuated by 10 dB compared to the spectral peak) the highlights on my white sheets where the light is strongest are more saturated, and the dimmer regions are less saturated, opposite my impression of this photograph.
Perhaps people who spend a lot of time watching TV in dark rooms where people are wearing white clothing are conditioned differently.
I imagine you'd start by laying down a set of climate benchmarks, agree on what is an acceptable variation under normal conditions, then should the averages begin to venture beyond those on the regular basis...
I don't think you've read much Taleb. Your "benchmark" sounds like something freshly checked out from the LTCM Lemma Loans Library.
Still, we would be better off if we knew when we were dealing with a wicked problem, as opposed to the regular kind. If we could designate some problems as wicked we might realize that "normal" approaches to problem-solving don't work. We can't define the problem, evaluate possible solutions, pick the best one, hire the experts and implement. No matter how much we may want to follow a routine like that, it won't succeed. Institutions may require it, habit may favor it, the boss may order it, but wicked problems don't care.
And he's specifically thinking about this particular problem.
Know any problems like that? Sure you do. Probably the best example in our time is climate change.
It's an open question whether the earth's climate is still considered to be a wicked problem 500 years from now, or five million years from now. Even a future Extropian Eloi might find themselves stuck with having to participate in a climate lottery.
I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.
I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.
Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.
At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.
The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.
A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.
For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.
The cold was so intense that bivouacking was no longer supportable. Bad luck to those who fell asleep by a campfire!... One constantly found men who, overcome by the cold, had been forced to drop out and had fallen to the ground, too weak or too numb to stand.... Once these poor wretches fell asleep they were dead. If they resisted the craving for sleep, another passer-by would help them along a little farther, thus prolonging their agony for a short while, but not saving them, for in this condition the drowsiness engendered by cold is irresistibl
Do not do anything on the internet you would not do in your front lawn.
Unimpeachable advice, if you've satisfied with having 100% of your brain devoted to the problem of what idiots with power might possibly think.
There's a name for what happens when people draw false conclusions from information they've obtained by skulking around that was never intended for their ears in the first place: it's called situation comedy.
Your advice is a prescription for madness on a global scale.
But then the gravity (paradoxically) gets weaker, and the density of air filling the shaft gets larger, meaning that you slow down tremendously.
I'm pretty sure that 80% of the time that the word "paradoxically" shows up, what it really means is "don't worry your pretty freckles thinking too hard".
Maybe we need to invent the companion word "patradoxically" to mean "this is actually completely obvious, but since you have freckles, we'll pretend that it isn't".
I suppose some law of gravity as conceived by a clever ten-year-old could be extraordinarily high at an epsilon displacement from the centroid of a just-a-titch oblate, spherical mass, but then you'd have to postulate a tiny black hole at the turtle point, protected by a hard chocolate coating of quantum-gravity exclusion effect (or a really, really strong, short-distance-repulsive nuclear gasbag force).
Problem with the beautiful future of Trek is that there's no real evidence that we're becoming better people. And exploiting space would permit us to continue an extractive existence.
That's exactly what the first algae said when it washed up on a stony beach. And so it was, until some algal cell with a shiny dome particularly free from cilia ascended to the very top of a stony outcropping.
1. If its warm its global warming, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world. 2. If its cold its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world. 3. If it rains its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world. 4. If it doesn't rain its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world. 5. If its humid its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world. 6. If its dry its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world. 7. If we get a breeze its climate change, lets have a press release and call for the end of the world.
By my scoring, I get this:
1. 0 for 3 2. 0 for 3 3. 0 for 2 4. 1 for 3 5. 0 for 3 6. 0 for 3 7. 0 for 2
There must be some great examples of 'too-clever APL' out there unless the mag tapes and IBM 2311s they were saved on have all Gone South by now.
Learning APL as my first high level programming language (at age 18) was one of the best things I ever did.
The vast majority of "cleverness" in APL one-liners involved exploiting deep mathematical identities which were completely obvious once mentally unpacked. If you used the language enough, you started to recognize certain chunks of symbols as idioms, and you could pretty quickly guess which mathematical mother sauce had been tarted up with carrots and pine nuts. You practically felt your IQ growing as you gained fluency.
The human mind is amazingly sophisticated as some very difficult tasks (ask anyone who has ever studied human vision) but at the same time we stumble over double negatives (to say nothing of triple negatives) which involves nothing more than determining the parity of a small integer.
Anyone who has ever assembled a BBQ knows just how badly the human brain handles the dihedral group D_4. If every piece in the kit was marked with its symmetry code, there would be far fewer BBQ assembly nightmares (like not initially noticing a small asymmetric drill hole in a strut that is otherwise completely reversible).
And why is it possible to tell someone to head north, turn right, go a bit, turn left, go another bit, turn left again, pass the church, then turn right and look for your destination and not have the person immediately know the direction of the final street? It's vastly easier than many other mental functions that we do do effortlessly.
APL makes one small step of logical necessity which involves one giant leap of man's brain: that we really can be taught not to be ignoramuses about the orientation of a multidimensional array after it is transposed in three different ways as it works it's way through an expression operating along different subsets of axes.
The bad kind of cleverness is relying on something that's kind of arbitrary about your data structure or its arrangement. "Well, in that case, it just falls through to the zero that terminates the following data object after walking a few extra bytes." (Don't suppose that assembly language coders working with just a few hundred bytes of RAM or ROM didn't regularly do exactly this kind of thing.)
You never get that kind of thing in APL, because that language is stripped down to mathematical essentials and almost completely devoid of weird-arbitrary-thingness.
If your application domain was full of weird arbitrary thingness, APL was a pretty poor match as a choice of programming language. You wanted to use APL to solve problems where some kind of deep order was in there screaming to rise to the surface.
You might think something was kind of too cleverish on first pass, but 90% of the time your final verdict escalated from clever to deep.
Everything I programmed in APL assumed that the vast majority of working data lived in system memory, like some kind of calculator on steroids. It was far from a great systems language.
It's because of my early experience with APL that I began permanently immune to certain kinds of fuzzy thinking. The only way to program a computer to pass the Turing test where it's as bad as the human mind at simple parity or tracking compass directions or mapping BBQ parts onto D_4 is to use neural networks that mimic the construction of the human brain.
Do you really think that Robocop cares if he's holding a book upside down? There might be situations where a book balances better with the fat side on the right, regardless of text orientation. When he gets to the mid point, he rotates the book 180 degrees and starts flipping the pages in the opposite direction.
Is he being too clever, or is he just being sensible, without the encumbrance of a ridiculous human perceptual asymmetry?
Who knew programmers and farmers had so much in common?
So it's you Phil Johnson—if that's even your real name—who is the last-sentence-gnome for every story posted at Slashdot for the past several years now.
As a consumable, one lottery ticket lets you dream of winning the lottery - hope is a powerful thing, you can talk compound interest and balanced portfolio all you want but only the lottery gives you the chance of instantly getting $175 million.
You're leaving out meteor strikes with a solid gold core. No need to calculate exact odds. This is a found-money thought experiment. They're just as much fun to think through as a lottery ticket, without involving the kinds of ark-B people who enrich themselves selling losing propositions to poor people.
Or, if you don't have your own back yard, you can always use a cheap Chinese wok to pan for gold in the bath tub, on the principle of transfluoridation. The real reason people buy lottery tickets is to avoid the domestic strife of everyone trying to monopole-ize the bathtub at the same time. Plus the fact that hot water costs real money.
Or, if you don't even have your own bath tub, you can believe that you're a trillionaire on planet Tresfunadore and you're taken there every night on the ethersubwarp, only for some very good reason that's presently slipped your mind, you can't remember all the joys and wonders while you're awake in your earthling body in your mysterious but very important mission here on planet earth.
then they jumped ship to deal with Yahoo instead for some ungodly reason
Considering that Firefox had the power to compel Google to throw giant sums of money at them indefinitely and for all time as per the DOJ's premonic Google anti-trust settlement, it is truly inexplicable that they would turn to a pittance from Yahoo instead.
No, the real joke is that someone actually thought "one of the greatest collaborative efforts in history" would somehow NOT to be riddled with politics at every level.
It's no joke that people think this is the real joke. No person with half a brain thought that Wikipedia was immune to politics, just as no person with half a brain thought that democracy would prove immune to politics.
What thinking people thought is that Wikipedia politics would be different from ordinary politics, and perhaps orthogonal in certain interesting dimensions. Adding orthogonality to a hidebound system is generally a net win. Democracy hasn't made the world a worse place just because it failed. Most likely it did bring us closer to taking the next step.
In my opinion, Wikipedia politics were substantially orthogonal to regular politics until too much of the admin dialog began to occur in unrecorded side channels, which neuters the transparency of a permanent and transparent record of who advocated what and why and with what justification.
Apparently (on the basis of much carping, though I myself have never had to deal with it) many of the admins have aggregated themselves into circle-jerk sock puppets behind the scenes. Exactly the same problem potentially exists at any poker table with more than two players. There are obvious ways to collude and there are subtle ways to collude. This problem is in no way peculiar to Wikipedia.
The strong Nash concept is criticized as too "strong" in that the environment allows for unlimited private communication. In fact, strong Nash equilibrium has to be Pareto-efficient. As a result of these requirements, Strong Nash rarely exists in games interesting enough to deserve study.
Here's an attempt to delineate a middle ground (which strikes me as not-so-middle):
I think I did read the original articles, but I'm not certain and now it's going to take some work to dig them up again so I can re-evaluate my original conclusions in light of this law suit. How very clever of Mr Weaver to aggressively remove the undo key from my mental keyboard.
Dude, you're posting on Slasbergers with people who read The Fountainhead as teenagers and it totally blew their minds, and been assburgers types they can't grow out of the mindset.
Funny, in my experience it's the people who aren't blessed with Asperger's syndrome who are particularly prone to pontificate on the basis of choir-pleasing ass-pluck.
Perhaps we should really rename it obsessive factual reality disorder.
Furthermore, a great many people who read The Fountainhead at a young age and found it mind blowing went into politics. How I wish more of these people had enough Asperchlorians in their bloodstream to balance their own chequebooks.
Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, it works, bitches.
Starvation causes death and human fat metabolism has a dominant linear term? Huh, fuck me gently, who knew?
Just for the record, one could construct an equally impressive linear regression concerning weight loss and water intake. Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, the Desierto de Atacama diet works, bitches.
While we're at it, why don't we point out that humanity has possessed a viable means of birth control for six million years now (+/- one)?
Or it could it be that these aren't the droids we're looking for?
Turbo Pascal became insanely popular on single-tasking systems because it was much easier to use.
Many aspiring programmers were ruined by precisely this ease of use, getting into the habit of massaging compiler complaints out of their code base with their fingers instead of their brains.
In C, if your compiler complains about an unsafe comparison between signed and unsigned, one can eliminate that complaint pretty quickly by tossing in a cast operator. Eliminating a braino... not so fast.
GUI-facing code often benefited from the rapid turn-around cycle of a "turbo" IDE, whereas algorithmic code typically didn't.
If you don't notice a flashing green light barely in your peripheral vision I would start to wonder if you ought to be driving at all.
At my height, the steering wheel blocks out half the dashboard. And, no, I can't fix this problem with a phone book (even if such a thing was still available).
My problem is that I'm forced to recline to a halfway recumbent position to keep from mashing my head into the ceiling.
In many vehicles I end up reclined so far back that I can barely reach the steering wheel. And, no, this is not because I have short arms. It's because the rear passenger window has now entered my peripheral vision. If this strikes you as strange, then I suspect it's been a long while since you spent any quality time with sin/cosine. (I have a wine bottle a mere 2" too tall for one of my cupboard shelves. If I tilt it to 45 degrees it fits just fine.)
So then I have to crank the seat forward until my knees are striking the front dashboard. Strangely, I don't find this uncomfortable for my legs, unless I wish to move them.
My peripheral vision is now roughly oriented toward the driver's seat-belt pulley, and my eye level is horizontal to the tint line on the windscreen. By the time I get the steering adjusted to a comfortable position, it's almost a certainty that half the dashboard is occluded by the top half of the steering wheel.
I can't see stop lights, either, if I'm first to the light and I've pulled up to the stop line, unless I use the old ear-to-shoulder trick—or I spot some other aspect of the intersection control synchronized to the light I'm waiting on.
What look like large vehicles from the outside are usually just as bad. Sure, the cabin height is increased, but usually they take most of it away with a higher seat height (to better accommodate all those fancy seat motors whose very existence makes the seating position you most desire impossible to achieve).
You should book a week sometime in the Hobbit Hotel. It will do wonders for your imagination concerning the circumstances that others face. Probably you should do this before participating in the design of any mechanical thing to be used by anyone other than a jet fighter pilot (whose physiques are carefully restricted to the design environment).
Actions sometimes send messages, but they are not speech.
Non-verbal actions are not speech (excepting deaf people and Italians and anyone with secure tenure in hard rock D-block and postural nuance of a clever hostage being photographed by his or her kidnapper), but often they are speech acts (in cases too far multitudinous to list here).
Just last week I read an entire book by Allan and Barbara Pease. Even this book (which promises the moon in three easy lessons) says that body language is best interpreted though consistent clusters.
Here, the static eye test amounts to a form of dead reckoning.
Claiming that this equates to the general ability to read people smacks of claiming that someone who can track big game from muddy impressions and broken twigs has the cognitive drop on Charles Darwin on all matters of big game observation.
As with personality indicators, one could in all likelihood devise fifteen other masked channels (not all of which consist of static images) with roughly the same degree of outcome correlation (where the reference outcome is something like success in group settings).
I also think this study's emphasis on freeze-frame campfire empathy is unfair to male performance. If you're in the business of poking sharp sticks at snakes or lions, the perceptual ability required is not to determine the animal's emotional state (angry, aggressive, threatened, lethal) but to determine moment by moment whether the animal will shrink back or strike forward.
The Pease book is clearly aimed at people in a sales environment (in which I also include making presentations in a board room) where the ability to form extremely rapid first impressions / first-reaction impressions is critical to career success (as opposed to short-term blood retention).
Compare the "it's not your fault" scene in Good Will Hunting (pachydermous elephant in the room) with the extended marital quarrel in Before Midnight (mass stampede of the unshackled lambs).
In the later case, neither spouse is seeing anything he and she haven't seen before (they could each write a book), but their proficiency in scorched-earth integration to identify a workable point of repair is severely put to the test.
Slashdot Mirror
An hour earlier than what?
Humans have been phase-locked to the mean solar day for just over 200 out of the last 6 million years.
1883: Railroads create the first time zones
Not even the sun is phase-locked to mean solar time. There's this little detail called the Equation of time whose discovery dates back to the Babylonians, which governs annual variation in apparent solar time. Apparent solar time just happens to be the primary zeitgeber on circadian rhythmicity in all mammals (that I've heard of) and a great deal more.
Majority of what population? People living north of the 49th? I doubt it.
Majority of people who wish pi was equal to 3 and that the earth's orbit were circular? Almost certainly, even though I don't think these two simplicity boners are conceptually compatible.
Do you know what the lead engineer of the GE design team for the original Fukushima reactor drove around town? A 1959 Edsel Ranger.
Certain mistakes were made back then in the heyday of mature industries like OS/360 and the Boeing 707 that we no longer make. Even the outlandish and highly inflated AI claims from the same era (which were held against the entire discipline for 50 years) are now almost becoming reality with deep learning. Times change. Even for AI. Even for nuclear.
Semi-retraction: Although I just made up that bit about the Edsel, I can't actually claim it's a false statement.
You're somewhat delusional if you believe this was pure fat loss. I regard it as a disservice to give people the impression that this kind of fat loss is either possible or healthy.
At the level of exercise required to sustain a caloric balance of -2700 calories per day over four months, the body would become severely protein challenged. Even converting fat to energy increases protein demand, as those organelles burn hard and wear out.
What happens with formerly fit individuals who then become obese is that these individuals actually have extremely large reserves of skeletal muscle (obese people tend to have extremely strong legs for practical reasons, it just doesn't seem like it as hefting their own body weight consumes most of their strength). As this kind of person goes into an endurance exercise program, he or she actually needs far less muscle mass than they have starting out.
If his story is true, I bet he lost a great deal of skeletal muscle mass in addition to a lot of fat. The muscle that remained would be extremely fit and efficient, but less strong.
A similarly obese person without the muscular reserve would be flirting with death in attempting to replicate these figures. If his story is even true. And if it is true, why did he quit and put all those pounds back on again? Could it be that his body figured out that the stress of the program was unreasonable to begin with?
Did he actually measure his body composition before and after, or did he just take a weight difference and presume that anyone who exercises that much couldn't possibly have shed any muscle mass?
I don't feel like digging up particulars I last read five years ago, but I distinctly do not recall having ever read anything credible which suggests this level of weight loss can be achieved on a pure fat-burning basis.
Master of Jack is the one thing where no other compiled language triumphs over C++.
If you're sure on day one that there are language features your project will never need (on any project fork)—cross my heart and hope to die—then go ahead and pick a less cluttered language better suited to your constrained subdomain.
What you're really saying here is that you'd rather work in a constrained subdomain—pretty much any constrained subdomain—than hump around on crowded streets hulked up with a universal camera bag (source Mumbai-based photojournalist Dilish Parekh).
It appears to me as blue and black. Definitively. First viewed as a whole image, full screen on a tall portrait IPS and then checked on a second landscape IPS (these two screens long ago adjusted to show matched colours).
Both the black and blue appear to me somewhat blown out. Actually, the mottled black almost appears as a mutant non-colour unlike anything one sees in real life (the colour balance algorithm of a digital camera subtracting blue from the black is a perfect explanation for this).
If I scroll so that I can only see the top of the dress (down to just past the horizontal black band across her upper back) I can almost conceive of how some people see this dress as white and gold. What I actually perceive is an ambiguous image under false, untrustworthy light.
In my bedroom I have several unusual light sources which I regularly use. In addition to an incandescent lamp, there an extremely yellow bug lamp and a bright and narrow-spectrum blue LED light intended to shift circadian rhythm.
I love the yellow bug lamp because it's initially so dim I can turn it on briefly while my wife sleeps to find my socks, plus I often use it for reading late in my day so as not to expose myself to blue light. I also had red and green light sources for a while, before I discovered yellow bug-light perfection (the red and green bulbs were 40 W coloured-glass bulbs that constantly smelled bad because they instantly baked any stray dust—a failed experiment).
I have pretty good sense in my bedroom of which colours are more or less trustworthy under vastly different lighting conditions. Even under my narrow-spectrum blue light (in an otherwise dark bedroom) I can't make anything white look like this photograph. In my bedroom under a pure blue illumination (75% between 450 and 480 nm, centered at 464 nm; with 490 nm attenuated by 10 dB compared to the spectral peak) the highlights on my white sheets where the light is strongest are more saturated, and the dimmer regions are less saturated, opposite my impression of this photograph.
Perhaps people who spend a lot of time watching TV in dark rooms where people are wearing white clothing are conditioned differently.
I don't think you've read much Taleb. Your "benchmark" sounds like something freshly checked out from the LTCM Lemma Loans Library.
In a sufficiently complex system (Rule 110), means are not guaranteed to exist (Cauchy--Lorentz distribution).
Jay Rosen on Edge.org:
And he's specifically thinking about this particular problem.
It's an open question whether the earth's climate is still considered to be a wicked problem 500 years from now, or five million years from now. Even a future Extropian Eloi might find themselves stuck with having to participate in a climate lottery.
I have a circadian rhythm disorder. Not long ago I free-ran at 25.5 hours for several years. Advancing by 1.5 hours per day, you're making adjustments to the world around you ever two or three days. Endlessly. I would have mortgaged a minor limb to change my rotational period from 17 days to 21 days. Just to be able to stay in a consistent phase with the day of the week would have been a major blessing.
I had previously tried melatonin with mixed success. At best, having exhaustively worked through many doses and times, it seemed to reduce my period to 24.25 hours, a little less than 2 hours per week. This is no bed of roses, either. And the melatonin was taking a three hour chunk of out every evening where I was yawning like a date-raped hedgehog waiting impatiently for a fresh coat of paint to dry in his homey bungalow, listless and unable to anything more complicated than cook dinner—usually a fairly simple dinner.
Recently I tried melatonin again in a sustained-release formulation (newly discovered at retail) and this magically worked much better. At a large dose, I'm able to stay on a 24-hour day permanently, over very close to it. The daily date rape continues to suck.
At lower doses—minus the daily date rape—I seem to stay near a 24-hour day, with unplanned excursions when it all comes unglued. This might well be addressed by further tweaking. I've ever so close now to having the best of both worlds.
The operative parameter with circadian rhythm disorder is that there's no such thing as "merely" a flesh wound for a haemophiliac. My clock drifts because there's something broken in the entrainment circuit. A haemophiliac bleeds because there's a gash or puncture or rash, but he continues to bleed because the blood chemistry required for blood clotting is MIA.
A normal person experiencing severe jet lag (say a trip to Japan or Australia) is in a horrible, unpleasant, barely functional place. In my metaphor, you feel weak because you're gushing blood. In this state, your clotting reflex (if you have a clotting reflex) is actually on overdrive. The stress is horrible, but the body is rapidly adapting and compensating. If you make it through the first day, you hope the second day will suck a little bit less, until after a few days, it hardly sucks at all, then you're body finishes making the adjustment, and everything becomes normal again.
For a person such as myself trying to maintain a 24-hour day without melatonin, the process goes the other direction. Light jet lag turns in moderate jet lag, and moderate jet lag soon becomes severe jet lag, and severe jet lag soon gives way to waking hypnagogic hallucinations. Every one of my attempts to force myself into adherence with the 24-hour clock on will-power alone developed along this path over two weeks. I was as cognitively impaired at this point as that time I got a bit too carried away in a bout of binge drinking, to an extent I never repeated again. And still the bleeding continued. By this point your will-power is so diminished, you need a jeweller's work bench and a steady hand to make even the smallest life decision. You know you're suffering like hell, but you've almost forgotten what crazy notion drove you to try maintaining a 24-hour waking day.
From French invasion of Russia:
Unimpeachable advice, if you've satisfied with having 100% of your brain devoted to the problem of what idiots with power might possibly think.
There's a name for what happens when people draw false conclusions from information they've obtained by skulking around that was never intended for their ears in the first place: it's called situation comedy.
Your advice is a prescription for madness on a global scale.
I'm pretty sure that 80% of the time that the word "paradoxically" shows up, what it really means is "don't worry your pretty freckles thinking too hard".
Maybe we need to invent the companion word "patradoxically" to mean "this is actually completely obvious, but since you have freckles, we'll pretend that it isn't".
I suppose some law of gravity as conceived by a clever ten-year-old could be extraordinarily high at an epsilon displacement from the centroid of a just-a-titch oblate, spherical mass, but then you'd have to postulate a tiny black hole at the turtle point, protected by a hard chocolate coating of quantum-gravity exclusion effect (or a really, really strong, short-distance-repulsive nuclear gasbag force).
That's exactly what the first algae said when it washed up on a stony beach. And so it was, until some algal cell with a shiny dome particularly free from cilia ascended to the very top of a stony outcropping.
By my scoring, I get this:
1. 0 for 3
2. 0 for 3
3. 0 for 2
4. 1 for 3
5. 0 for 3
6. 0 for 3
7. 0 for 2
Learning APL as my first high level programming language (at age 18) was one of the best things I ever did.
The vast majority of "cleverness" in APL one-liners involved exploiting deep mathematical identities which were completely obvious once mentally unpacked. If you used the language enough, you started to recognize certain chunks of symbols as idioms, and you could pretty quickly guess which mathematical mother sauce had been tarted up with carrots and pine nuts. You practically felt your IQ growing as you gained fluency.
The human mind is amazingly sophisticated as some very difficult tasks (ask anyone who has ever studied human vision) but at the same time we stumble over double negatives (to say nothing of triple negatives) which involves nothing more than determining the parity of a small integer.
Anyone who has ever assembled a BBQ knows just how badly the human brain handles the dihedral group D_4. If every piece in the kit was marked with its symmetry code, there would be far fewer BBQ assembly nightmares (like not initially noticing a small asymmetric drill hole in a strut that is otherwise completely reversible).
And why is it possible to tell someone to head north, turn right, go a bit, turn left, go another bit, turn left again, pass the church, then turn right and look for your destination and not have the person immediately know the direction of the final street? It's vastly easier than many other mental functions that we do do effortlessly.
APL makes one small step of logical necessity which involves one giant leap of man's brain: that we really can be taught not to be ignoramuses about the orientation of a multidimensional array after it is transposed in three different ways as it works it's way through an expression operating along different subsets of axes.
The bad kind of cleverness is relying on something that's kind of arbitrary about your data structure or its arrangement. "Well, in that case, it just falls through to the zero that terminates the following data object after walking a few extra bytes." (Don't suppose that assembly language coders working with just a few hundred bytes of RAM or ROM didn't regularly do exactly this kind of thing.)
You never get that kind of thing in APL, because that language is stripped down to mathematical essentials and almost completely devoid of weird-arbitrary-thingness.
If your application domain was full of weird arbitrary thingness, APL was a pretty poor match as a choice of programming language. You wanted to use APL to solve problems where some kind of deep order was in there screaming to rise to the surface.
You might think something was kind of too cleverish on first pass, but 90% of the time your final verdict escalated from clever to deep.
Everything I programmed in APL assumed that the vast majority of working data lived in system memory, like some kind of calculator on steroids. It was far from a great systems language.
It's because of my early experience with APL that I began permanently immune to certain kinds of fuzzy thinking. The only way to program a computer to pass the Turing test where it's as bad as the human mind at simple parity or tracking compass directions or mapping BBQ parts onto D_4 is to use neural networks that mimic the construction of the human brain.
Do you really think that Robocop cares if he's holding a book upside down? There might be situations where a book balances better with the fat side on the right, regardless of text orientation. When he gets to the mid point, he rotates the book 180 degrees and starts flipping the pages in the opposite direction.
Is he being too clever, or is he just being sensible, without the encumbrance of a ridiculous human perceptual asymmetry?
Human cognitive limitations are rather Byzantine
So it's you Phil Johnson—if that's even your real name—who is the last-sentence-gnome for every story posted at Slashdot for the past several years now.
You're leaving out meteor strikes with a solid gold core. No need to calculate exact odds. This is a found-money thought experiment. They're just as much fun to think through as a lottery ticket, without involving the kinds of ark-B people who enrich themselves selling losing propositions to poor people.
Or, if you don't have your own back yard, you can always use a cheap Chinese wok to pan for gold in the bath tub, on the principle of transfluoridation. The real reason people buy lottery tickets is to avoid the domestic strife of everyone trying to monopole-ize the bathtub at the same time. Plus the fact that hot water costs real money.
Or, if you don't even have your own bath tub, you can believe that you're a trillionaire on planet Tresfunadore and you're taken there every night on the ethersubwarp, only for some very good reason that's presently slipped your mind, you can't remember all the joys and wonders while you're awake in your earthling body in your mysterious but very important mission here on planet earth.
Considering that Firefox had the power to compel Google to throw giant sums of money at them indefinitely and for all time as per the DOJ's premonic Google anti-trust settlement, it is truly inexplicable that they would turn to a pittance from Yahoo instead.
It's no joke that people think this is the real joke. No person with half a brain thought that Wikipedia was immune to politics, just as no person with half a brain thought that democracy would prove immune to politics.
What thinking people thought is that Wikipedia politics would be different from ordinary politics, and perhaps orthogonal in certain interesting dimensions. Adding orthogonality to a hidebound system is generally a net win. Democracy hasn't made the world a worse place just because it failed. Most likely it did bring us closer to taking the next step.
In my opinion, Wikipedia politics were substantially orthogonal to regular politics until too much of the admin dialog began to occur in unrecorded side channels, which neuters the transparency of a permanent and transparent record of who advocated what and why and with what justification.
Apparently (on the basis of much carping, though I myself have never had to deal with it) many of the admins have aggregated themselves into circle-jerk sock puppets behind the scenes. Exactly the same problem potentially exists at any poker table with more than two players. There are obvious ways to collude and there are subtle ways to collude. This problem is in no way peculiar to Wikipedia.
Strong Nash equilibrium
Here's an attempt to delineate a middle ground (which strikes me as not-so-middle):
Coalition-proof Nash equilibrium
Any contribution you can make to this body of knowledge will be hugely appreciated.
I think I did read the original articles, but I'm not certain and now it's going to take some work to dig them up again so I can re-evaluate my original conclusions in light of this law suit. How very clever of Mr Weaver to aggressively remove the undo key from my mental keyboard.
Somehow it's way more cool to call this 'another universe' than to call this another part of the same universe, isn't it?
I wonder what the official ISO Linnaeus number is for extreme weakness of physical interaction below which universes are properly botanized.
Funny, in my experience it's the people who aren't blessed with Asperger's syndrome who are particularly prone to pontificate on the basis of choir-pleasing ass-pluck.
Perhaps we should really rename it obsessive factual reality disorder.
Furthermore, a great many people who read The Fountainhead at a young age and found it mind blowing went into politics. How I wish more of these people had enough Asperchlorians in their bloodstream to balance their own chequebooks.
Starvation causes death and human fat metabolism has a dominant linear term? Huh, fuck me gently, who knew?
Just for the record, one could construct an equally impressive linear regression concerning weight loss and water intake. Within the chosen margin of error of measurement, the Desierto de Atacama diet works, bitches.
While we're at it, why don't we point out that humanity has possessed a viable means of birth control for six million years now (+/- one)?
Or it could it be that these aren't the droids we're looking for?
Many aspiring programmers were ruined by precisely this ease of use, getting into the habit of massaging compiler complaints out of their code base with their fingers instead of their brains.
In C, if your compiler complains about an unsafe comparison between signed and unsigned, one can eliminate that complaint pretty quickly by tossing in a cast operator. Eliminating a braino ... not so fast.
GUI-facing code often benefited from the rapid turn-around cycle of a "turbo" IDE, whereas algorithmic code typically didn't.
FTFY.
Once captured, twice cry.
At my height, the steering wheel blocks out half the dashboard. And, no, I can't fix this problem with a phone book (even if such a thing was still available).
My problem is that I'm forced to recline to a halfway recumbent position to keep from mashing my head into the ceiling.
In many vehicles I end up reclined so far back that I can barely reach the steering wheel. And, no, this is not because I have short arms. It's because the rear passenger window has now entered my peripheral vision. If this strikes you as strange, then I suspect it's been a long while since you spent any quality time with sin/cosine. (I have a wine bottle a mere 2" too tall for one of my cupboard shelves. If I tilt it to 45 degrees it fits just fine.)
So then I have to crank the seat forward until my knees are striking the front dashboard. Strangely, I don't find this uncomfortable for my legs, unless I wish to move them.
My peripheral vision is now roughly oriented toward the driver's seat-belt pulley, and my eye level is horizontal to the tint line on the windscreen. By the time I get the steering adjusted to a comfortable position, it's almost a certainty that half the dashboard is occluded by the top half of the steering wheel.
I can't see stop lights, either, if I'm first to the light and I've pulled up to the stop line, unless I use the old ear-to-shoulder trick—or I spot some other aspect of the intersection control synchronized to the light I'm waiting on.
What look like large vehicles from the outside are usually just as bad. Sure, the cabin height is increased, but usually they take most of it away with a higher seat height (to better accommodate all those fancy seat motors whose very existence makes the seating position you most desire impossible to achieve).
You should book a week sometime in the Hobbit Hotel. It will do wonders for your imagination concerning the circumstances that others face. Probably you should do this before participating in the design of any mechanical thing to be used by anyone other than a jet fighter pilot (whose physiques are carefully restricted to the design environment).
Non-verbal actions are not speech (excepting deaf people and Italians and anyone with secure tenure in hard rock D-block and postural nuance of a clever hostage being photographed by his or her kidnapper), but often they are speech acts (in cases too far multitudinous to list here).
Just last week I read an entire book by Allan and Barbara Pease. Even this book (which promises the moon in three easy lessons) says that body language is best interpreted though consistent clusters.
Here, the static eye test amounts to a form of dead reckoning.
Claiming that this equates to the general ability to read people smacks of claiming that someone who can track big game from muddy impressions and broken twigs has the cognitive drop on Charles Darwin on all matters of big game observation.
As with personality indicators, one could in all likelihood devise fifteen other masked channels (not all of which consist of static images) with roughly the same degree of outcome correlation (where the reference outcome is something like success in group settings).
I also think this study's emphasis on freeze-frame campfire empathy is unfair to male performance. If you're in the business of poking sharp sticks at snakes or lions, the perceptual ability required is not to determine the animal's emotional state (angry, aggressive, threatened, lethal) but to determine moment by moment whether the animal will shrink back or strike forward.
The Pease book is clearly aimed at people in a sales environment (in which I also include making presentations in a board room) where the ability to form extremely rapid first impressions / first-reaction impressions is critical to career success (as opposed to short-term blood retention).
Compare the "it's not your fault" scene in Good Will Hunting (pachydermous elephant in the room) with the extended marital quarrel in Before Midnight (mass stampede of the unshackled lambs).
In the later case, neither spouse is seeing anything he and she haven't seen before (they could each write a book), but their proficiency in scorched-earth integration to identify a workable point of repair is severely put to the test.