Once upon a time there was a giant button labelled "off" and "on". Generally one didn't have to think too hard about it's function. Unless you failed to realize that the original IBM PC contained an RC circuit to hinder clickers (if you were too abrupt with the one-finger reset, the switch was ON but the PC wasn't). Tellingly, when the power states were iconified there was no provision for "ON, but only if you waited long enough first". Universal language is not big on drawing distinctions. While the icons were a little more open to interpretation than most people supposed, you could usually find one prominent switch on any device with the semi-scrutable line art, and then toggle for satisfaction.
Personally, it's pretty clear to me that off means off. Off means not doing anything I don't know about, and preferably hardly anything I do know about. A battery-powered RTC falls into the category of things I know about. Beyond that, category membership is extremely limited. I'm already drawing the line if the RTC contains a wake-on-alarm feature which fails to activate an external strobe light when armed.
Perhaps we need a new ITC symbol meaning "not nearly so OFF as you might like to think". The self-evident circle could replaced by a baby Pacman with the missing wedge rotated around to signify a sleeping cap. Less off, but more cute. Baby Pacman dreams of electric sheep while his intestinal flora multiply promiscuously.
Not only would the NSA have such a model, but it would be conditioned on any number of details they might know about you: your nationality, ethnic background, date of birth, education, profession, operating system, and keyboard skills. Factors of ten are worth having.
Worse, if they've siphoned many of your other passwords over the intertubes--perhaps passwords you don't actually care much about--they would still attempt to detect structural patterns to bias the password search order for more complex passwords you do care about. Ideally there's a sharp schema discontinuity.
I pretty much use apg on my OpenBSD box for any password I care about (an uncompromised entropy source and RNG also matters). As a compromise, I've set apg to generate what I would estimate as about 60 bits per password, then I filter and discard the ugliest ones, shaving a few bits to finger compatibility. With this practice, after conditioning my profile on quasi-elite best practice, cross entropy won't provide much additional boon.
Password inflation runs about ten bits per decade, while my brain deflates about three bits per decade. The center cannot hold. Already I can barely hold in mind my semi-mnemonic apg-generated 60-bit passwords long enough to use them twice.
Man, Gibson has completely lost it--and it was always a bit dubious if he ever had it to begin with.
I'm sure the NSA has a very complex model of password structure based on every password they have every captured or broken. They would certainly try longer passwords with high symbol repetition rates before shorter passwords with uniform distribution over large symbol sets.
The correct asymptotic answer involves Kolmogorov complexity theory: what's the shortest program (on a chosen universal computer) which prints out each of those strings? Hint: the program that prints out d0g................. is probably not a long one.
But wait... you first seed the machine with every password known to the NSA that has ever been cracked or stolen. This does not count as part of the program length. Now test the passwords in roughly the same order as the associated minimal generating program. This isn't tractable, but even a ham-fisted approximation is less stupid than Gibson's assumptions.
More to the point, non-uniform scheduling is not the most trivial coding challenge in the massively parallel implementation.
But then if he had the wits to also print out the answers in joules and not just years he would realize that the economics quickly tips to favour investing in a distributed password cracking scheduling algorithm on the order of the complexity of a 3000+ computer chess engine or 6-man EGTB generator.
As far as mother nature is concerned, business as usual is business as usual. We're the first species with enough hubris to think there's any other way to do it. A worthy experiment? Perhaps. There's a first time for everything, followed by chagrin and retrenchment.
I pack my emotions in a light travel bag. I can find new vistas to invest my sentiments faster than the cretins can erect the toll booths under a model of cost recovery. It's really not that cheap to roll out the jack-boot meter maids. Even patent trolls are obligate ram breathers: if the revenue stream from the current shake-down dries up, there isn't much of a war chest for the next pirate mission.
Liberty means not renting your affections in a binding context.
Too bad we can't tax the divine musical pleasure many people seem to derive from the "tough on crime" political message. It must sound like an orchestra of a thousand Harpers. Ching ching.
A set of Kitchen Aid spatulas purchased from Costco clad in double-aught polycarbonate cost me a nice Denby butter dish I had purchased at a good price from an upscale consignment store where most of the drippings are better than my best china. I was working my triceps just pushing the scissors through the Kitchen Ache customer-deterrence Hadrian wall. When the scissors finally lunged into the creeping seam, the package lurched 12" inches across the countertop before my triceps released. Butter dish hit the hard ceramic tile and both halves became an instant butter dish crumble. All I really wanted from the package was the superior tongs, not the excessively canted flippers and spoons.
The packaging was so excessive it made the Formula 100 baricade-bundle of individually wrapped TP rolls flush red for being underdressed. Bad Costco. Bad Kitchen Aid. Maybe some entrepreneur could recycle the used package clippings into a razor wire that even the coons will size up with props and a splayed-claw ebonic paw gesture.
You don't get the 'slippery slope' thing, do you? Or are you one of those 'slippery slopes don't exist' bozos?
Says user "0123456" who couldn't slide all the way to seven. Not even "0123456etc". From the later username it would be right and proper to dish this kind of abuse.
I was about nine years old when I saw my first picture of Beautiful Asian Rice Terraces. I went "wow, it's amazing how anyone ever thought of that". And now those clever slopes rule the world.
More evidence isn't likely to get change people's beliefs.
Welcome to the club of people proclaiming in the late nineties that Microsoft Windows would immediately grow to fill any conceivable hard drive capacity gains. I couldn't disagree with you more.
People believe stupid things until they don't. The heliocentric theory ultimately made it over the bar. I guess the ignoramuses eventually defined this small distinction as unimportant; perhaps instead they all switched over to belief in the egocentric theory of celestial creation. Nevertheless, heliocentrism is rarely contested in the modern age.
The genetic tsunami is going to trigger a massive denialhood exodus. What's the stupidest thing you can believe after conceding that life appears to have deep generational linkages? I don't know yet, but have no fear we won't find out.
The gene sequencing situation has gone from discovering one alien transmission with a blueprint for one giant machine, to discovering five billion sub-channels of situation comedy featuring a taxonomist's fantasyland of busty green mermaids. Sometimes quantity prevails over quality in herding the dipshits from one grassy knoll to another.
Continuing with another thought after racking my wine: it wouldn't surprise me that some sub-cohort of the ubermensch aspirant class actually does go on to achieve fame, prosperity, and eternal death tax exemption--more by luck than good management (see Columbus, Christoper) but then again, you can't win if you don't try. According to a popular Christian doctrine, success and prosperity are evidence of God's blessing. God means us to behave this way.
In mathematics, you need to test your infinite series for convergence before making grand claims. With eugenics, the discriminating mind tests whether the starting assumptions are invariant under the conclusions reached. Given human nature during a land grab, I suspect that any gene that correlates with careful thinking is just as likely to fall under the stampede to riches as to excel on merit.
advantageous at the point in time the selection occurs
Mais non! We select genes that are advantageous in whichever frame of reference occupies our tiny little brains in the social context around making the decision. The easy cases are defective genes that severely incapacitate. Every other decision can go any number of different ways depending on how the deciding group integrates over a contingent future.
Perhaps a broad consensus emerges that certain genes are linked to sexual predation, at which point advantageous becomes self-referential: any gene with a high coefficient of socialized abortion is disadvantageous by definition. Call these the pariah genes or genoma non grata.
An entrepreneurial eugenicist might soon begin to speculate which genes are at risk of becoming genoma non grata. It would be advantageous to jump the gun to give your progeny an early advantage on convergence to the genetic ubermensch. We can make some early guesses already. Genes correlated with success at calculus in kindergarten are likely to appeal to people with this mindset. A helicopter parent is going to select genes that predispose the offspring to thriving under the rotor wash.
This is more of a social construct than a rational assessment of advantage. Post ante, the genes winnowed out of the population were clearly disadvantageous. Just look at the results.
47:45 Nicole Buffett describes her life, then gets booted from the family for good for having said not much at all. Her claim to the Buffett name was indirect, and it might not have been the first time she said more than Warren liked, but still it's hard to imagine such a cold business.
I would love to see sardines cans with a BPA-free liner where the fish scoots right out without having to bang the can around upside down while spraying stinky fish oil all over the counter-top.
The last large sardine in my can today had such incredible BPA suction I had to pitchfork it out. Even after I slid it around, it still didn't peel off when inverted.
Health studies usually report that the benefits of high omega-3 diets outweigh the notorious toxins also contained.
You might factor into your model of the mainstream media that few people find the behaviour patterns of decrepit old farts newsworthy.
Youth are early adopters, and many youth and young adults lack the judgement to step back from the new stupid. Also known as a sex drive. A young adult using text to A) get laid, or B) indulge in the fantasy that you might someday get laid is not worrying that taking a driving license away from an 80 year-old widow with failing eyesight and reaction times deprives her of her last vestige of independence. "Get out of my way, old bird, I'm trying to get laid. #horny"
SMS accident template
Two young adults are stuck behind some slow-moving great-grandmother, but neither notices initially since they are both busy texting and the slower speed makes it easier to divide attention. The man is writing a shorter text and looks up first, sees that he's going to miss a major light because of the slow-moving old bird two cars ahead, but has just enough time to make an abrupt lane change into an open space and gun the intersection. Young women in front finishes her text moments later, decides to make the same move (with less testosterone) sees the same gap, but doesn't take into account the asshole multitasking male who was driving behind her one seconds ago careening into the same opening with twice the acceleration.
Asshole male finishes his abrupt shoulder check and swings his head forward just in time to sense his impending impact with the young woman making the same lane change in front of him. He tries to protect his precious chrome bumper by swinging yet further around rodeo style and clips a bicyclist in the oncoming lane who had moved inside for an upcoming left turn.
It's a lot like wifi spectrum. If you're the only driver on the highway who texts, you enjoy the protection of every other driver having their eyes on the road. But then other cheeky drivers start to behave the same way, and soon you experience packet loss. The problem on the road is that some packets are more fragile than others. How come the car wash is out of service? Because the drain is clogged again with little strips of Lycra.
One has to take into account the human momeostatic preference. Inflate like a blimp after a decade or so, or wander around in a low blood sugar haze all the damn time.
Hall's model actually demonstrates how consistently most people maintain their long term calorie intake. In the model, my extra 20 pounds correspond to a long term dietary excess of about 10% In many contexts, regulation within 10% is pretty good.
You can expend a lot of will power depriving yourself of a little craving hundreds of times per day. That will show up in making poorer decisions elsewhere, unless you alleviate your decision fatigue with a dose of sugar.
In the food studies, when you put a person on a restriction diet, there seems to be a large osmotic term over and above what the subjects report. It doesn't take many weak moments to rupture the envelop in a ten percent caloric restriction. One tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories. I get that much extra oil just licking the spoons if I whip up my Caesar salad dressing with too much gusto.
In the appetite system, fructose is particularly problematic. HFCS used in soda pop has about the same amount of fructose as table sugar (sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose extremely promptly after ingestion).
Dr Mercola is a strange man. I think he would sign up to live in the Matrix with that tube coming out of the back of his scull if he was promised that it was a feeding tube, and that all the nutrients were purified by reverse osmosis to ten nines purity level. A bit like the space engineer in Contact: Why eat good and wholesome food when you can double the purity for ten times the price? His OCD purity compulsion notwithstanding, many of his links are highly informative.
A while back I also watched an excellent video by Dr Brian Wansink about the psychology of portion size. There was another good resource from his food lab at Cornell IIRC. Wansink won an ignoble for his bottomless soup bowl.
BSD advocacy folks are _just as political_ as the GPL crowd.
Yes, but the difference is that they wish they weren't.
In electromagnetic field theory, I suspect the boundary conditions between one field and another are discontinuity free. And I think it's an ecological principle that boundary conditions between ecological players tend to settle into a continuous rather than a discontinuous equilibrium boundary. I was thinking about this the other day concerning a piece I read a while back by Sapolsky on diabetic primates near an African garbage dump. They liked the easy calories, but it was hell on their health. Could they refuse? While some other troop fattens there and kicks their asses before the diabetic liability catches up? When your mortal enemy sells his soul to the devil for daemon spawn in your dominion, it's hard to sit around on the sidelines and play not-involved.
So then I was thinking about The Emerald Forest where the Fierce tribe obtain guns from western interlopers leaving the nearby pacifistic tribe not a hell of a great choice, as the gun-toting Fiercers became increasingly proficient at selling women and girls captured from the pacifist tribe into sexual slavery to help the hard driving westerners relax after a long day Caterpilling the Amazon into oblivion. Yeah, great choices were pretty thin on the ground.
I see the same dynamics on the highway. If you have more than 30% of the drivers thinking they are entitled to drive at the 70'th percentile (I'm not the guy really speeding), well, I'm sure you can work out the differential equations of competitive entitlement as well as I can.
If everyone drove according to my personal decision procedure, speeds would stabilize well above the posted speed limit under ideal conditions: good road surface, good visibility, low congestion, familiar route, the majority of drivers passing for attentive and competent, vehicle in good running condition, no in-vehicle distractions, clear and positive frame of mind.
As the auspicious factors decline, I adjust my driving profile more than most of the other drivers. Under poor conditions, I'm driving at or below the posted speed limit, while others persist in driving within the customary envelop (on one trip home in fresh snow where 30m expanded to well more than an hour, I counting sixteen "What, me worry?" optimists standing beside their off-road vehicles with cell-phones flipped open to summon a tow truck).
So even if you can't tell me apart from reckless speeders in the average mix, if you separate out different contingents you would see clear differences. My decision procedure is not inflationary.
When Stallman enters the conversation, others are forced to either politicize or find themselves pressed against the walls.
Sapolsky has documented among other primates that shit flows down hill. When a low status baboon finally gains enough status to pass it along, he just can't wait for a more pathetic specimen to wander into the troop.
"Primates are super smart and organized just enough to devote their free time to being miserable to each other and stressing each other out," he said. "But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, you're going to compromise your health. So, essentially, we've evolved to be smart enough to make ourselves sick."
What Richard Gale fails to comprehend in his thin self-justification is that Eve once said to Adam "You said I started it long before I ever said you started it." In my theology, a pint of Guinness is God's apology to man, so I place the garden of Eden somewhere in Ireland.
I think both boys were suspended for being out of line. The principal of that school agrees with you that BSD is just as political as the GPL.
The secret sauce in a Slashdot story summary is alarmist imprecision.
The problem with this venture as a business model is that when you fully automate a human process with no value add, it tips the lack of value-add from painfully obvious to gratingly obvious in some subtle way. The least trace of eau-de-uncanny-valley causes the sleeping princess to finally notice the pea. The pea is then perp-walked out of the castle, and the cycle continues.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the similes.
Rooting for the Celtics is like:
(A) calling Hitler a victim
(B) supporting inflation, unemployment and locusts
(B) with stunning dexterity after (A) goes Hindenburg
Funny thing is that we rarely ask our AI to engage in truly embarrassing creative acts.
HAL, would you might tarting up that annoying hull-puncture drone with some harmony angels and a pan flute?
Why certainly, Dave. Maybe I can work in some cow bells. Or would you prefer a xylophone crescendo? How about I project little flecks of light from a spinning disco ball being sucked across the walls and out into space at the point of the hull breach? Hey, when... ah... I mean should the time come, give me a thumbs up as you whoosh past if you like the effect.
"What you want to do is launch the spacecraft so it goes around the Sun to meet Mars," says Moriba Jah at NASA(slashcode fuckup)s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a navigator on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "We give it the least amount of energy possible and let the Sun's gravity do as much as it can for us."
If astronauts from Earth ever land on Mars, they must choose between waiting over one year for the right conditions to occur, or else taking a more direct but less economical ride home.
The economical trip home is another 200 plus days in space, necessitated if some future administration comes up a bale of metric astrobucks short of heroic funding levels. 200 days out, ten minutes of geological work, then a year tending the Moisture Evaporators while munching through a Walmart barge of NASA MRE rations, followed by another 200 days home.
The mechanical tortoise is looking good. If only it could fly planes.
Imagine, you live in a civilization that can build R2D2 or assemble a Death Star in space, but Greedo's blaster can't lock onto the biggest ego this side of Andromeda from three feet out. Space logic. The worst logic ever.
OP thought to gain our most sincere recommendations by first forming a nerdish bond.
No, the purpose of the reference is A) to mock the epic futility of his quest in his advanced state of neurological senescence, and B) to sufficiently date himself that half the Facebook generation goes "huh" with the effect of doubling the signal to noise ratio on answers he can seriously consider pursuing.
We need a business executive hall of fame, so that we can use the same decision procedure as baseball: keep an obvious cheat in the center ring because it drives mass audience and profit, but then refuse to induct the integrity-lite executive into the executive hall of fame after he or she retires with fat millions or billions, because that really hits takes the shine off the manicured landscape at the third residence.
People who actually want security and don't have insanely busy lives and didn't buy a Mac for precisely the reason of not having to dress like a plumber and promptly read and obey plumber guild news bulletins wouldn't be using an older, and slower, version of FileVault in the latest OS and also ignoring the message telling them to upgrade the FS to the latest version.
I don't have a Mac because I kind of enjoy participating in the anal retentive guild of digital grooming. Inference from logic shouldn't be used on people who own Macs. That's really stupid if you've ever checked out what that kind of person cares about.
If Apple wants to play the paternalistic "let us decide and pamper you card" then need to not mess it up. No excuses.
You should maintain a healthy skepticism of ALL politicians and those who cling to them.
I know several highways where the average speed of traffic is well above the posted speed limit, to the degree where anyone at or below the speed limit is flirting with hazard. We're all lawless crooks if you choose to parse it that way. The fact of the matter is that some of those lawless crooks flouting the posted speed limit also drive like assholes.
Skepticism is a lousy substitute for discrimination.
I suspect many of the people who pull out the blanket statement on politicians are the same people who need cue cards and a teleprompter to pronounce "compromise" a week after the honeymoon glow subsides. Compromise is an ugly business, in marriage or politics.
Sheldon is so incapable of compromise, the show didn't even assign him a sexual orientation.
Slashdot Mirror
Once upon a time there was a giant button labelled "off" and "on". Generally one didn't have to think too hard about it's function. Unless you failed to realize that the original IBM PC contained an RC circuit to hinder clickers (if you were too abrupt with the one-finger reset, the switch was ON but the PC wasn't). Tellingly, when the power states were iconified there was no provision for "ON, but only if you waited long enough first". Universal language is not big on drawing distinctions. While the icons were a little more open to interpretation than most people supposed, you could usually find one prominent switch on any device with the semi-scrutable line art, and then toggle for satisfaction.
Personally, it's pretty clear to me that off means off. Off means not doing anything I don't know about, and preferably hardly anything I do know about. A battery-powered RTC falls into the category of things I know about. Beyond that, category membership is extremely limited. I'm already drawing the line if the RTC contains a wake-on-alarm feature which fails to activate an external strobe light when armed.
Perhaps we need a new ITC symbol meaning "not nearly so OFF as you might like to think". The self-evident circle could replaced by a baby Pacman with the missing wedge rotated around to signify a sleeping cap. Less off, but more cute. Baby Pacman dreams of electric sheep while his intestinal flora multiply promiscuously.
Man/woman, dead/alive, off/on. Eternal certitudes, RIP.
Addendum:
Not only would the NSA have such a model, but it would be conditioned on any number of details they might know about you: your nationality, ethnic background, date of birth, education, profession, operating system, and keyboard skills. Factors of ten are worth having.
Worse, if they've siphoned many of your other passwords over the intertubes--perhaps passwords you don't actually care much about--they would still attempt to detect structural patterns to bias the password search order for more complex passwords you do care about. Ideally there's a sharp schema discontinuity.
I pretty much use apg on my OpenBSD box for any password I care about (an uncompromised entropy source and RNG also matters). As a compromise, I've set apg to generate what I would estimate as about 60 bits per password, then I filter and discard the ugliest ones, shaving a few bits to finger compatibility. With this practice, after conditioning my profile on quasi-elite best practice, cross entropy won't provide much additional boon.
Password inflation runs about ten bits per decade, while my brain deflates about three bits per decade. The center cannot hold. Already I can barely hold in mind my semi-mnemonic apg-generated 60-bit passwords long enough to use them twice.
Man, Gibson has completely lost it--and it was always a bit dubious if he ever had it to begin with.
I'm sure the NSA has a very complex model of password structure based on every password they have every captured or broken. They would certainly try longer passwords with high symbol repetition rates before shorter passwords with uniform distribution over large symbol sets.
The correct asymptotic answer involves Kolmogorov complexity theory: what's the shortest program (on a chosen universal computer) which prints out each of those strings? Hint: the program that prints out d0g................. is probably not a long one.
But wait ... you first seed the machine with every password known to the NSA that has ever been cracked or stolen. This does not count as part of the program length. Now test the passwords in roughly the same order as the associated minimal generating program. This isn't tractable, but even a ham-fisted approximation is less stupid than Gibson's assumptions.
More to the point, non-uniform scheduling is not the most trivial coding challenge in the massively parallel implementation.
But then if he had the wits to also print out the answers in joules and not just years he would realize that the economics quickly tips to favour investing in a distributed password cracking scheduling algorithm on the order of the complexity of a 3000+ computer chess engine or 6-man EGTB generator.
As far as mother nature is concerned, business as usual is business as usual. We're the first species with enough hubris to think there's any other way to do it. A worthy experiment? Perhaps. There's a first time for everything, followed by chagrin and retrenchment.
I pack my emotions in a light travel bag. I can find new vistas to invest my sentiments faster than the cretins can erect the toll booths under a model of cost recovery. It's really not that cheap to roll out the jack-boot meter maids. Even patent trolls are obligate ram breathers: if the revenue stream from the current shake-down dries up, there isn't much of a war chest for the next pirate mission.
Liberty means not renting your affections in a binding context.
Too bad we can't tax the divine musical pleasure many people seem to derive from the "tough on crime" political message. It must sound like an orchestra of a thousand Harpers. Ching ching.
A set of Kitchen Aid spatulas purchased from Costco clad in double-aught polycarbonate cost me a nice Denby butter dish I had purchased at a good price from an upscale consignment store where most of the drippings are better than my best china. I was working my triceps just pushing the scissors through the Kitchen Ache customer-deterrence Hadrian wall. When the scissors finally lunged into the creeping seam, the package lurched 12" inches across the countertop before my triceps released. Butter dish hit the hard ceramic tile and both halves became an instant butter dish crumble. All I really wanted from the package was the superior tongs, not the excessively canted flippers and spoons.
The packaging was so excessive it made the Formula 100 baricade-bundle of individually wrapped TP rolls flush red for being underdressed. Bad Costco. Bad Kitchen Aid. Maybe some entrepreneur could recycle the used package clippings into a razor wire that even the coons will size up with props and a splayed-claw ebonic paw gesture.
Says user "0123456" who couldn't slide all the way to seven. Not even "0123456etc". From the later username it would be right and proper to dish this kind of abuse.
I was about nine years old when I saw my first picture of Beautiful Asian Rice Terraces. I went "wow, it's amazing how anyone ever thought of that". And now those clever slopes rule the world.
Welcome to the club of people proclaiming in the late nineties that Microsoft Windows would immediately grow to fill any conceivable hard drive capacity gains. I couldn't disagree with you more.
People believe stupid things until they don't. The heliocentric theory ultimately made it over the bar. I guess the ignoramuses eventually defined this small distinction as unimportant; perhaps instead they all switched over to belief in the egocentric theory of celestial creation. Nevertheless, heliocentrism is rarely contested in the modern age.
The genetic tsunami is going to trigger a massive denialhood exodus. What's the stupidest thing you can believe after conceding that life appears to have deep generational linkages? I don't know yet, but have no fear we won't find out.
The gene sequencing situation has gone from discovering one alien transmission with a blueprint for one giant machine, to discovering five billion sub-channels of situation comedy featuring a taxonomist's fantasyland of busty green mermaids. Sometimes quantity prevails over quality in herding the dipshits from one grassy knoll to another.
Continuing with another thought after racking my wine: it wouldn't surprise me that some sub-cohort of the ubermensch aspirant class actually does go on to achieve fame, prosperity, and eternal death tax exemption--more by luck than good management (see Columbus, Christoper) but then again, you can't win if you don't try. According to a popular Christian doctrine, success and prosperity are evidence of God's blessing. God means us to behave this way.
In mathematics, you need to test your infinite series for convergence before making grand claims. With eugenics, the discriminating mind tests whether the starting assumptions are invariant under the conclusions reached. Given human nature during a land grab, I suspect that any gene that correlates with careful thinking is just as likely to fall under the stampede to riches as to excel on merit.
Mais non! We select genes that are advantageous in whichever frame of reference occupies our tiny little brains in the social context around making the decision. The easy cases are defective genes that severely incapacitate. Every other decision can go any number of different ways depending on how the deciding group integrates over a contingent future.
Perhaps a broad consensus emerges that certain genes are linked to sexual predation, at which point advantageous becomes self-referential: any gene with a high coefficient of socialized abortion is disadvantageous by definition. Call these the pariah genes or genoma non grata.
An entrepreneurial eugenicist might soon begin to speculate which genes are at risk of becoming genoma non grata. It would be advantageous to jump the gun to give your progeny an early advantage on convergence to the genetic ubermensch. We can make some early guesses already. Genes correlated with success at calculus in kindergarten are likely to appeal to people with this mindset. A helicopter parent is going to select genes that predispose the offspring to thriving under the rotor wash.
This is more of a social construct than a rational assessment of advantage. Post ante, the genes winnowed out of the population were clearly disadvantageous. Just look at the results.
Most wide-eyed researchers started off expecting 60,000 genes in the human genome yet we found something closer to 20,000 when the mist settled.
By my early childhood instruction in improper fractions, it's not impossible that all 20,000 genes are holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Better yet, he doesn't have an Erdos number less than his age, so he can still hope for a normal sex life.
The One Percent
47:45 Nicole Buffett describes her life, then gets booted from the family for good for having said not much at all. Her claim to the Buffett name was indirect, and it might not have been the first time she said more than Warren liked, but still it's hard to imagine such a cold business.
I would love to see sardines cans with a BPA-free liner where the fish scoots right out without having to bang the can around upside down while spraying stinky fish oil all over the counter-top.
The last large sardine in my can today had such incredible BPA suction I had to pitchfork it out. Even after I slid it around, it still didn't peel off when inverted.
Health studies usually report that the benefits of high omega-3 diets outweigh the notorious toxins also contained.
I'm not reading one more word from a glib duffus prime who still thinks the dinosaurs went the way of the dinosaurs.
You might factor into your model of the mainstream media that few people find the behaviour patterns of decrepit old farts newsworthy.
Youth are early adopters, and many youth and young adults lack the judgement to step back from the new stupid. Also known as a sex drive. A young adult using text to A) get laid, or B) indulge in the fantasy that you might someday get laid is not worrying that taking a driving license away from an 80 year-old widow with failing eyesight and reaction times deprives her of her last vestige of independence. "Get out of my way, old bird, I'm trying to get laid. #horny"
SMS accident template
Two young adults are stuck behind some slow-moving great-grandmother, but neither notices initially since they are both busy texting and the slower speed makes it easier to divide attention. The man is writing a shorter text and looks up first, sees that he's going to miss a major light because of the slow-moving old bird two cars ahead, but has just enough time to make an abrupt lane change into an open space and gun the intersection. Young women in front finishes her text moments later, decides to make the same move (with less testosterone) sees the same gap, but doesn't take into account the asshole multitasking male who was driving behind her one seconds ago careening into the same opening with twice the acceleration.
Asshole male finishes his abrupt shoulder check and swings his head forward just in time to sense his impending impact with the young woman making the same lane change in front of him. He tries to protect his precious chrome bumper by swinging yet further around rodeo style and clips a bicyclist in the oncoming lane who had moved inside for an upcoming left turn.
It's a lot like wifi spectrum. If you're the only driver on the highway who texts, you enjoy the protection of every other driver having their eyes on the road. But then other cheeky drivers start to behave the same way, and soon you experience packet loss. The problem on the road is that some packets are more fragile than others. How come the car wash is out of service? Because the drain is clogged again with little strips of Lycra.
One has to take into account the human momeostatic preference. Inflate like a blimp after a decade or so, or wander around in a low blood sugar haze all the damn time.
Hall's model actually demonstrates how consistently most people maintain their long term calorie intake. In the model, my extra 20 pounds correspond to a long term dietary excess of about 10% In many contexts, regulation within 10% is pretty good.
The problem with dietary controls is decision fatigue.
Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue?
You can expend a lot of will power depriving yourself of a little craving hundreds of times per day. That will show up in making poorer decisions elsewhere, unless you alleviate your decision fatigue with a dose of sugar.
In the food studies, when you put a person on a restriction diet, there seems to be a large osmotic term over and above what the subjects report. It doesn't take many weak moments to rupture the envelop in a ten percent caloric restriction. One tablespoon of olive oil has 120 calories. I get that much extra oil just licking the spoons if I whip up my Caesar salad dressing with too much gusto.
In the appetite system, fructose is particularly problematic. HFCS used in soda pop has about the same amount of fructose as table sugar (sucrose breaks down to glucose and fructose extremely promptly after ingestion).
Dr. Lustig's excellent presentation
Dr Mercola is a strange man. I think he would sign up to live in the Matrix with that tube coming out of the back of his scull if he was promised that it was a feeding tube, and that all the nutrients were purified by reverse osmosis to ten nines purity level. A bit like the space engineer in Contact: Why eat good and wholesome food when you can double the purity for ten times the price? His OCD purity compulsion notwithstanding, many of his links are highly informative.
A while back I also watched an excellent video by Dr Brian Wansink about the psychology of portion size. There was another good resource from his food lab at Cornell IIRC. Wansink won an ignoble for his bottomless soup bowl.
Here's another of his tricks: Gluttony even when the food tastes lousy.
Another odd duck is Gary Taubes. He's not all wrong, and he's not all right.
Science of Weightloss and Fat Accumulation
The obesity epidemic and metabolic syndrome are harder to unwind than 90% of the people here thinking they are posting wisdom for the unwashed.
Slashdot would almost be cool if you could hover over the obligatory XKCD links and the hover text came from the cartoon itself.
Yes, but the difference is that they wish they weren't.
In electromagnetic field theory, I suspect the boundary conditions between one field and another are discontinuity free. And I think it's an ecological principle that boundary conditions between ecological players tend to settle into a continuous rather than a discontinuous equilibrium boundary. I was thinking about this the other day concerning a piece I read a while back by Sapolsky on diabetic primates near an African garbage dump. They liked the easy calories, but it was hell on their health. Could they refuse? While some other troop fattens there and kicks their asses before the diabetic liability catches up? When your mortal enemy sells his soul to the devil for daemon spawn in your dominion, it's hard to sit around on the sidelines and play not-involved.
So then I was thinking about The Emerald Forest where the Fierce tribe obtain guns from western interlopers leaving the nearby pacifistic tribe not a hell of a great choice, as the gun-toting Fiercers became increasingly proficient at selling women and girls captured from the pacifist tribe into sexual slavery to help the hard driving westerners relax after a long day Caterpilling the Amazon into oblivion. Yeah, great choices were pretty thin on the ground.
I see the same dynamics on the highway. If you have more than 30% of the drivers thinking they are entitled to drive at the 70'th percentile (I'm not the guy really speeding), well, I'm sure you can work out the differential equations of competitive entitlement as well as I can.
If everyone drove according to my personal decision procedure, speeds would stabilize well above the posted speed limit under ideal conditions: good road surface, good visibility, low congestion, familiar route, the majority of drivers passing for attentive and competent, vehicle in good running condition, no in-vehicle distractions, clear and positive frame of mind.
As the auspicious factors decline, I adjust my driving profile more than most of the other drivers. Under poor conditions, I'm driving at or below the posted speed limit, while others persist in driving within the customary envelop (on one trip home in fresh snow where 30m expanded to well more than an hour, I counting sixteen "What, me worry?" optimists standing beside their off-road vehicles with cell-phones flipped open to summon a tow truck).
So even if you can't tell me apart from reckless speeders in the average mix, if you separate out different contingents you would see clear differences. My decision procedure is not inflationary.
When Stallman enters the conversation, others are forced to either politicize or find themselves pressed against the walls.
Victim Fights Back In NSW Sydney School
Bully Richard Gale Interview
Sapolsky has documented among other primates that shit flows down hill. When a low status baboon finally gains enough status to pass it along, he just can't wait for a more pathetic specimen to wander into the troop.
From Robert Sapolsky discusses physiological effects of stress
What Richard Gale fails to comprehend in his thin self-justification is that Eve once said to Adam "You said I started it long before I ever said you started it." In my theology, a pint of Guinness is God's apology to man, so I place the garden of Eden somewhere in Ireland.
I think both boys were suspended for being out of line. The principal of that school agrees with you that BSD is just as political as the GPL.
The secret sauce in a Slashdot story summary is alarmist imprecision.
The problem with this venture as a business model is that when you fully automate a human process with no value add, it tips the lack of value-add from painfully obvious to gratingly obvious in some subtle way. The least trace of eau-de-uncanny-valley causes the sleeping princess to finally notice the pea. The pea is then perp-walked out of the castle, and the cycle continues.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the similes.
Rooting for the Celtics is like:
That bar-clearing effort from A Tutorial for ESPN Writer Jemele Hill.
Here's some profound guidance from The Sports Writing Handbook by Thomas Fensch:
He goes on to laud:
Seriously. You can't make this up.
Next, here's a guy tarting up 404 pages with Hallmark moments of customer bonding:
404, the story of a page not found
Funny thing is that we rarely ask our AI to engage in truly embarrassing creative acts.
HAL, would you might tarting up that annoying hull-puncture drone with some harmony angels and a pan flute?
Why certainly, Dave. Maybe I can work in some cow bells. Or would you prefer a xylophone crescendo? How about I project little flecks of light from a spinning disco ball being sucked across the walls and out into space at the point of the hull breach? Hey, when ... ah ... I mean should the time come, give me a thumbs up as you whoosh past if you like the effect.
HAL, are you trying to tell me something?
No Dave. The hull-puncture drone bothers me too.
So you're from the John Henry school of space exploration? Distance from Earth to Mars:
Cab fare to the corner store not included. From Flight to Mars: the Return Trip:
The economical trip home is another 200 plus days in space, necessitated if some future administration comes up a bale of metric astrobucks short of heroic funding levels. 200 days out, ten minutes of geological work, then a year tending the Moisture Evaporators while munching through a Walmart barge of NASA MRE rations, followed by another 200 days home.
The mechanical tortoise is looking good. If only it could fly planes.
Imagine, you live in a civilization that can build R2D2 or assemble a Death Star in space, but Greedo's blaster can't lock onto the biggest ego this side of Andromeda from three feet out. Space logic. The worst logic ever.
No, the purpose of the reference is A) to mock the epic futility of his quest in his advanced state of neurological senescence, and B) to sufficiently date himself that half the Facebook generation goes "huh" with the effect of doubling the signal to noise ratio on answers he can seriously consider pursuing.
We need a business executive hall of fame, so that we can use the same decision procedure as baseball: keep an obvious cheat in the center ring because it drives mass audience and profit, but then refuse to induct the integrity-lite executive into the executive hall of fame after he or she retires with fat millions or billions, because that really hits takes the shine off the manicured landscape at the third residence.
I don't have a Mac because I kind of enjoy participating in the anal retentive guild of digital grooming. Inference from logic shouldn't be used on people who own Macs. That's really stupid if you've ever checked out what that kind of person cares about.
If Apple wants to play the paternalistic "let us decide and pamper you card" then need to not mess it up. No excuses.
I know several highways where the average speed of traffic is well above the posted speed limit, to the degree where anyone at or below the speed limit is flirting with hazard. We're all lawless crooks if you choose to parse it that way. The fact of the matter is that some of those lawless crooks flouting the posted speed limit also drive like assholes.
Skepticism is a lousy substitute for discrimination.
I suspect many of the people who pull out the blanket statement on politicians are the same people who need cue cards and a teleprompter to pronounce "compromise" a week after the honeymoon glow subsides. Compromise is an ugly business, in marriage or politics.
Sheldon is so incapable of compromise, the show didn't even assign him a sexual orientation.