Lots of people simply do not have the intellectual facilities -- not training, I'm talking about capacity here -- to even begin to approach mathematics beyond various levels.
Every time one of my co-workers needs to calculate the volume of a shipping container, he asks me how to do it. He knows that he needs to use the length, width and height, but he can never remember whether he needs to multiply or add them together.
The belief that, with the right training, this guy could prove the Riemann Hypothesis, is absurd.
The New Math fiasco was driven by the belief that everyone could master abstract math, and that the ability of everyone to do so was important. They can't, and it is not.
I'm pretty good at math but I find it boring. I enjoy programming which is similar but for whatever reason I find it a lot more interesting
Me too. I think the big difference is the lack of feedback in math. If I work for hours or days to construct a proof, I don't really know if it is valid or not, and maybe it was all a waste of time because I made an error in the first few steps. With programming, I can test incrementally, fix errors as I go, and I can see the end result is valid because the program works. The feeling of accomplishment is much better.
How all the positive stories about Tesla and SpaceX make reference to Elon but all the negative stories don't even mention him
That is because when there is good news, Elon is front and center to deliver it himself. When there is bad news, it is buried in paragraph 3 of some PR webpage.
1. He was already rich. 2. If he wanted to get richER, then an aerospace company would have been about the worst possible way to do that. Historically, aerospace tends to make large fortunes into small fortunes rather than the other way around.
I still can't believe some people think the sentences are what's wrong, instead of the inaccurate verdicts.
Because the death penalty is fixable, while perfect verdicts are a fantasy. Capital punishment has been eliminated by most countries, including Russia, Myanmar, etc. Here is a map of countries that still have capital punishment. Is this really a club we want to belong to?
taking an innocent person's life by putting them in prison for decades
In this case, it would not have been "decades". He would have been released within a few years, and certainly after Rick Perry's presidential campaign collapsed. Perry, then governor of Texas, was under a lot of pressure to "look tough" for the primaries, so he granted few clemencies, and may have even impeded the appeals process. Perry dismissed evidence for Willingham's innocence, by claiming (without evidence) that he was a "wife beater".
If I understood this right they are calling the lack of attraction, repulsion.
Yes, you understood it right. They also provide the analogy of a tug-o-war rope being "repulsed" by the end with fewer people tugging on it. That is the stupidest analogy I have heard all day. The rope, of course, is not being "pushed" and neither is the galaxy.
The problem is these things are always tested on "shifty bastards". As soon as precedent is available, they get extended to ordinary people.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencklen
Why not? All kinds of pseudo-science and bogus evidence has been accepted in the past. Arson and bite mark "evidence" are clear examples of this.
A good example of this was Cameron Todd Willingham. He was executed in Texas for murder and arson based on flimsy pseudo-science evidence. Based on what we have subsequently learned about how fires start and spread, many arson experts now believe he was almost certainly innocent. Oops.
This guy couldn't catch a break after decades of trying to raise capital and build a flying car.
That is because he is doing it wrong. His "flying car" is really a drivable airplane. The best it can do is go from airport-to-airport, and then drive from there. You could achieve the same result, cheaper and safer, by just renting a car at the arrival airport, or (even easier) taking Uber to your final destination.
The billionaires are more sensible. Quadcopters are clearly a better technology for this application. They can fly city-center-to-city-center, and you won't need a pilot's license to fly in one.
Yet nobody seems to attack Apple for exactly the same view on their iPads.
1. People attack Apple about this all the time. 2. Most people that buy iPads see the "walled garden" as a feature. They are specifically looking for something safe for their 5 year old to learn phonics. When people buy Windows laptops, they are expecting a general purpose computer.
Anyway, if you haven't read TFA, don't waste your time. The whole article consists of quoting Tim Sweeney, and they explaining why everything he just said is full of crap... so then why bother to quote him? It is a pointless non-story.
The 40% is likely not random. The response may be stronger when it is something the patient cares deeply about. So the response to "Is your shoe size nine?" may be weaker than "Do you want us to kill you?".
Also, like many bio-feedback systems, the accuracy could be improved with training. If the patient practices, they may get much better at giving the intended response. It is not like they have something better to do with their time.
I can believe the length of the bathtub curve is much longer than the useful life of the disk drive.
The "bathtub curve" has two ends. Neither end is valid for HDDs. If a HDD spins up and formats, then it is no more likely to suffer an "early death" in the first few months than it is to fail in subsequent months. Likewise, the sharp rise in failures after 3-4 years doesn't appear valid. There is certainly a rise, but it is not that sharp. Also, HDD failure is more strongly correlated with accumulative spin time than with calendar age.
It's real in board products, cars and silicon.
These are different issues. Boards often fail because electrolytic capacitors dry out, and less often because of tin whiskers. Those are both aggravated by age and heat. I am not a "car guy" so I don't want to comment on that. I very much disagree that there is a "bathtub" failure rate for actual silicon (rather than chip to chip connections). I have 40 year old TTL chips that still work just fine.
This Backblaze report, previous Backblaze reports, and the Google logitudinal disk reliability study, have all found that the "bathtub curve" is a myth. HDDs do not have high early failure rates, nor does the failure rate suddenly rise after a set period of time.
Another myth that these studies have debunked is that HDDs do better if kept cool. Actually, failure rates are lower for disks kept at the higher end of the rated temperatures. This is one reason that Google runs "hot" datacenters today, with ambient temps over 100F.
Open book law exam in the past, now its open laptop.
"Open book" still requires the test-taker to do their own work. With "open laptop", they can be in collusion with another person who actually answers the questions. Lack of Wifi doesn't fix the problem because they could still use the cellular network, or have an ad-hoc network between two test-takers in the same room who share answers.
Disclaimer: When I was in college, I made money taking tests for other people. In a 200 student lecture hall, nobody notices that. So I think I understand the "cheater" mentality. Many people will put more effort into cheating that what would have been needed to just study and pass legitimately. Part of it is just the thrill of "beating the system."
I am surprised that they would allow anyone to use their own computer. If the test taker controls the device, the opportunities for cheating are unlimited. And they can't rely on the honor system, since, hey, they are lawyers.
They just raised taxes and lowered spending to an appropriate level
No they didn't. The US continued to run deficits, and the debt continued to grow. The WW2 debt was never paid off. It was just rolled over into new debt. US National Debt by Year
rather than pretending that we can borrow endlessly
We CAN borrow endlessly. Sovereign national debt is not like individual debt. There is no reason that it ever needs to be paid. We have been running deficits for nearly a century, with just a few blips. The only serious effort to balance the budget resulted in the Great Depression. Debt hawks claim that debt will lead to a weak currency and inflation. After a century of rising debt, we currently have exactly the opposite problem. The dollar is strong, destroying our exporters, and inflation is near zero.
Great illustration of how high corporate taxation is counter-productive.
America has the highest corporate tax rate of any country, but has the lowest amount actually collected of any 1st world country. This is because the rate is so high, and so arbitrary, with so many loopholes, that companies can mostly avoid paying. The biggest loophole is that they can avoid the tax by keeping capital overseas, and outsourcing the jobs to the capital, rather than reinvesting in America. So we get the worst of both worlds: low tax collection and job losses. Sad.
It depends on your investment goals. If you are investing for the long run (many decades), stocks have historically been better than bonds. If you need reliable, steady income, then bonds are better.
For companies, bonds are a better way to raise capital, because dividends are paid to stockholders with after-tax income, while bond interest is deductible. So it makes sense for Microsoft to borrow money by selling bonds, and then use the proceeds to pay for stock buy-backs, shifting their capital base from equity to debt.
We really should fix the tax laws so that interest and dividends are treated the same, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
I have met several people that said dropping acid was a positive life changing experience. It changed the way they look at the world. Steve Jobs made this claim, and credited LSD as one reason for his success.
The main reason given to NOT use LSD is the claim that it causes genetic damage and birth defects, but that has been totally debunked. It is not addictive, and side effects like anxiety and paranoia, only occur with repeated use.
California's peak demand is now about an hour before sunset to an hour after,
That demand is already met by NG "peaker" plants, which are very cost effective because THEY ALREADY EXIST. Electricity demand is falling, thanks mostly to LED lighting and variable speed DC motors, so there is no need for more capacity.
renewable generation falls off a cliff
Solar drops. Wind power tends to rise in late afternoon.
making it difficult for base-load plants to ramp up quickly
Yet they do it every day. California has no coal plants and few nukes. Most power comes from NG, which can ramp up quickly, especially when the demand peak happens predictably every afternoon.
Battery storage is needed when you want more than ~10-20% of your generation to be from solar.
1. We are no where near close to that. 2. It is not at all clear that batteries will be "needed" even at 10-20%. 3. Even if batteries are needed, it would make way more sense to put them near the endpoints rather than out in the desert. 4. These decisions should be made by the utilities not the politicians.
That said, I am surprised the Li-Ion pencils out, even with subsidies.
Who said it "pencils out"? The utilities don't care about the cost because they are allowed to push the costs onto their customers. The legislators don't care because boondoggles win votes whether they make sense or not, and by pushing for lithium, they get their picture in the news standing next to Elon Musk. The consumers don't care because these projects are too small to matter. Stupid policies can work as long as you keep them small.
This is not about "economics". It is about PR and meeting a political mandate, and not because the project actually makes sense. Alternative energy actually fits the demand curve fairly well (people run ACs when the sun is shining), and "smart meters" can help to shift demand to fit available supply. Car batteries, which are likely to be a major power consumers in the future, can be built with "smart chargers" that charge only when surplus energy is available (and thus the price is low). There is no actual need for these battery storage facilities.
These battery storage facilities make little sense today, and will likely make even less sense in the future. They are only being built because the California state government has required the utilities to build them.
Just out of interest, what happens if you sell your house?
In every jurisdiction I know of, this type of new construction requires several government inspections to make sure it is up to code. They inspect the drains and rebar before you pour concrete. They inspect the plumbing and wiring before you put up drywall. Etc. I have seen plenty of professional contractors fail these inspections for pretty obvious deficiencies. So it is likely that her work is at least as good as theirs. What she lacks in knowledge she makes up in actually-giving-a-shit, since it is her own house.
Slashdot Mirror
some people experience a kind of transcendent wonder that they're seeing something true about the universe
Isn't the same math true in any universe?
Could there be an alternative universe where 1+1=3?
Or where 4 is prime?
Lots of people simply do not have the intellectual facilities -- not training, I'm talking about capacity here -- to even begin to approach mathematics beyond various levels.
Every time one of my co-workers needs to calculate the volume of a shipping container, he asks me how to do it. He knows that he needs to use the length, width and height, but he can never remember whether he needs to multiply or add them together.
The belief that, with the right training, this guy could prove the Riemann Hypothesis, is absurd.
The New Math fiasco was driven by the belief that everyone could master abstract math, and that the ability of everyone to do so was important. They can't, and it is not.
I'm pretty good at math but I find it boring. I enjoy programming which is similar but for whatever reason I find it a lot more interesting
Me too. I think the big difference is the lack of feedback in math. If I work for hours or days to construct a proof, I don't really know if it is valid or not, and maybe it was all a waste of time because I made an error in the first few steps. With programming, I can test incrementally, fix errors as I go, and I can see the end result is valid because the program works. The feeling of accomplishment is much better.
Also, programming pays better.
How all the positive stories about Tesla and SpaceX make reference to Elon but all the negative stories don't even mention him
That is because when there is good news, Elon is front and center to deliver it himself. When there is bad news, it is buried in paragraph 3 of some PR webpage.
they are all get-rich-quick schemes.
1. He was already rich.
2. If he wanted to get richER, then an aerospace company would have been about the worst possible way to do that. Historically, aerospace tends to make large fortunes into small fortunes rather than the other way around.
it's a weird area.
Indeed. Homer Simpson lives in Northern Kentucky. I have relatives in Kentucky, and for a while they thought The Simpsons was a documentary.
I still can't believe some people think the sentences are what's wrong, instead of the inaccurate verdicts.
Because the death penalty is fixable, while perfect verdicts are a fantasy. Capital punishment has been eliminated by most countries, including Russia, Myanmar, etc. Here is a map of countries that still have capital punishment. Is this really a club we want to belong to?
taking an innocent person's life by putting them in prison for decades
In this case, it would not have been "decades". He would have been released within a few years, and certainly after Rick Perry's presidential campaign collapsed. Perry, then governor of Texas, was under a lot of pressure to "look tough" for the primaries, so he granted few clemencies, and may have even impeded the appeals process. Perry dismissed evidence for Willingham's innocence, by claiming (without evidence) that he was a "wife beater".
Oh, by the way, Rick Perry is Trump's nominee for Energy Secretary: Idiot Tasked With Maintaining America's Nukes Surprised to Learn What His Job Is.
If I understood this right they are calling the lack of attraction, repulsion.
Yes, you understood it right. They also provide the analogy of a tug-o-war rope being "repulsed" by the end with fewer people tugging on it. That is the stupidest analogy I have heard all day. The rope, of course, is not being "pushed" and neither is the galaxy.
The problem is these things are always tested on "shifty bastards". As soon as precedent is available, they get extended to ordinary people.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." -- H. L. Mencklen
Why not? All kinds of pseudo-science and bogus evidence has been accepted in the past. Arson and bite mark "evidence" are clear examples of this.
A good example of this was Cameron Todd Willingham. He was executed in Texas for murder and arson based on flimsy pseudo-science evidence. Based on what we have subsequently learned about how fires start and spread, many arson experts now believe he was almost certainly innocent. Oops.
This guy couldn't catch a break after decades of trying to raise capital and build a flying car.
That is because he is doing it wrong. His "flying car" is really a drivable airplane. The best it can do is go from airport-to-airport, and then drive from there. You could achieve the same result, cheaper and safer, by just renting a car at the arrival airport, or (even easier) taking Uber to your final destination.
The billionaires are more sensible. Quadcopters are clearly a better technology for this application. They can fly city-center-to-city-center, and you won't need a pilot's license to fly in one.
Yet nobody seems to attack Apple for exactly the same view on their iPads.
1. People attack Apple about this all the time.
2. Most people that buy iPads see the "walled garden" as a feature. They are specifically looking for something safe for their 5 year old to learn phonics. When people buy Windows laptops, they are expecting a general purpose computer.
Anyway, if you haven't read TFA, don't waste your time. The whole article consists of quoting Tim Sweeney, and they explaining why everything he just said is full of crap ... so then why bother to quote him? It is a pointless non-story.
True, but even 40% is better than nothing.
The 40% is likely not random. The response may be stronger when it is something the patient cares deeply about. So the response to "Is your shoe size nine?" may be weaker than "Do you want us to kill you?".
Also, like many bio-feedback systems, the accuracy could be improved with training. If the patient practices, they may get much better at giving the intended response. It is not like they have something better to do with their time.
I can believe the length of the bathtub curve is much longer than the useful life of the disk drive.
The "bathtub curve" has two ends. Neither end is valid for HDDs. If a HDD spins up and formats, then it is no more likely to suffer an "early death" in the first few months than it is to fail in subsequent months. Likewise, the sharp rise in failures after 3-4 years doesn't appear valid. There is certainly a rise, but it is not that sharp. Also, HDD failure is more strongly correlated with accumulative spin time than with calendar age.
It's real in board products, cars and silicon.
These are different issues. Boards often fail because electrolytic capacitors dry out, and less often because of tin whiskers. Those are both aggravated by age and heat. I am not a "car guy" so I don't want to comment on that. I very much disagree that there is a "bathtub" failure rate for actual silicon (rather than chip to chip connections). I have 40 year old TTL chips that still work just fine.
The bathtub curve is real
This Backblaze report, previous Backblaze reports, and the Google logitudinal disk reliability study, have all found that the "bathtub curve" is a myth. HDDs do not have high early failure rates, nor does the failure rate suddenly rise after a set period of time.
Another myth that these studies have debunked is that HDDs do better if kept cool. Actually, failure rates are lower for disks kept at the higher end of the rated temperatures. This is one reason that Google runs "hot" datacenters today, with ambient temps over 100F.
Open book law exam in the past, now its open laptop.
"Open book" still requires the test-taker to do their own work. With "open laptop", they can be in collusion with another person who actually answers the questions. Lack of Wifi doesn't fix the problem because they could still use the cellular network, or have an ad-hoc network between two test-takers in the same room who share answers.
Disclaimer: When I was in college, I made money taking tests for other people. In a 200 student lecture hall, nobody notices that. So I think I understand the "cheater" mentality. Many people will put more effort into cheating that what would have been needed to just study and pass legitimately. Part of it is just the thrill of "beating the system."
I am surprised that they would allow anyone to use their own computer. If the test taker controls the device, the opportunities for cheating are unlimited. And they can't rely on the honor system, since, hey, they are lawyers.
They just raised taxes and lowered spending to an appropriate level
No they didn't. The US continued to run deficits, and the debt continued to grow. The WW2 debt was never paid off. It was just rolled over into new debt. US National Debt by Year
rather than pretending that we can borrow endlessly
We CAN borrow endlessly. Sovereign national debt is not like individual debt. There is no reason that it ever needs to be paid. We have been running deficits for nearly a century, with just a few blips. The only serious effort to balance the budget resulted in the Great Depression. Debt hawks claim that debt will lead to a weak currency and inflation. After a century of rising debt, we currently have exactly the opposite problem. The dollar is strong, destroying our exporters, and inflation is near zero.
Great illustration of how high corporate taxation is counter-productive.
America has the highest corporate tax rate of any country, but has the lowest amount actually collected of any 1st world country. This is because the rate is so high, and so arbitrary, with so many loopholes, that companies can mostly avoid paying. The biggest loophole is that they can avoid the tax by keeping capital overseas, and outsourcing the jobs to the capital, rather than reinvesting in America. So we get the worst of both worlds: low tax collection and job losses. Sad.
It depends on your investment goals. If you are investing for the long run (many decades), stocks have historically been better than bonds. If you need reliable, steady income, then bonds are better.
For companies, bonds are a better way to raise capital, because dividends are paid to stockholders with after-tax income, while bond interest is deductible. So it makes sense for Microsoft to borrow money by selling bonds, and then use the proceeds to pay for stock buy-backs, shifting their capital base from equity to debt.
We really should fix the tax laws so that interest and dividends are treated the same, but that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
I have met several people that said dropping acid was a positive life changing experience. It changed the way they look at the world. Steve Jobs made this claim, and credited LSD as one reason for his success.
The main reason given to NOT use LSD is the claim that it causes genetic damage and birth defects, but that has been totally debunked. It is not addictive, and side effects like anxiety and paranoia, only occur with repeated use.
California's peak demand is now about an hour before sunset to an hour after,
That demand is already met by NG "peaker" plants, which are very cost effective because THEY ALREADY EXIST. Electricity demand is falling, thanks mostly to LED lighting and variable speed DC motors, so there is no need for more capacity.
renewable generation falls off a cliff
Solar drops. Wind power tends to rise in late afternoon.
making it difficult for base-load plants to ramp up quickly
Yet they do it every day. California has no coal plants and few nukes. Most power comes from NG, which can ramp up quickly, especially when the demand peak happens predictably every afternoon.
Battery storage is needed when you want more than ~10-20% of your generation to be from solar.
1. We are no where near close to that.
2. It is not at all clear that batteries will be "needed" even at 10-20%.
3. Even if batteries are needed, it would make way more sense to put them near the endpoints rather than out in the desert.
4. These decisions should be made by the utilities not the politicians.
That said, I am surprised the Li-Ion pencils out, even with subsidies.
Who said it "pencils out"? The utilities don't care about the cost because they are allowed to push the costs onto their customers. The legislators don't care because boondoggles win votes whether they make sense or not, and by pushing for lithium, they get their picture in the news standing next to Elon Musk. The consumers don't care because these projects are too small to matter. Stupid policies can work as long as you keep them small.
Economics doesn't matter
This is not about "economics". It is about PR and meeting a political mandate, and not because the project actually makes sense. Alternative energy actually fits the demand curve fairly well (people run ACs when the sun is shining), and "smart meters" can help to shift demand to fit available supply. Car batteries, which are likely to be a major power consumers in the future, can be built with "smart chargers" that charge only when surplus energy is available (and thus the price is low). There is no actual need for these battery storage facilities.
These battery storage facilities make little sense today, and will likely make even less sense in the future. They are only being built because the California state government has required the utilities to build them.
They scan their docs to fine-tune advertisement delivery.
Yup. I get free storage, free office apps, and I get fine-tuned ads for stuff I am actually interested in. Win-win-win.
Just out of interest, what happens if you sell your house?
In every jurisdiction I know of, this type of new construction requires several government inspections to make sure it is up to code. They inspect the drains and rebar before you pour concrete. They inspect the plumbing and wiring before you put up drywall. Etc. I have seen plenty of professional contractors fail these inspections for pretty obvious deficiencies. So it is likely that her work is at least as good as theirs. What she lacks in knowledge she makes up in actually-giving-a-shit, since it is her own house.