So are soldiers, TSA agents or, for that matter, suicide bombers. It doesn't make it better. Unless they are slaves or otherwise forced, they made a choice to do that job. It might've been a hard choice, bills to pay and all, but a choice nevertheless.
The problem is that a gaussian approach to the numbers assumes that random fluctuations will even out. But the equations used in quantum physics allow for waves to combine, and that's what is happening - interference, just not between 2 waves as in the double-slit experiment, but between dozens or maybe hundreds of waves. This article here: http://dev.physicslab.org/Document.aspx?doctype=3&filename=PhysicalOptics_InterferenceDiffraction.xml shows towards the bottom how massive peaks you can get with multiple interference patterns.
What has fascinated me about freak/rogue waves is that sailors have known about them for decades if not centuries, but scientists were telling them it can't be.
And the reason is badly understood statistics. I've recently read Black Swan, and that gave me a few new concepts to work with, but the basic idea is exactly that: We don't really have a good understanding of statistics and probabilities, especially about extremely low probabilities in big numbers.
Or, as Tim Minchin put it: One-in-a-million things happen all the time.
And it's not just in the oceans. The entire financial crisis was caused by the people in charge taking huge (but low probability) risks, ignoring that once enough people have taken enough of those "low probability" risk, they become very likely to actually happen.
Freak waves are cool because they are in the gray area between the normal distribution and the really freaky - thus they happen often enough that they are rare, but not bigfoot-rare. We can actually study them.
Yeah, that's all. Nothing productive in this thread anymore. But I strongly believe that assholes need to be told off or they start thinking their behaviour is acceptable.
Yeah, just the fact that you said '27" display' tells me everything I need to know about you.
Shoe size? A/S/L ?
There are times I've considered a fourth...
For some people it's cars...:-)
I had a 21" as a secondary display for a while, but it turned out that I didn't really use it. But then again, I know enough about the mind to understand that multi-tasking is an illusion and focus makes you productive.
You should upgrade your display. Since I switched to a 27" display, I don't feel like screen space is valuable anymore. Very, very rarely do I use anything in fullscreen, because I simply don't need to.
Back when 14" was the standard, screen space was really valuable. Today? Get a bigger display.
Actually, I do. Around the time that everyone realizes that removing legacy support is the only way that IPv6 will ever get any actual traction. Also, we know the fantastic advantages and painlessness of legacy support from the windows world, right?
IPv4 needs to die or IPv6 will remain a footnote in history.
Europe switched to the Euro not by adding it and waiting if the local currencies die out, but by adding both the Euro and a deadline for local currencies. Today, the old local currencies aren't legal tender anymore (though the central bank will convert them in case you find any old notes in your grandmothers socks or something).
Without that, I'm sure we'd still be having a mix of currencies today.
X is part of the name and has always been. The official name used to be "Mac OS X" until recently, and the upcoming version is officially named just "OS X":
Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't everyone do this?
No.
I start with code, because I think in code. Writing out a couple lines of pseudocode explains much clearer to me what I intend to do. Then I add comments to explain why I am doing things and then I flesh out the code from pseudo- to real code.
I said windows is, by design, more secure that Mac OS
Comparing apples and oranges. Different approaches in security seldom compare naively along one axis. There are many good approaches in windows, and many good approaches in OS X (it hasn't been called Mac OS for a decade now, maybe if you'd get up to speed...)
The issue is more often implementation, where both MS and Apple blunder. But don't forget that it took a decade of heavy fire from pretty much everyone before MS finally woke up and put a focus on security. Before that, their crap contained the most shoody fuck-ups you can imagine and more. I sincerely hope that Apple doesn't require that kind of wake-up call. But they definitely need one, given that they don't even use, say, sandboxing on all of their own applications.
I am skeptical of the causal relation between marketshare and malware share. It has been thrown around as an argument for more than a decade, but there is little evidence for it. At the very least, the correlation is weak, as the rise in malware seems to come at arbitrary times in arbitrary bursts. Unless you postulate that somehow 14% is a magical number, plotting the curves would show they demonstrate no similarities.
I am not saying that market share is not a factor - few malware targets NetBSD or BeOS or any of the other obscure OS with a market share barely visible under a microscope. However, market share is at best one of many interacting factors. The most important consequence is that you can not predict the future trend from market share alone, not even broadly. If the OS X market share doubles over the next two years, the amount of malware could stay almost equal, it could double, tripple or explode by several orders of magnitude.
While I'm not exactly surprised, as the article states much of the obvious, I wonder.
Is this true for FOSS projects? Where you jump on Github and contribute a patch? Where nobody will even know that you're a woman or elderly, or whatever, for at least the first few years?
It does take a leap of faith to state "There is no God" (atheism). The sentence isn't testable or falsable.
Which is why it is the shorthand version. The full version that we atheists employ when it is a serious philosophical debate goes something like "With a probability as close to certainty as you care to measure, we can conclude that there is no necessity nor evidence of the existence of a higher being as postulated by the world religions."
But that doesn't fit into the form fields where you are asked for your confession, so we put it down as "atheist", which does.
My personal version, though, is that if I look at the world, there are only two logical conclusions you can end with. Either, there is no god. Or, he is one sick, twisted fucker.
The gravitational force of even her even if she passes the clock at less than 10 cm is on the order of magnitude of 10^-6 newton. The air currents caused by her breathing or walking by are almost certainly causing a greater effect than the gravity.
Yes, I know it was a joke. I just felt like checking the math.
He never said the two are the same. The key word here is "indistinguishable", i.e. they appear the same.
The problem with magical thinking is that it applies a false cause-and-effect relationship to the world. You assume that if you do X, then Y will follow, in a case where no such relationship actually exists, beyond maybe the coincidental. Tim Minchin has a nice sketch about it: http://youtu.be/pQjqxayxwt4
Good luck evaluating all those 'objective' facts coming in via your senses.
Effortless. A million years of evolution do that for you.
Of course, your mention of Wittgenstein (funny how some philosopher names are dropped almost everywhere, how about you point out the actual passage that you are thinking about?) Anyway, that mentioning implies that you are trying to make a philosophical rather than a practical point. Now the funny thing is that yes, my brain is betraying me regarding the information delivered by my senses. But, unlike religion, that is still a fact-based decision, the thing that it is not is raw fact. It is processed - which is the purpose of the visual cortex et al.
Too many "thinkers" confuse fact-based with raw-iron-facts. They are not the same.
What makes you believe the causality you imply is this direction, though? It could well be the other way around, that these people who are good at networking and social skills just happen to gather around religion as their shared interest, but any other interest would do?
I'm not just talking about the small group you attend, but the religion as a whole. Humans are social creatures and like to gather with like-minded others. Religion is a strong focus point because of its claim to speak about all aspects of life, so it beats chess clubs and other hobbies as a shared interest.
And yet strong communities have formed around other things than religion, if the shared interest is of life-importance to those involved. Artist communities come to mind.
Author seems confused about evolutionary history vs. present usefulness.
Most who research these topics are well aware of why the known human shortcomings have developed - namely that they were evolutionary useful under specific circumstances. Our preference of false positives over false negatives is certainly a survival trait if the price of a false positive is a short moment of fear while the price of a false negative is being eaten by a lion.
But that doesn't mean these traits are still of advantage today, in the context of a modern world.
It depends. I don't think the audience qualified to comment (i.e. other mathematicians) has much trouble understanding it.
I do agree that some pseudo- and wannabe-sciences try to sound more important than they are. But with even a little bit of education, it is fairly easy to cut through the bullshit.
But that is a different thing altogether, and as such the argument does not apply.
On anything that is video (animated images count) or audio, I absolutely want confirmation.
I regularily open several tabs in the background, e.g. go through a news site, open all interesting articles in their own tabs, continue until end of summary page, then go read all of them. The next time some audio suddenly starts blasting through my speakers, drowning out my music, and I have to hunt down the fucking window that does it, I'll do berserk.
Seriously, audio in webpages should always require an explicit user start.
one should ask themselves if they trust a bunch of mathematicians who turn out phrases like
I'd rather trust a mathematician who has trouble explaining himself clearly to non-mathematicians, but knows his field and his craft, than one who writes poetry during lunchbreak, but whose record in his field is spotty.
Slashdot Mirror
Telemarketers are just doing their job.
So are soldiers, TSA agents or, for that matter, suicide bombers. It doesn't make it better. Unless they are slaves or otherwise forced, they made a choice to do that job. It might've been a hard choice, bills to pay and all, but a choice nevertheless.
Thanks, AC. In 12+ years of /. this was one of the most informative AC comments I've come across.
The problem is that a gaussian approach to the numbers assumes that random fluctuations will even out. But the equations used in quantum physics allow for waves to combine, and that's what is happening - interference, just not between 2 waves as in the double-slit experiment, but between dozens or maybe hundreds of waves.
This article here: http://dev.physicslab.org/Document.aspx?doctype=3&filename=PhysicalOptics_InterferenceDiffraction.xml shows towards the bottom how massive peaks you can get with multiple interference patterns.
What has fascinated me about freak/rogue waves is that sailors have known about them for decades if not centuries, but scientists were telling them it can't be.
And the reason is badly understood statistics. I've recently read Black Swan, and that gave me a few new concepts to work with, but the basic idea is exactly that: We don't really have a good understanding of statistics and probabilities, especially about extremely low probabilities in big numbers.
Or, as Tim Minchin put it: One-in-a-million things happen all the time.
And it's not just in the oceans. The entire financial crisis was caused by the people in charge taking huge (but low probability) risks, ignoring that once enough people have taken enough of those "low probability" risk, they become very likely to actually happen.
Freak waves are cool because they are in the gray area between the normal distribution and the really freaky - thus they happen often enough that they are rare, but not bigfoot-rare. We can actually study them.
Fuck off, troll.
Yeah, that's all. Nothing productive in this thread anymore. But I strongly believe that assholes need to be told off or they start thinking their behaviour is acceptable.
Yeah, just the fact that you said '27" display' tells me everything I need to know about you.
Shoe size? A/S/L ?
There are times I've considered a fourth...
For some people it's cars... :-)
I had a 21" as a secondary display for a while, but it turned out that I didn't really use it. But then again, I know enough about the mind to understand that multi-tasking is an illusion and focus makes you productive.
Look at all that wasted space.
You should upgrade your display. Since I switched to a 27" display, I don't feel like screen space is valuable anymore. Very, very rarely do I use anything in fullscreen, because I simply don't need to.
Back when 14" was the standard, screen space was really valuable. Today? Get a bigger display.
Nobody expects IPv4 to go away any time soon.
Actually, I do. Around the time that everyone realizes that removing legacy support is the only way that IPv6 will ever get any actual traction. Also, we know the fantastic advantages and painlessness of legacy support from the windows world, right?
IPv4 needs to die or IPv6 will remain a footnote in history.
Europe switched to the Euro not by adding it and waiting if the local currencies die out, but by adding both the Euro and a deadline for local currencies. Today, the old local currencies aren't legal tender anymore (though the central bank will convert them in case you find any old notes in your grandmothers socks or something).
Without that, I'm sure we'd still be having a mix of currencies today.
X is part of the name and has always been. The official name used to be "Mac OS X" until recently, and the upcoming version is officially named just "OS X":
http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/16/2802281/apple-officially-renames-mac-os-x-to-os-x-drops-the-mac
Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't everyone do this?
No.
I start with code, because I think in code. Writing out a couple lines of pseudocode explains much clearer to me what I intend to do. Then I add comments to explain why I am doing things and then I flesh out the code from pseudo- to real code.
People think differently.
I am writing english, don't I? Quote: "don't need that kind of wake-up call".
"To install this virus, run ./configure && make & make install" :-)
I said windows is, by design, more secure that Mac OS
Comparing apples and oranges. Different approaches in security seldom compare naively along one axis. There are many good approaches in windows, and many good approaches in OS X (it hasn't been called Mac OS for a decade now, maybe if you'd get up to speed...)
The issue is more often implementation, where both MS and Apple blunder. But don't forget that it took a decade of heavy fire from pretty much everyone before MS finally woke up and put a focus on security. Before that, their crap contained the most shoody fuck-ups you can imagine and more. I sincerely hope that Apple doesn't require that kind of wake-up call. But they definitely need one, given that they don't even use, say, sandboxing on all of their own applications.
I am skeptical of the causal relation between marketshare and malware share. It has been thrown around as an argument for more than a decade, but there is little evidence for it. At the very least, the correlation is weak, as the rise in malware seems to come at arbitrary times in arbitrary bursts. Unless you postulate that somehow 14% is a magical number, plotting the curves would show they demonstrate no similarities.
I am not saying that market share is not a factor - few malware targets NetBSD or BeOS or any of the other obscure OS with a market share barely visible under a microscope. However, market share is at best one of many interacting factors. The most important consequence is that you can not predict the future trend from market share alone, not even broadly. If the OS X market share doubles over the next two years, the amount of malware could stay almost equal, it could double, tripple or explode by several orders of magnitude.
Good point, that would probably drop the force by another order of magnitude or so. Doesn't change the point, though.
While I'm not exactly surprised, as the article states much of the obvious, I wonder.
Is this true for FOSS projects? Where you jump on Github and contribute a patch? Where nobody will even know that you're a woman or elderly, or whatever, for at least the first few years?
It does take a leap of faith to state "There is no God" (atheism). The sentence isn't testable or falsable.
Which is why it is the shorthand version. The full version that we atheists employ when it is a serious philosophical debate goes something like "With a probability as close to certainty as you care to measure, we can conclude that there is no necessity nor evidence of the existence of a higher being as postulated by the world religions."
But that doesn't fit into the form fields where you are asked for your confession, so we put it down as "atheist", which does.
My personal version, though, is that if I look at the world, there are only two logical conclusions you can end with. Either, there is no god. Or, he is one sick, twisted fucker.
The gravitational force of even her even if she passes the clock at less than 10 cm is on the order of magnitude of 10^-6 newton. The air currents caused by her breathing or walking by are almost certainly causing a greater effect than the gravity.
Yes, I know it was a joke. I just felt like checking the math.
The Clarke quote is being overused.
He never said the two are the same. The key word here is "indistinguishable", i.e. they appear the same.
The problem with magical thinking is that it applies a false cause-and-effect relationship to the world. You assume that if you do X, then Y will follow, in a case where no such relationship actually exists, beyond maybe the coincidental. Tim Minchin has a nice sketch about it: http://youtu.be/pQjqxayxwt4
Good luck evaluating all those 'objective' facts coming in via your senses.
Effortless. A million years of evolution do that for you.
Of course, your mention of Wittgenstein (funny how some philosopher names are dropped almost everywhere, how about you point out the actual passage that you are thinking about?)
Anyway, that mentioning implies that you are trying to make a philosophical rather than a practical point. Now the funny thing is that yes, my brain is betraying me regarding the information delivered by my senses. But, unlike religion, that is still a fact-based decision, the thing that it is not is raw fact. It is processed - which is the purpose of the visual cortex et al.
Too many "thinkers" confuse fact-based with raw-iron-facts. They are not the same.
Interesting point.
What makes you believe the causality you imply is this direction, though? It could well be the other way around, that these people who are good at networking and social skills just happen to gather around religion as their shared interest, but any other interest would do?
I'm not just talking about the small group you attend, but the religion as a whole. Humans are social creatures and like to gather with like-minded others. Religion is a strong focus point because of its claim to speak about all aspects of life, so it beats chess clubs and other hobbies as a shared interest.
And yet strong communities have formed around other things than religion, if the shared interest is of life-importance to those involved. Artist communities come to mind.
Author seems confused about evolutionary history vs. present usefulness.
Most who research these topics are well aware of why the known human shortcomings have developed - namely that they were evolutionary useful under specific circumstances. Our preference of false positives over false negatives is certainly a survival trait if the price of a false positive is a short moment of fear while the price of a false negative is being eaten by a lion.
But that doesn't mean these traits are still of advantage today, in the context of a modern world.
It depends. I don't think the audience qualified to comment (i.e. other mathematicians) has much trouble understanding it.
I do agree that some pseudo- and wannabe-sciences try to sound more important than they are. But with even a little bit of education, it is fairly easy to cut through the bullshit.
But that is a different thing altogether, and as such the argument does not apply.
On anything that is video (animated images count) or audio, I absolutely want confirmation.
I regularily open several tabs in the background, e.g. go through a news site, open all interesting articles in their own tabs, continue until end of summary page, then go read all of them. The next time some audio suddenly starts blasting through my speakers, drowning out my music, and I have to hunt down the fucking window that does it, I'll do berserk.
Seriously, audio in webpages should always require an explicit user start.
one should ask themselves if they trust a bunch of mathematicians who turn out phrases like
I'd rather trust a mathematician who has trouble explaining himself clearly to non-mathematicians, but knows his field and his craft, than one who writes poetry during lunchbreak, but whose record in his field is spotty.