Boutla's work that you refer to here used visual stimuli, which actual dovetails with current findings. Remembering things like digits, words, etc., (the basis for the 7+/-2 number) may involve other working memory capacities.
Did it not also depend on what kind of (was it) chunks you store (if this is at all what is stored in should it perhaps be ultra-) STM ?
Yes, modality is critical here. This work is about an aread involved in maintenance of visual items. More semantic working memory has been widely attributed to the prefrontal cortex as I mentioned in an earlier post.
Interestingly, both groups of researchers were working strictly with visual memory. I wonder whether the working memory used by programmers, mathematicians, etc. will be in the same place, or a different area altogether?
And what about the famous "magic number", 7 +/- 2? These people seem to be offering 4 +1/-2.
Good observation. It's important to note that what these guys claim to have located is the neural substrate of the "visuospatial sketchpad" as memory researcher Alan Baddeley called it. It has to do with your ability to concurrently hold several distinct visual items in mind at once. This number is something like 4+/-2. It's seems to be linked to the number of items you are to "subitize"... that is, how large a numerosity you can recognize without counting (e.g., if there are three pennies, you just "see" three, but if there were 12, you'd have to count them).
Anyway, the important point is that this is different from the "7+/-2" general working memory capacity first put forth by George Miller. That limited capacity has been fairly well established (by a LOT of researchers, in both monkeys and humans--e.g., Fuster, Goldman-Rakic, Earl Miller, JD Cohen, Smith and Jonides, Courtney, and many others) to exist in the prefrontal cortex--the area at the very front of the brain. This is, by far, what most people mean when they refer to the "working memory" capacity of the brain. And it's no where near the posterior parietal area the current authors are pointing to.
As someone else noted in this thread, just because an isolated area comes on and maxes out in a particular task does not mean it is solely responsible...it may mean that is necessarily involved, but a more diffuse network finer than their resolution capability may be recruited. More importantly, it's a tall order to establish that this area is the limited capacity bottleneck, and doesn't just max out because some other bottleneck has reached capacity, so the whole system tops out. What you now want to do is some lesion studies in animals showing that the involvement of this area is causal. However, Marois and Vogel (the authors of the current papers) are very sharp guys, so I'm not going to second guess their conclusions before reading their paper. However, I am going to ding the science editor writing for Nature for bring the fuzzy, baggage-laden concept of "intelligence" into the mix. They seem to have found the visual working memory bottleneck...what this says about "intelligence" is pure speculation and a red herring.
Therefore, you should never rely on coolant when any part of it is at or very close to its boiling point. The coolant properties of the fluid break down.
Uhm, is this not how refrigerants work is closed systems?
That is because Wall Street is so concerned with short-term profits.
The entirety of American business ideology is skewed toward haste at the expense of good judgement. Just watch the Apprentice. Last week, George (one of The Donald's henchman) got sore because a cast member would not hurry up and blurt out quickly enough who should get "fired." The cast member wanted to reason out loud, but George shot him down saying that an executive has to make tough decisions quickly, on the spot, go with his "gut." This is uttter bullshit. A lot of judgements are made under uncertainty, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize the uncertainty! There's this horrible premium on decisiveness, a reverence for quick turn-around, quick action, quick conclusions. It breeds a completely artificial, self-perpetuating misconception that only the fastest businesses, quickest decision-makers rise above the competition.
The truth is, good business takes time. Good decisions require analysis. Creative solutions need to be nurtured. You mention how Japanese industry comes up with this sort of stuff. Well, it's cultural. Asian cultures revere wisdom and carefulness of thought. It's part of the general reverence of age: Quick, impetuous decisions, impulsivity, are seen as hallmarks of youthful foolishness. My girlfriend who's working on her MBA in International Business studied business mores in China. There, it is insulting to accept a deal outright, or to decisively accept an offer without careful deliberation. Deliberativeness, careful consideration are signs of respect, signs that the matter is important, and you have the maturity and wisdom to think things through.
I'm not advocating wasting time or dilly-dallying (my own work habits notwithstanding). But there's something to be said for taking time to think.
I would fly in a plane with a 1 and 10,000 chance that it would crash, but I would NEVER bet my species survival in a 1 10,000 bet with ANYONE.
In fact, that is something I would NEVER bet with ANY ODDS, not even a 1 in a googleplex.
Really? Then what if someone was to approach you with the proposition that you tithe 75% of your income for the remainder of your life to NASA for tracking near-earth objects? No? 50%? How about 25%? Surely you will commit 10% of all your income to hedge against an outcome you said you would never, ever bet against because the stakes are so high.
You have confused outcome with probability.
The magnitude of an outcome does not affect the best estimate of its probability.
It might, of course, affect your behavior and your tolerance for risk. If I was to ask you if you'd be willing pay $1 to play a game where you have 1/100 chance of winning $1000000, you're likely to say yes. If I was to ask if you'd be willing to pay $1 to play a game where you have a 1/100 chance of winning $10, you'd probably laugh at me.
Invert the behavior over for bad outcomes. (Play a game where I pay you $1, but there's a 1/100 chance that you will owe me $10000000 vs. play a game where I pay you $1, but there's a 1/100 chance that you will owe me $10).
None of this make me "wrong" when I say the original poster is silly to think there's 50% chance of asteroid impact this decade, because it either "will or it won't." The consequences of the impact do not change how we go about determining its probability. Only our tolerance for risk.
Furthermore, you make some overtures about the paucity of information in determining the rate of impacts. That's fine. The best estimate of an outcome's probability may not be reliable. By that I mean how confident you are in your estimated probability. But you can quantify that confidence as well.
I will go out on a limb here and guess that there is better than 99.9999% confidence that the probability of an asteroid strike in the next 10 years is less than 50%. In fact, I'd bet the same level of confidence can be expressed at a probability of less than.0005%. This does not preclude it from happening. But you will excuse me if I don't change any of my life plans around that eventuality.
To say that probability of something uncertain happening is "50% No more, no less" is a classic trap in misunderstanding the meaning of probability. Because an event has two possible states (does occur, does not occur) does NOT mean the probability of it occurring is 50%...This is degenerate and wrong thinking in probability. The best estimate of the probability of something happening is exactly equal to the rate at which that event occurred previously. This is called the base rate or prior probability and is integral to Bayes' theorem (please see this). Thus, if you flip a coin (of unknown fairness) 100 times and 41 of those flip come up heads, what's the best estimate of the probability that the next flip will be heads? 41%. [Side note: There are tests to determine if this rules out the coin being fair or not, but even these assume some a priori criterion for ruling out chance effects (i.e., "I'll call it unfair if the coin's pattern is likely to happen by chance less than 5% of the time"...this is called the "alpha level" of such tests).]
Anyway, there is a special distrubtion to describe the occurrence of random events in time (the Poisson distribution), but suffice it to say, the probability of an asteroid hitting the earth in the next decade is NOT 50%. This would only be true if, in the past, an asteroid has hit the earth (on average) once every other decade.
I would argue this info IS ALREADY in the wrong hands and the commoditization of such info merely creates a balance by giving that same access to the little guy (or reasonably little guy).
I disagree. Most of your run of the mill identity thieves are little guys. While I am suspicious of governments and businesses misusing this type of information in misguided attempts to protect "security," there is at least some modicum of accountability and just sheer inertia against a massive organization mobilizing overtly criminal use of private information. Too many people involved to keep it quiet. However, it's going to be a lot more difficult to check the intentions of a "little" guy getting access to this sort of goldmine, and if it goes through, I'm sure many small "businesses" will be set up for the sole purpose of stealing identities for fun and profit. This kind of consolidated information is dangerous in anyone's hands.
Haven't read Stephenson, but the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thing was The Hound from Fahrenheit 451...all spiderlike and venomous. All it needs is a 4 inch needle proboscis to deliver the lethal dose of morphine.
Re: exploit the underlying nature of your brain!
on
The Memory Masters
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The story you are referring to is the true account of one the most famous subjects in psychology--"S" studied by the Russian neurologist AR Luria. He authored a book called "The Mind of A Mnemonist: A Litte Book About a Vast Memory." The man could not forget anything and was tortured his whole life by it. Highly recommended reading.
Perhaps the most famous, certainly one of the most cited, papers in cognitive psychology is George Miller's 1956 paper "The magic number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information." The 7+/-2 rule is one of the few, true "laws" in psychology. It describes the number of items that can be held online in working memory by the average individual. I won't even begin to touch here the myriad theories that proposes mechanisms for this limited capacity.
The technique you talk about regarding the grouping of multiple memoranda into a single unit is called "chunking" and was studied by another great in psychology, the late Herb Simon of CMU. He and Bill Chase found that chunking was basically what set chess masters apart from novices. They saw entire board configurations at once, rather than the relation of individual pieces.
The ability to appreciate the numerosity of multiple items without counting is called subitizing. I know less about this, but the average person can subitize up to about five items.
Anway, just wanted to give credit where it's due for what has become pop psychology fodder.
You see, I was a Sr. Technical Advisor at AutoZone... I initiated AutoZone's transition to Linux and I directed the port of their existing store software base to Linux. I personally ported all of AutoZone's internal software libraries for use under Linux
I see. Mr. Greer, meet Mr. Subpoena. Mr. Subpoena, Mr. Greer.
It was, in fact, SCO's activities that 'greased the skids' and allowed the business case for using Linux to be made more easily. That is a story long in the telling; perhaps I'll share it another day.
I will gauchely reply to myself to add that, as the article implies, it's not simply the range of applied flip force. It's an interaction between applied flip force and leverage point, angle, etc. of the flip--more specifically, the axis of rotation conferred onto the coin due to all these factors--which determines if it will actually flip. So, you can't simply decide you will flip the coin "harder" to get fairer results.
Even a study of 100,000 flips. It will not come out 50/50 of course. Some people...... Anyone agree with me here?
Nope. You missed two points, one made in the article, another about statistics.
1) Their argument is not about differential face/tail weight. Their argument is about the likelihood of the coin to flip at all. They make the point that over a surprisingly large RANGE of initial flipping forces, the coin fails to flip...even though it appears to flip in the air to the casual observer. It's actually precessing. This means that, given a flip force chosen randomly from the set of flip forces a person can apply, there's a slight bias that the coin will not actually flip.
2) It doesn't matter that even over many, many trials the count is not exactly 50-50. As you point out, you don't actually expect that even with a fair a coin you will get exactly 50-50 results on a single run. However, you do expect that the variance from 50-50 is normal and unbiased, and dependent on the number of trials you have. You can use inferential statistics to determine if the distribution of non-50/50 results you get after repeated experiments is more or less than the variance predicted by chance. I won't get into how, but apparently their measured bias is reliable.
Yup, my girlfriend and I had a blowout argument over a similar issue in thermodynamics. Actually, it started off as an argument about neatness. I was making the weak argument that it's stupid to make the bed because you'll be back in it in about 16hours anyway. She argued that not only does it look neater, but the sheets are all arranged for better coverage, and...get this..."besides, it keeps the bed warm."
"What?!"
"The covers keep the bed warm. Just like they keep you warm when you're under them."
"Uhm, no, covers keep you warm cuz they trap the heat you generate; if there's no body in the bed, there's no heat to trap."
"Yeah-huh! The bed's warm after you get out of it. The covers keep it there."
"Honey. Sweetheart. Unless your comforter is made of aerogel ['Wha..?' 'Nevermind.'], I'm quite sure whatever residual heat is in the bed has quite dissipated through the comforter after 16 hours. Cotton just isn't that good of an insulator."
"So? It's still warmer than the cold room."
"No. Baby. Honey. Listen. Do you know the laws of thermodynamics? The heat doesn't stay there. It's dissipating. Without a heat source, eventually everything in the room is more or less the same temperature. That means your bed too."
"Then why is toilet so cold? I bet if it had a cover it would stay warm."
"No. Baby. Sweetness. The toilet is cold because of the heat conduction of porcelain. It sucks the heat from your ass faster, then say, sitting on your bed."
We NEED to take this step foward, DESPERATELY, in order to help solve poverty, exploitation and many other ills in the world.
With all due respect, I call bullshit. Your arguments and the parent post's arguments are simply so much sentimental claptrap.
There's so much clamor for 'intellectual honesty' in the current political climate, let's start here.
Let's call a spade a spade. Space exploration is worthwhile because we, as a society, have decided that the enrichment of human knowledge is a virtue per se. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Human endeavor. It needs no other rationalization.
To say that space exploration is worthwhile because of unrealized, indeterminate side effects that are not the goal or intention of the pursuit, but held up, nevertheless, as some sort of social promisory note is just sophistic rhetoric. Tomorrow, I'll go tell the homeless guy down the street the good news: "Worry not, dear poor person, for we are building a space elevator that will elevate the dignity of all humankind, and so too shall your station rise!" Yes, and then I'll go tell the patients in the oncology ward that we shall cure cancer by building flying cars, for surely some modicum of the technology needed to build a flying car will make cancer fly from the body as well.
Here's the thing: Multiple fronts. Society proceeds on multiple fronts. We don't stop space exploration because we have sick and poor people. We don't stop researching epilepsy because we have diabetes, stop researching diabetes because we have AIDS, stop researching AIDS because we have cancer, stop researching cancer because middle aged men have erectile dysfunction. What we DO do (giggle) is engage in a torturous debate in resource allocation. In terms of real life application, space exploration is an incredibly expensive, high risk investment with a possibly high payoff potential on a very far time horizon. But in the short term, we learn a lot about how the world works. This does improve the human condition in some abstract sense, but to say that it is a necessary step to curing some of our pressing social ills is disingenuous. The way to address our pressing social ills is to, you know, address our pressing social ills. We just have to figure out how to do that in a responsible way and still leave enough money over for the purer, less immediately tangible pursuits that we collectively value. Doing this factor analysis well is the hallmark of good government.
FTA:...he created a portable device similar to a desktop printer that can produce any prescription lens from a single-mold surface in five to 10 minutes.
Slashdot Mirror
Boutla's work that you refer to here used visual stimuli, which actual dovetails with current findings. Remembering things like digits, words, etc., (the basis for the 7+/-2 number) may involve other working memory capacities.
Did it not also depend on what kind of (was it) chunks you store (if this is at all what is stored in should it perhaps be ultra-) STM ?
Yes, modality is critical here. This work is about an aread involved in maintenance of visual items. More semantic working memory has been widely attributed to the prefrontal cortex as I mentioned in an earlier post.
Interestingly, both groups of researchers were working strictly with visual memory. I wonder whether the working memory used by programmers, mathematicians, etc. will be in the same place, or a different area altogether?
And what about the famous "magic number", 7 +/- 2? These people seem to be offering 4 +1/-2.
Good observation. It's important to note that what these guys claim to have located is the neural substrate of the "visuospatial sketchpad" as memory researcher Alan Baddeley called it. It has to do with your ability to concurrently hold several distinct visual items in mind at once. This number is something like 4+/-2. It's seems to be linked to the number of items you are to "subitize"... that is, how large a numerosity you can recognize without counting (e.g., if there are three pennies, you just "see" three, but if there were 12, you'd have to count them).
Anyway, the important point is that this is different from the "7+/-2" general working memory capacity first put forth by George Miller. That limited capacity has been fairly well established (by a LOT of researchers, in both monkeys and humans--e.g., Fuster, Goldman-Rakic, Earl Miller, JD Cohen, Smith and Jonides, Courtney, and many others) to exist in the prefrontal cortex--the area at the very front of the brain. This is, by far, what most people mean when they refer to the "working memory" capacity of the brain. And it's no where near the posterior parietal area the current authors are pointing to.
As someone else noted in this thread, just because an isolated area comes on and maxes out in a particular task does not mean it is solely responsible...it may mean that is necessarily involved, but a more diffuse network finer than their resolution capability may be recruited. More importantly, it's a tall order to establish that this area is the limited capacity bottleneck, and doesn't just max out because some other bottleneck has reached capacity, so the whole system tops out. What you now want to do is some lesion studies in animals showing that the involvement of this area is causal. However, Marois and Vogel (the authors of the current papers) are very sharp guys, so I'm not going to second guess their conclusions before reading their paper. However, I am going to ding the science editor writing for Nature for bring the fuzzy, baggage-laden concept of "intelligence" into the mix. They seem to have found the visual working memory bottleneck...what this says about "intelligence" is pure speculation and a red herring.
Therefore, you should never rely on coolant when any part of it is at or very close to its boiling point. The coolant properties of the fluid break down.
Uhm, is this not how refrigerants work is closed systems?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...
"Yeh foo-foo-meh ya can't get fooled again"
-GWB
(sorry, couldn't resist)
problem with Wind OS is that it sounds too much like "Wind Aw's" which is awful close to "Wind Ass" if you're British. Maybe that's OK, though.
Other ideas:
Wind Owes
Wind O's
Win Does (like the deer)
Win Doh's!
Or, for the far east flavor,
Nguyen Doze
... prestidgeous Ivy League degree ....
...Stop thinking like a couch potatoe.
Dan? Is that you?
That is because Wall Street is so concerned with short-term profits.
The entirety of American business ideology is skewed toward haste at the expense of good judgement. Just watch the Apprentice. Last week, George (one of The Donald's henchman) got sore because a cast member would not hurry up and blurt out quickly enough who should get "fired." The cast member wanted to reason out loud, but George shot him down saying that an executive has to make tough decisions quickly, on the spot, go with his "gut." This is uttter bullshit. A lot of judgements are made under uncertainty, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to minimize the uncertainty! There's this horrible premium on decisiveness, a reverence for quick turn-around, quick action, quick conclusions. It breeds a completely artificial, self-perpetuating misconception that only the fastest businesses, quickest decision-makers rise above the competition.
The truth is, good business takes time. Good decisions require analysis. Creative solutions need to be nurtured. You mention how Japanese industry comes up with this sort of stuff. Well, it's cultural. Asian cultures revere wisdom and carefulness of thought. It's part of the general reverence of age: Quick, impetuous decisions, impulsivity, are seen as hallmarks of youthful foolishness. My girlfriend who's working on her MBA in International Business studied business mores in China. There, it is insulting to accept a deal outright, or to decisively accept an offer without careful deliberation. Deliberativeness, careful consideration are signs of respect, signs that the matter is important, and you have the maturity and wisdom to think things through.
I'm not advocating wasting time or dilly-dallying (my own work habits notwithstanding). But there's something to be said for taking time to think.
I would fly in a plane with a 1 and 10,000 chance that it would crash, but I would NEVER bet my species survival in a 1 10,000 bet with ANYONE.
.0005%. This does not preclude it from happening. But you will excuse me if I don't change any of my life plans around that eventuality.
In fact, that is something I would NEVER bet with ANY ODDS, not even a 1 in a googleplex.
Really? Then what if someone was to approach you with the proposition that you tithe 75% of your income for the remainder of your life to NASA for tracking near-earth objects? No? 50%? How about 25%? Surely you will commit 10% of all your income to hedge against an outcome you said you would never, ever bet against because the stakes are so high.
You have confused outcome with probability.
The magnitude of an outcome does not affect the best estimate of its probability.
It might, of course, affect your behavior and your tolerance for risk. If I was to ask you if you'd be willing pay $1 to play a game where you have 1/100 chance of winning $1000000, you're likely to say yes. If I was to ask if you'd be willing to pay $1 to play a game where you have a 1/100 chance of winning $10, you'd probably laugh at me.
Invert the behavior over for bad outcomes. (Play a game where I pay you $1, but there's a 1/100 chance that you will owe me $10000000 vs. play a game where I pay you $1, but there's a 1/100 chance that you will owe me $10).
None of this make me "wrong" when I say the original poster is silly to think there's 50% chance of asteroid impact this decade, because it either "will or it won't." The consequences of the impact do not change how we go about determining its probability. Only our tolerance for risk.
Furthermore, you make some overtures about the paucity of information in determining the rate of impacts. That's fine.
The best estimate of an outcome's probability may not be reliable. By that I mean how confident you are in your estimated probability. But you can quantify that confidence as well.
I will go out on a limb here and guess that there is better than 99.9999% confidence that the probability of an asteroid strike in the next 10 years is less than 50%. In fact, I'd bet the same level of confidence can be expressed at a probability of less than
To say that probability of something uncertain happening is "50% No more, no less" is a classic trap in misunderstanding the meaning of probability. Because an event has two possible states (does occur, does not occur) does NOT mean the probability of it occurring is 50%...This is degenerate and wrong thinking in probability. The best estimate of the probability of something happening is exactly equal to the rate at which that event occurred previously. This is called the base rate or prior probability and is integral to Bayes' theorem (please see this). Thus, if you flip a coin (of unknown fairness) 100 times and 41 of those flip come up heads, what's the best estimate of the probability that the next flip will be heads? 41%. [Side note: There are tests to determine if this rules out the coin being fair or not, but even these assume some a priori criterion for ruling out chance effects (i.e., "I'll call it unfair if the coin's pattern is likely to happen by chance less than 5% of the time"...this is called the "alpha level" of such tests).]
Anyway, there is a special distrubtion to describe the occurrence of random events in time (the Poisson distribution), but suffice it to say, the probability of an asteroid hitting the earth in the next decade is NOT 50%. This would only be true if, in the past, an asteroid has hit the earth (on average) once every other decade.
What the fuck is this article about? The blurb looks like a bunch of fucking gibberish.
/Gonna be ghibli-ghibli-ghibli-GREAT!
Ghiblits and ghravy, my friend! Dhelicious thurkey thrimmings! Released for the whole of the U.S. to enjoy! Mm-MMM! Sing it with me now...
Gimme ghibli on my plate / I can hardly wait
I would argue this info IS ALREADY in the wrong hands and the commoditization of such info merely creates a balance by giving that same access to the little guy (or reasonably little guy).
I disagree. Most of your run of the mill identity thieves are little guys. While I am suspicious of governments and businesses misusing this type of information in misguided attempts to protect "security," there is at least some modicum of accountability and just sheer inertia against a massive organization mobilizing overtly criminal use of private information. Too many people involved to keep it quiet. However, it's going to be a lot more difficult to check the intentions of a "little" guy getting access to this sort of goldmine, and if it goes through, I'm sure many small "businesses" will be set up for the sole purpose of stealing identities for fun and profit. This kind of consolidated information is dangerous in anyone's hands.
Haven't read Stephenson, but the first thing that came to mind when I saw this thing was The Hound from Fahrenheit 451...all spiderlike and venomous. All it needs is a 4 inch needle proboscis to deliver the lethal dose of morphine.
The story you are referring to is the true account of one the most famous subjects in psychology--"S" studied by the Russian neurologist AR Luria. He authored a book called "The Mind of A Mnemonist: A Litte Book About a Vast Memory." The man could not forget anything and was tortured his whole life by it. Highly recommended reading.
Perhaps the most famous, certainly one of the most cited, papers in cognitive psychology is George Miller's 1956 paper "The magic number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information." The 7+/-2 rule is one of the few, true "laws" in psychology. It describes the number of items that can be held online in working memory by the average individual. I won't even begin to touch here the myriad theories that proposes mechanisms for this limited capacity.
The technique you talk about regarding the grouping of multiple memoranda into a single unit is called "chunking" and was studied by another great in psychology, the late Herb Simon of CMU. He and Bill Chase found that chunking was basically what set chess masters apart from novices. They saw entire board configurations at once, rather than the relation of individual pieces.
The ability to appreciate the numerosity of multiple items without counting is called subitizing. I know less about this, but the average person can subitize up to about five items.
Anway, just wanted to give credit where it's due for what has become pop psychology fodder.
It....was....a.....joke.
You see, I was a Sr. Technical Advisor at AutoZone... I initiated AutoZone's transition to Linux and I directed the port of their existing store software base to Linux. I personally ported all of AutoZone's internal software libraries for use under Linux
:-P
I see. Mr. Greer, meet Mr. Subpoena. Mr. Subpoena, Mr. Greer.
It was, in fact, SCO's activities that 'greased the skids' and allowed the business case for using Linux to be made more easily. That is a story long in the telling; perhaps I'll share it another day.
Yeah, yeah...tell it to the judge, Jim.
I will gauchely reply to myself to add that, as the article implies, it's not simply the range of applied flip force. It's an interaction between applied flip force and leverage point, angle, etc. of the flip--more specifically, the axis of rotation conferred onto the coin due to all these factors--which determines if it will actually flip. So, you can't simply decide you will flip the coin "harder" to get fairer results.
Even a study of 100,000 flips. It will not come out 50/50 of course. Some people...... Anyone agree with me here?
Nope. You missed two points, one made in the article, another about statistics.
1) Their argument is not about differential face/tail weight. Their argument is about the likelihood of the coin to flip at all. They make the point that over a surprisingly large RANGE of initial flipping forces, the coin fails to flip...even though it appears to flip in the air to the casual observer. It's actually precessing. This means that, given a flip force chosen randomly from the set of flip forces a person can apply, there's a slight bias that the coin will not actually flip.
2) It doesn't matter that even over many, many trials the count is not exactly 50-50. As you point out, you don't actually expect that even with a fair a coin you will get exactly 50-50 results on a single run. However, you do expect that the variance from 50-50 is normal and unbiased, and dependent on the number of trials you have. You can use inferential statistics to determine if the distribution of non-50/50 results you get after repeated experiments is more or less than the variance predicted by chance. I won't get into how, but apparently their measured bias is reliable.
Yup, my girlfriend and I had a blowout argument over a similar issue in thermodynamics. Actually, it started off as an argument about neatness. I was making the weak argument that it's stupid to make the bed because you'll be back in it in about 16hours anyway. She argued that not only does it look neater, but the sheets are all arranged for better coverage, and...get this..."besides, it keeps the bed warm."
"What?!"
"The covers keep the bed warm. Just like they keep you warm when you're under them."
"Uhm, no, covers keep you warm cuz they trap the heat you generate; if there's no body in the bed, there's no heat to trap."
"Yeah-huh! The bed's warm after you get out of it. The covers keep it there."
"Honey. Sweetheart. Unless your comforter is made of aerogel ['Wha..?' 'Nevermind.'], I'm quite sure whatever residual heat is in the bed has quite dissipated through the comforter after 16 hours. Cotton just isn't that good of an insulator."
"So? It's still warmer than the cold room."
"No. Baby. Honey. Listen. Do you know the laws of thermodynamics? The heat doesn't stay there. It's dissipating. Without a heat source, eventually everything in the room is more or less the same temperature. That means your bed too."
"Then why is toilet so cold? I bet if it had a cover it would stay warm."
"No. Baby. Sweetness. The toilet is cold because of the heat conduction of porcelain. It sucks the heat from your ass faster, then say, sitting on your bed."
"Well, yeah! The bed feels warmer."
"Yeah, it feels warmer."
"Cuz we made it in the morning."
(At this point I break down in sobs)
Given all the latest advances in Boner Science, I guess the middle aged men with erectile dysfunction are winning this debate.
Hey, look who's running the country. I said allocating our resources well is a hallmark of good government!
We NEED to take this step foward, DESPERATELY, in order to help solve poverty, exploitation and many other ills in the world.
With all due respect, I call bullshit. Your arguments and the parent post's arguments are simply so much sentimental claptrap.
There's so much clamor for 'intellectual honesty' in the current political climate, let's start here.
Let's call a spade a spade. Space exploration is worthwhile because we, as a society, have decided that the enrichment of human knowledge is a virtue per se. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Human endeavor. It needs no other rationalization.
To say that space exploration is worthwhile because of unrealized, indeterminate side effects that are not the goal or intention of the pursuit, but held up, nevertheless, as some sort of social promisory note is just sophistic rhetoric. Tomorrow, I'll go tell the homeless guy down the street the good news: "Worry not, dear poor person, for we are building a space elevator that will elevate the dignity of all humankind, and so too shall your station rise!" Yes, and then I'll go tell the patients in the oncology ward that we shall cure cancer by building flying cars, for surely some modicum of the technology needed to build a flying car will make cancer fly from the body as well.
Here's the thing: Multiple fronts. Society proceeds on multiple fronts. We don't stop space exploration because we have sick and poor people. We don't stop researching epilepsy because we have diabetes, stop researching diabetes because we have AIDS, stop researching AIDS because we have cancer, stop researching cancer because middle aged men have erectile dysfunction. What we DO do (giggle) is engage in a torturous debate in resource allocation. In terms of real life application, space exploration is an incredibly expensive, high risk investment with a possibly high payoff potential on a very far time horizon. But in the short term, we learn a lot about how the world works. This does improve the human condition in some abstract sense, but to say that it is a necessary step to curing some of our pressing social ills is disingenuous. The way to address our pressing social ills is to, you know, address our pressing social ills. We just have to figure out how to do that in a responsible way and still leave enough money over for the purer, less immediately tangible pursuits that we collectively value. Doing this factor analysis well is the hallmark of good government.
Think Richard Stallman meets John Goodman..
[shudder] No, thanks all the same, I'll think something different...
P-ISM? A computer built into pens?! That's nothing! I invented a computer that's built into your jeans! I call it J-ISM, naturally.
What? It comes in your pants!
He does it in about 5-10 minutes.
FTA: