I once presented two stories of the same event (a suicide bombing in Israel I believe), one from the BBC and one from the Guardian, to people in my blog, and asked if they could spot the biggest difference between the two. Not one person out of about thirty noticed the difference I was after - one article said "7 dead in suicide bombing", the other said "8 dead in suicide bombing" - the latter having included the bomber himself in the total.
It wasn't even a particular attempt at spin really, but the fact that nobody spotted the difference goes to show how hard it is to extract an accurate picture from multiple reports, even over, as you said, very basic information.
It's a combination of various traits, mostly our innate tendency to anthropomorphise things which show "purposeful" behaviour (probably based on how much of our brain is devoted to social interaction) and the combination of our pattern-matching skills and our instinctive use of them without having 100% evidence (you don't want to wait till you have conclusive proof of the tiger in the bushes before reacting!). And probably a dose of the fear of death. Early "religions" focussed on things that had "purpose" - trees, the sun, seas - and ancestors.
It's also been hypothesised that religion has an evolutionary advantage in maintaining group cohesion, but I personally think that's a later "benefit" that arose with civilisation and the move from tribes to nations.
Not really, Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, is actually considered to have been the main organisational brains behind 9-11 and other operations. For sure he's not the charismatic leader OBL was, but Al Qaeda hasn't lost anything like all of its talent at the top.
I have a 500ml can of Monster Energy in front of me, which cost me £1.40; the same shop sells 250ml cans of Red Bull for £1.35. That makes Red Bull almost twice as expensive, which is quite a trick. Own-brand 250ml cans from supermarkets tend to be around 40p, making Red Bull about 3.4 times as expensive...
Use IPython, and not only do you get an interactive Python console with tab completion, code highlighting, simple introspection, logging, macros, profiling and more, but it also acts as a shell where you can do things like ls -l, and treat the output as a Python type that you can pipe to variables and functions if you so desire. Awesome software.
Geocities wasn't a social anything, AOL was primarily an ISP with their own walled garden they tried to preserve for as long as possible, and Myspace barely qualified as being a social network in that it had a very limited set of ways to interact with other people, all of which were implemented horribly anyway.
Social networking sites are all about the network effect, and will always tend towards a single player dominating. The only other players will be those aiming at different markets e.g. demographically (Bebo) or nationality (Orkut, QQ). And those niches are all dominated by a single site as well.
Like eBay, Facebook would have to undergo a whole load of colossal blunders sustained over a long period of time before any other player would have the chance to replace them.
What's the better alternative though? One that actually exists and has a compelling reason for Facebook's hundreds of millions of users to switch.
In my experience, the people who really started using Facebook and spurred the initial growth are all starting to move on.
The people who started using FB were college students, I'm sure a large proportion of them are still active on there, and the growth in new users who are college students outstrips those that have deleted their accounts or even stopped using it regularly. FB claim around 50% of their users log in at least once a day, if you accept the wildly-overblown estimates of dupe/sockpuppet/marketing accounts bandied around on/. then the proportion of actual users using it regularly is even higher than half.
One-click Daily Mail headlines - I just got ARE WORKING MOTHERS GIVING MIDDLE BRITAIN CANCER?. But apparently that's too many caps,/. just doesn't get good journalism.
Computer Literacy is the New Literacy. Those without it are already ruled over those with it. From quants developing market models to make millions in seconds to average joes trying to print shipping papers to know what to pull off the shelves, computers are everywhere.
ROFL. The quants are just grunts, using their skills to make money for their bosses, who are almost certainly not particularly computer literate.
Soundcloud is where I find stuff nowadays, at least for electronic music. It's so much better than Myspace in terms of usability it's ridiculous, especially since Myspace's horrible redesign. Plus, Soundcloud provides very nice embeddable widgets for playing tracks or albums - lots of artists have a Facebook page which provides a news feed of releases which embed tracks from their Soundcloud page, and use FB for events and so on.
I get the feeling that for various reasons (revolutionary foundation, being a young nation, strong national identity/myths etc) a lot of Americans tend to see things in a very black and white fashion and have an aversion (suspicion?) of acknowledging and accepting the complexities and contradictions that arise in every real-world system. Again it may just be my perception but it seems as though a lot of the free-market extremists here not just lack any knowledge of modern economics and market failures (moral hazards, lemon markets etc), but tend to be very dismissive (overly so sometimes) about psychological or sociological studies that expose those complexities.
Bollocks. After 32 years without, going on medication for ADHD has been the best thing that's ever happened to my ability to live my life and do things.
The other big exception is Paul Erdos, who published more papers than Euler (1,525) and was publishing up until he died at the age of 83 at a math's conference.
Goodkind is a great author if you like rape, Objectivism, almost-rape, noble goats, hundred-page monologues on Objectivism, torturous writing, huge internal inconsistencies, oh, and rape. Not forgetting, lost of stuff ripped off from the Wheel of Time.
Given that according to Wikipedia over 1.3 billion people use MMS and have sent over 50 billion messages, I think the fact that you "didn't need" MMS is utterly irrelevant to the market as a whole and thus Apple's plans for the iPhone.
I would thoroughly recommend The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies as a very good discussion of at least the first few of your questions; it considers various current hypotheses on the creation of the Universe along with that of a creator god, and explores the consequences and logical issues with each in a very even-handed way. One of my favourite books.
If you use the Cooliris plugin you can use it to browse albums/user's photos on FB and it displays a much higher resolution image than on FB itself - I assume it (somehow) accesses the uncompressed photos, as they look crispy on my 1950x1080 display...
With regards to the EPR paradox there's been lots of experiments done, the most famous probably being Aspect's in 1981; they all show that Einstein etc. were wrong, and local realism is violated by entanglement.
I very much doubt anyone is saying Hawking radiation is disproven; that's almost akin to saying QM and thermodynamics are wrong. This book is a very good overview of the last 30 years or so of black hole research, and has a brilliant title to boot:)
Slashdot Mirror
Very much so, for instance Trafigura suppressing a report on toxic oil dumping. If you go to the superinjunction blog they have a spreadsheet with a list of supposed injunctions.
Somalia :)
I once presented two stories of the same event (a suicide bombing in Israel I believe), one from the BBC and one from the Guardian, to people in my blog, and asked if they could spot the biggest difference between the two. Not one person out of about thirty noticed the difference I was after - one article said "7 dead in suicide bombing", the other said "8 dead in suicide bombing" - the latter having included the bomber himself in the total.
It wasn't even a particular attempt at spin really, but the fact that nobody spotted the difference goes to show how hard it is to extract an accurate picture from multiple reports, even over, as you said, very basic information.
It's a combination of various traits, mostly our innate tendency to anthropomorphise things which show "purposeful" behaviour (probably based on how much of our brain is devoted to social interaction) and the combination of our pattern-matching skills and our instinctive use of them without having 100% evidence (you don't want to wait till you have conclusive proof of the tiger in the bushes before reacting!). And probably a dose of the fear of death. Early "religions" focussed on things that had "purpose" - trees, the sun, seas - and ancestors.
It's also been hypothesised that religion has an evolutionary advantage in maintaining group cohesion, but I personally think that's a later "benefit" that arose with civilisation and the move from tribes to nations.
Not really, Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, is actually considered to have been the main organisational brains behind 9-11 and other operations. For sure he's not the charismatic leader OBL was, but Al Qaeda hasn't lost anything like all of its talent at the top.
I have a 500ml can of Monster Energy in front of me, which cost me £1.40; the same shop sells 250ml cans of Red Bull for £1.35. That makes Red Bull almost twice as expensive, which is quite a trick. Own-brand 250ml cans from supermarkets tend to be around 40p, making Red Bull about 3.4 times as expensive...
Use IPython, and not only do you get an interactive Python console with tab completion, code highlighting, simple introspection, logging, macros, profiling and more, but it also acts as a shell where you can do things like ls -l, and treat the output as a Python type that you can pipe to variables and functions if you so desire. Awesome software.
Geocities wasn't a social anything, AOL was primarily an ISP with their own walled garden they tried to preserve for as long as possible, and Myspace barely qualified as being a social network in that it had a very limited set of ways to interact with other people, all of which were implemented horribly anyway.
Social networking sites are all about the network effect, and will always tend towards a single player dominating. The only other players will be those aiming at different markets e.g. demographically (Bebo) or nationality (Orkut, QQ). And those niches are all dominated by a single site as well.
Like eBay, Facebook would have to undergo a whole load of colossal blunders sustained over a long period of time before any other player would have the chance to replace them.
What's the better alternative though? One that actually exists and has a compelling reason for Facebook's hundreds of millions of users to switch.
The people who started using FB were college students, I'm sure a large proportion of them are still active on there, and the growth in new users who are college students outstrips those that have deleted their accounts or even stopped using it regularly. FB claim around 50% of their users log in at least once a day, if you accept the wildly-overblown estimates of dupe/sockpuppet/marketing accounts bandied around on /. then the proportion of actual users using it regularly is even higher than half.
One-click Daily Mail headlines - I just got ARE WORKING MOTHERS GIVING MIDDLE BRITAIN CANCER?. But apparently that's too many caps, /. just doesn't get good journalism.
Sexiness doesn't come from what you're wearing, or not. It comes from what you're doing.
That's why there's no such thing as porn magazines, image-based porn websites or erotic art then?
I think you mean %appdata%, %localappdata% or %programdata% for config files surely?
Computer Literacy is the New Literacy. Those without it are already ruled over those with it. From quants developing market models to make millions in seconds to average joes trying to print shipping papers to know what to pull off the shelves, computers are everywhere.
ROFL. The quants are just grunts, using their skills to make money for their bosses, who are almost certainly not particularly computer literate.
Soundcloud is where I find stuff nowadays, at least for electronic music. It's so much better than Myspace in terms of usability it's ridiculous, especially since Myspace's horrible redesign. Plus, Soundcloud provides very nice embeddable widgets for playing tracks or albums - lots of artists have a Facebook page which provides a news feed of releases which embed tracks from their Soundcloud page, and use FB for events and so on.
I get the feeling that for various reasons (revolutionary foundation, being a young nation, strong national identity/myths etc) a lot of Americans tend to see things in a very black and white fashion and have an aversion (suspicion?) of acknowledging and accepting the complexities and contradictions that arise in every real-world system. Again it may just be my perception but it seems as though a lot of the free-market extremists here not just lack any knowledge of modern economics and market failures (moral hazards, lemon markets etc), but tend to be very dismissive (overly so sometimes) about psychological or sociological studies that expose those complexities.
Just my 2 pence worth though.
Actually it was, the UK committed to going metric before it joined the EU.
Bollocks. After 32 years without, going on medication for ADHD has been the best thing that's ever happened to my ability to live my life and do things.
The other big exception is Paul Erdos, who published more papers than Euler (1,525) and was publishing up until he died at the age of 83 at a math's conference.
Goodkind is a great author if you like rape, Objectivism, almost-rape, noble goats, hundred-page monologues on Objectivism, torturous writing, huge internal inconsistencies, oh, and rape. Not forgetting, lost of stuff ripped off from the Wheel of Time.
Given that according to Wikipedia over 1.3 billion people use MMS and have sent over 50 billion messages, I think the fact that you "didn't need" MMS is utterly irrelevant to the market as a whole and thus Apple's plans for the iPhone.
I would thoroughly recommend The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by Paul Davies as a very good discussion of at least the first few of your questions; it considers various current hypotheses on the creation of the Universe along with that of a creator god, and explores the consequences and logical issues with each in a very even-handed way. One of my favourite books.
If you use the Cooliris plugin you can use it to browse albums/user's photos on FB and it displays a much higher resolution image than on FB itself - I assume it (somehow) accesses the uncompressed photos, as they look crispy on my 1950x1080 display...
The view is that the state's role is just to protect from force or fraud, not just force. Which boils down to contract law AFAICT.
With regards to the EPR paradox there's been lots of experiments done, the most famous probably being Aspect's in 1981; they all show that Einstein etc. were wrong, and local realism is violated by entanglement.
I very much doubt anyone is saying Hawking radiation is disproven; that's almost akin to saying QM and thermodynamics are wrong. This book is a very good overview of the last 30 years or so of black hole research, and has a brilliant title to boot :)
Thanks for the comments, very interesting for someone who did his last bit of tensor maths just over a decade ago :)