HN user
...Also a book and an April 2004 article in the Atlantic Monthly.
http://www.google.com/search?q=The+Case+Against+Perfection+M...
The Case Against Perfection What's wrong with designer children, bionic athletes , and genetic engineering by Michael J. Sandel
we only have large-scale climate readings for the last 100 years or so. Past that it's sparse readings, interpolations and projections.
...And these paintings: .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age#Depictions_of_wi... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrick_Avercamp
my friend, who just graduated with a PhD in astrophysics from Princeton, and is now a postdoc at Berkeley. She
http://www.google.com/search?q=princeton+affirmative+action+...
http://www.google.com/search?q=berkeley+affirmative+action+g...
Please post your friend's relevant scores (SAT, GRE, etc.).
women, who have their professional involvement with math decrease dramatically as they enter the working world and need to support themselves. There's a strong, though not certain case for a cultural effect here.
It would be interesting if this phenomenon were correlated with 2D:4D ratio, wouldn't it? http://www.google.com/search?q=steve+sailer+finger+length
And by the way, on color? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink
Did you check the references cited by that paragraph?
No-one in Iceland thinks it's odd that a musician should also be a VC.
I had a heart attack.
Why did that happen? Most people do not have heart attacks.
Handguns: Revolver or Pistol?
A revolver is a type of pistol.
why a gun instead of a pistol?
A pistol is a type of gun.
scrap our entire welfare system and just give every man, woman and child in the country GBP 3000/year, no questions asked
a 6.5x decrease
That would be negative 5.5 times, or 5.5 times below zero.
were y'all only thinking about the USA?
Yes. Thank you for broadening my perspective.
41 miles per gallon is still terrible ... Ford do rather better with the cars they sell in Europe
We don't have to wonder why.
European countries tend to have lax safety and smog-emission standards. If America had those same lax standards, ceteris peribus, fuel economy would be higher there.
European countries also tend to have higher fuel prices. If America had those same high fuel prices, ceteris peribus, consumers there would select vehicles with higher fuel economy.
Glass at normal temperature flows, but incredibly slowly, you can see from old window glass which is thin at the top and thicker at the bottom.
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Urban legend. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#Behavior_of_antique_glass
The observation that old windows are often thicker at the bottom than at the top is often offered as supporting evidence for the view that glass flows over a matter of centuries. It is then assumed that the glass was once uniform, but has flowed to its new shape, which is a property of liquid. ... When actually installed in a window frame, the glass would be placed thicker side down both for the sake of stability and to prevent water accumulating in the lead cames at the bottom of the window. Occasionally such glass has been found thinner side down or thicker on either side of the window's edge, as would be caused by carelessness at the time of installation.
We don't really create-- we merely transform physical resources from one form to another
If I were to give you an equal mass of rocks in exchange for everything that you own, would you be equally wealthy (equally secure)?
If society were instantly given equal masses of rock and mud in echange for all of the artifacts that it had created over the past 100,000 years, and if in the same instant all of any otherwise technology gains of the past 100,000 years were also lost, would the 6.7 billion people alive today be equally as secure as before that instant change? If not, why not?
If humans have been able, over the past 100,000 years, to transform matter and energy into forms that better serve their security, why might they suddenly no longer be able to do that?
If nothing has been created, the how is it that 6.7 billion people today exist in relatively high security where previously only a handful of thousands could exist and in relatively low security? http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080425101050.cni2ks3...
Regarding energy:
Did our developed energy resources exist before humans created them? Are they imminently running out? Is general entropy imminent?
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The matter/energy that exists naturally tends to either be too general to best serve human security, or if specific tends to be so in suboptimal directions. Do humans not improve their own security by transforming general and chaotically-specific resources into specific and orderly ones tailored to their own security needs? Are humans running out of general resources and chaos with which to transform into security-enhancing resources? Are humans running out of the creativity that has been driving this 100,000+ -year-long improvement in human security?
Would it matter if humans were also creative of resources, rather than simply consumptive of resources? http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...
Our whole evolution up to this point shows that human groups spontaneously evolve patterns of behavior, as well as patterns of training people for that behavior, which tend on balance to lead people to create rather than destroy. Humans are, on net balance, builders rather than destroyers. The evidence is clear: the civilization which our ancestors have bequeathed to us contains more created works than the civilization they were bequeathed.
In short, humankind has evolved into creators and problem-solvers. Our constructive behavior has counted for more than our using-up and destructive behavior, as seen in our increasing length of life and richness of consumption.
This view of the average human as builder conflicts with the view of the average human as destroyer which underlies the thought of many doomsdayers. From the latter view derive such statements as "The U.S. has 5 percent of the population, and uses 40 percent of resources," without reference to the creation of resources by the same U.S. population. (Also involved here is a view of resources as physical quantities waiting for the plucking, rather than as the services that humankind derives from some combination of knowledge with physical conditions.) If one notices only the using-up and destructive activities of humankind, without understanding that constructive patterns of behavior must have been the dominant part of our individual-cum-social nature in order for us to have survived to this point, then it is not surprising that one would arrive at the conclusion that resources will grow scarcer in the future.
They became the wealthy tribe once they were free of the mainstream Malaysian class system.
Malays have little to do with Singapore's economy.
Singapore had no resources other than the brains of its people; they were the underclass who were booted out of Malaysia
Han Chinese are not Malays. From Appendix 1 of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" by Lynn & Vanhanen (p218):
Singapore
In 1974, data for a representative sample of 147 ethnic Chinese and 190 ethnic Malay 13-year-olds for the Standard Progressive Matrices were collected (Lynn, 1976). In relation to the British 1979 standardization sample, the Chinese obtained a mean IQ of 106 and the Malays a mean IQ of 90.5. ... The population of Singapore is 76 percent Chinese, 14 percent Malay, and 7 percent Indian
How?
Why would one want population to stop growing? http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource
(Top Gear) tested [the Tesla Roadster] last week. ... The thing ran out of juice after 60 miles of track time.
55 miles. http://www.google.com/search?q=top+gear+tesla+roadster+55
The Roadster has also been informally tested by a Hacker News reader: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=318154
it will be the laughing stock of any track day.
First off, as Wil pointed out, it doesn't like staying at 100mph+ for very long. That naturally makes it not a track friendly car. It will get passed up easily on the straightaways at some tracks (ex you can hit 140+ on the back straight at Road Atlanta). And the brakes will get roasted and it will run out of battery after just a few sessions. ... In summary the Tesla is not a car guy's car, it's a SV show-off car.
A friend mentioned to me that the macbooks have gotten bigger over the years and there was on that was 12 inches (?) that they no longer make.
Part of the "increase in size" is just pretend. Modern notebooks are not as large as their quoted screen sizes might imply. As 4x3 and 5x4 aspect displays have given ground to widescreen displays, display sizes of given diagonal measurement have dropped.
To wit: a 14" widescreen (16:10 or 16:9) is not as large (does not have as much area) as an old-fashioned 14" 4x3 screen, which in turn is not as large as an old-fasioned 5x4 screen. A modern 15.4" widescreen is about the same size, overall, as an old-fashioned 14" screen. Apple's current 13.3" Macbook has about the same screen size as did its old 12" notebook. It is only effectively "larger" for widescreen content that would produce black bars on the old 12" squarer screen.
More comparisions: a modern 22" widescreen is about the same size as an old-fashioned 5x4 19" screen. A modern 19" widescreen is about the same size as an old-fashioned 5x4 17" screen.
Every country that has a 'research' nuclear reactor spends hundred of million to do 'big' science.
What would that have to do with the nuclear power industry?
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Producing isotopes is the main use of the [research] reactor.
What would medical-isotope production have to do with the nuclear power industry?
The full letter is scanned-in here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_letter
Members of my own family died in the nazi death camps
Which camps? Were they in Germany or Poland?
From that Jay Cross flashpaper:
Alexander goes beyond the drought-resistant, no-maintenance yard to the maintenance-free, barren yard. Natural as a hippy’s armpit, this hardscrabble, lifeless expanse, especially in the midst of neighboring houses with specimen plants and lush yards trumpets the owner’s iconoclastic avant-guard design sensibility. It screams, “I’m different.” ...
Alexander does both himself and his neighbors a favor by dumping the detritus of past projects in his front yard. Neighbors report that property values (and therefore property taxes) are lower when they have line-of-sight to the Alexander home. ...
Pattern No. 12: DISHEVELED ENTRANCE
You know you can get away with wearing blue jeans inside when you pass by this funky collection of neglected plants and broken fence just before getting to the door.
Gorging on pasta when pregnant will just produce a type I diabetic child.
I think you meant "Type II".
Nobody, as far as I know, buys luxury goods which are absolutely indistinguishable from cheaper versions.
People pay more for wine in bottles, even though the same wine in a box is cheaper.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22No+cork+sniffer+would+be+c...
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A $300 bottle of wine tastes somewhat better than a $10 bottle.
It also sells for $300, despite the fact that the $10 bottle of wine can be made indistinguishable from the $300 bottle of wine by merely adding a few dollars' worth of chemicals.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-09-11-wine-chemist...
chemists are trying to isolate chemicals that produce desirable fragrances and flavors. ...
many wineries are shunning such technology and embracing distinctly Luddite, back-to-the Earth growing techniques such as using things like "Preparation 500," the springtime vineyard spray made from the manure-stuffed cow horns, buried over fall and winter, then ground up and mixed with water.
"We're trying to make better wine through alchemy," joked Jim Fullmer, director of the Philomath, Ore.-based Demeter Association, a non-profit group that certifies vineyards as "biodynamic" — a sort of hyper-organic designation that means the vintner relies on such things as lunar cycles and planetary alignment rather than chemistry.
"Biodynamics is probably the exact opposite," Fullmer said. "Winemaking is an art."
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People do not pay $300 a bottle for wine that tastes better. People pay $300 a bottle for wine that makes them feel romantic -- wine based on such things as manure-stuffed cow horns, lunar cycles and planetary alignment.
A manufactured diamond is not a mined diamond, and it never will be. A manufactured diamond cannot help but lack the authenticity of a mined diamond, even if the two cannot be told apart.
It is where a luxury comes from -- not what it ends up being -- that is important in determining its value.