gambling8nt

I agree that lack of physical activity is another likely factor for changing hormone levels and their secondary effects.

However, I know of no reason to think that these changes are heritable, or that naturally low T is actually a reproductive advantage in our society. (Indeed, given that we have inverted the more typical historical trend of the wealthy out-reproducing the less wealthy, and the selection of low-T for wealth here asserted, one might expect that this society actually reflects reproductive pressure against low-T, rather than in favor of it.)

Half a century--two human generations--is not nearly enough time for evolutionary pressures to have the sort of effect you are talking about. Least of all in a society of abundance in which the majority of members reproduce.

Instead, I'd suggest you look at the various changing environmental factors for an explanation of these phenomena: BPA in plastics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A), the growing use of soy in human diets (with its attendant phyto-estrogens), and the growing quantities of synthetic human estrogen in the environment (already known to have effects on fish, see for instance http://www.seattlepi.com/local/124939_estrogen04.html).

If the bolts holding the payload in place shear away under the lateral force of supporting the payload, the payload may fall and hit the hard inside of the launch vehicle, making the two events quite similar. (Indeed, the original drop I linked to occurred when the satellite was not correctly bolted to a table on which is was going to be tipped to one side in order to verify that it could withstand the stress of being in that physical orientation.)

That said, ugh's comment suggests my reasoning (as an explanation for vertical assembly) is either incorrect, incomplete, or both.

This does indeed suggest that there may be other factors at work. I could try tossing out other ideas, but they would be little more than hypothesis. (Bending during the tipping process damaging the joints in multi-segment launch vehicles? This might explain the difference with SpaceX's Falcons, which I believe do not have joints with O-rings.)

The launch vehicles themselves may not be that fragile, but payloads often are. Multimillion-dollar satellites can be damaged or completely non-functional from effects as small as being dropped 1 meter (see http://www.spacetoday.net/Summary/2230 , for example).

As noted in the how it works link (posted twice on this page, or at the bottom of your chart), they've assumed you have the average emission levels for all sorts of other activities, such as home telephone service, car purchases, apparel purchases, and, of course, alcohol and tobacco.

About 30% of first marriages and 40% of second marriages fail within the first ten years (and, as the parent noted over 50% of first marriages fail-- see table 41 and the appendix table II of http://cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_022.pdf ). About 20% of each fail within the first five years.

Ten years is not enough time for children to be conceived and raised to maturity in a two-parent home (a situation that significantly improves probable education and life outcomes for a child). Ten-year term contracts are too short to secure the primary purpose of marriage--forming families to raise children--and too long to make a large dent on the divorce rate.

To elaborate on cperciva's (correct) point:

On a projective plane a parabola contains a single point at infinity, connected (both figuratively and topologically) to the two open ends. A hyperbola contains two distinct points at infinity each connected to one end of each of the two usual components.

It's not like the IPCC was trying to hide this. If anything, the entire way this scenario played out should be a reassurance that the IPCC and cooperating scientists are acting in good faith. They're not trying to "cover up" failures; they're acting on the established scientific process.

Actually, the linked research came from a survey commissioned by the WMO, not the IPCC...the IPCC fabricated the original claims that there would be more and more severe hurricanes due to global warming, according to the original article, with "no science so [sic] substantiate them."

One of the authors of this research, who resigned from the IPCC in protest over the original hurricane claim, indicated in 2005, "All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones." It has taken the past several years to compile data to change this stance, and the results contra-indicate the IPCC's original claims.

There are, undoubtedly, scientists who act largely in good faith based upon the existing climate data; the limited amount of data that I have seen indicates that there are aspects of global climate change that are quite real. The IPCC, however, is a political organization that appears transparently to be acting (or, at least, to have acted) in bad faith--between its baseless claims regarding hurricanes, its inaccurate estimates and later denial of the rate of melt of glaciers in the Himalayas, and various dubious data practices (failure of some members to comply with freedom of information requests, "lost" data and storing only reduced results of data, and selectively ignoring the tree ring data, to name just a few examples).

This is not the story of a claim being well-founded, but being corrected by advances in data or theory. This is the result of a political claim based on little or no evidence being examined by an outside body and found inaccurate.

The original article indicates fewer, but slightly stronger.

As a fellow believer in not bothering to go to class, my feeling on the matter was always that I would go to class if and only if it was at least one of (1) more efficient than reading the textbook, or (2) substantially different from reading the textbook. These were both rare properties.

It looks like there are too many "unspecified" articles to learn much from this visualization, other than a moderate decrease in the number of articles in your "startup" category, supplanted largely by "ask" topics--a trend that largely leveled off early in the x-axis on this graph (which would be dramatically more useful if it had some amount of real-time benchmarks to give some sense of scale).

Real life situations have finite cutoffs in behavior that remove many pathological problems with certain statistical models.

Except that in real life there are no distributions with support outside of a finite interval in space or time; there's always some point when you stop running the system...if some packets don't arrive by that point, you generally don't care how much longer they would have taken.

Chi-squared distributions are well approximated by normal distributions close to the mean.

The point is not that arbitrary statistics will necessarily always be perfectly behaved (or even well behaved) on sampling data--it's that to make reasonably accurate predictions of system behavior, under certain practical conditions, these statistics are well-behaved, and an inexperienced statistician (as most people are) is less likely to make a gross error.

What Zed is saying when he notes that meta-statistics are normal is that, thanks to the central limit theorem, the average and standard deviation of data sets collected from the same underlying probability distribution (with convergent average and standard deviation) will tend to be normally distributed (in the limit approaching infinite sample size), even if the underlying system behavior is far from a normal distribution. In practice you work with finite sample sizes, so an underlying distribution sufficiently far from normal will result in a non-normal distribution of meta-statistics--but in most applications, these sort of pathological distributions are largely irrelevant.

Take our example of looking at response time for loading a web page. There is some finite point (say, 10 sec) beyond which we no longer care how much longer it takes. So instead of considering the distribution of response times t, we consider the distribution of min(t, 10 sec). This distribution only has support over a finite interval, so its meta-statistics normalize rapidly as you increase the number of trials.

Using this will under-report the actual standard deviation in the response time (which might, as you say, not even converge), since we've eliminated extremely low probability events with very high response time, but as a practical matter this is largely irrelevant--if these events are high enough probability for us to care we'll notice them anyway. The point of this exercise is not to perfectly ascertain the underlying distribution of t, it is to develop useful predictions for system behavior in practice.

You can get some of the PISA mathematics test questions (on which Hyde & Mertz variance ratio claims are based) from the 2006 PISA at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/14/10/38709418.pdf [pdf]. A cursory examination of these questions makes your claim appear accurate.

The original paper by Hyde and Mertz can be found at http://tctvideo.madison.com/uw/gender.pdf . In it, the authors reference data from the Program for International Student Assessment as their primary evidence in attempting to discredit the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis (apart from their discussion of differing degrees of female membership on IMO teams). Careful examination of the 2006 PISA data, however, indicates a positive correlation between variance ratio and mean performance amongst OECD countries with above average performance (selected to control for availability of educational resources, and overall social stigma against mathematics). This suggests that countries which have taken action to reduce Variance Ratio in order to equalize educational outcomes have also reduced overall mean outcomes.

In other words, countries which have successfully suppressed greater male variance (if it is inherent) or have through cultural engineering increased apparent female variance, have done so at the cost of reducing mean outcome.

It is worth noting, however, that this result was achieved by looking at countries that were assumed to already have adequate educational resources, and have already achieved above average mean outcomes--presumably through some sort of cultural emphasis on the value of mathematics. Both of these effects appear greater than that of suppression of male variability.

As noted above, the collection of all sets cannot be a set in any set theory with specification, regardless of regularity:

Call the collection of all sets S. We specify T by

T=\{x| x \in S \wedge \neg x \in x\}

T is then the subclass of S of sets that do not contain themselves. Thus with specifiction (provable from replacement, or as an axiom by itself), it is contradictory for S to be a set.

If you reject the law of excluded middle, you can have a intuitionist set theory where S is neither a set nor not a set; alternatively, you can have a set theory without specification one constructed based on a type theory might meet this requirement.

The collection of all sets is not a set under ZF set theory, regardless of choice.

Such a collection, if it were a set, would imply the existence of a set of all sets that did not contain themselves from the axiom schema of specification.

Previous discussion of this article at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=772556 (slightly different URL, but same text).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=783912 was a Wired article on that topic on HN two months ago; perhaps that's what you are remembering?

I noticed that as well; I assume people basically all tended to check page length at the same point through the page--presumably at some boundary between content sections.

I was going to post a comment directly disagreeing with this, and citing the large number of Jewish dating sites, but these are really only used by people on the more religious end of the spectrum, so it is possible that the effect is more prevalent in the Hindu-Hindu match calculations than in Jew-Jew match calculations. I would posit, however, that this effect, along with the self-selection bias of using a multi-cultural dating website, is almost certainly the cause for the tendency for higher matches towards non-relgious people.

After my freshman year of college I hitchhiked from Washington DC to San Francisco, zig-zagging across the US. While I did not travel with absolutely nothing (nor did I hitch the entire way; parts of it I went by bus), I wound up spending between $2 and $5 a day on food, so I think my experience is sufficiently similar to what was talked about in the OP to comment.

There were several important points missed by the OP. Hitchhiking across long distances is slow and incredibly discouraging--especially in featureless areas like the US Midwest. Heck knows how people on the Oregon trail managed it. People almost universally insist on dropping you off in a town or a city, but nobody picks up hitchhikers inside of a town or city (unless they're willing to pay their way), so you have to walk back out into the middle of nowhere before you'll have much of a chance of picking up a ride.

If you ever do find yourself hitchhiking, you want to immediately protect yourself from the climate. (This ought to be obvious, but apparently isn't based on my interactions with some people regarding this sort of thing.) In places where it's cold, you want to be sure to be wearing something warm and dry; in places where it's warm, you'll want to have bottles for water, and a means to carry it (and I don't just mean the dinky kind you can usually get as bottled water...by the end of my journey I was happily carrying two 2-liter soda bottles and a 1-liter bottle someone had given me for water in the backpack I had brought with me).

Speaking of items to have with you, a towel actually is useful--something large enough to use as a blanket to cut down on heat loss due to wind, something you can wet down and wrap around your head to cool off in high heat, something to help clean yourself off when the opportunity presents itself.

Whatever you do, you should try to be aware of local laws and practices and how they will affect you; for instance, while it is technically illegal to walk along interstate roads in most of the US, it's not likely you'll attract police attention unless you walk dangerously close to traffic, or appear to be obviously armed and dangerous. The one time I was picked up for this, the cop dropped me off at a nearby exit and gave me directions on how to efficiently complete the next leg of my journey using only state and local roads.

This segues nicely into another general principle. Be nice to people you run into. As long as it doesn't look like you have anything worth taking, essentially every human interaction you have will be positive as long as you act positively towards others--this is more true than usual, since, as a hitchhiker, no one can really expect to get everything from you, so the only people who will interact with you at all will be people who want to help you. Such people can be easily discouraged if you don't appear friendly, or grateful for their assistance.

There's a lot more to be said about the hitchhiking experience, but the most important point to drive home is this: traveling long distances, mostly on foot, is not to be undertaken lightly. It is grueling, unpredictable, and often discouraging. It is not a good way to get from point A to point B, when they are separated by large distances. But it will let you meet a variety of interesting people in--and see a lot more of--the space in between.

That definition more accurately fits the typical usage of the term 'dork'. The word 'geek' is usually used to indicate someone with a great deal of specialized knowledge (such as a computer geek, or a math geek, but also sometimes less technical topics, like a literature geek or a band geek), and typically a lack of social prowess. A 'nerd', on the other hand, is more typically one who displays heightened scholastic ability in all (or at least most) areas, but a significant lack of social skill.

I'm not trying to say that any other use of these (or any other) words is, in any sense, wrong. But these are their current, common, usage.

EDIT (since the urban dictionary link wasn't there when I wrote the above): Remember that different people use words differently. An urban dictionary definition is just what the people who use and vote on urban dictionary definitions (in particular, the urban dictionary definition in question) agree that a word means. This is why lexicography isn't trivial; there is significant sample bias in, for example, the set of people who care enough about how urban dictionary defines 'geek' in order to change it.

That's actually on the list.

He did discover new information. The probabilities of survival switched from: A: 1/3, B: 1/3, C:1/3 to A: 1/3, B:0, C: 2/3

He just didn't discover any information to change the probability of his own survival.

Because of the way the information was gathered, the chances of survival for A and C are no longer equal (C is twice as likely to survive)--having only two possible outcomes does not guarantee that the probability is 50-50.

Why is your "deduction and imagination" time a fixed quantity? The thrust of the argument in favor of learning through books rather than the internet is that you will spend an equal amount of external problem solving time, but more internal problem solving time as part of the information gathering process.