hugh

Ahh, thanks for that.

I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I am surprised by how few there are. There's only one Chopin-like piece, for instance. This causes me to worry: how many bad Chopin-like pieces did this thing spit out before coming up with a passable one? If there's still a human intelligence sitting there and sorting the good compositions from the bad ones, the program is significantly less impressive.

To put that "billion dollars" in perspective, General Motors' current burn rate is apparently $6.9 billion a month. Ouch!

I don't really see anyone "egging him on". All I see is a bunch of people not taking him seriously.

That's why I specified cellulosic or algae-based ethanol.

Sure, a Tesla Roadster can do 0-60 mph in four seconds, but it doesn't _sound_ as cool as a Lamborghini when it does so.

Seriously though, I would be very sad if internal combustion engine powered cars vanished. I personally suspect that the future of personal transportation is still gonna be based on liquid fuels (maybe cellulosic or even algae-derived ethanol) because they're so much easier to store and transport than anything else.

Hydrogen storage requires weird high-pressure containers and exotic materials. Electricity storage requires weird toxic metals placed in weird toxic solutions. Ethanol storage requires a bucket.

Apparently not included in the plan: building new power stations, or even any discussion of it.

Anyone got any good numbers on questions like: if half of California's cars were switched to electrical over the next ten years, how many more power stations would the state require?

I don't agree with your premise, here. You need to show any study that would demonstrate that women (a) really get fatter as they get older and (b) they get so much fatter that they would increase their BMI to the point of jumping up in the classification.

Four seconds of googling turns up: http://obesity1.tempdomainname.com/subs/fastfacts/obesity_wo...

see Table 3. The prevalence of obesity (as of 1999-2000) increases from 23% in the twenties to 42% in the fifties, and declines after that.

Thanks for pointing that out. The response was better than the original article, except for this one bit:

Because sexuality is so entangled with power in American culture, it's hard to talk about sex without getting political. The two are nearly inseparable to Republicans especially, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in their opposition to "non-traditional marriage" (only a near-complete ignorance of the history of marriage could lead one to think what we have now is "traditional"), Senator Craig's "wide stance" in the bathroom stall, and their glee in bringing down Bill Clinton over his "unnatural acts."

which is just plain odd, because that's the one and only time politics is mentioned in either article.

Ummm, yeah, I get the feeling the author might be trying to justify something to himself, here.

OK, first things first: ew.

Now we've got that out of the way, why is it that every writeup of some social science research must have at least one glaring factor that's been ignored? In this case it's:

There is a significant difference, however, on whether they have ever had sexual intercourse with men. Overweight (92.5%) and obese (91.5%) women are significantly more likely ever to have had sexual intercourse with men than normal-weight women (87.4%).

Is this primarily due to the fact that women get fatter as they get older and hence the overweight/obese group is overloaded with the women at the high end of the (15-44) age range? Probably.

Also this bit:

When a man propositions a woman, she can respond in one of two ways; she can say “yes” or she can say “no.” When a woman propositions a man, he can also respond in one of two ways; he can say “yes” or he can say “yes, please.” He has no realistic choice to say no.

thankfully is not true. Yeech!

It is probably true, however, that women at the low end of the attractiveness spectrum have a much easier time of it than men at the low end of the attractiveness spectrum, thanks to the relative abundance of non-picky men compared to non-picky women.

Did I? Sorry, what was the point?

Flagged for politics, but in the meantime you'll excuse me if I, as it were, stick my dick in the mashed potatoes.

I think it's a rather silly analysis. Firstly, for the whole premise:

This might be the key passage of my interview with John Ziegler on Tuesday, for it is, in a nutshell, why conservatives don't win elections anymore.

By "conservatives don't win elections any more" he means that they've lost two congressional elections in a row. And one Presidential election. That's not a death of anything, that's just a normal part of the political cycle.

Secondly, for his proposed reason:

There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.

And that's supposed to be unique to conservatives how? Being unable to believe that others don't think the way you do is extremely common on both sides of politics. Working at a university as I do, the left-wing equivalent is almost ubiquitous among just about everybody I talk to on a day-to-day basis.

But they won against the Czars.

Romney has a proven record of turning around sinking ships.

Was that a deliberately mixed metaphor? Turn around a sinking ship and all you get is a wreck which faces in the other direction.

A plurality of anecdotes sampled without bias?

That's the problem: interesting data points become anecdotes while uninteresting data points don't, which is why you can't reconstruct the data from the anecdotes.

Ummm, yes.

Drat.

Y'know, that gives me an idea. Why not a foot-controlled mouse? That way I'd never have to take my hands off the keyboard.

(quick googling)

Oh, they already exist. Has anyone ever used one? They're three hundred bucks, so I'm not gonna buy one just to try it out and see if I like it.

I'm still not convinced that it's possible to make the kind of super-long, defect-free nanotube cables that are going to be required. I'll be very happy if I'm proven wrong, but I certainly wouldn't say it was inevitable.

Well, that's going straight into my top eight top nine top ten lists lists list.

More of a quantum chemist, though I realize this is a distinction most people who aren't theoretical solid-state physicists are unlikely to care about.

Margaret Thatcher also had a chemistry background (though only a Bachelors, unlike Merkel's PhD).

Interesting, I had indeed not heard of it. And before you get all confused like I did, I should point out that this article is from 2003.

Recent data: http://www.investmenttools.com/futures/bdi_baltic_dry_index....

I'm sure it's not necessary. You haven't said why you want to learn statistics. Is it just for fun, or do you have some eventual practical application in mind?

Personally, I just learn the bits I need, as I need them.

Oh, so that's what it was. I read the entire article to try and figure out what NLP meant, and still didn't figure it out.

Interestingly, the only country I can think of off the top of my head with an engineer "in charge" is Iran. I don't think Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a great example of how a country should be run.

If numerati were a word, it'd be a plural. I'm reasonably sure the correct singular forms would be literatus (male) and literata (female).

Oh, as for your actual question? I can't think of anything.

Who wrote this title? Is there some guide out there to getting attention on social news sites which states that every submission needs to contain the word "amazing" or "secret"?

What's the "secret"? That Mirror's Edge will make you vomit? That's no secret -- in fact, the first line of the article is:

By now you have probably heard the warning: Playing Mirror's Edge will make you vomit

True. Though it seems like there's a fine line between "being better at your competitor's core competency", which is a great business plan, and "being just like X except with an extra Y", which isn't.

I'm talking in a worldwide context, not a US one.

OK, now I suspect you're a troll, and that tsetse-fly is some kind of sock-puppet, and that you really need to think of something better to do with your time than this.

update: No, now I come to look at it, tsetse-fly has been around for a while and made some sensible comments, so probably isn't a sockpuppet. mellow, on the other hand, is 14 days old and has mostly posted rubbish.

In that case the term "neocon" is sufficiently broad to be meaningless. We should probably make up new labels if nobody can agree on what this one means.