hugh_

Heck, you're right, I should!

Not really, it's just damn near impossible to buy anything that isn't made in China or some other crappy dictatorship.

I don't have time to spend a lovely Saturday morning watching a 90-minute video just to criticize it, but how can one "debunk" the calories-in calories-out model? Surely this is just plain old thermodynamics?

Y'see, this is why I don't like the fact that comments can no longer go below -4.

Yep, I got my first bike for my sixth birthday and never had training wheels.

What's the point of giving a four-year-old a bike anyway? It's not like you're going to let 'em ride it anywhere interesting, or unsupervised.

Let's assume that the fraction of people in prison has grown over the last 70 years. This is either because sentencing has got harsher or because people are committing more crimes. Anecdotally, though, sentencing seems to have got less harsh -- for instance in the 1950s the Boggs act resulted in minimum mandatory sentences of 5-20 years for a first drug offense. Thus, we must conclude that people are committing more crimes than before.

Now, either they're committing more crimes because sentencing has got less harsh, or they're committing more crimes because of other social factors (eg the growth of gang culture, drug culture, et cetera). Either way it's not clear to me that making sentencing even less harsh than it already is will solve anything.

What cars do pilots drive? What foods do vintners eat?

I'd say it's more like asking "What cars do park rangers drive?" or "What foods do wrestlers eat?" because we're talking about groups of people with quite specific requirements. The question, while overly broad, isn't silly, because there's a lot of people who have no idea and have never heard of things like Maple, Magma. Heck, now I coem to think of it I've never heard of Maxima, so your answer taught me something new. And if you learn something new from the answer, it's probably not a silly question!

Are the folks in prison really the same folks who would otherwise be attending the University of California? I think they're generally pretty different demographics.

Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.

One of my favourite theories on prison reform: a huge problem with prisons is the formation of gangs and other social structures within the prison walls; not only do these promote the emergence of a criminal culture within the prison, they also make the prisoners harder to guard.

This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.

Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.

Sounds like what we really need to do is outsource the prisons. To, say, Mexico, or China. I'll bet the Chinese don't pay $50,000 per prisoner per year to keep their prisoners locked up -- heck, they probably harness their labour to turn a profit.

But the robot _might_ be being controlled by some guy in another room who is also controlling the lightbulb (alternatively the person could be following instructions given by an earpiece). Or maybe they're both hooked up to a geiger counter. I admit it seems pretty unlikely that anybody would wire a robot or person up to flip a switch at exactly the same time a lightbulb comes on, but it only seems unlikely because of our pre-existing knowledge about robots and lightbulbs. If we take away that knowledge and simply make it a statement about how variable A changes when variable B does, it's much harder to infer which way, if either, the causal link goes.

(I suppose if you really wanted to be paranoid you could suppose that your _own_ actions in flipping the lightswitch might be subconsciously being controlled by someone else, but this is a whole different level of skepticism)

E.g., are we right to assume that all the laws of chemistry are "in principle" reducible to physics, even though we can never hope to make such a reduction in practice?

Actually, making that reduction in practice is pretty much what I do for a living.

It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind.

What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?

Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws?

Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?

In this case we can be reasonably confident in the causal link between the switch and the light because we're controlling the switch ourselves -- this helps us eliminate the other causal possibilities (a) that the light going on and off causes the switch to flip and (b) both the light and the flipping of the switch are separately caused by some third factor of which we're ignorant.

In situations where we can't freely vary any of the parameters we're always going to have a lot more difficulty. Given a pile of correlations between, say, happiness and the countless other variables in the mere two hundred or so countries which exist (eg "average bovine thigh circumference"), it'd be impossible, in the absence of any good theories about what should make people happy, to determine what does make people happy.

Luckily we have pretty good ideas from our own observations and from those of others about what actually does make people happy: health, wealth, nice weather, absence of civil war, et cetera. But we'll never be able to get anything other than the vaguest confirmation of what we already believed out of statistical methods alone.

The horizontal axis represents musical time, from the beginning to the end of the piece, while the vertical axis shows how far the similarities persist into the higher-level structure of the piece.

If I understand this correctly, this means that the vertical axis goes from "similarity in large-scale structure" at the top to "similarity at the momentary scale" at the bottom, so the triangle is a sensible way to look at it.

I reckon that the best way to become a generalist is a two-step process:

1. Become a specialist

2. Become a generalist

This has two advantages. Firstly, you'll be useful and employable in your youth, since a specialist with a few years' experience is a valuable asset, but a half-baked generalist is pretty useless. Secondly, and more importantly, you'll know what it's like to really understand a subject, which should help you in your quest to partially understand all the others.

Really? Wow.

And people are complaining that the crash was caused by under-regulation? How about first removing all the laws which force banks to lend money to folks who are unworthy of credit?

Even if we did develop a lie detector with high accuracy, how would we know?

There's good reason to believe that lie detectors might work much better in the laboratory, on test subjects telling inconsequential lies to experimenters and knowing they'll go home, than on real suspected criminals telling vitally important lies (or truths) for life-or-death stakes.

The article says that fears of damage to your credit rating, if you do this, are "overblown". But surely the damage to your credit rating among rational creditors should be really severe?

If I were a bank and I found out a borrower had walked away from a previous loan leaving their creditors holding the bag, there's no way in hell I'd lend them a single cent, ever.

It's largely economics of scale. The linked post says that New York State is spending vast sums of money just to house twelve inmates on death row, so obviously it would be cheaper to throw those twelve inmates into the existing prison system for life.

On the other hand, if we were to execute a thousand prisoners per year then it would start to get a whole lot cheaper. For instance, I'd be in favour of executing the scrote that stole my bike.

Without any suggested strategy that would defend against all possible attacks, though, it's not much of a suggestion. The current strategy may be the best one available. If unreliable two-component powder+syringe underpants bombs are the best option currently available to potential aircraft bombers, then that's definitely something.

I have adopted a "we are homosapien" (note: not plural) outlook towards the humanities

While I have no idea what that means, I would like to point out that "homo sapien" is not the singular of "homo sapiens"

Does he consider Blink 182 to be more "mainstream" than Vampire Weekend?

They're still a helluva lot more expensive than coal-powered plants, which is what the third world is actually building.

Except Iran isn't a sovereign nation, it's just a patch of soil run, in practice, by a bunch of unelected mullah-thugs. The doctrine of sovereign rights should be restricted to democracies. The mullahs have no more sovereign right to the territory they happen to control than the Crips or Bloods.

Perhaps, but the social dynamics are made extra interesting by the fact that the "passionate entrepreneur" is the too-cool-for-school kid of a dozen years ago, and he's having trouble coping with it.

I'm not sure whether it's pathos or schadenfreude, but there's something fascinating about the weird approval-seeking behaviour exhibited by this former cool kid towards the new cool kids, especially given the enormous stylistic gulf between the two bands.

Why was the abridged, no-value-added version linked instead of the original?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/story/print?guid=83A47014-F...

I'm pretty unconvinced that it's a worthwhile product. I don't see a worthwhile gap in the market in between smartphones and laptops.

Smartphones are great because they fit in your pocket, but annoying because they lack some of the features of laptops. Laptops are great because they have full keyboards, optical drives etc but are annoying because they won't fit in your pocket. I don't really have any desire, though, for a device which has no keyboard and still won't fit in my pocket.

Perhaps solutions should be aimed at slowing down the churn rate on the "new" page, then? What if everybody were limited to submitting, say, one article per day?

This is probably a good thing. A large prize might create some rather perverse incentives for, uhh, direct intervention in the data set.