hughprime

Since I had a look at a couple of them, I suppose I might as well provide reviews.

"Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university mathematical education, if only to teach me what the hell a "Lemma" was, exactly. It's also fun to read.

"21st Century Physics Flexbook" -- very odd. Admittedly intended as a K-12 textbook rather than a university-level textbook, but not much of a way to learn physics even for the kids. Virtually no mathematics whatsoever, let alone calculus. A random grab-bag of topics from "gravitation" (with an attempt to explain relativity which would be more confusing than enlightening) to "nanoscience" and "biomedical imaging". Basic mechanics finally comes in at the end as an afterthought. Not recommended to anyone.

Which textbook are you talking about?

I have a moderate hatred for most entry-level physics textbooks, which manage to pad about 100 pages' worth of information into a thousand-page tome full of glossy photographs in order to justify the $100+ price tag. So if there are any good free texts that would be great.

The first four are good general advice. The fifth and sixth are good ideas some of the time, the seventh is a bit platitudinous but possibly good advice some of the time, and the eighth is more like "a guide to writing like Kurt Vonnegut".

I assume "it looks AMAZING" is perfectly within the usual editorial standards of "omgbuntu", but wouldn't mind seeing a different headline here.

How about "it looks REASONABLY GOOD" or "it looks ABOUT LIKE YOU MIGHT EXPECT"?

That's great, but I wonder how heavy the nuclear reactor would need to be that provides the 2 MW to power this thing. Is this something we could practically loft into orbit with present-day rockets? (Ignoring the not-entirely-unreasonable-in-this-particular-case environmental objections to flying nuclear reactors through our atmosphere on failure-prone chemical rockets...)

I suppose, on the upside, that once you had this thing in space it could stay there -- a nuclear reactor plus plasma rocket which could just shuffle back and forth between Earth orbit and Mars/Jupiter/wherever, refuelling at every Earth stop.

Works great for me, but only if the music in question has no lyrics. Baroque, bebop or pretentious Philip Glass-y stuff seems to work best.

It obviously can't do very much to a truck, but I wonder what it would do to a human. Nothing very good, obviously, but how long would you need to keep it focused on someone before they dropped down, brain cooked? (I can't help but notice that the beam is approximately head-sized).

I wonder if a reflective helmet would be a decent countermeasure (or, dare I say it, a tinfoil hat?)

Is the single word really necessary? I mean, it already says "google.com" up in the URL bar, so you know what you're looking at.

You're probably taking it too seriously then.

Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in everything I read. It's much harder to concentrate on the test when half my brain is busy visualizing what four hundred Captain Picards would look like marching down my street.

The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would get brought to the surface eventually, and at least some of those should get amended away.

The second sentence is a straw man.

Is there some kind of competition I don't know about to mention the words "straw man" in as many threads as possible? It seems to pop up in just about every thread, along with the words "correlation does not equal causation".

Those sorts of questions always bothered me in IQ tests too. I was also always bothered by questions like:

"What comes next in this sequence? 1,4,9,16,25,"

Sure, the answer might be 36, but then again maybe we're looking at some subtler sequence of numbers than that. Maybe it's "the number of bald men who walked past my house every hour since 5am". Maybe the next number is 345 due to the annual Patrick Stewart Lookalike Parade. Who knows?

Probably. Hell, we could all just start using Euros (or whatever) for cash, and then exchange our Euros for plastic-only US dollars at changing booths (which would suddenly become a lot more common).

This, of course, doesn't make life any easier for anyone, except the jerks who already use cards for everything (aka the jerks I always get stuck behind in line while I wait for their little receipt to print and get signed).

Because, while it doesn't provide particularly useful advice, it is at least a good starting point for discussion on an interesting subject?

Also, because people upvoted it before taking time to read it carefully and think about whether the advice was really valuable?

Straw man. Who the hell uses their todo list like that? Who are those "proponents" who suggest playing this sort of silly "estimate the task and match it to a time slot" game? I've never met one.

You've never seen a Gantt chart? You're lucky, then.

This is the "makers' schedule" vs "managers' schedule" again. Donald Trump doesn't need a "To do" list because he (presumably) works on a manager's schedule -- if he decides he needs to do something he'll tell his assistant to set up a meeting with the relevant person, then he'll meet with the relevant person at the appropriate time and the thing will get done. Also, he doesn't need to worry about the minor errands which most of us need to fill our to do lists with either, since he can just bark "make me a dental appointment!" at somebody and it gets done.

To do lists are only relevant to those who actually need to sit down and do things on their own. Did Einstein have a To Do list? I don't know, but if he didn't then it was for very different reasons to Donald Trump.

I agree. How about six months? All the major issues have been festering for years, what's an extra six months of delay?

Remember, the government can't build a new road without three years of planning, community consultation, environmental impact statements, mandatory waiting periods, careful negotiation with all stakeholders, and whatever other bureaucracy might crop up along the way. But when the government wants to pass a bill to spend a trillion bucks or fundamentally change the nature of the economy, they seem to think that about twelve hours is the ideal length of time to spend debating it.

What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly because they didn't have to.

That bugs you? I'm pretty grateful for it, personally.

The jihadists' greatest strength is also their greatest weakness: they're not very rational. If they were rational then they'd figure out that there are more efficient ways to kill random civilians than anything they've explored so far. On the other hand, if they were rational then they'd figure out that killing random civilians to please an invisible sky wizard is a pretty fucking stupid way to spend your life anyway.

Aside from that, they do realize that the internet is an international medium and the vast majority of it isn't subject to FCC rules, right?

Speaking of which, as a non-US citizen, I'd like to invite companies to send me free products so I can say nice things about them on my blog!

What about surgically implanted bombs in fat people? (Like in that movie I won't name just to avoid spoiling it for the small number of people who haven't seen it.) Does anyone have a good idea of whether that's a severe risk? Can anyone have a sizeable bomb surgically implanted and live long enough with it inside them to recover from the surgery enough to walk around normally?

It's fairly certain that "old, ugly, fat, have children" are all characteristics that would lower the match %, therefore you argument of equating these different traits is debunked.

I think you need to look up how their "match %" is computed. It was described in an earlier post on that blog.

There is, as I understand it, some evidence for the idea that people learn what's attractive in a member of the opposite sex by essentially averaging out all the faces which they see while growing up. This makes a helluva lot of sense as an evolutionary strategy -- you learn what your species looks like by observing as many other members as you can, and then you try to mate with the least unusual-looking person you can. Aside from protecting your offspring from the weird disability-causing genes which are sometimes signalled by unusual-looking features, it's also a great strategy if you assume everyone else is using it too: if you mate with a non-unusual looking partner you'll get non-unusual-looking kids, who will then be sought-after mating partners.

Anyway, if our brains really do use this strategy I think it goes a long way towards explaining some of this data.

edit: I don't mean to imply that this is the only criterion our brains use -- we probably find most attractive people who are slightly taller, more muscular and/or larger-breasted than the average we see while growing up. However in other things like facial structure where no particular face is objectively fitter than any other, heading towards the average is a pretty good plan.

There are a zillion factors which haven't been corrected for. As well as class, they include message length, message quality, profile quality, number of messages received on average by each class of respondee, income, education, number of cats owned and whether or not the man's profile consists of a shirtless photo posing in front of his Honda Civic (and I don't know why that mental image came to mind).

I imagine you could, by using fake profiles and fake messages, do a controlled experiment which took all these factors out. My guess would be that you'd still see a vaguely similar effect but that it would be much less pronounced.

Gender preference is certainly non-equivalent to race preference. On the other hand, it does show that certain forms of discrimination which would be wrong (and just plain illegal) in other settings are perfectly okay in a dating setting.

As a better example, I'm not interested in dating women who are old, ugly, fat, or have children, and that's perfectly okay. If I were not interested in hiring women who were old, ugly, fat or have children then I'd have a serious lawsuit on my hands.

Now personally, I think that refusing to date someone based on their race is both regrettable and closed-minded, but it's not detestable the way that actual racism is.

Actually I find the nationalities of the winners to be the least interesting part of Nobel Prize season. Apart from opportunities for nationalist chest-thumping, brow-beating and/or hand-wringing, who cares?

On the other hand, I bet if you were to go to the newspapers of the home countries of the two researchers not born in the US you wouldn't find the headline "Three Americans win Nobel Prize". Hmm, let me check...

Yup! The Age (Melbourne) currently has the headline "Our Beautiful Mind: Scientist Australia's first woman Nobel laureate". (Can't find an equivalent in the UK just now -- there are enough British Nobel laureates that they don't need to get excited over each one.)

I have nothing against golf as a game, and I've played it a few times myself, but the idea that there's this much money floating around just in sticking logos on the shirts of guys who hit balls into holes to persuade other guys to buy new sticks with which to hit other balls into holes makes me feel like there's an awful lot of money being wasted.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem with the term "polymath" -- too many people seem far too keen to apply it to themselves.

I think the best strategy at this stage in history is the "know everything about something and something about everything" strategy. Aside from making life more interesting, the more you know about fields outside your own specialty the more likely you are to have great ideas in your own field, since most "new ideas" in a field are really just of the form "hey, why don't we try this approach which they use in another field on this field?"

To save me the hours and hours of curiosity, does someone want to give a brief and work-safe summary of what this particular activity is?

Oakland is really lacking in a few ways though. Aside from the fact that you can't walk for more than a mile without seeing something really depressing, the thing that really creeps me out about Oakland (and I'm an East Bay resident) is the lack of shops. How can there be a city of half a million people with no malls and no department stores? Heck, there's hardly even any supermarkets.

Restaurantwise, there's a few good ones, but not really enough to satisfy your every whim. Barwise, once you've removed all the really unsafe ones you've got just a handful left, scattered among Oakland's three or four safe neighbourhoods and separated by miles of "don't go here at night".

The weather is better (slightly) and the rent is cheaper (much) though.

Only one million? Cheaper than I thought!

Actually I do see a few houses in the $1 million range on that page, but none of them seem to have yards. With no backyard and no reasonable parks in the neighbourhood, where would your children play?