roundsquare

Thanks, that's basically how I saw it. I guess that's one way how this proof essentially makes the problem discrete (in addition to assuming perfect driving).

Is the following correct? This proof depends on the fact that in the clause gadget (figure 5) the car can't turn once it jumps to the cheek point. Because of this, it can't in from the track for one for one variable to that for another.

I was under the impression that we were very close to being able to move sensors with our minds.

http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_br...

I'm sorry, but are people not able to ignore this? I, like everyone, use Google all the time and I didn't even notice this till now. There are times when pointing out something that could be improved makes the experience worse.

On top of that, isn't this complaint ignoring relevant differences between Google and Wolfram Alpha? In particular, the fact that Wolfram Alpha is funded by Wolfram's other income and Google makes money from its search engine (and therefore needs to put ads in a prominent place).

Nah. I think the real benefit is that they have a "victory" every few hours to keep them going.

Yeah. Having been locked in stairwells before (luckily not for too long) I don't usually take the stairs unless they are out in the open.

"Why isn't blaming professors for cheaters analogous to blaming rape victims for being insufficiently vigilant against rape?"

I don't think the analogy holds well. The point is that a professor is supposed to help his/her students when they have questions. If they don't do this, they increase the probability of cheating occurring. It's less of "blaming" and more "noting" that this happens. If the professor is partially ignoring this duty, he/she is partly to blame. (I'm not saying that happened here, just explaining what I think @reason's logic is).

There certainly is such a thing as being too aggressive in trying to detect cheating. It happened to my dad once but he cleared it up by re-doing the problem from scratch in front of the teacher.

I think it's absolutely critical that any accusation of cheating allow the student to respond, preferably to a different teacher if the original teacher still thinks they were cheating.

To quote from the article: "Media Transcript Full Version"

But wait. With your blog now, either your family gets an update (maybe via an RSS feed) or they check it periodically. The same would be true of a public circle. Either they join the public circle an get an update when you post or they can check the content of the public circle whenever they want (assuming you don't need to join the circle to see its content).

"But besides all that, teaching is a profession that is charged with preparing and educating our youth for tomorrow. Obviously, teachers go into it knowing this, and often for that very reason. But in my eyes, that's quite a responsibility. There are plenty of better paying jobs out there with less vacation that, at the end of the day, don't make much of a difference."

If you ask me, that's all the more reason to increase pay and remove the near absolute job security. (Note: I haven't independently fact checked the job security so if its wrong please let me know). Given how important the job is, doesn't it make sense to align the incentives properly?

For the most part, when I hear people disagree with this, they tend to bring up specific problems with things like No Child Left Behind. Its hard to disagree that using bad techniques to measure teacher performance is a bad idea and I don't have a specific better solution, but I don't think that means we should stop trying.

What am I missing? I don't see this as much different from a regular cook book...

When I was a freshmen at Cornell (2002) there were two possible intro classes:

CS 101M was half java and half matlab

CS 101J was mostly java with a week or two of matlab (recommended for CS majors)

After this class (or the AP test) our next two classes to qualify for the major were in Java and SMLNJ.

Interestingly, our algorithms class (considered upper level but required) was purely theoretical (no programming at all).

I think there is a good chance of google resisting this since they can add the features through other (integrated) apps. Why have messaging when you have GMail? Why have events when you have Google Calendar? Etc...

I suppose I should be clear from this point on: I am against Google+ forcing people to show their gender.

"Well... that's the point. I really don't want to talk about it as an ethical decision, and I guess I can avoid that by pointing out that it is more obviously a good business decision."

In this case, I don't like making it a business decision for two reasons:

1) It is all but certain that Google considered the business repercussions of forcing people to show their gender. They almost certainly balanced the number of people they would not be able to get against the fact that the data is not indexed and searchable and concluded that, from a business point of view, it was worthwhile to force people to show gender. In the end, without real data, there is probably not a good way to make the business argument in a way that convinces google that they are wrong from a business point of view. (Of course, while testing, if the data they gather says that this is killing their business, they'll probably change the way it works).

2) If we can make the moral argument, and Google busy it, they are less likely to start changing their default privacy settings, etc... on people just because its good business.

Of course, I realize there is strength in making something a business decision. It means that even if they don't buy the moral argument, we still get the outcome we want. But, in this case, I think the two reasons stated above outweigh this (especially point number 2 given the experience with facebook).

I'm having some trouble connecting your last few paragraphs ("An conception of the idea..." onward), which are very general in nature, to the specific topic here. As far as I can tell, you are basically arguing for some sort of rules based morality. Without getting into if that's desirable or not (though in many cases, I agree it is), its not clear to me what rules you are in favor of. Please do explain...

(On your moral argument and discussion of perceived risk, I essentially agree).

I see what you're saying, but I don't think these two are in any way inconsistent. Gender equality starts with breaking down people's assumptions. If people just saw stick figures, I think they'd assume they were male. Thus, to break that assumption, he needs to do something to make it clear that some of them are women. So, if he has scientists talking about something, having half of them be women should, hopefully, ingrain a little more that women can be scientists.

Just for fun... it might not be impossible:

You can reduce R^2 to {x | 0<=x<=1}[1] and thus, by induction, we can reduce R^n to {x | 0<=x<=1} for any integer n.

If I remember correctly, there are about 10^80 particles. The position of each particle is a point in R^3 so the position of all particles is R^(3*10^80). So, the position of every particle could be stored by the position of a particle on a 1 meter (foot, inch, whatever) long stick.

Of course, you run into problems if space is discrete or, in any event, with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle but you can still store a lot of information with each particle.

Horribly impractical of course, but like I said, just for fun...

[1]http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/infapp.htm

Is it just me, or do a lot of us geeks have a small font bias? Is it because we want more information on the screen?

Personally, I like small fonts when I'm coding but larger fonts for other stuff.

You're making this into a business decision. I'm sure that google has put a lot of thought into this and made what they think is the best business decision (in addition to the fact that they are testing it in beta).

There are, however, concerns above and beyond profits that could drive this decision.

"them" in the sentence probably referred to "gender issues" not "folks".

Good point. I forgot we learned about "slices of a pizza" that early.

By the way, the history of the degree is somewhat interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_(angle)

Also quite difficult to get the same level of conversation.

Haven't seen the movie but there is also a TV series. Its not very realistic though (according to a real life culture trainer).

Sorry, I think I was unclear in my question.

"cannot countenance the possibility that there is not a completely uniform distribution of ability across all conceivable human subgroups."

What ability are you talking about? (This is not disagreement btw, this is truly for clarification).

"The assumption of biological egalitarianism underpins the idea that all inequalities of outcome are due to the malice of straight white middle-class males.

Yet it is not straight, white, middle-class males who are actually committing most of the rapes in America."

Insofar as this particular argument goes, it doesn't matter if the males are white or middle-class. It is, however, straight men who commit most of the rapes as well as other sexual abuses and sexual harassment in America.

AFAIK, under international law for statehood it would require a permanent population, a defined territory, government and capacity to enter into relations with the other states.[1]

There is some precedent for non-states getting "international personhood" but so far its only happened to the UN and even that is only minimal personhood. [2] I don't think the logic would carry over.

Treating it as a natural resource would probably put it under the jurisdiction of states where it resides. At that point, maybe states can do what Equador did with nature and treat it as having fundamental rights in their constitution.

[1]http://www.taiwandocuments.org/montevideo01.htm [2]http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/4/1835.pdf (very long and I don't think mostly relevant).

"Now you forgot the bisexuals! ;p"

You know, I thought that at firs too. I was going to say that it doesn't make sense to say a bisexual has B=0.5 and that we should have B_male and B_female. However, as I tried to think of a situation where you'd want to split that into two dimensions, I couldn't come up with one. As long as we read B as a relative preference it makes sense to say bisexuals have B = 0.5.

"Also do these women who don't want to disclose their gender really need Randall Munroe to file the bug report for them?"

He's someone who gets listened to.

I don't understand this statement at all. Are you saying that he's ignoring the fact that women have different abilities to defend themselves from attackers?

"the problem is with degrees"

I partly disagree. For kids, defining something using irrational numbers would probably be very confusing. Using integers is much easier.

So, why 360? Because we talk about right angles a lot and we want to have a third, a half, etc... and (I'm guessing) they wanted it to be a multiple of 10.

I think the point is to be able to teach geometry to kids without worrying about them getting confused by fractions and/or irrational numbers.

Why does smallest in terms of absolute value matter? In any event, I can define the circle via the center and r/2 or center and r/4, etc... I don't see any value in caring about the absolute value.

As for dimensionality, how are you using the word? No matter what, we need 3 numbers to define a circle in R^2. Two numbers define its position and one number defines it size. I don't see what you're getting at. If you mean that because radius is a measure of length (one dimension) and area is a measure of area (two dimensions) then I have two questions: 1) Why does that matter? Its still just a single number. 2) Even if it does matter, why is radius more fundamental than diameter.