yakiv

some futuristic chip implant in your head to prevent you from committing it

Just curious, are you thinking of The Alliance?

> Never blame on malice what can be blamed on incompetence.

So, does the early bird get the worm or do good things come to those who wait? We're maybe too inclined to just assert these sorts of things as fact. (This includes me.)

Would every drawing have to loop? Pi doesn't. I personally don't actually know if there's something about this specifically that would force every drawing to loop, though.

Or you could consider both.

Even if you can't measure someone's creative thinking ability very well, that doesn't mean that it can't improve with practice.

I think strait is right. "Elite achiever" only (directly, anyway) has to do with performance, not intelligence.

I was hoping that the neutrinos were actually going faster than light. Confirming established theories is boring, but breaking them is exciting.

Do you know any specifics of how the standard model breaks down at high enough energies?

This (probably) won't discuss the technical problem, but http://www.bitcoinity.org/markets will let you track Bitcoin prices.

Bitcoin seems to be picking up again. From Mt. Gox:

    > Last price:$45.00000
    > High:$48.46900
    > Low:$36.65000

I'm no expert on bitcoin, but I've read that you can have as many addresses as you want. You could generate a new address for each time you order through bitspend and never give them your "main" address. Overall it may or may not be a better option than just buying directly from a merchant because of other considerations.

Can't be. Has to say "0" sometimes.

This is just speculation.

California has this:

    > California’s Master Plan for higher education, adopted in
    > 1960, guarantees a place in college for every state
    > resident who can benefit. The historic blueprint produced
    > systems and programs that have served as models for other
    > states and for countries across the globe.

This one might be incorrect, but California being on the west coast might mean that there are more Asians per person in California than in many other parts of the US, too.

> I thought it was basic enough to be studied at about that age in the rest of the world.

Where do you think GP went to school? Neither the post nor the profile indicates a location.

Edit: I should say that I don't know for sure that you don't know from some other post GP made.

Does anyone here know why the Einstein cross has 4 of the repeated image instead of being a continuous repetition around the lens object? It seems to me like you should see the magnified image as a sort of circle instead of having a finite number of repetitions.

Is this related to the lines forming a cross you see in pictures of stars?

Or to not give an individual power in the first place.

Actually, if you're curious, there's matter that isn't made of atoms, such as neutrinos.

    > Human beings are irrational and sometimes do things that
    > aren't in their economic best interest out of principle
    > or ethics.

You also said

    > Think about it: if I murder somebody, then offer you $100
    > not to tell anyone, would you take the money? I certainly
    > hope not.

I use Ruby some, but I'm not sure I'd describe it as clean exactly. I've used Python a bit recently and was struck by just how clean it seemed. (I'm not sure Python has anything that quite replaces blocks, though. I don't claim Python's all better than Ruby.)

How about Sugar? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%28desktop_environment%29)

It's like Facebook.

(I'm an American.) I'd be interested to hear what dangers Americans seem to be oblivious of.

I don't know if we've gotten there yet, but Fizz Buzz specifically may not always be an effective weeding-out tool: once enough people have heard of it, they may prepare specifically for it. Perhaps a better approach would be to come up with your own small test of comparable difficulty, sort of like a blog that has a custom but otherwise extremely hackable way of testing if you're a real person.

"How dare you digitize books from the library of Alexandria. That's theft!"

No idea what I'm trying to say here, by the way.

Genuine question here: when are multimethods useful in practice?

Why does it matter here if the tax-exempt organization is religious or not? Pretty much every tax-exempt organization is going to have an agenda---if it didn't, it probably wouldn't exist. Why are religion-based agendas less tolerable here?

What's the difference between a smart phone and a laptop? A smart phone can go with you everywhere to a greater extent than a laptop can. I think that glass would push that farther.

I'm going to make an utterly irrelevant comment here, but I think that in general it's better to not use "former" and "latter" like this---it often forces the reader to look back earlier in the text if they want to figure out what you're saying.

From dictionary.com:

flammable: "easily set on fire; combustible; inflammable."

inflammable: "capable of being set on fire; combustible; flammable."

[Standard boilerplate about dictionaries being imperfect reflections of what words actually mean.]

[Perhaps less-standard boilerplate about how words can mean different things in different places.]

Whatever the nuances are, "inflammable" doesn't mean "fireproof", which is my main point.

Perl: "There is more than one way to do it."

Some ways Excel lets you organize data: (1) chaotically on one worksheet, (2) with different data sets in different worksheets, (3) in tables (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/overview-of-exc...).

Python: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it."

Perhaps Excel/Perl*Python wouldn't have any of Excel's organization tools exactly but would instead have only independent tables that could be made larger and smaller as needed.

Edit after reading some comment about databases:

Perhaps this program would be a front-end of sorts for databases or could act as one. That might be unrelated to the Perl/Python difference, but it could be a useful feature.