Steuard

47 ms·

391.
by Steuard 12y ago
Even, say, the difference between "never attend church" and "sometimes attend church" (which evidently makes divorce 10% more likely)? Or how about the difference between household incomes of $85k and $110k (bars differ
392.
by Steuard 12y ago
To my eye, the previous comment was using X to represent the same thing, at least within each individual phrase. (Plugging in "X=spine severing" into both uses in that example seems to work just fine, for instance.)
393.
by Steuard 12y ago
These are neat comparisons, in both part 1 and part 2 (especially the strikingly opposite effects of big weddings vs. expensive weddings near the end of part 1). But boy, what I wouldn't give to see error bars on those graphs!
394.
by Steuard 12y ago
If you're listing topology as "less meaningful", I'm guessing you haven't spent much time studying topics in physics that have been developed since the 1970s or so. Topology turns out to be a pretty big deal.
395.
by Steuard 12y ago
What is the use case for this? It's hard for me to see anything other than K-12 math homework (or early college, in some cases). Even graphing calculators have broader applicability than that, and that's saying something. I'm
396.
by Steuard 12y ago
I'm betting that interpreting your math handwriting would be quite a bit harder than interpreting printed text. That said, I'd love to have that feature, too.
397.
by Steuard 12y ago
One issue that I've seen raised before is that there's a bit of a Catch-22 in public perception in Africa. As you point out, withholding the experimental drug has nasty overtones of "saving the cure for the white folks".
398.
by Steuard 12y ago
Again, you're basing this on a rational assessment of the different drugs in question. That's just not the mindset that we're talking about here. When you grow up hearing your parents and your preachers and your teachers all
399.
by Steuard 12y ago
The point is that (as I understand it, which may not be that well) folks on that side tend to frame this fundamentally differently than you do. They don't view a system of laws as an evolving structure to balance rights and harms, they
400.
by Steuard 12y ago
Good for him for acknowledging his mistake. He seems to have moved fairly quickly from his original flawed advice to an unsatisfying "[I] was inarticulate" and on to a solid "I answered that question completely wrong". G
401.
by Steuard 12y ago
Is that from Komarr ? (Bujold often has interesting things to say about parenthood.)
402.
by Steuard 12y ago
When I hear "energy dispersed at the edges", I think "lost" (or effectively absorbed), not "reflected back the way it came". I can't think of any obvious mechanism that would lead to significant coherent r
403.
by Steuard 12y ago
But as far as I know, Blackboard (or Moodle or Sakai or...) data is stored locally at your institution, not housed on a Google server somewhere. I think the data mining possibilities are much lower in that case. I'm all in favor of dis
404.
by Steuard 12y ago
Assuming I understand you, that's what I was getting at with "computational" scientists as a separate or intermediate category.
405.
by Steuard 12y ago
I hope you're not still talking cruise ships here! Those folks are often paying high prices by the minute or by the megabyte for access: you'd be pretty literally stealing from your neighbors in that situation. (The moral issue fo
406.
by Steuard 12y ago
What, "experimentalist"? That's not a synonym for "scientist", it's a subset. At least in physics, the main categories are "experimentalist" and "theorist". You'll sometimes find interm
407.
by Steuard 12y ago
I've finally given up on opting out, or perhaps I should frame it as finally declaring a partial victory and moving on. I still think the scanners are a huge waste of money and time, but they've gotten better. The x-ray versions a
408.
by Steuard 12y ago
Everyone has their own priorities and processes. For me, being able to throw half a dozen pages into a document feeder and get a small, good-quality PDF in my email a minute later is a big step up from the effort I used to put into assembli
409.
by Steuard 12y ago
Whimsy? Fun? What is the point of any Easter egg in software?
410.
by Steuard 12y ago
Or rather, these are all quotes from various Lovecraft short stories. (I don't think there's anything special about one particular collection.)
411.
by Steuard 12y ago
That's a really good one! As I recall, it introduces concepts one at a time in a good, educational way, and it winds up fully relativistic (and kinda crazy) by the end. Another more immersive but less "instructive" game is &q
412.
by Steuard 12y ago
"Point of the story is that almost everyone is prejudiced against thug-looking-people and it's often misattributed to racism." I don't think I follow you here. I think that most folks concerned about racism in these situ
413.
by Steuard 12y ago
For most "time machines" you read about, you aren't really going to run into the "CPT" issues from quantum field theory. Unless you're considering a model of time travel where you're still literally in the
414.
by Steuard 12y ago
It's a valid issue. You wouldn't need to worry about any component of your motion that's "constant velocity" (so, inertial straight-line motion), since all inertial reference frames are equally valid. But you would
415.
by Steuard 12y ago
It's really hard to get a teacher to change platforms (or textbooks or whatever) when they've got years of expertise and teaching materials built up on their current system. This isn't just laziness: you really are a less eff
416.
by Steuard 12y ago
What is the advantage of "browser based" in this case? It sounds like you're asking for a mail client that's not tied to a particular mail provider's website, and that's what native clients have provided ever s
417.
by Steuard 12y ago
To my eye, it's a little odd to read an article about multiple groups of experts who spent months or years hashing out a difficult problem, and then to see a comment like this one that proposes its own much simpler solution. Is your th
418.
by Steuard 12y ago
Sure, and the warning signal doesn't travel at the full vacuum speed of light, either: part or all of its path goes through electronics, and electrical signals travel only something like 0.5c. But this is a really short article aiming
419.
by Steuard 12y ago
If you were to sit down with a pile of beads and try to build a big HCP stack and a big FCC stack layer by layer, you'd quickly understand why the densities are the same. The bottom two layers (call them A and B) are identical between
420.
by Steuard 12y ago
This comment is pretty frightening to me. Email is very often used for "mission critical" purposes, not just for exchanging messages with other users (let alone just "with other users of the top 5 providers"). I know tha

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