Steuard

152 ms·

571.
by Steuard 13y ago
Unfortunately, I don't have any quick answer to this ready to hand, and I don't have remotely enough spare time right now to try and write a long one. I know that sounds like dodging the question, and maybe it is. But I see it as
572.
by Steuard 13y ago
A meta-comment, which I'm separating from my main reply: Rather a lot of the comments here seem to be reacting to this in ways that boil down to "Feminism is unfair to men!" For anyone out there who hasn't studied much o
573.
by Steuard 13y ago
For this particular question, it's hard for me to see that there's any real mystery involved. The push for more gender equality in traditionally male professions only shows up for professions associated with high status and/o
574.
by Steuard 13y ago
I think the idea is to encrypt with multiple cyphers, each endorsed by a different government (preferably mutually mistrustful governments). That way, in principle, the Chinese may have a backdoor to one layer and the US to another, but the
575.
by Steuard 13y ago
It's a really neat question, and as a new-ish parent I've given it some thought. In fact, there's even another layer to it: shortly after birth, people tend to count in weeks rather than months. My guess at an answer is that
576.
by Steuard 13y ago
Is this purely symbolic, or is there some real sense in which replacing the USDA website with a placeholder saves the government a measurable amount of money?
577.
by Steuard 13y ago
One of the confusing issues here is that there is not a single, constant density necessary for the formation of a black hole. Instead, the Schwarzschild radius of a (potential) black hole is proportional to total mass. That means that as yo
578.
by Steuard 13y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but most of your comments seem to be focused on limitations of the sensor, not on the lens itself. (It's hard for me to picture how a lens would behave differently at low light intensity than at high
579.
by Steuard 13y ago
See, that's the fun part. If you try to pack in more information than given by these limits, you inevitably form a black hole (and then you lose access to those individual cm^3 regions, and your plan falls apart).
580.
by Steuard 13y ago
Don't count on finding big misconceptions here: in fact, questions about black hole entropy and the Beckenstein bound are some of the most intensely studied topics in theoretical physics today. Not that we understand the answers! But t
581.
by Steuard 13y ago
The remarkable thing that this explanation doesn't really explore in depth is that the maximum information (~entropy) contained in a region scales according to its boundary area rather than to its volume. That means that "maximu
582.
by Steuard 13y ago
I guess that I have trouble imagining how any law of physics that I know of would enforce such a rule. The whole point of statmech is that the 2nd law is an emergent phenomenon: it's not a separate influence on the universe independent
583.
by Steuard 13y ago
My glib objection was not to the notion of there being less entropy in one state than the other, but in calling the result "the 2nd law of thermodynamics" in cases like this. The phase space argument means that it is less likely
584.
by Steuard 13y ago
The glib answer here is that there's really no such thing as the 2nd law when you're talking about a small number of individual fundamental particles. The statement "entropy never decreases" is actually a purely statisti
585.
by Steuard 13y ago
Ah, they got a lot of their ideas from us, and honestly, we got ideas from them, too. (Alcubierre's "warp drive" metric in general relativity was evidently inspired by Star Trek, for instance. And I seem to recall that Arthur
586.
by Steuard 13y ago
Physics professor here. As others have said, this is a really cute idea in physics that touches on some neat properties of the universe (like fundamentally identical particles, conservation of lepton number, and the effects of time reversal
587.
by Steuard 13y ago
You seem to have missed the bits about Chinese honey being commonly collected and processed in non-standard ways (machine dried, it said) that lead to inferior taste, which was then covered up with various additives. Also the bits about Chi
588.
by Steuard 13y ago
Dan can probably give better answers, but as an early backer I know that I was quite eager to get in before those "early bird" copies sold out. I also recognized, though, that if I'd missed them I would have been significantl
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by Steuard 13y ago
This isn't really my specialty (string theory), but it's close enough "next door" that our conferences tend to have speakers on this topic on a regular basis. (There's a lot of overlap in individual researchers, too
590.
by Steuard 13y ago
I continue to be excited about the current Kickstarter for "Robot Turtles", a board game targeting 3-8 year olds that's based on programming concepts. It sounds like a lot of fun. There are about two weeks left to get a copy.
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by Steuard 13y ago
That's not really the same issue as in these latest revelations, though. The latest bit really is fundamentally technical, and folks like the article author may only focus on the easier-to-understand national security interest and over
592.
by Steuard 13y ago
It's very valuable to see this reaction to the latest Snowden disclosures: I expect it will be common, and the tech community needs to be prepared to make it clear why this really does reflect another betrayal of trust. Personally, I c
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by Steuard 13y ago
Personally, I've seen a lot more vaccination refusal among left-wing anti-corporate types than among the devoutly religious. That may be a function of my usual peer group, but to solve this problem it's going to be important to re
594.
by Steuard 13y ago
That doesn't actually make it better. The point is that we want people in those communities to be able to trust that the doctors who come to their door don't have an ulterior motive. It's not a question of whether the vaccine
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by Steuard 13y ago
I had a friend in college who used to talk about how she almost died as a kid due to complications of chicken pox. She was very vocally thrilled when the vaccine was announced.
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by Steuard 13y ago
At least in the US, my impression is that vaccination refusal is more common among left-wing anti-corporate types than among fundamentalist Christians. It thrives any time there are non-rational beliefs, but it doesn't seem to be too p
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by Steuard 13y ago
The Kickstarter page itself was submitted to HN yesterday by creator @danshapiro, but it's taken off enough at this point to get some press. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6321383 http://www.kickstarte
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Googler’s programming board game for kids meets Kickstarter goal in 5 hours(allthingsd.com)
2 points by Steuard 13y ago|1 comments
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by Steuard 13y ago
Look, it's not about the Lenna image in particular (even though it was the inspiration for this thread): given the cropping and the long history, I think there are much bigger issues for the community to worry about. But it sounds like
600.
by Steuard 13y ago
I don't think that the parent poster is saying "women are put off by nudity". (As you point out, there are other contexts where women can often be just as comfortable with it as men are.) As I read it, the parent poster is sa

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