Turing_Machine

78 ms·

3091.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"humans didn't spontaneously emerge from a long standing heat bath." They didn't? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you arguing intelligent design or something? Because the standard evolutionary theorie
3092.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
I'm not sure that ants are doing a "realistic simulation of the universe", though, or anything like it. From what I understand, they're a lot closer to little robots than they are to something that can do Kip Thorne-leve
3093.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"what are the advantages of these techniques compared to gradient descent?" Well, the really big advantage is that simple gradient descent can get you stuck in local maxima (or minima, depending on how you look at things). Many fi
3094.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"It is when we are discussing the limits of sustainability and growth" We aren't anywhere near the "limits of sustainability and growth". "It might be free in the sense that nobody owns the sun. It's not f
3095.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Are you wilfully trying to not see the point I'm making or something?" No, I'm pointing out that: 1) "Efficiency" isn't the only goal in life. It would be more "efficient" for the entire populat
3096.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Also, conversion losses do matter" Not when it comes to the fusion reactions occurring in the sun. Cooking stoves aren't really relevant here at all, but of course the reason we use these so-called "Rube Goldberg"
3097.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Basic matter of thinking in terms of conversion losses. " While it is true that Western agriculture uses a lot of fossil fuels, that isn't necessarily the case for all possible models of agriculture. Plants get their energy
3098.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"Your very link shows a number of times the treaty was ignored." And yet it largely remains effective. Despite all the things you mention, people still speak Spanish in the Spanish half. Ask the Aztecs, Incas, Mayas... how pragm
3099.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Err.... I just gave an example of one that wasn't "ignored". The world was divided up between Portugal and Spain by the Pope, never mind that most of it was largely unknown to Europeans at the time, and never mind that it was
3100.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
But the comparison is with the costs of the Concorde when it was shut down in 2003, not the costs of the Concorde in the 1960s.
3101.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Aircraft fuel efficiency has improved by more than 50% since the 1960s. Most people would call that more than "a few percent".
3102.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
On the contrary... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tordesillas Look at that line, and note which non-European countries speak Spanish and which ones speak Portuguese. For instance, Brazil wound up being Portugu
3103.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"If that's the case, why haven't we been hit by any in recorded history that gave us more water?" Most of the comets whose orbit intersects with Earth's orbit collided eons ago. Some comets still enter the inner Sol
3104.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Ha! A long-term mystery has been solved for me. When I was a kid I encountered a tool called a "sloyd knife", which seemed like a really weird name. Now I know -- it's not weird, just Swedish. :-)
3105.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Right. You don't get an automatic retry with cars.
3106.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Yeah, there would be advantages in the cars exchanging data, but you could have that while still leaving the final decisions up to the individual car (rather than being dictated by a centralized controller). That's more or less what an
3107.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
I wonder if some kind of detachable "trailers" might be the answer here. For normal driving, you'd have a single-passenger pod (with maybe enough cargo space for a bag of groceries or whatever), but you could hook on extra pa
3108.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
The problem with a centralized system is that is a single point of failure. If the central system went out, things would get Very Bad, Very Fast.
3109.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
> If so, they are doing a poor job: this makes Seattle look less interesting to me. Perhaps not. It could be Portland doing it. :-)
3110.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
The share of book sales which are ebooks from major publishers has declined, largely because they're, yup, overpricing the ebooks to avoid cutting into print sales. Indy is doing fine.
3111.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
6 watts absorbed per kg of body mass would be somewhere in the range of 500 watts for a human being, so, yes, very high -- that's around 5x the amount of energy normally produced as body heat. I would think that would be enough to prod
3112.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Tylenol/acetaminophen/APAP/paracetamol immediately came to mind for me as well. It's flat-out amazing to me that shit is still allowed on the market. It hammers your liver really hard, especially in combination with alco
3113.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Nice work. I already had Privacy Badger and had disabled third-party cookies, but it's good to have confirmation that it's working. I'm showing up as not logged into anything, even though I am, in fact, logged into six of tho
3114.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Anchorage, Alaska was a more common stopover between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, Korea, etc. in the days before airliners could easily cross the Pacific in one hop. ANC is still a major refueling and sorting stop for air cargo -- most al
3115.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"One of the causes is the sudden release of methane present in seabeds" You mean "one possible cause among many" (including, ATW, meteor impact, volcanism, sea level change, sea oxygen content change, sea acidity change
3116.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Much of the Earth's original carbon supply has been sequestered in the form of carbonate rocks. Much of the planet is covered with miles of them. That carbon isn't going anywhere.
3117.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"the extinction event with the highest extinction rate." Sorry, that is not correct. The K–Pg extinction event wiped out around 75% of all living species , apparently within the span of a couple of years.
3118.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
"how he came from poor to riches" By destroying the economies of entire countries?
3119.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Hmmm... why wouldn't it be a good way to make decisions, assuming that the Republic of Ireland's weather people are competent, and their own people were unavailable (for whatever reason)? Some things are independent of politics,
3120.
by Turing_Machine 9y ago
Can verify that if you give numerical methods people C you may get wonders like (e.g.) main() functions that are 30 pages long. No, I'm not kidding. I shudder to think what they'd have done with C++. :-)

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