ajarmst

70 ms·

601.
by ajarmst 12y ago
I think it's more "What's wrong with this country? Can't a man walk down the street without someone trying to get him to give up something of value for less than it's worth?" The issue's not with being o
602.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Don't you know that there's no difference between doing that and starting a global thermonuclear war! They're the same thing! Don't you watch movies?
603.
by ajarmst 12y ago
We're nonconformists! You can tell by our uniform!
604.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Damn it. I am, like, NEVER going to finish this dissertation.
605.
by ajarmst 12y ago
And those terms may be used not to refer to the system as a whole, but particular tasks within it. Hard constraints on tasks that can never miss a (often nanosecond resolution) time point, firm real-time that can't be missed but which
606.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Part of the problem, is that Dijkstra's complaint is often still quite relevant: "Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what
607.
by ajarmst 12y ago
A more accurate headline might be that meditation appears to ameliorate genetic damage associated with stress. But I guess that's less surprising, exciting and clickable than implying that meditation causes Lamarckian inheritance.
608.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Randy Bachman (of Bachman Turner Overdrive) did a very interesting analysis of the chord from a guitar player's perspective on CBC a few years ago: http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/guitarist_randy_bachman_d.
609.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Yeah, I believed you guys when you told me that in early 70s. I stopped believing after the fourth or fifth time you gave up. Or maybe when it was when you stopped being able to even put people in LEO. Humans may one day go to Mars, but
610.
by ajarmst 12y ago
One wonders how this particular correlation rates in comparison with other better-known correlations: youth, maleness, poverty, stress, solitude, access to firearms. I suspect that it would kind of disappear into the noise. I wonder if i
611.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Addendum: I also note that Pakistan, Peru and Nepal report very low suicide rates versus world averages. Usual questions about what "report" means, but one would probably think they would discuss this apparent problem with their
612.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Couple of warning signs: (1) Article is actually a paid advertisement, and doesn't pretend to anything like peer review. (2) "In addition to the statistical evidence, Renshaw collected anecdotes that supported his developing the
613.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Don't forget "be armed to the teeth and express a willingness to violently respond to any intrusion into your territory". It's pretty much standard lex talionis strategy, which has been around as long as humans have for
614.
by ajarmst 12y ago
"To say that music is the product of a gene for “art-making,” naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes." No, it's not. "Pinker doesn't care much for art, though.&quo
615.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Wow, that's one of the most egregious and intricately constructed straw man attacks I've ever seen. It's above and beyond the New Yorker's ordinary standard of belittlement and misrepresentation. Thank you. <Edit&gt
616.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Almost certainly not. Stephen Pinker has a whole book discussing not only why not, but why some people are willing to ignore both evidence and reason in order to believe it anyway: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature ( http
617.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Not only is it not proven for <insert drug here>, it's not even a useful hypothesis in the scientific sense. No one has ever proposed a useful model of the "chemical balance" that is hypothesized to be "imbalanced
618.
by ajarmst 12y ago
The relationship between organisms, ecologies, and the planet needs a more nuanced treatment in the classroom, as well. We didn't evolve on some static geological feature -- we evolved to live in a fetid stew of the waste products of
619.
by ajarmst 12y ago
I've long believed that all compliant compilers should implement all undefined behaviour as an attempt to format the hard drive. It makes bugs much easier to detect in testing. Bugs that ship will mask themselves from customers, and m
620.
by ajarmst 12y ago
So, uh, what James Lovelock has been saying for 40 years, then?
621.
by ajarmst 12y ago
This is hardly news. The origin locale and timeframe (acquired zoonotically from Chimpanzees north of Kinshasa, probably around 1908, travelling by river to Kinshasa and Brazzaville, where social conditions permitted amplification and adap
622.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Stevens and Rago, "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, Volume II", page 211,212. if ((pid = fork()) < 0) err_sys("fork error"); is idiomatic in Unix.
623.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Note, in particular, his "Corollary 4: The greater the flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. "
624.
Why Most Published Research Findings are False(plosmedicine.org)
3 points by ajarmst 12y ago|0 comments
625.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Ioannidis' "Why most published research findings are false" ( http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj... ) is particularly relevant here, I think.
626.
by ajarmst 12y ago
False dichotomy. It's not a case of some minority who can't learn without teachers, but that pretty much all human beings benefit strongly from human interaction while learning (and, in particular, from an asymmetrical pair of ro
627.
by ajarmst 12y ago
"The only thing missing is probably the importance of human interaction." That's it, right there. Because, for the majority of students, human interaction isn't merely important, it's critical. The problem with M
628.
by ajarmst 12y ago
Sounds like there's a bit of "no one ever got fired/pilloried for claiming that things were going to be worse than they turned out to be!" going on. I remember a lot of that going around in 1995-99. Study the issue, ad
629.
by ajarmst 12y ago
I don't think "repealing" is the word you wanted there...
630.
by ajarmst 12y ago
When "elaborate multi-agency government conspiracy" and "off-by-one bug in non-critical section of code" are your two competing theories, both Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor (two important rules of reasoning)

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