alan-crowe

8 ms·

31.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
Another example of "wasn't widely deployed because of its cost" is the Kalthoff 30-Shot Flintlock from 1659. Here is a video from Forgotten Weapons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghKrbNpqQoY I'm startin
32.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
The review distills the book's view of the difference between pure mathematics and applied mathematics. "applied" split from "pure" to meet the technical needs of the US military during WW2. My best example of the s
33.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
The important context is that life is short, just seventy years, and has stages, your early twenties are a magical time. Losing your ambition and wasting your early twenties are a subtle danger, but nevertheless a serious danger.
34.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
My analysis it that it is a plot by a company that makes "child proofing" gadgets. People are having fewer children, so sales of child-proofing gadgets are falling. People are keeping dogs and cats as pets instead, but neither dog
35.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
The documentation pages for FreeBSD include manual pages, for example https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hcreate&manpath=Fr...
36.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
A basic exercise in mathematical logic involves looking for minimal sets of connectives. You can base logic on just NAND. But you get NOT by joining two inputs together, so you might refuse to count that and say it is NOT and AND. Another p
37.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
Grothendieck starts by asserting that the experimental-deductive method has been spectacularly successful for four hundred years. His article never gets round to revisiting this. He never notices the bi-modal quality of the successes. Some
38.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
Your comment needs a link, such as https://www.castlecraig.co.uk/addiction-resources/what-are-b... to brain zaps. The phenomenon is not widely known and your comment will not be understood without it.
39.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
Sabine Hossenfelder, a physics Youtuber, recently departed from her usual content to discuss sorbitol giving her digestive problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5v61YtDYo4
40.
by alan-crowe 2y ago
I think that you are missing how credibility and propaganda intertwine. The BBC gives you accurate reports on Indonesia and Chile to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Britain. Aljazeera give accurate reports on B
41.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
It is clear that the weight attached to LOC will decline as management acquires more directly relevant information. The difficult issue is whether there is a zero lower bound . Imagine buying in software, against a specification. A fully d
42.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
"Professor-General Norden" might be a dig at the Norden Bomb Sight, an American high-tech wonder weapon that under-performed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6D5rXbMBKo tells the tale.
43.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
But there is a surprising counter claim that the dodecahedrons predate the invention of knitting: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2022/08/04/fiber-arts-myster...
44.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
One sees signal beacons (a bonfire on a hill, used to send a simple warning message) both up close, and from a distance of many miles. Thus one sees with the naked eye that a great fire looks like a mere candle from far enough away. Then on
45.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
Steel man one: controlling the social costs of mate competition. Struggling to find a wife? Start an affair with a married woman, persuade her to divorce her husband and marry you. If that is permitted then the happy husband has to guard ag
46.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
In the original understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment, the public policy take away is the anti-prison argument: you can try to set up a prison system that treats the prisoners in a kind, reforming way, but the guards will treat th
47.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
My reference point for this kind of thing is the video cassette recorder (VCR). Trusting to memory I think that they entered the consumer market at around $700 and were down to around $100 by the time they were obsolete. But before they rea
48.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
We can dig into the nature of the pareidolia. The basic technique for coping with life's problems is to copy the answer from somebody more intelligent. I'm an ordinary person, facing a problem in domain D; I spot a clever person a
49.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
or cloakatively clichéd.
50.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
People grow old and die. It takes about seventy years. Thoroughly wasting a year of everybody's lives is equivalent to 1.4% mortality.
51.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
It is more nefarious than that https://babylonbee.com/news/lego-introduces-new-sharper-bric... These are depopulation bricks.
52.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
Here is a less scatological parable about GDP. Alice loves widgets. She would pay $100 for a widget. She goes on line and finds Bob offering widgets for sale for $100. Err, that is not really what she had in mind. She imagined paying $30 fo
53.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
If you enjoy the intersection of H P Lovecraft and mathematics you may enjoy https://www.hulver.com/scoop/story/2009/1/15/182727/390
54.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
Reading the Wikipedia page, the Frank-Caro process is a straight forward chemical reaction. Shovel calcium carbide into your reactor. After the reaction is done, shovel calcium cyanamide out of the reactor and on to your farm land to fertil
55.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
In the UK the government both limits the supply of doctors and manages a fairly cheap National Health Service. How? It is rationed by queuing and achieves poor medical outcomes.
56.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
The Go book The Treasure Chest Enigma by Noriyuki Nakayama starts with an essay that gives the book its title. The Treasure Chest Enigma is a life-and-death problem too hard for professional Go players, but easy for amateurs. A real life
57.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
I call this issue "Tower Jumpers" versus "Arm Whirlers". I'm taking the names from Inventing Flight by John D. Anderson, Jr. The book is mostly about the Wright brothers. It starts with a discussion of the early h
58.
by alan-crowe 3y ago
That is powerful writing. Powerful by orthodox literary standards. In my own notebooks I regard that kind of writing as bad. I call the trap that it falls into "letting language do my thinking for me." Consider "directed towa
59.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Claiming that things are OK because they are pervasive makes William Willerforce cry.
60.
by alan-crowe 4y ago
Section IV says: The idea of biological or cultural evolution causing a mass population explosion is a philosophical toy at best. I think it likely that biological and cultural evolution get tangled together. Ponder the Darwinian pressures

More ›