bloak

144 ms·

1351.
by bloak 9y ago
Your last paragraph is totally correct, in my opinion. (It is probably also true that many people who use "racist" insults are not really being "racist"; they are just insulting in an effective, target-specific way. If t
1352.
by bloak 9y ago
We don't know what they thought, obviously. We can only hypothesise about that. Psychology would be so much easier if we could directly observe other people's thoughts...
1353.
by bloak 9y ago
Yes! They should definitely try that experiment! When reading the article my first questions were: do these people think there is a real human at the other end, and, if so, do they think the photo is of that human? It's probably imposs
1354.
by bloak 9y ago
That may be true in the USA but I don't think we were talking about the USA specifically. In the EU we have lots of immigrants who didn't have or need a job-specific visa. Even in the USA, don't you have immigrants who were r
1355.
by bloak 9y ago
That could be relevant. Also the word "actor", with the same ending, is sometimes (by some newspapers, for example) reserved for men. Sometimes a similar trick anecdote is told about a "German". There's a suspicion
1356.
by bloak 9y ago
It explicitly calls itself an "essay".
1357.
by bloak 9y ago
That works much better with "surgeon" instead of "doctor". Lots of doctors are female, but not so many surgeons, at least here in the UK.
1358.
by bloak 9y ago
I would expect immigrants to more frequently choose careers that require fewer linguistic skills, such as engineering or music, rather than law or advertising, say. Some of my engineer colleagues are very hard to understand on the phone bec
1359.
by bloak 9y ago
That is true, but it has little to do with advertising. In the absence of other evidence I buy the product that costs least per gram/litre. In most cases that's the supermarket's own brand, which is also the brand I've m
1360.
by bloak 9y ago
The number is not confidential, so people would not have to remember it, nor would they have to use a password manager. Digits are much easier to spell over the phone than a mixture of letters and digits. People are used to identifying them
1361.
by bloak 9y ago
Mr President, we must not allow a battery gap!
1362.
by bloak 9y ago
Oh, that's boring. It's almost as boring as saying that the number of any countable physical thing must reach a maximum because it is bounded by the mass of the universe divided by the mass of an electron, or something equally ted
1363.
by bloak 9y ago
Your "mathematically sound" statement seems obviously false, which probably means I'm misunderstanding it. Perhaps you should state it more formally.
1364.
by bloak 9y ago
> every subgroup will also have to hit peak child Not really, because subgroup membership is flexible: people can enter and leave a subgroup. But even ignoring that objection, calculating that the Amish will eventually outnumber everyone
1365.
by bloak 9y ago
Oh, no, not that old chestnut: anyone who questions the Stratfordian theory is a snob and therefore wrong! John Michell's book, "Who wrote Shakespeare?", is a great read: fun and informative. He doesn't argue for a parti
1366.
by bloak 9y ago
Good question. I'm going to say "demisemiennial" instead of "quarterly" from now on.
1367.
by bloak 9y ago
It's not that simple. Sometimes people use a word in one or several ways, while expecting other people to use it in one or several different ways. And it hardly ever makes sense to count all people equally: you're probably more in
1368.
by bloak 9y ago
Yes, and I've left my keys in the outside of the front door all night, with the keys for both cars attached, probably. Fortunately it's a good neighbourhood... I'd like houses to have something like central locking, like cars
1369.
by bloak 9y ago
Make a wooden disc and a stick whose length is 108 times the diameter of the disc. Attach the disc to one end of the stick and hold the other end near your eye. Observe that the disc has the same apparent diameter as the moon, eclipsing it.
1370.
by bloak 9y ago
True, but an ancient text giving the speed of light even within an order of magnitude is ... interesting. Though it's not clear that the author was really talking about the speed of light and not the speed of the sun. The 2202 is intri
1371.
by bloak 9y ago
Sometimes we do, but a lot of things get invented again, by a different giant (or midget) who didn't have time to read all the existing literature.
1372.
by bloak 9y ago
Can't you deduce skin colour from chemical analysis of bog bodies, or is melanin unstable in those conditions? Also, can't we deduce skin colour from analysis of DNA (and from the climate: sunlight affects skin colour)? Perhaps th
1373.
by bloak 9y ago
Arguably, if you don't include the words "this is not a drill" in your exercise then your exercise is not sufficiently realistic. The real question is: why include those words in a real announcement?
1374.
by bloak 9y ago
War is perhaps illegal, except in self-defence, but certain people interpret "self-defence" to mean "defence of (national) interests", but also, belt-and-braces, they don't actually declare war any more and claim th
1375.
by bloak 9y ago
2. There's value in blockchain technology, certainly, but someone who buys (any kind of) bitcoin is not buying technology. You wouldn't invest in baseball cards just because you think there's value in sport, would you?
1376.
by bloak 9y ago
That's an interesting question. Of course, not everyone has a passport, but that's a nit: people applying for car insurance typically do have a driving licence with a photo. What would an AI make of a huge database of photos and i
1377.
by bloak 9y ago
Here's one reason: In most countries people have an official sex, shown on official documents. (That will change one day: sex should be treated as potentially confidential medical data.) However, most countries have never had an offici