evanb

85 ms·

1. 901.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   I was watching "Total time spent watching this video" video, and had a basic question. How does one tell guesstimate that there's a hard lower bound on a quantity. ie. Video Length is at least 0, because negative watch times
2. 902.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   I feel like you don't appreciate the way science works. If we found out tomorrow that the universe were, at its bottom, made of string cheese, that would not invalidate Newtonian Mechanics. Newtonian / Classical Mechanics is an
3. 903.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   I don't know. It's not clear to me what consciousness means, but if forced me to take a stance, I'd give a Hofstaderian response and say that it's a matter of degrees, and that perhaps consciousness is the experience of
4. 904.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   I should add that he gets into very practical details, like how much should one charge for a fixed amount of computational capacity, in 1998 (before AWS etc. :P).
5. 905.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   It seems extremely plausible to me that any matter that is organized enough to support meaningful arbitrary computation (ie. not Seth Lloyd's "it's computing it's own evolution" kind of computation) would share some
6. 906.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   I recently stumbled upon a good video showing some old delay line memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9cUbYII5RY
7. 907.▲
   USAJOBS – Astronaut Candidate(usajobs.gov)

   1 points by evanb 11y ago|0 comments
8. 908.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   Gravitons are usually formulated by perturbing the metric around the flat Minkowski metric, but you can do perturbation theory around any metric, include those that describe accelerating frames. So, you might actually get gravitons in an ac
9. 909.▲
   by evanb 11y ago

   The difference is the last case of your second link. For example, Table[i+j,{i,0,3},{j,0,i}] yields {{0},{1,2},{2,3,4},{3,4,5,6}}
10. 910.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    Which national parks do you mean? Sure, there's the Golden Gate National Recreational Area, Point Reyes, San Pablo Bay National Wildlife Refuge, the smelly salt flats down by Fremont, and there's the California Coastal National M
11. 911.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    I'm confused by this 'hypothesis' >My guess is that once you consider all of the symmetries that could exist (and there are many which have not yet been found; supersymmetry has long been posited but remains undiscovered),
12. 912.▲
    What every physicist should know about string theory(scitation.aip.org)

    2 points by evanb 11y ago|0 comments
13. 913.▲
    How MacArthur Geniuses Handle Their Windfalls(nytimes.com)

    70 points by evanb 11y ago|65 comments
14. 914.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    The Many Worlds interpretation is the idea that the wavefunction never, ever collapses. It just evolves unitarily according to the Schrodinger equation forever.
15. 915.▲
    Octopuses Appear to Take Up Arms as Submarine Warfare Escalates(npr.org)

    2 points by evanb 11y ago|0 comments
16. 916.▲
    World's longest tunnel completed(businessinsider.com)

    3 points by evanb 11y ago|0 comments
17. 917.▲
    Feynman's Public Lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics(vega.org.uk)

    108 points by evanb 11y ago|20 comments
18. 918.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    Much less famous than Feynman's Messenger Lectures at Cornell (or his real "Lectures" that got turned into the books) are the lectures he gave in New Zealand that became QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. The good n
19. 919.▲
    World Science Festival: Infinity(youtube.com)

    1 points by evanb 11y ago|0 comments
20. 920.▲
    We should host the Olympics in the same place every time(washingtonpost.com)

    288 points by evanb 11y ago|122 comments
21. 921.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    I don't know much about tensor networks, so I may not be the right person to answer your question. Maybe that's answer enough? I would guess that it would only be apparent how to do some kind of embedding like you're thinki
22. 922.▲
    An Exact Mapping Between the Variational Renormalization Group and Deep Learning(arxiv.org)

    30 points by evanb 11y ago|7 comments
23. 923.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    99 Percent Invisible just had some interesting episodes on automation and autopilot, especially as it relates to air travel: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1&#x2
24. 924.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    Having the hour be the same everywhere is something that I can get behind, until I start to worry about when the "day" changes. Let's say you're in some unfortunate place where 12am happens at local noon. When someone
25. 925.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    Let's not forget about the habitable epoch of the early universe [1]. There's a good 7 million years near the beginning of the universe that in principle was inhabitable to Earth-like life. None can say if the physicists of that
26. 926.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    No, it is not a coincidence [0]. It is a direct result of the fact that in relativity temporal and spatial information has to be unified into a single vector (a four-vector [1]). Since (in the Noether theorem sense [2]) energy is the cons
27. 927.▲
    Multiple choice(johndcook.com)

    58 points by evanb 11y ago|23 comments
28. 928.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    I took friends of mine on Emperor Norton's Fantastic San Francisco Time Machine [1] sort of as a joke, and it turned out to be an absolutely excellent decision. The Emperor Norton reinterpreter is a passionate history buff, knows a lo
29. 929.▲
    NSA in P/poly: The Power of Precomputation(scottaaronson.com)

    286 points by evanb 11y ago|34 comments
30. 930.▲
    by evanb 11y ago

    It's not quite so clear as that. In Mma you can give special meanings to any patterns of symbols you like, which is very much like defining a macro.