fastaguy88

11 ms·

91.
by fastaguy88 3y ago
The problem certainly becomes clearer if you state that Monty never opens the door with the prize. But I have to admit that even when presented with the Monty Hall problem extension, 100 doors, with Monty offering 99 chances to change, it
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Having only taken math through advanced calculus and differential equations, none of the examples make much sense to me. But there is the "Monty Hall problem", where many mathematicians believe(d?) the incorrect result. https:&#x
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
This article does not say anything about whether more baby boomers are becoming homeless. It says that the fraction of homeless over 60 has increased dramatically. But exactly the same number of people who were homeless in their 40s twent
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
A pedant might point out that "I read an article which I didn't understand" should be written "I read an article that I didn't understand" or "I read an article, which I didn't understand." In t
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Interesting to hear that zoning ordinances are equivalent to the people’s bureau of housing. And nice to know that the market serves everyone (if they have enough money), but those retirees in their little house will be moving out, because
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Perhaps more affordable on average, but if the apartments replace older smaller single family homes, then the supply demand thesis suggests that those single family homes would become less affordable. So yes, things become cheaper if everyo
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Perhaps this is true on average over all housing classes, but in my university town, there has been a tremendous increase in supply (luxury appts for rich undergraduates) and no decrease in costs. And now there is a proposal to remove all
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
This is a commonly (mis)-used argument, that misses the fact that if the statistics tell us the risk is less than some value (lets say 10^-6), the assumption is that the risk is 10^-6. Often, statistical tests have the power to detect very
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Amusingly, the comments section for the NYTimes article is strongly pro-Android. (Apparently Android phones have had dozens of popular features long before iPhones.) With no mention of software support timelines (from the comments, one mi
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
I dislike the implication that "significance inflation" is new -- the result of "woke-ness". Did Teddy Roosevelt do all the things he is credited with? Or Thomas Edison? (or Napoleon?) I'm know little about hist
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
It's an actuarial calculation with good statistics on (for governments and large corporations) very large populations. So the estimates are accurate. But mostly, defined benefit pensions do not go the the heirs, so there is more mone
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
It’s easy to pick on defined benefit plans when they are underfunded, but they do have advantages for the employer - when the retiree (and spouse) die, the obligation is over. A given contribution can fund more people at a higher level if t
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
I was surprised that the description of the two U. Wisconsin incidents never mentioned whether the exposed researchers every got the strain of flu they were working on.
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
I guess this is an interesting question, but it seems incredibly contrary to the whole point of SQL. Two tables should never be the same, if they were, why would you have two tables. I can understand why one might want to check if two data
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
The fed chart is adjusted for inflation, so the numbers at the pump are higher. Do you have any reason to believe that gas taxes have increased in the past decade? The federal tax has not increased since 1993, and is not indexed for infla
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
The question was, how accurate does replication need to be, in a replicating system with selection. My argument is that if you do not need perfect copies, and if you can make large numbers of copies, replication does not need to be very acc
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
There are thousands of examples of proteins that are less than 50% identical, yet fold into exactly the same shapes and catalyze exactly the same chemical reaction. Biological systems are extremely robust to change. And remember, self re
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
It only has to be very good if the things being replicated are very fragile. If you only need 50% accuracy, replication can be very sloppy. And remember, thanks to selection, we can start off sloppy and improve.
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Not really a billion years though. Perhaps several hundred million between when there was liquid water on earth and evidence of bacterial life. A surprisingly short time. We have spend almost 10x as long evolving to modern organisms than i
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Actually, though the graph is tricky to decipher, if you are in the bottom 70% of income or the top 1%, you have some advantage. Of course, the actual numbers are not shown, but there are clearly many more applicants in the bottom 70% than
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
It is not clear to me how desperate the need is. It is not hard to find examples of things that, at first glance, seem clearly nonsensical. But some examples may be miscoded and corrected later, while other examples are simply misunderstand
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
More than 1.2 million people died of Covid in the US. Motorcycle accidents could not have accounted for more than 6,000 of those. We have good estimates of excess deaths (deaths over the expected numbers of heart attacks and other causes),
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
As a scientist who cares about reproducibility, the big difference between the "useless cat" and providing the input file name on the command line is that, in the latter case, the program can capture that file name and reproduce i
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Another cheap networked Time Machine solution is a used Intel Mac Mini (~$120 for 2.5 Ghz Intel i5, 8 GB Ram, 256 GB SSD), and set it up to export your time machine disks over the network. Not only is it "real" Time Machine, it a
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
I can definitely see where the "educated workers" producing this headline should be concerned. But the study talks a lot less about replacement and more about productivity, and the fact that there are too few new workers to repla
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
The trick is to find some multi-millimeter bacteria. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2022/june/worlds-largest... .
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
The confusion I have is that there are “only” 1.7 million apps. So comparing submissions and rejections to apps seems problematic. It seems like less than 10% of those 5.2 million apps actually made it into the store, assuming an app is the
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Building evolutionary trees from genomes is challenging, in part because of the difficulties inferring trees when different parts of the genome may be evolving at very different rates, but also because of the wide dynamic range of genome qu
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
From the "horses" mouth -- Viterbi describing the Viterbi algorithm, and related developments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgW4p7-jpUs
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by fastaguy88 3y ago
Perhaps a version of the second law can be described in one sentence ("heat flows from hot to cold", perhaps), but when I go to the Wikipedia page, it's quite a bit more complicated than that (e.g. existence/importance o

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