gjm11

1329 ms·

3211.
by gjm11 17y ago
Well, he claims it saved him weeks of work. It would probably have been mind-numbingly boring work, too. So he (1) got more done per unit time, thus hopefully having more chance to impress the people who set his salary, and (2) got to work
3212.
by gjm11 17y ago
Any reason to regard this as anything more than yet another crankish diet? The usual signs are there (extravagant claims, "for the details, read my book", "patent pending", distinct shortage of actual science).
3213.
by gjm11 17y ago
It took me a little while to work out what he's doing here, so here are a few notes for interested readers. 0. Key point: the goal here is to do infinite-precision integrals. Not merely "arbitrary precision", where you get to choose a numbe
3214.
by gjm11 17y ago
I regret that my program doesn't record how it achieved each number, so without running it again I can't tell you how to get 2036 or 2086 as per 3pt14159's request above. It's at http://pastie.org/767276 in case anyone cares.
3215.
by gjm11 17y ago
Actually, not 9! but (1+2) x 3 x ... x 9, because multiplying by 1 is no use. According to my brute-forcer, you can get everything from 0 to 2283 but not 2284. The first few missing numbers are 2284, 2758, 2812, 2902, 2932, 3076, 3119, 3137
3216.
by gjm11 17y ago
Well, it turns out if you look closely that usually the arms aren't exactly the same. Which is rather a clue: the coordinating mechanism isn't some kind of quantum magic that enables the structure in the centre to determine exactly what the
3217.
by gjm11 17y ago
Perhaps one of these: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/health/22brod.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/25/health/25medicine.html EDITED to add: HN discussion of the fi
3218.
by gjm11 17y ago
Everything you have said here I think I have already answered earlier, with the following exceptions. It was you, not me, who introduced peer review into the discussion; I've no idea what your basis is for talking about a "fixation". Most o
3219.
by gjm11 17y ago
Those who don't already know may want to note that this algorithm is exactly the one used by simple Bayesian spam filters, as proposed e.g. by a certain Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html (more on this at http://www.paulgra
3220.
by gjm11 17y ago
Especially as (e.g.) there doesn't seem to be any similar terroristic tendency among physicists, who are also very smart (anecdotally I'd say: slightly smarter on average) and smart in broadly similar ways. (Note: "on average" means just th
3221.
by gjm11 17y ago
No, I am not '"forgetting" that the AGW folks fixed the peer review system', I am explaining why even if that's true it doesn't mean that AGW people are "paid to confirm AGW". Also, so far as I can tell it isn't true for any sensible mean
3222.
by gjm11 17y ago
Um, no. He says it's always been his wildest dream, and then puts it in something he describes as "what I plan on doing over the next fifty years of my life". Which to me, at least, says not "of course this one isn't really going to happen"
3223.
by gjm11 17y ago
He "plans" to be CEO of Apple in 15 years' time. He thinks he'll be "on the radar" for this on the strength of 1. a startup doing VoIP; 2. another startup enabling designers, artists, photographers, etc., to put their portfolios online; 3.
3224.
by gjm11 17y ago
Either you have misunderstood my point about peer review and being-paid-to-confirm, or I have misunderstood what you mean about being "paid to confirm AGW". I would only say that someone is paid to do X if they understand that their job dep
3225.
by gjm11 17y ago
I think it's extremely unclear to what extent anyone (1) attempted to rig the peer review process and (2) succeeded. In any case, even a very badly rigged peer review process would not make it true that climate researchers are "paid to conf
3226.
by gjm11 17y ago
Do you have any actual evidence that climate researchers are paid "to confirm AGW"? (I take it that by that you mean that if they published work, of equal quality to what they actually publish, that cast doubt on AGW then they would get pai
3227.
by gjm11 17y ago
In what possible sense has AIMA replaced PAIP? PAIP is crammed to the gills with substantial pieces of Lisp code that do interesting and useful things; it focuses as much on the "programming" as on the "artificial intelligence" and has a lo
3228.
by gjm11 17y ago
I've played several other games from Rio Grande (though not Dominion) and their standard is generally very high.
3229.
by gjm11 17y ago
If you consider the denial of anthropogenic global warming to be an "idea such as creationism", there's ample recent evidence that many people here are part of that audience. (FWIW, (1) I think it's clearly less crazy than creationism, (2
3230.
by gjm11 17y ago
mathoverflow would be completely inappropriate for this person; it's aimed at professional mathematicians.
3231.
by gjm11 17y ago
What is your definition of "religion"? Progressivism doesn't have any of: rituals, priests, official buildings, sacred texts, gods, other supernatural beliefs, holy places, concern with an afterlife, elevation of tradition over reason, use
3232.
by gjm11 17y ago
The function whose values get cached maps a square region at time n to a smaller (concentric) square region at time n+k, for some choice of k. The bits that might be affected by stuff outside the square aren't returned.
3233.
by gjm11 17y ago
I think it's exactly because smells are so specific that there are few "general" smell words. It's useful to have a word for "red" since lots of different things are red, and particular shades of red rarely trigger very specific memories. B
3234.
by gjm11 17y ago
Surely "commercial lunar satellite" means "thing orbiting the moon in order to make someone a profit" rather than "thing orbiting the earth that happened to go past the moon a couple of times"?
3235.
by gjm11 17y ago
With a dumb bignum library addition will be O(d) and multiplication will be O(d^2), d being the number of digits; d increases linearly with index, so to compute the n'th Fibonacci number by naive iteration will be O(d^2), whereas doing it b
3236.
by gjm11 17y ago
I like to ask candidates to write real code (not pseudocode) on paper, but emphasize to them that I don't really care about superficial syntax errors. Most of the point of this is not in seeing the code they produce, but in watching them th
3237.
by gjm11 17y ago
I have asked a candidate about Fibonacci numbers in interview. We discussed a number of different implementations, the possibility of memoization, the practical differences between machine integers, machine floating-point, and bignums, etc.
3238.
by gjm11 17y ago
This is not the first New Scientist article in recent days to attract a lot of comments of the form "I went there and got sent to a site that sells fraudulent antimalware". New Scientist itself is certainly not in that business. newscientis
3239.
by gjm11 17y ago
Many biologists, palaeontologists, etc., apply "labeling and name-calling" to creationists; the person whose blog the original article here is posted on (not, as it happens, the author of the article itself) is a good example. I do not find
3240.
by gjm11 17y ago
Presumably s/he considers the claim "climate change is real" less crappy than the claim "climate change is a giant hoax". I don't see anything very awful about that, although of course not everyone will agree with it.

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