gort

23 ms·

181.
by gort 17y ago
(Slightly off topic, but isn't the benefit of the appendix outweighed by how often if becomes infected, etc?)
182.
by gort 17y ago
I doubt it; isn't it providing protection from UV-caused skin cancer and such? [Edit: I took you to mean that pigment was generally not beneficial, but probably you meant only in certain environments, which would be fair enough.]
183.
by gort 17y ago
Neither the word "evolution" nor the word "gene" appears in an article that is clearly about a change in gene frequencies over time caused by natural selection. Hmm. (Perhaps the author is trying to avoid the suggestion that white people ar
184.
by gort 17y ago
I believe JGC is becoming a personal hero of mine: he's already deep into coding an analysis of the data: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/12/google-earth-view-of-met-off...
185.
by gort 17y ago
Just because it's interesting, Eliezer mentioned later that he'd done the AI-box a couple more times and failed; I think his final record was 3 successes in 5 attempts. http://lesswrong.com/lw/up/shut_up_and_do_the_impossible/
186.
by gort 17y ago
"Heritability" means something like "how much of the variation in a population is due to genetic differences". This leads to some odd results, e.g. number of arms has low heritability (almost all variation is due to environment). Anyway, la
187.
by gort 17y ago
If there's no truth to the matter of what's out there or how the world is, then I invite you to leave your 10th floor apartment via the window some time. After all, there's nothing out there that makes this dangerous.
188.
by gort 17y ago
if it's true that there is such a thing as an ineffable experience, this means that the basic assumptions underlying all of science are false. Isn't the fact that these experiences can be induced by using a physical collection of molecule
189.
by gort 17y ago
its only when the believers in psi phenomena do these experiments that they discover positive results Hmm? Isn't that what we expect if there are no psi phenomena? [ETA: Ah, perhaps this was an argument against the premise that parapsycho
190.
by gort 17y ago
"The problem is that the mechanical principles that govern each particle of our bodies (and of the things around us) already specify how each of us behaves as a whole. But in that case, there is no room for the ghostlike component to have a
191.
by gort 17y ago
To me, more interesting than Bayesianism versus Frequentism was the observation that scientific procedure as it currently stands allows a field like Parapsychology to survive.
192.
by gort 17y ago
The article behind this small webpage was a blog post by Eliezer, which I see has now been submitted to HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978124
193.
Parapsychology: the control group for science(nothinginbiology.com)
39 points by gort 17y ago|37 comments
194.
by gort 17y ago
I'm not 100% sure this is the answer to your question, but it's worth beating in mind in any case: Burning fossil fuel adds carbon to the ecosystem. At any one time some of that carbon exists as CO2, but much of it exists in other forms, e.
195.
by gort 17y ago
Seems to require a dot in the URL: This: http://to./z0ba1 Not this: http://to/z0ba1
196.
by gort 17y ago
I'm not the most mathy person in the world; can someone explain to me the following statement: "Exactly one of the following sets is in OBS4: 19x17, 18x17, 17x17." If I've understood it correctly, OBS4 is the set of grid-sizes which are imp
197.
by gort 17y ago
Interesting that the paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which discusses "the decline", has amongst its authors Jones and Briffa, two names I've seen associated with the alleged "hiding" of the decline.
198.
by gort 17y ago
I am an evolutionary biology student, though this depends on details I don't know... The sperm are all produced by the same individual, and so you might expect them to be essentially identical aside from the genes they carry, in which cas
199.
by gort 17y ago
"I'd expect the mean man (no pun intended, and excluding those who never reproduce) to have 2-ish wives - that's what the "the average person is descended from twice as many women as men" quote is about." Surely you mean (ahem) the mean m
200.
by gort 17y ago
Wolfram is real useful for this sort of thing, by the way; here are your three calculations with: A = P(gay), B = P(virgin | gay), C = P(virgin | not gay) If 5% are gay: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=A+*+B+%2B+%281+-+A%29+*... If 1
201.
by gort 17y ago
No, it says gays are (vastly) more likely to be virgins, not just that virgins are more likely to be gay.
202.
by gort 17y ago
"His team's survey found that 13.9 per cent of men [...] said they have never had sex." "The study also found that male homosexuals were 11 times more likely to be virgins than heterosexuals" So, I'm trying to find some plausible interp
203.
by gort 17y ago
"bash a book you haven't read" Because he found it unreadable .
204.
by gort 17y ago
And by the number of 7-line sequences produced by each.
205.
by gort 17y ago
"I've never understood [...] why talking about qualia and consciousness depends on having them" It doesn't, but someone has to have them in order for the concepts to get introduced in the first place. Imagine a world that has always been
206.
by gort 17y ago
The problem with philosophical zombies ("p-zombies") is that, since they're indistinguishable from normal humans, some of them must go around talking about qualia and consciousness and so on; it's mysterious what's causing them to do this,
207.
by gort 17y ago
That's the odds of it happening in 7 specific lines. But what are the odds of it happening by chance at any point in time to any person of Schwarzenegger's importance or higher?
208.
by gort 17y ago
I'm curious about your opinion on this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7536167.stm
209.
by gort 17y ago
Good grief, could they miss the point any further? "The batteries may be more dangerous than a bottle of water, but they are not more dangerous than a water bottle filled with liquid explosives." The relevant question is whether the batteri
210.
The SuperFreakonomics Global-Warming Fact Quiz(freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com)
2 points by gort 17y ago|0 comments

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