hugh

39 ms·

421.
by hugh 18y ago
In a slightly more evil thought experiment (Harvey Dent might approve), we could make one slight change: if it's heads we interview her once and then let her go, but if it's tails we'll keep on waking her and interviewing her every day for
422.
by hugh 18y ago
Nothing is above physical laws. That's not an assertion, that's a definition.
423.
by hugh 18y ago
Even if they did, I don't think they'd have anything interesting to make decisions about.
424.
by hugh 18y ago
Where's this paranoia coming from? Do you really live in a world where the police are the thing that stops ten-year-olds from reading Calculus textbooks?
425.
by hugh 18y ago
Please, no politics. If I wanted to read a forum where every thread was used as an excuse for off-topic Bush-bashing I'd read.... well, pretty much any other forum in existence.
426.
by hugh 18y ago
According to the article, the system doesn't really plot an only-right-turns route, it's more like an 80%-right-turns route. But the fact that the software knows enough to know that left turns are worth avoiding is a pretty good piece of wo
427.
by hugh 18y ago
But is that really true? From what I hear, the great unwashed Chinese masses are just as capable of getting excited over dumb pop-culture ephemera as our own. Ultimately it's the top few percent who produce technological innovation anyway.
428.
by hugh 18y ago
Article, if taken seriously, might explain something about chemistry. But maths?
429.
by hugh 18y ago
I've noticed a marked dearth of "!HN" comments on this site recently. I really think we need more of them. Therefore, I'm gonna point out that this is !HN. Some guy whining aggressively about sports on TV -- this seems about as far from HN
430.
by hugh 18y ago
So you'd have to fill out eight ballot papers instead of our two or three. Or perhaps, you'd fill out a single perforated ballot paper and it would be ripped apart before counting. I've seen Australian ballot papers which are about three fe
431.
by hugh 18y ago
From the wikipedia article on sunspots: Since sunspots are darker than the surrounding photosphere it might be expected that more sunspots would lead to less solar radiation and a decreased solar constant. However, the surrounding margins
432.
by hugh 18y ago
Y'know, I hate to come to your country and tell you how to run your elections, but I really think the best way to do it is the way we do it in Australia. You go to the ballot box, and you get a pencil, and a printed ballot sheet with a stan
433.
by hugh 18y ago
In any case, I'm fairly sure that the Chinese test is not much like the SAT, and does indeed test for a bunch of memorized knowledge. Every part of the Chinese educational system has a huge emphasis on memorized knowledge.
434.
by hugh 18y ago
I don't think it's testable -- that's why I'd call it an interpretation rather than a theory.
435.
by hugh 18y ago
You're right, now I come to read more carefully there is something new here -- it's a more convincing test than has been done before. The experimental setup is neat -- by setting up the detectors along an east-west axis and using the Earth'
436.
by hugh 18y ago
I don't buy quantum immortality as a necessary consequence of many-worlds. There are some rather dodgy steps in the logic -- in particular the one that says that "you" can't find your personal experiences going down a branch where your exis
437.
by hugh 18y ago
Two and a half years ago, I (effectively) owned nothing except the contents of the two suitcases that I brought to the US with me. That wasn't liberating, it was just inconvenient and annoying, and I had to start reacquiring stuff immediate
438.
by hugh 18y ago
That's a good reason to have children: someone to offload all your stuff onto.
439.
by hugh 18y ago
Nothing new here, just a demonstration of stuff we've known for years on a somewhat more spectacular length scale. The editors of Nature should know better than to put a headline like "faster-than-light information transfer" on there, since
440.
by hugh 18y ago
Or at least, to the subset of physicists likely to be reading a paper on gravitational waves. In any case I think it's safe to assume that Einstein understood it. He was pretty good at the whole general relativity thing.
441.
by hugh 18y ago
I don't know. Were there ever all that many? (Although I know plenty of adults who might spend their holidays doing garage science, if it weren't for the fact that they already get paid to do it as a day job.)
442.
by hugh 18y ago
Terrible, sensationalist headline. Was "doing science in a residential area" an actual quote? If not, why is it in quote marks?
443.
by hugh 18y ago
An interesting article, marred only by the occasional clangingly awful sentence like these: "I am looking at one of the Dead Sea scrolls of classical antiquity: a shard of half-recovered time. It belongs, I realise, to a genre of accidental
444.
by hugh 18y ago
It's nice that they've improved by nine stones in a year, but what I don't buy is the idea that this means they're going to get up to winning an unhandicapped game against a 9th dan player anytime soon. As I understand it the game is curren
445.
by hugh 18y ago
Speaking of spamming, creating an account and immediately posting a link to your own blog is generally frowned-upon.
446.
by hugh 18y ago
And rightly so -- all the current solutions have ugly, slow interfaces. Telling it when you want to fly in and out is a matter of filling in about six little text boxes, sliders and pop-up menus. I just tried out the mobissimo "one box" sea
447.
by hugh 18y ago
Just wondering: what kinds of things go on a fourteen-page long resume?
448.
by hugh 18y ago
I think this is a bad idea, for the following reasons: 1. Threads about moderation tend to be really boring. People discussing things on a forum can be interesting, whereas people discussing the forum on which they're discussing the forum t
449.
by hugh 18y ago
I think bitching about things getting too modded-up is a good story-downvote substitute. I think we need more of it.
450.
by hugh 18y ago
This would be better if it were lengthened out to a proper article. It would probably still sound pretentious, self-important and platitudinous, though.

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