iguy

45 ms·

421.
by iguy 7y ago
Yes, it seems to me that they really thought they would fight that war. At the tractor-engineering level, isn't it partly that they didn't iterate many times? What Ford was making in the 50s was not so different. But they junked t
422.
by iguy 7y ago
Royalty are special and weird, and a drop in the bucket. Overall the ban was pretty successful, it created a world where a few Hapsburgs behaved this way, instead of every guy in a village with three cows to his name. Their family trees are
423.
by iguy 7y ago
Yes. I think a definition of "group selection" which includes either multicellular organisms or social insects would be extremely unusual, and basically misses the whole debate. Nobody is confused about why oak leaves sacrifice th
424.
by iguy 7y ago
Can you say where this is from? TIL that there's a strong N/S pattern, wikipedia says 0.1 in Delhi in 1980, but an astonishing 38% in TN.
425.
by iguy 7y ago
Well, royalty are special and weird, and a drop in the bucket, and prove little. My point was that it was a widespread pre-islamic custom, not one which arrived with the book; the geographical correlation with islam is because (as cstross s
426.
by iguy 7y ago
It was certainly common for a long time in many places, and still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long predates Islam). But I'm not sure dowry tradition is quite the right marker, IIRC it's much les
427.
by iguy 7y ago
Or lower, on selfish genes™️. Which can certainly imply doing things bad for the individual but good for their kin group. Although I don't know about this Inuit story.
428.
by iguy 7y ago
OK, these are serious questions. 1) This is true, and uncontroversial. Nobody doubts that bonsai are small for environmental reasons. More technically, the heritability of traits is inversely related to how variable the environment is. Once
429.
by iguy 7y ago
I do not know this study, but sentences like "paternal grandfather's food supply was only linked to the mortality RR of grandsons and not granddaughters" in a study with N=303 make me pretty skeptical about p-hacking. There&#
430.
by iguy 7y ago
Thanks. That there is signal in which twin is taller at precisely age 12 is interesting, and seems like the same phenomenon as the adult effects. But I'm saying something much simpler. In a school class, there's another effect, th
431.
by iguy 7y ago
Often what looks like an effect of grandparents on kids (controlling for parents) is just genetics -- what you observe in the parents is a noisy measure of some hidden variable, and the grandparents give you additional (noisy) data. > ou
432.
by iguy 7y ago
But the numbers you describe are for adult height, right? Wouldn't you expect a much stronger effect if your sample was a mix of (say) 4-6th-grade kids. I think that's what GP is saying.
433.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure, not the same mechanism (selective enrollment). But the papers seem parallel in that they try to demonstrate something we know to be crazy, using steps that are accepted when studying things we don't know.
434.
by iguy 7y ago
Adult height is, as you say, a proxy for good genes & healthy environment. A noisy one, but not all noise. It's my understanding that this trumps the "hidden biases" idea (that height impresses people in job interviews et
435.
by iguy 7y ago
OK, but isn't it the other way around? A re-design may be a good idea, and a particular design may imply that you want a different size.
436.
by iguy 7y ago
Isn't a single CCTV camera going to give you MB/s? To be honest I'm astonished that there are oil wells without video cameras. Or perhaps those are counted elsewhere.
437.
by iguy 7y ago
It's not the voting (which has been possible for millions of people, for ages). It's the horse-trading to figure out what to put to a vote, or ideally to find the right compromises. Surely that's the point of having few enoug
438.
by iguy 7y ago
Well what's your proposed new format? If it relies on humans not wishing to grandstand, then I'm not optimistic. If if divides up the 6000 into smaller numbers, maybe with some hierarchical structure... then that's not one bo
439.
by iguy 7y ago
Surely the salaries are also divided up in this scheme...
440.
by iguy 7y ago
Right, a house of 6000 can't discuss anything. Isn't the obvious answer to devolve more powers? Decide fewer things federally, and let states (or perhaps there should even be formalised voluntary groups of states?) diverge more in
441.
by iguy 7y ago
Under-appreciated fact, this weight difference was one of the major reasons for switching from canals to railways, in their early days. The engineering needed to hold up a train (along a hillside, never mind over a bridge) is much cheaper t
442.
by iguy 7y ago
Unless the swift-for-tensorflow effort cross-fertilises something interesting, I suppose? If you were asked to guess the most likely path by which AMD cards become widely useful, perhaps this would be as good a bet as any.
443.
by iguy 7y ago
Sure. But if it's better, it's worth doing anyway. The question of how best to collect taxes is orthogonal to questions of what to spend them on.
444.
by iguy 7y ago
If work means mechanical work (which was once important!) then machines must be well over 99% now. More generally, the only sensible answer is probably to divide labor productivity today with that of pre-industrial labor. Which amounts to a
445.
by iguy 7y ago
> This study has nothing to do with taxes, though. It's talking about unconditional handouts Sure, but it's being read as a pilot study for such things "at home", where it would most certainly have to be funded by tax
446.
by iguy 7y ago
Many answers! What I think the GP is saying is this: A system of handing out benefits needs a class of administrators to actually hand it out, keep track of who should get it, who's already got it, and so on. For sure it's good fo
447.
by iguy 7y ago
I don't know about Chinese, but I thought that one argument about languages getting simplified involved lots of 2nd-language speakers. Different rules of evolution would apply to the language of an empire (like new-world Spanish, or Ur
448.
by iguy 7y ago
Have never heard this phrase for fish, but guessing from elsewhere (sculpture?) thought it meant the whole fish, as opposed to fillets.
449.
by iguy 7y ago
I haven't read this in detail, but according to commentary here [1] it sounds like they don't actually have 40-year returns, they have 10-year data and extrapolate. Which is a massively different thing, and as you would expect wou
450.
by iguy 7y ago
This may surprise you, but I wasn't around in the 16th century to either support or oppose anyone's actions, let alone their intentions.

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