jeffcoat

8 ms·

31.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
I didn't mean to defend the idea that every fact is true for a reason. I remember reading something of Chaitin's a couple of years ago that drove home the point that most mathematical facts are, in some fairly-well defined sense, true for n
32.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
Diagonalization is a poor example -- though I don't think Cantor's logic was widely accepted until the early 20th century -- but I think there are examples of proofs where mathematicians will accept the logic, but argue with it none the les
33.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
The grinder -- the one you use to sharpen your tungsten tips for TIG welding -- at the machine shop I where I learned to weld had signs all over it reminding you to take off your gloves before turning the spinning grinder wheels on. That sh
34.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
Seeing Baez mention Yudokowsky is a bit surreal -- it's a bit like Amazon talking about the book-selling startup I'm totally planning to launch someday. If the name isn't familiar to you, Dr. Baez starting writing a blog before we had a nam
35.
by jeffcoat 15y ago
From William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar , Act I, Scene 2: CAESAR Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are da
36.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
The only answer you've gotten so far is garbled nonsense ... and I don't want to make similar mistakes. So I'll stay very simple: 1. You don't need general relativity to talk about this. Special relativity (that's special as in "special cas
37.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
This was posted today on the XKCD blag [sic], which is distinct from the comic feed. http://blag.xkcd.com/
38.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
The current events angle is nice to have, but I'm at least as interested in the new-to-me way Randall organizes the information in the chart.
39.
Radiation Dosage Visualization(blog.xkcd.com)
18 points by jeffcoat 16y ago|2 comments
40.
A Bayesian Classifier for Wine(slate.com)
10 points by jeffcoat 16y ago|0 comments
41.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
Our current technology is a long way off -- but he's making a prediction (or maybe more of a suggestion) for 15 years from now. I wouldn't have guessed even 3 years ago that we were this close to having a working Jeopardy player.
42.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
Very interesting; thanks for the clarification. I was fooled.
43.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I noticed that, too; but a little later in the game, Trebek declared "leg" (instead of "he was missing a leg") wrong without hesitation. So it's definitely being held to some standard.
44.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
'cd ". "' is valid; it means "set the current directory to the one named [dot][space]". I assumed it was something he'd seen as a way to sortof-conceal a directory, since it's both hidden and looks a lot like the [dot] directory that you'd
45.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I keep Calibre's library on Dropbox, and so also solve the problem of keeping my library in sync between different computers.
46.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
1. Assume self-interest on the part of (many but not all) other people. 2. See if you can convince some other person to give you money to solve a problem, where your solution involves something besides or in addition to physical labor. (Man
47.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I needed to solve this problem about 12 years ago: Digging through the scraps of Fortran available on then-much-younger Internet (I may have even resorted to the university library!), I discovered that a standard trick for coloring 1-dimens
48.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I disagree that math is easy to self-teach: The fundamental things being taught to math majors are how to distinguish between valid and invalid reasoning, and how to produce arguments (proofs) that contain only valid reasoning. For better o
49.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
It's actually worse than that, if a lot of studies are being done: Let's say that you only publish when you discover an effect with a p-value of better than 0.05 -- that is, when you believe that, if the effect weren't real, then the probab
50.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
Known to whom, exactly? I know him only through his books; I've read _Clean Code_ and _Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices_. They're both excellent. I'd happily recommend either one to someone wanting to improve
51.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
That reminds me of my worst habit as a programmer: I want to solve every problem myself, instead of asking for help. I certainly don't recommend quitting every time you have a problem you can't solve in half a hour, but there's a happy medi
52.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
The first habit I try to impress on junior programmers is not to be satisfied when you've fixed a problem: you aren't done until you understand what went wrong in the first place, and have a plausible explanation as to why the change you ma
53.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I had to look that up, too. Wikipedia says, "LCBO stores are generally the only stores allowed to sell hard liquor in Ontario". About 30% gets spent there, the majority of it on a card reported stolen.
54.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
How so? If P!=NP, that is obeyed by the brain as much as by computers and whatever trick our brains does to be creative despite of this, will be available to computers as well, regardless of P?=NP. What am I missing? Let's talk math: In s
55.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
The distinction I usually make is that a "project manager" is responsible for scheduling: maintaining a picture of the current state of the project, the current best estimates for when things will happen next, and make sure that everything
56.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I don't see anywhere that you're refuting the idea that burglars won't use lockpicks, instead of messier but much simpler-to-learn entry methods. I'm a decent hand with a lockpick myself, but when I had to get into my house with-the-keys-(a
57.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
Craigslist is generating an enormous amount of wealth. Every time it facilitates a successful exchange between two users -- the sale of a used lawnmower, a room that gets rented out, a job posting that reaches the right person -- both sides
58.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
[Wikipedia quote] His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdős drank copious quantities. (This quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős himself.)[7] After 1971 he also
59.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
> Write down the problem. > Think real hard. > Write down the solution. I had a college physics professor who called this "The Method of Applied Brilliance".
60.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I have Wolfgang Langewiesche's _Stick and Rudder_, a classic book for pilots on how to fly airplanes, sitting on a shelf near me. According to Wikipedia, the author of this article is his son.

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