lambdaphage

10 ms·

31.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I don't remember-- it must have been either differential geometry or topology, but I think the theorem in question was the inscribed angle theorem: http://www.proofwiki.org/wiki/Inscribed_Angle_Theorem . Not a dif
32.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I don't know-- usually the answer to such questions about academic priorities is "because it was cheaper", but they just seemed to emphasize geometry much more at the K-12 level. It's a generalization, of course, but a
33.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I'm always surprised when reading the notes of scientists and mathematicians working in previous centuries to see just how steeped they were in synthetic geometry. This was taken to an extreme in the case of the Principia, but one can
34.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
What does "the impulse towards genetic determinism" mean here? Comparisons of identical twins raised apart show that physical appearance is highly heritable, so it would seem that "the impulse towards genetic determinism&quo
35.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
> it's considered a settled issue that everyone is equally likely to get HIV. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Under every interpretation I can think of, it is incorrect. In the first place, people vary in their CD4 a
36.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
> glibertarian hmm.
37.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
It is a dreadful poesy to think that the last stargazer from this planet might have been a robotic rocket, looking up once at the fixed stars for all of humanity before ending it.
38.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Adult lactose tolerance is the mutant phenotype-- intolerance is the norm.
39.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Nice. I once needed to do reciprocal blast for the complete genomes of about 300 bacterial species. That's on the order of half a billion queries, but the work was embarrassingly parallel, and each discrete job only took about 90 sec
40.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I anticipate this reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7088378
41.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Well, that really depends on what you consider a price: if a law prevents a landlord from renting to the tenant offering them the most money, they have to decide on the basis of some other criterion. In SF, you apparently had people showing
42.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I appreciate this link. I read it through, but I'm afraid it doesn't really present much of a case for... whatever it is Solnit wants to do about housing policy in SF, besides sneer at tech workers. I found the piece frustrating
43.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Sure, and the question is how you achieve those aims. If you can read an op-ed by one of the most highly respected progressive economists in the world, whose message is: > Rent control in SF has had perverse consequences for tenants. D
44.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
What criterion do you suggest to determine who lives in SF, besides "let people come to mutually beneficial arrangements among themselves"? Keep in mind that the most common alternative policy, rent control, is widely acknowledge
45.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
If you believe an argument to be unsound, you can point out the error. That is one of many advantages arguments have over rhetorical questions.
46.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Not to mention the 70% of Silicon Valley workers in the linked study ( http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2014/01/15/study-30-percent-tec... ) [note: figure comes from self-reports] who would stay and presumably
47.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I'm pretty confused about how shuttle buses became the preferred metonymy for corporate evil. As if replacing each bus with twenty cars would make SF a better place for anyone?
48.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I've read your comments three times, and the original article twice. I'm still very confused about what your point is. Before I read your comments, which call direct attention to the author's style, my impression of it was t
49.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
What.
50.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Well actually, speak of the devil, I moved out of my last apartment specifically because my downstairs neighbors, who had lived there for years, were completely intolerable. If I could have waved a magic wand and replaced them with an AirB
51.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
People have lots of preferences about housing, which is why people tend to make an effort to suss out their housing options. Whether your neighbors are permanent or transient is just another dimension along which your preferences can vary.
52.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Our attitude towards any law really should be a presumption of doubt, especially laws that interfere with consensual activities. Laws are blunt objects that come with their own enforcement costs and unintended consequences. We should be
53.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
If you keep treating your intellectual opponents like this, you're going to get trounced the next time you run into a smart one. To be very brief, you seem to think that libertarians believe, roughly, (1) "the world is simple, so
54.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Just to lay my cards on the table: I'm registered as a member of the US Green Party and have been involved with various left wing activist movements since I was fifteen. I've also been poor, living in a junkie hotel and doing day
55.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Mathematical biologist here. There are lots of criticisms of the state of mathematical competence in biology I could offer, but power analysis really isn't one of them-- that is typically the one thing that _is_ taught well, if only b
56.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Sorry, I should have clarified-- my boss is Spanish but works in computational biology, not Spanish lang/lit.
57.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
That's a general problem with the interpretation of test answers. What an appropriately penalized scoring scheme for a multiple choice tests does is set the expected value of guessing to zero, providing an unbiased estimator of perfor
58.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
My graduate advisor is Spanish, but is faculty at a university in the States. In his first year of teaching, he penalized for incorrect answers (as is apparently the Spanish custom). But his students threw fits during office hours, so he
59.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
I don't understand why it even requires more effort. Here's one of the emails Sharp cites: <mchehab@redhat.com> wrote: > > Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the > returned v
60.
by lambdaphage 13y ago
Crick was perhaps halfway into a Ph.D. in physics when the war broke out, during which he basically did very applied physics for the British. After the war, he did a Ph.D. under Max Perutz on X-ray diffraction. Crystallography is very us

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