mtdewcmu

34 ms·

331.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
The hole for this has different requirements than holes for water and petroleum: you'd not want to drill one of these holes into an aquifer, because then it would fill up with water. Oil and gas wells have to be drilled in specific pla
332.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I consider it science-based. She researched the choice of oil based on the underlying polymer chemistry and gave a taste of that research. The article also contains a lot of opinions that are not, or probably not, based on science. But &quo
333.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Evolution doesn't design, clearly. But its solutions are not determined by chance alone, either. The shapes of the solutions are partly determined by the contours of the available solution space. It's sort of like pressing soft ma
334.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
It would be interesting to see if they all succumb to the same kinds of illusions. I guess the important question is whether these illusions are arbitrary and reflect arbitrary choices by evolution, or if they are fundamentally hard and wou
335.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I guess the premise is that, given that multiple 3D objects could correspond to what we are seeing, we consistently choose the wrong one. Perhaps to borrow your analogy, it would be sort of like if, upon seeing a multiplication problem equa
336.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Right. But I think any description would have to be vague given what little we actually know. If it sounded too precise, it would be giving the impression that we know more than we do.
337.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
How optimum the solution is is related to how important and conserved the system is. The visual system is very old, and it has unquestionably been subject to intense selective pressure.
338.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
>> My point is that someone seeing a reference to sym_equal may not realize that (1) it's identical (at the C level) to rb_obj_equal and that (2) that fact has important performance ramifications. Exuberant ctags will find the #d
339.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Cool. It seems to make the common argument that "since evolution is random, it makes mistakes, therefore we see illusions." I disagree with this logic. I think it would be truer to say "since visual processing resources are (
340.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
>> remove `sym_equal` entirely and replace all usages of it with `rb_obj_equal`. ...it must have the same identity as `rb_obj_equal` That's exactly what #define does. It replaces all usages and gives the token the same identity a
341.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I'm wondering if this dataset exclusively covers the US, and if so, how much of any decrease in occupational accidents can be attributed to the loss in manufacturing jobs to overseas. Whether that represents progress is a matter of per
342.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
When I see good people getting energized over something like GMO, I just feel kind of disappointed that that energy isn't going to a cause worth supporting. The fear of eating tainted food seems to be a sort of primal fear or archetype
343.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I like Randi and I went to see his presentation when he came to my college campus years ago. I've never felt in much danger from the types of spoon-benders and various charlatans he targets, though. Maybe I'm just naive, but someh
344.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
>> 1. "Don’t optimize for the short-term" vs "Keep it simple and straightforward". >> Often the simplest thing may not work in the long run. But its better to err on the side of keeping things simple. IMO, th
345.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I got the sense that Erlang overlaps somewhat with node.js in terms of what one might use it for. Could anyone familiar with both compare them?
346.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Not to be a wet blanket, but there doesn't seem to be anything mysterious about this side effect. I was expecting something different as a result of the sensational-sounding title: something truly hard-to-explain, not just having one&#
347.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
>> why are there more defects in Erlang and Java than Perl and Ruby? I have no experience with Erlang, but one reason I'd expect Java to have more defects than Ruby and Perl is that Java is more verbose, i.e. it takes more code t
348.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
You'd have to know the source code quite intimately to answer that. My hunch is that when it slows down, what you'd see under the covers is a tangled mess of locks and some kind of leaking resource(s). If the tabs were more isolat
349.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
There are many threads, but threads are not isolated by the OS to the same extent as processes; hence, their fates are all intertwined. The user can't kill one misbehaving thread, and even if you could, you couldn't expect the pro
350.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Firefox is a house of cards, because all those billion tabs are sharing a single process and they all need to cooperate perfectly.
351.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
But the website looks excellent.
352.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I got more of a sense of how research is done in college as opposed to high school. I think the simple fact is that there's a lot more information to teach that falls in the "what" category. The actual hands-on work of histor
353.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
I think it's not so strange -- digging through old data in archives is what historians do. If you compiled your findings into a book, you'd be writing bona fide history. History is stupendously fascinating. What dawned on me in co
354.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
In order to price something, you have to find a buyer who is willing to put up the money. Only the US government could pay billions for it, and, in fact, they already did -- back in the 60s. The price it could fetch now is utterly irrelevan
355.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Yeah. I hate the title. Apparently the editors felt the story's importance wasn't self-evident enough, and what readers would be capable of understanding was a pricetag. In truth, the data is priceless in every sense of that word.
356.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
You're right that type 1 diabetes has autoimmune origin. The presence of autoantibodies can be used clinically to distinguish it from the other types of diabetes mellitus[1]. [1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diab
357.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Yes, and I imagine that one possibility is to retransplant new cells as the existing ones are killed off by the immune system. Not an elegant solution to an engineer, but medicine is full of inelegant solutions.
358.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Good point. There should be plenty of diabetes research foundations to donate to -- JDRF would top my list. If you donate to one of those, it's like buying a mutual fund. Your investment is diversified and has the best chance of doing
359.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
If this is truly promising, I expect they'll have to beat a path through all the aspiring donors to get to work each day. The problem with biomedical research as I see it is not a lack of donations, it's that the typical case is t
360.
by mtdewcmu 12y ago
Rabies leads to an excruciating death...

More ›