nessus42

49 ms·

391.
by nessus42 14y ago
It doesn't follow that we will be able to do it, nor even that it is possible, but before the understanding that flat universes contain zero energy, the claim that you might manufacture a universe would seem to completely absurd. Where wo
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by nessus42 14y ago
Sure they are. Impossible things are impossible, even in an infinite number of possible worlds!
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by nessus42 14y ago
In a flat universe, the universe starts off infinitely large and infinitely dense at time 0. As the universe expands, it gets less dense. Imagine an infinitely dense rubber sheet that starts to stretch at time 0, and after time 0 it is no
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by nessus42 14y ago
Indeed! It's hard to believe that SICP is not on the OP's list. It should be on any list of books on Lisp.
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Isn't this basically an argument over John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment? No, this debate is completely and utterly different from Searle's Chinese Room argument! Searle's argument is a philosophical one for the assertion
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by nessus42 14y ago
Another factoid that causes the mind to reel is that a flat universe, which is of infinite size, also has zero total energy . This means that it is conceivable that someday we might figure out how to manufacture entire new universes. Who s
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by nessus42 14y ago
Cosmologist do usually take a flat universe to indicate an infinite universe. They also take "negative curvature" to indicate an infinite universe. Only a universe with "positive curvature" is taken to indicate a finite universe.
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by nessus42 14y ago
If the universe is flat, and therefore infinite, yes it means that most probably there are an infinite number of identical duplicates of you. It does not mean, however, that there are any duplicates of you that make a particular typo. I sho
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by nessus42 14y ago
The equating of writing slower code to "sloppy programming" seems like sloppy reasoning to me. If it was sloppy to knowingly go with a slower solution, then using Python, for instance, or any scripting language for that matter, would always
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by nessus42 14y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "hasn't taken off". Scala is pretty thriving in these parts: I.e., we use Scala where I work. Headhunters contact me about open Scala positions. A few months back there was a Scala symposium down the street tha
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by nessus42 14y ago
If we were to replaced both "it's" and "its" with just "its", absolutely no expressiveness in the language would be lost. This is shown by the fact that in spoken English, there is no audible distinction between these words. You can tell wh
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by nessus42 14y ago
I don't think that Kuhn described this process as "flawed". He was an historian wo revealed for us a pattern that often plays itself out in actuality, where for scientific progress to continue, the proponents of the current orthodoxy have t
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by nessus42 14y ago
You're welcome.
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by nessus42 14y ago
I'm not sure that it would be correct to interpret Kuhn as stating that paradigm shifts only occur upon death. His point was rather than science often doesn't proceed in the orderly way that we've typically been led to believe. Often do
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by nessus42 14y ago
This just is not true to the degree that people are typically led to believe. As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, Thomas Kuhn completely demolished this idealized version of how science works when he published The Structure of Scientifi
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by nessus42 14y ago
I had actually written "died off" rather than "retired", as that's how I recalled it being stated when I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . But then I couldn't recall a good reason why they had to die, and not just retire, so I
407.
by nessus42 14y ago
I'm not sure exactly what the intent of the OP is, but it is clear that the US government is employing these tactics, or similar ones. How do I know? They've explicitly said so! There was an article a few days ago on wired.com about this
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by nessus42 14y ago
Thomas Kuhn, the famous philosopher and historian of science (and physicist by training), wrote all about this back in 1962 when he published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions . This book brought us the term "paradigm shift", which h
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by nessus42 14y ago
The world is almost certainly deterministic. Either that, or the cosmos is rolling dice in quantum mechanics wave collapse. It's hard to see how any sort of mystical "free will" can come out of a random number generator. We are all just ver
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by nessus42 14y ago
There are both deterministic and non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. The "Many Worlds" interpretation is deterministic, as all possible outcomes end up happening, albeit in different parallels worlds. Bohm's interpretati
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Have you personally ever taken LSD and actually suffered flashbacks? If yes, how bad were they? No, of course not. I am a law-abiding citizen who believes in the rule of law, and I would never consider breaking it. I did, however, h
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by nessus42 14y ago
Yes, indeed! I don't actually mind most of Apple's skeuomorphs, but the new iCal just makes me wince every time I see it. It's hideous.
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by nessus42 14y ago
LSD does wonders in helping you to unlock your inner creative mind. Unfortunately, the flashbacks are a bitch!
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by nessus42 14y ago
Wasn't there an article posted here about this very same issue with penalty kicks in soccer? Well, I'm not sure that I read it here, but I did read it somewhere: Someone did a mathematical analysis and determined that goalies should stand i
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by nessus42 14y ago
> I don't think I've ever come across a case where the error wasn't with a different tense or form of the verb. I.e., the sentence is structured a bit oddly, but it largely makes sense. Oh come now. English, and I presume all natural
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by nessus42 14y ago
I don't understand this response. Just because any individual such post may not work for you, if you read 100 such posts, you might come across a technique that works spectacularly for you. Much of life is about trial and error to discover
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by nessus42 14y ago
I should think that dealing with people internationally would provide more tolerance for questionable grammar, not less, since non-native speakers of English typically make quite a few grammatical errors. Especially for irregular and idioma
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Many disagree with me on this point of view, but routinely I've found that those that express themselves well in their native language write better code. Many people with perfect grammar communicate terribly, and many people with mu
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by nessus42 14y ago
> Whenever you confuse the two, you cause me to have to reparse the sentence. "it's" becomes "it is" and then I have to determine that that doesn't make any sense and go back to substitute it. I'm sorry. When they come up with a cure
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by nessus42 14y ago
I've never been diagnosed with a disability, and now I am supposed to jump through hoops to try to prove to people that I should be given some sort of special exemption? As if I need more humiliation in my life than to notice after the fact

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