qrendel

14 ms·

61.
by qrendel 11y ago
Didn't actually say that he was, though it may be the TV show has changed my memory of his place in the second and third books. After a few years it gets hard to keep track of exactly what happened in a ~5000 page series.
62.
by qrendel 11y ago
I think this is one way to look at it, at least for the books. For the TV show, over all the seasons it seems like three main characters have emerged (based on longevity, screentime, and plot importance): Daenerys, Tyrion, and Jon Snow. You
63.
by qrendel 11y ago
I thought the question was about radiation emitted by the black hole itself, i.e. Hawking radiation, not radiation emitted by matter outside but near the black hole, i.e. accretion disk radiation. It's not really contradictory that stu
64.
by qrendel 11y ago
IANAP(hysicist), but afaik it's due to pair production of photons at the boundary of the black hole. One photon falls into the black hole, the other escapes in the opposite direction, conserving momentum. The pair production of photons
65.
by qrendel 11y ago
When an fitness advantage is removed from an allele, so that possessing it becomes completely neutral, the gene still tends to disappear slowly over time due to mutation and genetic drift. The formula for the average time to complete disapp
66.
by qrendel 11y ago
See my reply to tlunter[1], particularly link #4. Vermont is around the second best state in the U.S. education-wise and has a school system which is globally competitive. The U.S. is a giant country and there is a big difference between th
67.
by qrendel 11y ago
Perhaps it's a sign that they see the battle as already won. The widespread acceptance of Facebook et al in spite of all the bad publicity about tracking is taken as tacit approval of the surveillance economy.
68.
by qrendel 11y ago
Massachusetts seems to be consistently ranked as having one of the top public school systems in the US.[1][2][3] That might explain part of the discrepancy between your experience and my own. (Edit: In fact, it seems MA would be pretty comp
69.
by qrendel 11y ago
I'm not sure how to concisely respond to this as explaining everything right or wrong with U.S. public schools would be tall order. At the same time, it's likewise hard to believe your list would be the expected knowledge at gradu
70.
by qrendel 11y ago
Almost no one graduating in the US would have even one of these skills, except possibly "knowing how to play a majority of sports." Most people graduating college wouldn't even have more than one or two of them, if any at all
71.
by qrendel 11y ago
An April Fool'd man can't get fooled again.
72.
by qrendel 11y ago
If you think that's bad, I know of two different people offline, one who had a stroke at 27 and the other a heart attack at 34. Don't know either well enough to comment on their lifestyle or contributing factors, though.
73.
by qrendel 11y ago
As I understand it, it's a practicality issue: with enough extra stages you can always escape, but the payload size rapidly approaches zero. (See: http://space.stackexchange.com/a/5383 ) The size, complexity, and c
74.
by qrendel 11y ago
Why isn't it as likely that they want a hostage to use as leverage? Accusing him of doing something insanely idiotic would give plausible deniability of the actual purpose.
75.
by qrendel 11y ago
There's not going to be another AI winter. The past AI winters occurred because people drastically underestimated how difficult AI would be. MIT (Seymour Papert specifically) thought computer vision could be solved by some graduate stu
76.
by qrendel 11y ago
This assumes you can find a preferable country that will take you. Most of the world is as anti-immigrant (on average) as the US is. Unless you have a lot of money they can take through taxes, changing citizenship isn't always easy.
77.
by qrendel 11y ago
Similarly to what the other reply said, if the claim is that these countries can only afford to provide healthcare for their citizens because the US subsidizes their defense, then the implication is that the US is paying for both their defe
78.
by qrendel 11y ago
I'm not really inclined to spend time on a detailed analysis at the moment, but given what the US wastes (imo) on military spending and healthcare (relative to other similar nations, e.g. Canada), you could get a good portion of the wa
79.
by qrendel 11y ago
@j2kun: Just curious, any chance you'd do an explainer on the Curry-Howard equivalence[1] sometime? Forgive me if you already have, but a search didn't turn anything up. Seems pretty relevant to math ∩ programming and also of inte
80.
by qrendel 11y ago
Or MS already has custom-made backdoors for governments, and forcing Apple to put them in too would take away Apple's superior positioning when it inevitably gets leaked that MS has been doing this for a long time. No evidence for it,
81.
by qrendel 11y ago
The debate has been ongoing since the Snowden leak, and even before that among people who were aware of the disclosures by William Binney, Thomas Drake, et al. Unfortunately, the general public has shown that they really don't care at
82.
by qrendel 11y ago
Go read the actual timeline of the allegations against him. The entire thing is so one-sided in favor of Assange that it's effectively government propaganda to even pretend he's anything other than a political prisoner. The prosec
83.
by qrendel 11y ago
From the release on the Wikileaks site ( https://wikileaks.org/nsa-201602/ ): "The US government has signed agreements with the UN that it will not engage in such conduct against the UN--let alone its Secretary Gen
84.
by qrendel 11y ago
Considering they recently chose to completely ignore the UN opinion on his "arbitrary detention," on top of everything else in the past - false rape accusations, ignoring his asylum status - I don't see what more he really ha
85.
by qrendel 11y ago
They can pass laws requiring software to be backdoored without allowing the company to notify the public (similar to what happened to Lavabit), or can use three letter agencies to backdoor most software anyway (similar to what happened with
86.
by qrendel 11y ago
> Climate change? Get educated! It's not caused by sustainable animal farming! Grass-fed and free range cattle are an even larger contributor to deforestation and climate change than intensive animal agriculture is, since it requi
87.
by qrendel 11y ago
> All else equal, everyone wants to minimize nuclear states, and nobody is happy about Iran having a nuclear program of any sort. Not that I agree, but there was at least an argument for a nuclear Iran made in Foreign Affairs about thr
88.
by qrendel 11y ago
Exactly this. Animal agriculture necessarily kills far more animals than crops since you have to grow significantly more crops to feed livestock in the first place. Meat does not just magically appear without having been fed. Not only that,
89.
by qrendel 11y ago
a) This is from April 2014. b) While I couldn't immediately find anything debunking this particular study, it's hard to take at face value considering all the research showing correlation between high-vegetable diets and lower mor
90.
by qrendel 11y ago
Across all goods, purchasing power is still lower for the median worker in an impoverished country compared to the median western worker. Look at the price of all goods you can afford (healthcare, electronics, etc), not just a few specific

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