stolio

17 ms·

91.
by stolio 12y ago
I'm not sure it goes back to the formation of our DNA. Or at least not in that way. We're raised on stories of Abraham Lincoln and Rosa Parks and we idealize how important they were to society. Now as people leave childhood and
92.
by stolio 12y ago
MIT's OpenCourseWare is Creative Commons licensed, the only restrictions placed on a third party who wanted to caption the courses are 1) attribution, 2) the derivative work must be non-commercial in nature, 3) that the license remains
93.
by stolio 12y ago
If you flatten the demand peaks wouldn't the baseline go up? At the limit where demand fluctuation is taken care of by arbitrage central generation could be constant.
94.
by stolio 12y ago
Or, female CEO's are a more risky prospect than male CEO's and companies have different risk/reward motivations based on their situations. If a company's facing a tough grind for a few years they may be risk averse and
95.
by stolio 12y ago
From the first paragraph they're claiming to have unified (to some extent) quantum physics and general relativity while simultaneously solving the dark matter and dark energy problems. That would be a very big deal. Add in the use of
96.
by stolio 12y ago
Our political parties have very different ideas about how to fix education. Liberals just keep lowering expectations (learning to read is too much now?) and conservatives just want to either fully privatize it or at least let "the m
97.
by stolio 12y ago
For fun, KE = (1/2)mv^2 = 32 MJ -->[mathing intensifies]--> a 1,000 kilogram car moving at about 565 mph carries 32 MJ of energy, which is what 1 liter of gasoline carries. A gallon is about 4 liters, so at 100% efficiency it cou
98.
by stolio 12y ago
I remember hearing about a plan to build a giant rail-gun (or coil, or whatever) into the side of a mountain and try to send stuff into space. The issue was A) the barrel would be evacuated of air and the piece of glass covering the end wou
99.
by stolio 12y ago
This could maybe be an xkcd "what if" problem....I suspect a train of mach 27 projectiles would have some interesting effects on our atmosphere.
100.
by stolio 12y ago
huh. I ctrl-f'd for "sphere" and missed it. There goes the high point of my saturday night. Maybe later they'll ask how many cats running in circles you need to levitate a dog wearing a ferrous vest.
101.
by stolio 12y ago
Or, say a cat's roughly a sphere of radius 10cm, capacitance of an isolated sphere is C=4(pi)(epsilon_0)(radius) = radius/k_e = .1/(9x10^9) = 11 pF Ballpark. YCCMV.
102.
by stolio 12y ago
Agreed, this is a highly correlative study. However even if meditating doesn't have a direct effect on the brain (it is in some forms just sitting there) it encourages the type of self-reflection that leads to healthier choices. The mo
103.
by stolio 12y ago
> This study was done on adult monkeys. I think we read Table 1 differently: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/table/T1... > And AFAIK, in humans the differences in neural connect
104.
by stolio 12y ago
On the gendered toys thing, Rhesus monkeys show gender preferences for different types of toys. I'd be surprised but interested to see a follow-up paper about cross-species gender expectations forcing toy choices. paper: http:/&
105.
by stolio 12y ago
The last time this topic came up, buried in the comments somewhere I found this gem: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm It's controversial, but it has some ideas not usually tossed around in these debates. It certa
106.
by stolio 12y ago
I agree in the sense that we shouldn't let unvaccinated kids go to school and risk the health of other kids. But I also think it's important not to poison the long-term approach in the process. I know a lot of anti-science people
107.
by stolio 12y ago
I've been putting off the SICM course and thus scmutils but the idea of a Clojure port makes me a little giddy. 2 good things I see: the possibility of using it in bigger projects (sorry, Scheme) or just not dealing with context switc
108.
by stolio 12y ago
> At this point, probably the best we can do is to so relentlessly ridicule the position that it becomes an embarrassing opinion to hold I'm so sad that this is a solution for so many things these days. Science isn't the soc
109.
by stolio 12y ago
That's a bummer. I used to run Debian with OpenBox so I'd often end up sifting through the old CrunchBang forum threads to fix stuff. Just an amazingly nice and supportive community. Running Debian/OpenBox was pretty cool.
110.
by stolio 12y ago
Edwin (the text editor that comes with MIT-Scheme) is not quite emacs, but when I used it for SICP I kind of liked it...once I figured out the debugger. (edit: that sounded sarcastic, I actually liked Edwin) Apparently there's an im
111.
by stolio 12y ago
Unless I've missed something big in the past 2 years even the Debian Project Leader is still a volunteer[0]. If most/all money's going to operating costs it's hard to make the case they're holding out on somebody.
112.
by stolio 12y ago
One thing to note is that the weaker the social safety net is the more reason companies have to pay their employees more. If a company can have part-time (or sometimes full-time) employees who also receive food-stamps and Medicaid from the
113.
by stolio 12y ago
If you're into physics I'd recommend solving some problems using whatever language, but especially functional languages (i.e. Lisps, Haskell, etc.) because you have some big "A-ha!" moments as to what the math really mea
114.
by stolio 12y ago
It's an important question whether or not these countries can grow their agriculture (which implies infrastructure and institutions as well) at an exponential rate. If they can't, then Malthus was right. If they can, Malthus was
115.
by stolio 12y ago
I don't feel that bad since Guitar Center put almost all their competitors out of business. I remember being furious on the days I had to go to Guitar Center because I needed something that afternoon and there was nowhere else to
116.
by stolio 12y ago
I doubt that Niger, which is projected to quadruple in population by 2050, will be able to scale their agriculture on their own. If they're even sustaining themselves at this point. Countries like that are able to increase their popul
117.
by stolio 12y ago
It's hard for me to tell if you're actually "in the wrong" here. Innocent people are also captured and tortured by authorities, but it's a huge stretch to blame that on karma. If you say people experience karmic re
118.
by stolio 12y ago
Sub-Saharan Africa alone will add 1.3 billion people by 2050 http://www.voanews.com/content/africa-to-record-largest-popu...
119.
by stolio 12y ago
You don't like Malthusian population doctrine? If we add 2 billion people or 30% to the world population over the next 20 years it raises some interesting questions about feeding these new 2 billion people. Especially since most of th
120.
by stolio 12y ago
You should be aware that the "CSM Mantra" (?) and "TM" meditation are very fringe forms. When most people say "start meditating" they're generally not referring to those. I personally consider TM to be n

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