zeteo

43 ms·

391.
Celebrating inequality(nytimes.com)
9 points by zeteo 13y ago|0 comments
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by zeteo 13y ago
Yay! One more way for rich people to hang out with rich and famous people.
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by zeteo 13y ago
Don't worry, I wasn't proposing to cut funding. My point was simply that, if government hadn't taken over research since the 1940s, science would be in a better fundamental shape right now. Alas, that did not happen, and killing the NSF ove
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by zeteo 13y ago
Can some kinds of projects be conducted better with government support? Yes. Should almost all scientific research depend on the same support? Probably not. Projects that are not due to realize either great profits or publicity coups within
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by zeteo 13y ago
There are several good reasons to reject the argument that costs make massive government intervention necessary. First, a good telescope in the days of Galileo or an electric generator in Tesla's were still pretty expensive high-tech toys.
396.
by zeteo 13y ago
From Galileo to WW2, science progressed at an amazing pace with little and sporadic government support (mostly in the way of prizes). Then governments stepped in and started throwing insane amounts of money at research projects - who was go
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by zeteo 13y ago
Free honey? Beekeeping is actually a lot of work (especially when the hives are spread out like this). Also they say it's up to 85% effective, so that's the maximum not the average.
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by zeteo 13y ago
>Cell Signaling will, eventually, have its Joseph Priestley, its Dmitri Mendeleev. That's very optimistic, but not necessarily true (even ignoring the question of when ). Priestley succeeded so well because he developed simple, reprodu
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by zeteo 13y ago
>The article asserts that the increased usage is to compensate for speeding up the kill lines Yes, but we're not talking about restricting usage, this is about banning them altogether. It would be interesting to know how German producer
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by zeteo 13y ago
>The same effect could be created by just using proper hygienic conditions in the slaughterhouse That's a pretty strong assertion. How did you find out that equivalent hygienic conditions could be created in slaughterhouses at a moderat
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by zeteo 13y ago
How can you take such decisions while considering only the purported benefits and not the costs as well? Let's take antimicrobial sprays for example. They presumably protect some consumers from food-borne illnesses. Shouldn't this be balanc
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by zeteo 13y ago
>the system has a loophole: large swathes of the city are designated as roads, sidewalks, highways (which is a technical term for the road allowance). These areas of the city are completely free to use, for anyone, on the condition that
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by zeteo 13y ago
>the most important reason for the program’s success was that it dispensed with a reliance on causation in favor of correlation Is this necessarily so? I see a lot of good old-fashioned factors mentioned in the article: converting data
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by zeteo 13y ago
Again, weight of farm tools is a naturally continuous variable. There are heavy hoes, light plows and lots of ground in between [1] [2]. Transforming weight into a binary variable with an arbitrary separation point is not sound statistical
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by zeteo 13y ago
>the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold So let's see, the research is about the relationship between two variables, both of them naturally continuous
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by zeteo 13y ago
>The plough was heavier [...] it gave men an advantage over women. [...] Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses And this is why North European countri
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by zeteo 13y ago
>Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it It was not until 1677 [1] that people started to discover how reproduction works beyond "penis goes in,
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by zeteo 14y ago
> the belief that someone can truly produce a magnum opus [...] within [...] a project that driven by a negative taskmaster, is completely ludicrous There's a difference between a stressful and an honest environment. If you read som
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by zeteo 14y ago
>Calling your disagreement with the author a "misconception" on the author's part is implying a hard factual accuracy on your side - and here you are both wrong and disingenuous. The first paragraph of the article is a pretty clear stat
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by zeteo 14y ago
>None of these "misconceptions" have much to do with the main point [...] the entire Columbus story does not apply [...] what do your comments about googles in pockets and drake equation have to do with anything? I don't see how you can
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by zeteo 14y ago
> throwaway points with which you're quibbling Throwaway points as to how likely it is for advanced aliens to even exist and whether they might be willing to trade with us? He's attempting to refute all possible motivations that alien
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by zeteo 14y ago
This article is full of misconceptions. Let's address a few of the most egregious ones. >there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. Th
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by zeteo 14y ago
Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.
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by zeteo 14y ago
>This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients [but] this is still a huge mystery to science If "no uncertainty" was the golden standard, we'd never do anything new (except
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by zeteo 14y ago
"This automobile business is all good and interesting, but - no. I really like riding in a horse buggy. Not for the speed, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like candle light and wearing a top hat even though, technically, I
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by zeteo 14y ago
Next sentence is "it has all been automated", so clearly he means "not directly".
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by zeteo 14y ago
So the "wisdom of the crowd" turns out to work best when it's not allowed to be a crowd. Taking independent votes from non-communicating individuals is in line with Surowiecki's original example (estimating the weight of an ox), but far fro
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by zeteo 14y ago
I'm surprised to see two such distinct incidents brought together under a common heading. The first one (interview granting) is about feeling more altruistic towards people that we share some experience with. Interesting phenomenon, but it
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by zeteo 14y ago
An article called "why coders should embrace C++" would get lots of flak around here, and deservedly so. But it's a much smaller field with many fewer options than the entirety of life. Do we really believe there is a definition of the "goo
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by zeteo 14y ago
We can easily reduce subset sum [1] to Problem 1 by using the second formulation ("given a set of integers and an integer s, does any non-empty subset sum to s?") and setting the integers to be the coin denominations and all the correspondi

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