One of the silliest, hilarious but on point thing I've ever heard uttered from a video game character
Not problems like 'What is beauty?' Because that would fall without the purview of your condundrums of philosophy.
I solve practical problems..." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SNgNBsCI4EA
Serious question - just like quoting an expert in the relevant topic isn't an appeal to authority, etc.
In the same way, an appeal to an authority is better than nothing, but its still a really weak argument. You can misunderstand authorities and authority can be mistaken or suborned. Its a reasonable argument if nobody knows much about the topic, but its never convincing if people are learned in the topic; the benefit of an expert is not that they are experts, its that they know how to defend their position with reasoning. As the motto of the royal society says "Nullius in verba".
"Beware old men in a young man's game."
Edit: Nope I'm wrong, just redid the math. Apologies.
Survivorship bias is a bias because the sample is biased - Its when you pick a group of people who have already won and then are surprised that they beat the odds and won because you confuse the probability that a specific person wins with the probability that at least 1 person wins.
To get a good estimate of this you need to come up with some priors about how many skilful and unskillful equivalents there were at the age of 30 and how much worse the unskillful ones are at staying alive.
I meant if you meet X people at a random point in their career then on average more than half will make it to the end because some of the original sample died before you sampled the population. Basically older people would have a lower chance of their luck running out even if they where all equally incompetent.
At least assuming the original population isn’t dying of something else vastly more often etc.
The credentials of the expert don't determine whether or not the statement is an appeal to authority.
Sometimes I’m glad I’m in this field though, because I hear about the researchers working on prions that have started dying off, and I know it’s one of those one and 100,000 events that you inevitably experience.
Plastic explosive with electric igniter ain't that bad, but old school fuses and mines are scary.
As we say in America: “Hold my beer.”
Edit: Or more charitably, they underestimated the consequences.
This wasn’t Jackass, it was a science programme and he was the resident engineer. In theory he knew what he was doing but underestimated the risks and paid the personal consequences.
> The episode saw him "strapped into a rig like a go-cart which was propelled along a track into a post".
I'm sorry but to me this reads like something out of Darwin Awards.
Which is why he asked for 4x what might be fair? I’m being facetious: I have no idea. I am just saying there is little constraint on how much damages you can reasonably ask for.
It didn't occur to me that the subject matter would be incompatible with narration, but it (IMO) just doesn't work that way. Large portions of the book have equations and heavy notation. Here's an actual passage:
> it can be simplified to cee equals bracket two aitch over em end-bracket to the one half power times bracket one minus parentheses pee e over pee cee end parentheses to the ar over cee pee power end bracket to the one half power.
Yeah, I just couldn't keep listening to that. I need to get a print copy, because the subject matter is interesting.
She realized that Feynman's verbal explanations were so clear that she had not had any trouble visualizing the diagrams as he drew and discussed them.
It was just in a box in the back of his truck. Looked fun.
I wince, sometimes, thinking back. But my family was a logging family, so getting blown up was just one in a long list of ways to die.
nitrocellulose is very simple to make and detonate... and is also very stable.... I don't see why we need secrets... I played with that stuff when I was a teenager
Nitrocellulose can also be detonated with a properly brisant primary charge, which nitroglycerin is quite capable of being.
Typically Nitrocellulose (aka gun cotton, and the primary ingredient in most smokeless powders) won't detonate on it's own, but it's a very different beast from nitroglycerin.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_...]
I stamped initials in steel beams etc. Hardest thing was getting detonators = well controlled. Never tried to make a tank buster.
Fond memories!
https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/the-history-of-radi...
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/29/garden/shopping-canal-st-...
If properly prepared and used and stored responsibly then gun cotton can be safe, even when used for teenage antics. Lighting off a piece while resting it on an open palm of course being one classic trick with nitrocellulose. I'd say storage and transportation of low and high explosives are some of the riskiest aspects because there's so many insidious ways for it to go wrong that you wouldn't learn about until you need to take your shoes off to count past 7. It doesn't help that nowadays it's so trivial to find out how to synthesize acetone peroxide and storing it long term is always going to be fraught with peril. Especially when someone without any semblance of proper containers stores it sealed up in a plastic bottle with a screw on cap. Just one drop or one crumb of primary explosive on the screw threads and maybe you get it sealed up, but when it dries out in the threads there's a good chance it goes off in your closed up hand when you try to open it and add in all the friction rubbing between the threads.
It’s thoroughly explained in the manuals freely available at US Army web site.