623 karma · joined February 6, 2013
As a contrived scenario to help more intuitively understand refraction, it's nice, and I think that was what he was going for. It's how I read it.
In this case I find it rather bizarre that the Wired article has framed it in this way ("Unknown Mathematician") and then instantly (first paragraph) gives us this:
"a 50-something lecturer at the University of New Hampshire named Yitang Zhang"
So...a university lecturer...? Is "Unknown" really appropriate here? He's hardly Ramanujan!
The piece is a fairly nice write up for the layman, in the usual style of such things (sometimes I feel Simon Singh invented that style - of course he didn't, but you know what I mean), it's just the angle they've gone for seems curious. I guess it's original (?).
"Almost every line is something I want to print out, frame and then take a shit on"
but by golly if it isn't entertaining to read someone else do it.
Good observation, and humour points for the light-hearted snark. I don't quite disapprove of these articles, but I agree once you see the pattern it is rather ubiquitous.
Where I am with these at the moment is questioning whether the person would have written it anyway and is tagging their business into it (reasonable) or writing something specifically to increase their visibility (I'm more skeptical).
Occasionally I imagine such a writer sitting at their desk with "the big book of business basics" saying "which one shall I write up today and post to HN to obliquely promote my product?". But then, if they're sharing something of value then do I even care? The ones which seem dangerous are those which have distorted something of value to specifically relate to their product. There was one a few months ago (re)defining "Technical Intelligence" in a really confusing way in an attempt to tie it to the business in question - absolute train wreck.
This, especially, summarises my feelings about a vast number of HN submissions and articles on the internet in general of the form "The X kinds of Y" or "The 10 reasons Z" or "The Blahblahblah Principle". We all know this type of article. Many books too, especially in self-help and dieting, etc.
At best the writer has described a model which is useful for understanding some aspect of a larger picture, and at worst they are just doing reasonable-sounding pattern-recognition from a largely anecdotal pool, and then building what they believe is a bulletproof system from it all.
I remember when I was in university I wrote notebooks full of this kind of thing. I go through them from time to time and find interesting ideas wrapped up in way too much rigidity in search of a neat formalised system. There must be half a dozen "guru" bestsellers to be refined from those notebooks, if anyone had the time and lack of internal honesty to write them.
For a while now, variants of "Simply put, this is wrong" have been what my brain returns whenever I see such articles, yet I do still read them and I do still find nuggets.
I didn't quite understand the ending though. "You haven't really seen any of the inventions yet. Would you like to?", "Sure", Tesla points finger -> I don't get what just happened.
Btw I loved your original comment in both style and content, hence my riffing. One of those if-I-could-upvote-twice circumstances.
[1] When someone says "opposite" draw a reasonable hyperplane and reflect.
One thing I would say is that I've heard that no matter where one lives in London, the black snot goes away pretty quickly after moving there. I find that hard to believe (because: "why?") but so many people have told me it I think it must be true, except now you've said that for you it was constant so I don't know what to think any more.
Another thing is that "Plenty of opportunity to work in London and avoid the most horrible snot / commute issues.." fills me with hope! Cheers!
This comment originally started as an analogy to striking distance and grappling distance in a fight, but I couldn't make it read unsatirically.
What is your opinion on the opposite? For me that's far more unsettling. I've initiated handshakes with people whose age and home country meant they didn't really have much experience of the Western "firm handshake", always the limp wrist. I don't know whether to shake it, or draw the hand to my lips as courting a princess. Which, I assume, was not one in your repertoire of "intricate hiphop style handshakes".
Jokes aside, more than one family member had felt it important to instruct me in the art of a good handshake as a matter of gentlemanly conduct from a young age, even long after I'd obviously "got it", and I distinctly recall one of my friends suddenly in his mid-20s going from a pathetic one to a really decent powergrip apparently because his boss had told him after a promotion that he ought to work on his handshake. I say this in defense of the one who "actively squeezes", as it may not be macho-signaling so much as over-correction for their past dead fish.
If I lived in London I'd like to think I would make a project out of finding all the shortcuts and hacks like this applicable to my routine. I'm sure the video is only the tip of the iceberg (especially as Tom Scott generally really knows how to make his stuff short and sweet - anyone else feel the video was edited to pretty much perfection?).
I've been away from the UK for a while now, returned for 7 days about a year ago and on the way back to the airport on the underground at the end of an awesome week got a text from a friend telling me I look like Aidan Gillen (that's Tommy Carcetti from the Wire), so naturally I was grinning ear to ear and didn't care who saw. The contrast between my mood/appearance and absolutely everyone around me was just bizarre. I got a few grumpy confused looks from people who must have thought I was mentally ill.
I was told by someone the other day that when I do permanently return to the UK I "ought to move into the working-in-London phase". I'm hoping I will have the option not to - definitely more of a day-tripper London fan here. And don't even get me started on the black snot! How is it possible that even in single day the contents of one's nose can change colour like that?!
Disappointingly there seem to be some glitches which sometimes cause the stick to, erm, stick into the ground when landing straight as in my strategy above. When that happens I tend to ragequit, then find myself sneaking back for another session a few hours later...
I'd be very interested if the course has an "end". My hunch is that it does, and it's a cliff much like the one if you try going left. I suspect that before this cliff there is one final obstacle though which can be used skillfully to propel the stick a decent hail mary distance. Haha, I feel like I'm on my BBC Micro in the early 90s again speculating wildly about later levels of games that are just too hard for me ever to see them!
So here's how the Ikaruga element worked: each player had three controls 'up', 'down', and 'change bat colour'. The bats could be either black or white, and so could the ball. If you tried to return a shot but your bat wasn't the same colour as the ball then you'd lose the point. The beauty of it was that if you were holding down the 'change colour' button when you returned the ball then the colour of the ball would change. So let's say you have two players who are getting into a heated rally both with white bats and a white ball. They're concentrating on trying to catch the other one with good shots rather than the colour when, suddenly, one player presses change colour to change their bat to black, then again to change it back to white, but they keep it held down. They return the next shot and now the ball is black. Their opponent has to change their bat colour quickly in response otherwise they'll lose the point. Pretty soon the mindgames set in - changing your bat colour twice but not holding down the button to trick your opponent into thinking the ball is going to change colour, or my personal favourite always changing the ball colour and then suddenly not doing so out of the blue. We could have made a fourth button for the change ball colour instead of doubling up the functionality of the change bat colour button, but the way it telegraphed possible intention was kinda cool. That was the Ikaruga dimension of the game.
There was another nifty element I remember too which was that the ball was returned faster the closer to the centre of the bat it was struck, or slower nearer the edges, with a few pixels of sweet spot in the exact centre which would give a mega shot.
It was one of those games you make quickly and then spend hours ahem "testing" multiplayer in between adding new features. It was really fun because of five main things to be thinking about while playing: simply returning the ball (!), having the right colour bat (the most basic Ikaruga element), putting tricky spin on the ball (made all the more fun by the rotation of red diameter line showing exactly how much spin you'd put on it), hitting near the centre to make a fast hard-to-return shot (with a satisfying "whoomph" sound and particle trail effect for the mega shots), and finally the cheeky ball colour switch mindgames.
I'll have to dig it up, check it all still works, and put it somewhere for people to download. Or at the very least make a youtube video to show how it works (on reflection, that would have probably been less effort than the above write up!). Cheers :)
A few years ago my cousin and I made a version of Pong crossed with Ikaruga ("Ikapong" - very creative title I don't think) and put a line on the ball so you could see exactly what spin it had on it as it moved. I got a lot of satisfaction from that and always find myself wishing other bat and ball games would implement that way of showing spin. In this case it wouldn't be faithful to the original, but playing this did remind me of that.
My favourite are the colour ones. I stare and stare at them trying to isolate the bit that - for example - is actually grey but looks red, to see its "true" colour. That level of concentration...not really ever seeing the grey, but perhaps objects behind me in the room flying around Matilda-style.
I wonder if it has a bias towards the IP of the player? I kept getting locations in my country, much more than it felt like I should be if it were totally random.
A good example for me is top level gamers. I love playing games and watching them being played competitively (videogames, Magic the Gathering, Chess, etc.). I've dabbled in competitive gaming but never committed very far, and when I do talk to high level players I always want to know what their day jobs are. To my surprise (or disgust, or satisfaction - I'm not quite sure which), many are unemployed or involved in low-level jobs which allow them to maximise practice time. Some are professional and sponsored but unless they do really well then their incomes from this are atrocious. Then there are others such as "Ultradavid" (a fighting game commentator, but someone whose work I highly respect) who is a lawyer! Only a couple of days ago I asked Ryan Hart (probably the best UK all-rounder at fighting games) about his job and he said he does remote consultancy and editing which means he can travel worldwide to play and still work. One of my relatives is world-class in a competitive sport and also has a very high-powered career - I asked him how he manages that and he told me the prestige of the sport in question allows him to be given time off for competitions and training, though his life essentially is just work, family, and the sport. I found that one particularly interesting because I suspect even if he were far and away the best Counter Strike player in the world rather than in a well-respected sport then that wouldn't fly in his profession. Anyway, these are datapoints which increase my knowledge and help inform my own decisions.
In the case of gwern, it could influence my own choices greatly to hear if he lives off an inheritance, or is a Physics professor, or a professional football player, or especially if he has applied his analytical skills to learning specific technologies in high demand and low supply which maximise his hourly earnings to enable him to work very little and do what he wants the rest of the time. Or, indeed, if he is unemployed and poor, and if so...why?
I love this description. You've put into words something I've long felt about a particular, and pretty large, set of HN submissions.
Interesting. I don't think I quite follow how "non-primaries" (which means..."replies"?) harm one's average karma statistic, and how the average karma statistic + reply-delays penalise nested discussion, could you clarify?