MikkoFinell

Just ordered one! "Smartphone" going in the bin.

Facebook--the most insidious and intrusive data harvester in history--at least lets its users ostensibly rename their profile and delete their account. Why does HN give less of a fuck about its users than Facebook does?

No they will actually refuse to delete your account as well. They did however present the option of renaming the account, but then it turned out that's not possible either.

I disagree that Starcraft doesn't seem harder. The strategic depth is arguably comparable, but the difference is you need the dexterity of a master pianist to execute.

Thanks for sharing, I love stories like this.

Like I already told you, in order to fix your ignorance of how researchers use jargon, you can go through the literature. I'm sorry, but I'm not here to teach you these things, and it's not really my concern whether you're informed or not. I can recommend using Google Scholar as a starting point if you'd actually (surprisingly) be interested in educating yourself.

No one in this thread, or in the article, has claimed that gray matter is randomly distributed.

Regarding your comment about how incompetent I am, and how extremely strange this MRI analysis is:

Measuring cortical thickness by MRI is a standard technique in neuroanatomy since 15 years ago. And really, a quick search of the literature would have shown you this. But I suppose that's too much to ask.

Within a given region, if there is more gray matter, and it is more clumped together, then the distance to nearest non-gray matter will be larger on average. This is what the authors call thickness.

Regarding your other comments about how the authors cherry picked their results and made up numbers in order to fabricate results, I can not take a stance.

Where in the article did you read anything suggesting that "They took the distance to the border (white matter) of all the points in a region."? I read the article, but didn't find anything like that.

The authors explained quite carefully what they mean by thickness, as per the quote I provided. They are measuring the average distance between voxels in MRI scans. Since thickness is a measure of average distance in this case, it makes sense to provide it in millimeters like in the figure you mentioned. If you read the article, the authors make distinction between volume, surface area, and thickness under the "Discussion" part [0].

[0] http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

As far as I know, thickness is a synonym for density. Quote from the article:

To calculate thickness, for each gray matter voxel we computed the distance to the closest non-gray matter voxel. In 2D-space, for each voxel, we took the maximum distance value of the corresponding 3D voxels across all layers and multiplied by two. Mean thickness in each subregion was calculated by averaging thickness of all 2D voxels within each region of interest.

Yeah I do believe it makes a difference, because brain atrophy is linked to a range of cognitive impairments, for example strongly correlated with Alzheimer's disease.

But you're right on the last point though, about assuming thinner is bad automatically. Heavy and chronic cannabis usage has been linked to an increase in density, but a reduction in total volume, which resulted in a slight overall decrease in IQ. The takeaway from all this being: Cognitive function is affected by a variety of parameters and we got more neuroscience to do still.

The study was regarding density, not size.

Anyone know a cheap DIY way to generate quantum-random numbers at home? For example, get a Geiger counter and wire it up to code that counts the milliseconds between clicks... something like that?

I upvoted your comment because it's so constructive, telling me I'm an idiot because I don't find reddit interesting.

I had no idea there was "discussion subreddits" on reddit. I always thought it was a site for hoarding karma by posting memes and puns.

> WW2 doesn't change Pinker's conclusions, by his own admission.

His conclusion from the data is that wars between great powers become less frequent but more deadly. Please read the book you're critiquing.

I don't understand what you mean by "all his arguments held back then" when a significant portion of the book explicitly shows and discusses data regarding the number of wars fought during 1800 and before, compared to 1900 and early 2000. And the fact that another significant portion of the book deals with data about how much more likely a person is to die from violence in general during that period compared to the more recent period. I'm still convinced you have not read the book, and I suspect that is why your counterargument to it resembles a strawman.

Thats wrong, which you'd know if you actually read it.

I'm referring to all data, including political stability. You're less likely to find yourself in a war than ever before.

The source of my claims is the book by Steven Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature.

You're right about everything. But consider ISIS, what kind of communication should we perform that will make future groups like that stop beheading people and raping children? There are situations where violence unfortunately is the only option left, and in that case you will want it to be as targeted and clean as possible to avoid collateral damage. Currently drone strikes is the best tech for that purpose, and we have an incentive to make it better for the reasons previously mentioned.

The world is currently the least dangerous it's ever been in history, and all data and all trends point that it will be even less dangerous in the future. Sorry but you're simply wrong.

Yeah you're right, and those people who got shot probably deserved it because they were probably racists or something.

> ideas can sometimes be obfuscated by abstruse mathematical formalism

They are trying to communicate with other researchers who actually care that the proofs are correct. Maybe you don't, if you're simply trying to reimplement some algorithm, but criticizing research papers for using mathematical formalism is a bit ridiculous.

Alternatively, grow up and stop playing games.

Yeah at that point I had to scroll up and check if the article was posted on April 1, but apparently it's not a joke.

Low socioeconomic status is a predictor for criminality, as well as a predictor for car type owned. Thus car type is correlated with criminality.

They need call and text history to data mine so they can make money off of you by selling ads, and creating a psychological profile that will help make their products more intrusive.

Better stay away from the evil Mozilla corporation, and instead use one of those other, more privacy-aware, browsers like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge.