drx

* Bach, Mozart, Beethoven (get a complete works so it doesn't bore you after a while. There are many gems which are not known by the general public, like the famous BWV 565, etc.)

* Chiptunes (I recommend maktone and dubmood)

* Daft Punk, Ratatat

* Anything I know by heart -- I won't be distracted by the lyrics. This also works if you don't understand the lyrics

That's the way I have set up my websites a few years ago. Never seen a single spam comment since then.

Of course, a determined spammer will overcome these hurdles. But most spam bots don't bother.

Some people, myself included, are wary of Facebook and don't have an account there, for various reasons. Privacy erosion, nasty tactics, spam are among them.

Now I'm not saying these issues are present in Facebook Connect, but I don't have the time to find out and I don't want to gamble that everything will be dandy in the future, especially with a company so removed from ethics as Facebook.

When you name a new product using your old and renowned brand (like Facebook Connect using Facebook), both positive and negative karma is inherited from the old brand. This also may explain why some don't like FB Connect.

And, if you use another company's product (like with Quora and FB Connect), you risk inheriting the consequences of its negative karma as well.

That was very open, which you don't see all that often.

Please let me know when you figure this out, I too am interested in this. My email is in my profile.

This only applies to individuals. Business accounts don't have this option.

This is incredibly useful information, thank you for posting it. In emergency situations (like drowning) I tend to try to rescue people who might be in danger (as long as it's safe, of course). This I did not know and it could have had dire consequences for me.

A guy I know has a form of dyslexia (though I'm not sure this is the correct word) that makes him initially unaware (for a few seconds) of the difference between E and ∃ (and other vertically mirrored characters)

Imagine the horror of graph theory for him (e.g. ∃x,y E(x,y), etc.)

I have no opinion either way, since the field seems to be dominated by empirical "evidence" and cranks, but this guy's entire argument rests on this sentence:

"One of the myths of "Uberman sleep schedule" is that it makes it possible to enter REM sleep and skip non-REM sleep stages entirely. That myth is derived from another false claim that implies a non-essential role of deep sleep. I will ignore these claims as standing in total disagreement with laboratory findings and models of sleep. Instead, let us focus on a more plausible claim of the possibility of compressing sleep stages.".

I.e. "I will ignore one of my opponent's arguments and instead focus on another. Since I can rebuff the other argument, my original viewpoint is true". It's a logical fallacy.

He also tends to say "X is unnatural/abnormal" => "X is unhealthy".

I wish someone did serious research into the topic without prejudice.

If you're asking how to set up a Delaware company as a non-US resident without ever stepping on US soil, then yes, it's possible.

You can do that via an agent. You can find one by googling 'Delaware Inc' or 'Delaware LLC' or by looking at the official list of registered agents at http://corp.delaware.gov/agents/agts.shtml. It usually costs around $200-$300 per annum for the basic service.

It might be possible to connect the brain implant to the brain in a similar way that the eyes are connected to it, thus creating an additional input instead of using an existing one. Brains seem to have an uncanny ability to adapt to new inputs.

Didn't the reddit guys originally want to develop an app like that?

Title case is so inconvenient. For a few seconds I was trying to grasp how Steam, Kickstarter and Diaspora can possibly connected.

The reason I subconsciously did it was that natural numbers have an inherent structure to them. You can describe all natural numbers using only the objects 0 and succ, where succ = (+ 1).

An interesting fact is that this is sufficient to express + and :

a + 0 = a a + (succ b) = succ (a + b)

a 1 = a a * (succ b) = a + a * b

One way to look at structures (like, say, natural numbers) is too look at what really defines them, as in, what is absolutely necessary and sufficient to define them? In this case, 0 and succ is.

Note that I'm not saying you're wrong, everyone is entitled to their own definition of beauty. Isn't that the beauty of it?

Part of the beauty in the original equation is that it contains every object thought to be elemental in arithmetic and moreover, it contains every one of them exactly once.

It contains 0, 1, +, , ^, which are sufficient to express all of elementary natural arithmetics (unless I'm mistaken) -- all natural numbers can be expressed by adding enough ones to a zero (0, 0+1, 0+1+1, ...), and if I recall correctly, + and aren't enough to state all the truths in natural arithmetics so ^ is needed.

There is a very interesting paper on this called "The saga of the High School Identities" by S. Burris (http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~snburris/htdocs/MYWORKS/PREPRI...)

Moreover, it contains three very attractive (if not the most attractive) mathematical constants we know. There is so much we don't know about their relationship. We have no idea if any of these numbers is transcendental or not: pi + e, pi − e, pi*e, pi/e, pi^pi, e^e, pi^e. We don't even know if half of them are even irrational or not (therefore, we don't know if pi is just another facet of e, or maybe an entirely different object!)

So to see all this (and more; one could say so much more) in one equation so terse is so surreal a feeling.

I can't resist not showing this clever derivation of the e Maclaurin series.

I referenced the fact that

e^x = 1 + x/1 + x^2/(2!) + x^3/(3!) + ...

Now, one of the many equivalent definitions of e is that it is the only real number for which this holds:

d/dt (e^t) = e^t

This means that e^t is a real function which is so smooth, that no matter how many times you differentiate it, you always get the same function (it turns out that it is the only such real function)

Now, we know that e^0 = 1 (since x^0 = 1, where x != 0). Therefore, in its Maclaurin series, the only term not depending on x should therefore be 1 (otherwise e^0 wouldn't be 1).

So know we know that e^x looks something like this:

e^x = 1 + (something)

Now we can ask ourselves which this question: since d/dx e^x = e^x, what must also be in the e^x series, if 1 belongs to it? Well, whatever differentiates to 1, so now we know that

e^x = 1 + x + (something)

(because d/dx (1 + x + something) = 1 + x + d/dx something)

Now we can again ask this question for our current form; what must we differentiate in order to obtain 1 + x? And thus we get

e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + something

This way, if we write the two (equivalent) series this way:

e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + d/dx e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2 + x^3/(2*3) +

And we can complete it with the infinite Maclaurin series.

Now this is less formal than it should be and it would probably make the formalists cringe, but I hope you get the idea. You can actually apply the same principle for sin x and cos x, except in their case, they're actually mutually derived from each other. I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader (oh how fun it is to say that after reading this phrase countless times)

It is actually far from just a convention. It has everything to do with the Taylor series of the functions e^x, sin x and cos x.

e^x = 1 + x/1 + x^2/(2!) + x^3/(3!) + ...

If you substitute ix for x, you get:

e^{ix} = 1 + ix/1 + (ix)^2/(2!) + (ix)^3/(3!) + ... = = 1 + ix + (-x^2)/(2!) + (-i)x^3/(3!) + ...

You can also derive the Taylor series for sin x and cos x, which are:

sin x = x - x^3/(3!) + x^5/(5!) + ...

cos x = 1 - x^2/(3!) + x^4/(4!) + ...

Therefore you can see that e^{ix} = cos x + i(sin x). Of course, I haven't shown how to derive the Taylor series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_series) for these functions, but I have to stop somewhere.

I hope that I have shown you that this isn't just an arbitrary convention, in fact far from it. The formula is so beautiful also because of the many intricate relationships between all these elementary mathematical concepts, including complex analysis, trigonometric functions, series, etc.

It should also be noted that this is just one of the many (in fact, aleph zero many) different ways to prove this equivalence.

Edit: Some formatting corrections, sorry, new here.