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hadronzooon Flipping 10 heads in a row - a small probability demonstration

It's relatively easy toss a coin and always get heads (for both biased and unbiased coins): http://books.google.com/books?id=tTN4HuUNXjgC&pg=PA317#v... (Jaynes's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, Section 10.3)

hadronzooon United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P

I quite agree with you (and Fisher) that the Social Security system's problems are solvable (you might have confused me with winestock). My point was that SS is a distraction–Medicare dwarfs the other entitlement liabilities–and it will take more than rolling back the Bush tax cuts to bring about budget surpluses.

hadronzooon United States loses AAA credit rating from S&P

I think it will take more than rolling back the Bush tax cuts. If no entitlements changes are made, it would take roughly twice the GDP of the entire world:

"Add together the unfunded liabilities from Medicare and Social Security, and it comes to $99.2 trillion over the infinite horizon. Traditional Medicare composes about 69 percent, the new drug benefit roughly 17 percent and Social Security the remaining 14 percent." –Richard W. Fisher, Dallas Federal Reserve President, May 28, 2008 [1]

1. http://www.dallasfed.org/news/speeches/fisher/2008/fs080528....

hadronzooon How Will DIDO Wireless Networking Change Everything?

> Using this new technology shared spectrum is not limited by Shannon's law at all. They can get 10x what Shannon's law is possible. They have 10 radios working, all at the Shannon limit on the same frequency and they do not interfere with each other at all. They think they can get to 100x, 1000x, they don't know what the limit is. They can do 100x what cellular does now with the same spectrum. This means no more dead zones. No more drops.

The wireless industry is notorious for snake-oil salesmen. When you actually claim that your technology violates Shannon channel capacity, it doesn't inspire much confidence that you understand information theory.

From the description (this is just a guess), it appears that DIDO offloads channel characterization to a centralized server to reduce the computational requirements of the clients (similar to AGPS). MIMO techniques (like DIDO) do not violate Shannon capacity. They improve Eb/N0 by increasing gain through beam-forming and physical antenna diversity. In addition, DIDO appears to be using some form of asynchronous spread spectrum (even though they deny using CDMA, there are many other flavors), which allows all clients to transmit simultaneously by using orthogonal codes. Spread spectrum techniques also improve gain at the expense of bandwidth.

While they may have a good implementation, I don't see anything earth shattering here.

hadronzooon We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future

It's difficult for me to buy Tyler Cowen's thesis that all of the huge gains in marginal productivity have been tapped. If you're a developer, you tend to see incomprehensible inefficiency everywhere, especially if you consult for larger organizations or work on applications that involve human collaboration. I think a more probable explanation for "The Great Stagflation" is the unprecedented level of market intervention and regulation that did not exist during the industrial revolution.

hadronzooon As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensnared

"And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt." —Tacitus, Annals Book III, 27

hadronzooon BitTorrent - It's not just about copyright any more

RaptorQ codes, an efficient fountain code implementation, have a relative reception overhead of K+2 symbols with probability of 99.9999%. See: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rmt-bb-fec-raptorq-06

Unfortunately, they're patent encumbered.

hadronzooon Razoring Ockham’s Razor

MacKay makes an argument for Occam's Razor using logical probability: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~mackay/itprnn/ps/345.357.pdf

hadronzooon Fargo: new Scheme-like language working in Node.js/browser

  > (cdr '())
  => ()
  > (cdr (list))
  => ()

hadronzooon A working implementation of fully homomorphic encryption [pdf]

Bootstrapping technique: http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/145.pdf

hadronzooon Why shaken, not stirred?

FCI recently performed an empirical comparison of shaking vs. stirring:

Shaking completely chills, dilutes and aerates a drink in around 15 seconds, after which the drink stops changing radically and reaches relative equilibrium. Shaking is basically insensitive to bartender-induced variables. …bartender skill is very important in a stirred cocktail. Because stirring doesn’t reach equilibrium, stirred drinks are warmer and less diluted than shaken cocktails. Stirred drinks, unlike shaken ones, are not aerated. Stirring does not alter the texture of a drink—it merely chills and dilutes. A properly diluted cocktail stored at -5 degrees Celsius in a freezer is indistinguishable from a properly stirred one. http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/09/02/cocktail-science-in-...

hadronzooon Jeff Hawkins talk on modeling neocortex and its impact on machine intelligence

Vitamin D's software is built atop Numenta's platform: http://vitamindinc.com/demo.php

hadronzooon Visualizing hierarchical data using Voronoi Treemaps

Here's an interactive example visualizing average consumer spending: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080...