has2k1

I thought of telomere length too, but given that the person is an outlier in age and they are healthy would it still be as accurate a measure?

I think the biological aspect that is the proxy for age should not affect the well-being of the person.

> ... had mind-bogglingly idiotic parents who raised him the wrong gender ...

Though uncommon, XX children can have ambiguous genitalia at birth. Today (1) we have some idea on what it is and we can deal with it at various stages of growth in-utero, at birth, during infant development, at adolescence or even later? Faced with a similar situation the past, parents gambled (aided with biases and superstitions). Is that sufficient to call it idiocy, I do not think so.

1. https://childrensnational.org/choose-childrens/conditions-an...

> This raises the question of why gold tends to be found near other gold on Earth.

When you spin a combination of stuff that is "loose enough" at sufficient speeds, the centrifugal force acts on the constituent masses differently. As a result similar masses coalesce.

This is the same principle used to separate and concentrate (enrich) all kinds of stuff in centrifuges.

> But evolving wings loses the ability to climb

I think you are skipping steps as you try to imagine the process. Wings are at the extreme, there are intermediate features. Checkout a video of "flying squirrels", you will notice that they are more like "gliding squirrels".

You cannot cheat that way. It tracks time since the question became live.

> Machiavelli's dislike of mercenaries was poorly placed, as after all they were simply following the economic incentives.

That is part of the reason he did not like them, their loyalty was bought and the "prince" who used them did not have any other leverage. It is difficult to win and then govern with mercenaries as the protectors of the kingdom. A long standing mercenary army does not convey legitimacy, and when disbanded there are issues of proper resettlement and worry about a rival acquiring their service.

To get a better understanding of her use of the word "metaphor" I recommend the book Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff. It makes the argument that the language (specifically the concepts we build using the language) we use is metaphorical. It goes on to show how wholesome the bind between metaphors and concepts is.

From reading the book, if someone says that "In a complex world we perceive, think, understand and communicate metaphorically.", I get what they mean. It occurs to me that her use of the word "metaphor" follows from such a comprehension.

Medicine 200 years from now will be different. Doctors are largely ignorant of nutrition. When you go to the doctor, how often do they ask about the what you eat? Unless you really look unhealthy or you mention some correlation between the symptoms and a specific food, your diet is a lowly weighted factor in your unwell being. I think that will change, and many of the catalysts will be from patients who teased out the effects of nutrition on what ails them.

There is also a significant leakage of nutritional advise from sports science, and all this information is finding adherents/testers in the regular world and will eventually (after the pseudoscience is sorted out) have a corrective influence on medicine.

I think at some point Medical nutrition therapy (MNT) will be a lot more common and maybe even have specific practitioners, (like physical therapists) instead of being a doctor-nutritionist partnership. The practice will evolve and it will get standardised and taught to "specialists".

That the ailment is nutrition based competes with all other factors. It is a giant diagnosis problem, not a just a nutritional elimination problem.

> Their business model has nothing to do with their own analytics talent

I recall — some years ago — when they were advertising for Jobs, some of the criteria for potential technical fitness was a high placement in some of the competitions. Plus, I have engaged in a few of the competitions and you have to have a team of capable data scientists to design them. They are not clueless people.

As a company that deals with data analysis, Kaggle can surely tell between different levels of user participation.

I interpret it charitably as "some fraction of users forced to register in order to download data go on to become active users of the platform".

It is easy to confuse it for such, but it is not bootstrapping. It is a form of multi-dimensional random variable generation, where the generated dimensions preserve same correlations/relationships as those in the original dataset.

Have you considered that maybe the language had not evolved enough for them to be appealing. With b'' and u'' string syntax coming into the language, there is a realisation that string interpolation can be an opt-in feature among other reasons.

What you have is decision making analogous to the function

    evaluate(string_interpolation, python_ecosystem)

which is different from

    evaluate(string_interpolation)

Back-ports are an option but they are an extra dependency. When you have not used a new feature, the cost of an extra dependency out weighs the unknown benefits that would be realised by using a back-port.

I have been conditioned to write code that is 2/3 compatible, that even when I am writing specifically for the PY3 interpreter the code turns out to be a __future__ import away from being valid PY2. I did not think much of them at first, but very recently, f-strings have changed that.

I think many people get imprinted with writing the PY3 code using only the features available at the time they switched over.

If you buy into Pansychism [1], bacteria are very conscious.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

> Barring a major collapse, we are unlikely to forget about them ...

It is not a given that generations that live through changing times (whether regressing/progressing technologically) will maintain the same priorities and convictions.

For example, imagine there are 100 (some number much bigger than 1) radioactive waste sites scattered around locations with different economic capabilities. Then a discovery is made that, though costly enables complete recycling/cleanup of the nuclear waste. Some locations are able to cleanup and some are not. The emergence of a solution reduces the perceived danger posed by nuclear waste. The longer it takes for all the locations address the issue, the easier it becomes to forget about it.

Really interesting view point. When the convenience of use improves along with the performance of the methods, then we worry less about not understanding how the methods work.

In the broad sense, isn't this an example of how we trust?

When it is time someone or a group of people will step up. Then issue will become that of adaptation. Enough people will have to see it through the early and rough stages. Prospective users will have to not get turned off by negative hastily written or outdated opinion pieces.

Most people would not be willing to give a chance to what may be a great product in 5-10 years. So the next great operating system will most likely sneak in through a Trojan horse. My bet would be, containers, something, something, something, operating system.

Most side-channel attacks have mainly been a threat to the implementation of cryptographic systems and algorithms. Now Specter and Meltdown have brought that concern to all systems.

The gist of the parent post is, create complex systems and these things will bite.

Remember the rule of paw, don't pick the prickly pears by the paw.

I think so too. Maybe a way around is if you think of it as being largely carrots and sticks. When the stick is big enough the results can be comparable to those of universal virtue.

Parent says

> ... to produce screen casts ...

Not "to consume".

The democratisation/commoditization of a technology increases the probability that any given one capability of that technology will be discovered [1]. If what you think of as "very hard" is rooted in historical and present capabilities, those with angst on the issue are uncertain how long it will remain "very hard". Given that there is radical change, I do not think that sense of dread is misplaced.

[1] This is no a frivolous statistical argument. It helps establish a lower threshold and when other factors are considered the effect is strictly increased. The are some counter reasons, they help to think about he problem, but they are less convincing.

I wonder if given the input and output of the algorithm, you could train some type of deep neural net. And if successful, what the hidden layers would look like?

> In another 300-500 years

instead of "In the future", triggers me. Do you know something we do not? I am resigned to the notion that everything is up for grabs.

> I am not sure if I am a toy simulation

We need "reality discriminants". The trippy thing is if they could exist and their output is not necessarily boolean. There would be a threshold point at which beings can exist along the simulated-real spectrum, were by they can understand the output of the "reality discriminants", yet they are not real.

For this particular case, are you accusing the raccoons of just merely adapting positive outcome superstitions?

> People who regularly took medication, such as beta-blockers, which impede parts of the nervous system, often had lower rates of cancer

This is not far away from backing up the link between long term stress and cancer.

> Language is not knowledge or culture. It is merely a tool for communication

A lot of culture co-evolves with language. In a language are myths and legends, some of which contribute to the words in the language, which then give birth to other proverbs and stories, and so on. All of which and fragments of which become available for communication. The more knowledge and culture a language loses, the more bland communication in that language becomes and the information density of the language decreases. This in turn affects communication because to maintain the same amount of information it has to become longer, so the attitude towards communication changes. And so does the message.

The tool of communication is part of the message itself.

Singular persons influence people, ..., attitudes change and then governments react.