lmarinho

My usual answer is that math isn't too concerned with what things are, but with how they work with each other. So the answer would be: anything that works like the Peano axioms says it should. The "what it is" can be filled in later, and that's what makes math so powerful.

I was a very fearful flyer, couldn't stop visualizing possible accident scenarios while on an airplane, sweaty hands, grabbing the arm rest, all that. Today I rejoice the experience so much that sometimes I consider buying a ticked just for the sake of flying. I even get excited for simple short haul flights on economy, flying new airplanes, airlines etc.

At the end, it all came down to three things:

1. Learning about aviation as a hobby

As software engineer, it was very easy to get invested into learning about these wonderful machines and how everything around them works. As soon as you understand what is going around you, all the safety measures, redundancies etc., you feel more in control of your environment. Weird noises don't come as surprises anymore[1]. To help you with this I'd suggest following some aviation related channels on Youtube.[2]

2. Flying a lot

I had to spend a couple of years flying 4+ times per month. Having a ton of positive experiences on airplanes does wonders to your uncouncious fears.

3. Flying upper classes

This is a lot harder to do, depending on your financial condition. I do my best to pick a good seat for my flight, hunt for upgrades, use miles to get business/first tickets. Flying on upper classes does wonders to "soften" your experience.

[1] Some examples:

- Airbus flap actuators are usually very noisy and you can hear them if you sit close to the wings.

- Hydraulic actuators on some Airbus models make a barking noise.

- While sitting upfront on smaller planes, you can get some vibration right after liftoff due to the front landing gear spinning before it is retracted.

[2] Suggested channels:

Captain Joe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC88tlMjiS7kf8uhPWyBTn_A

Mentour Pilot: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpHKudUkP5tNgmMdexB3ow

Thanks for bringing this back to the surface. I see that SEPs design has greatly improved since I last visited it. The new looks make for a much more pleasant reading experience, right on par with the excellent content.

I think the best way to make people subservient to their government is to keep their subsistence dependent on it. There has to be a better solution for this.

Automation might make many goods and services readily available without requiring extensive labor, but that also means more people will have access to cheaper goods. Who knows what demands might come up in this new society that people with low skills might be able to cover.

My favourite touch screen UI on current cars is the one on the VW Golf 7. It has this proximity sensor that highlights and increases the size of buttons when your hand approaches the screen.

Overall, the interface is very clean and avoids a lot of visual distractions present in many of these UIs.

It lacks the responsiveness/speed we see on modern tablets, tough, this seems to be the rule on the market, even Tesla's screen is quite slow.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyBUcCno_i8

Very touching. I took some similar pictures of my mom as she fought pancreactic cancer, and of the emptiness she left on rooms and objects.

I find that contemplating the pain in this straightforward way prevents it from growing into some kind of monster in your memories.

I've recently watched this documentary called 'Jiro Dreams of Sushi'. It is about this legendary 85-year-old sushi master in Japan and his two sons who will succeed him in the business. At some point there was an interesting quote that went along the lines: when Jiro dies, his son will need to be twice as good as him, if he is "only" just as good, people will think he is worse.

I think this is quite true in the Apple case, there was a "genius" aura around the Steve Jobs personality that helped inflate the perception of his already impressive achievements. Without that aura, Apple might be doing just as good a job as he would do, but people will think worse of them.

Personally, I think that as long as they keep putting out the excellent quality products they've been releasing lately, pushing into new areas now and then, they will be just fine for quite some time.

What amazes me is that I read the whole article and only noticed this after reading your comment. Now I'm disturbed too.

Hi, It's great to hear that you are back on it! I stumbled on this page a couple of years ago and was saddened to see it wasn't getting updated. Thank you for this great piece of writing.

Something that has been working very well for us is asking for payment before the work starts on a set of deliverables. Charging gets very simple, if he pays, you start working, if he doesn't, you don't. Not every client may accept these terms, if they give you trouble on this, it may be an early warning for future payment problems.

I don't know, I can find plenty of iPhone quality photography on the Web already. I expect professional quality content from dedicated news outlets.

Maybe he can try starting a charter city.

Interesting that he uses the term "objects in space" on this text. I wonder if it was inspired by the Firefly episode with the same name, which itself reflects the directors reading of Nausea[1].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausea_(novel)

A little example I've come up with is writing a bunch of tests for a function you are implementing and seeing them automatically executed.

Try to fix fib by changing a, b and i values:

  (defn fib [n]
    (loop [a 1, b 1, i 1]
      (if (= i n)
        a
        (recur b (+ a b) (inc i)))))

  (= (fib 0) 0)
  (= (fib 1) 1)
  (= (fib 2) 1)
  (= (fib 3) 2)
  (= (fib 4) 3)
  (= (fib 10) 55)

Good point, my statement was poorly formulated. While I agree that analytic geometry and other developments in the field could be more fundamental, Hilbert's formalization can still be useful to express more precisely what one means by "points" and "lines", being, I think, applicable to the current discussion.

I'd also refer to Hilbert's Axioms[1], which are the basis for the modern treatment of Euclidean Geometry.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17384/17384-pdf.pdf

I like the high resolution background image, maybe you could find a more graceful way of introducing it. Try fading it in after it has finished loading, like bing.com, instead of making the user watch it "build down".

During college, in order to plan my time, I used to measure my studying time on more mathematically intense texts. I took 30-60mins per page on average. It is a hard read, at least for me, but intensely gratifying too.

Love the app, congrats! I will start using it this week and see how it goes.

My only gripe with it is related with responsiveness to touch: if I tap on '+' or on 'View all habits', the button doesn't highlight. This can feel frustrating if the next screen takes a while to load and you don't know if your touch was valid or not. This problem happens with almost every button in the app.

I'm curious about how they plan to bring these materials here. I assume changing the trajectory of the asteroid towards Earth wouldn't be a very good idea, considering the potential risk of impact. Maybe small chunks of material brought by numerous cheap reentry capsules are the way to go.

Is there a running list of companies/colleges that engage in this kind of practice? I'd like to know to keep my distance from them. Since they are so keen on invading other peoples privacies I gather they wouldn't mind being exposed on this issue.

The prevailing theory is that it is truly random. Check out the Wikipedia entry on theories that aimed to eliminate that randomness, called hidden variable theories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory

The example I came up with when trying to explain the concept was pretty similar, however I framed it in a problem of finding the total value in a huge amount of coins.

That is correct. If the safest policy is to avoid touching patents altogether and people come up with similar solutions to problems without having any information whatsoever about a related patent it begs the question: what knowledge did the patent bring to the world?

Building on that, I pose a question. Has anyone here ever used a software patent as a reference to help solve a problem?

I recommend listening to the EconTalk Podcast episode on this subject, it's very interesting and informative, as usual: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/07/hennessey_on_th.htm...

That problem is related to the fact that Circles can be both used as (1)a privacy group of people to which you push stuff and (2)a filter for content published from that same group. To avoid this kind of confusion maybe Google should separate those uses more clearly or just drop (2) altogether.

Another way out for (2) would be doing some kind of circle matching: if someone has shared something with you and a circle very similar to your "Close Friends", it should show on the filter for that circle, if not matched to any circle it should go to a 'general' stream.

Hope the real change in that value doesn't disappoints us. If I travelled in time from 1970 to today and looked at this site I surely would be disappointed.

Looks nice, I was looking for something similar the other day, easily sharing a directory over HTTP from command line. I ended up writing a couple of very simple bash functions that added/removed the current directory to ~/Sites (I'm on a Mac). Apache did the rest.

That doesn't seem to be the case but I've met a lot of not-too-bright students that managed to get excellent grades by "optimizing" their study to answer precisely the kind of questions asked more frequently in tests.