natejenkins

Code is here:

https://github.com/natejenkins/xkcd-mario

Thanks for any feedback!

The result is fairly obvious to any dog owner, but the study is representative of the type of "pop" science that appears so often in the news but carries little actual significance. 34 dogs total, 17 in each group (humming vs crying), 9 of which respond to humming and 7 of which respond to crying, albeit the latter much faster than the former. Of those 34 dogs, 16 were therapy dogs. While the time difference is large, more dogs respond to humming than crying.

So we have a very small sample size which is biased towards therapy dogs. It is also very susceptible to p-hacking. Why "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"? Was this the song that produced the largest effect out of 20 different songs? Why do more dogs respond to the humming than crying but the dogs that do respond to crying act so quickly? Were the crying sounds much louder than the humming? Why not crying vs yelling, both of which are likely of similar volume? And so on.

I'll have pastries once a week when I have breakfast with my wife, but otherwise I tend towards yogurt, bananas, and a handful of cereal. I'm not on the "sugar is evil" bandwagon. I definitely do manage my weight but it is more about calorie control than sugar intake. A serving of yogurt will have between 100 and 220 calories depending on if it is plain or has a bunch of good stuff added (I like both), a banana around 100 calories, and a handful of cereal about the same. I love sugary cereal and don't want to eliminate it from my diet. The difference between how I consume it now and when I was a kid is that I really eat one handful at breakfast time whereas in my childhood would eat one to two large bowls.

Granola is the killer. The crunchy kind of granola has more calories per gram than sugary cereal and unfortunately is more dense. I see many people trying to eat a healthy, low calorie yogurt and granola breakfast only to fill the bowl with granola. Game over.

At worst this is a 1% error rate, at best 0.1%. Scientific validity aside, I find it unbelievable this was not considered reasonable doubt.

It would be nice if someone could explain any of the exceptions to the Oddo-Harkins rule, such as the dip at atomic number 44, Ruthenium.

N ~= 2flfefcL

where fl is the fraction of habitable planets hosting life, fe is the fraction of life-bearing planets that develop an intelligent life-form, fc is the fraction of intelligent life-forms that decide to communicate, and L is the length of time a given civilization is transmitting "visible" communications. Taking ourselves as an example, L is already on the order of 100 years. The original estimates for these values were fl = 1, fe = 1, fc = 0.1-0.2, and L = 1000-100,000,000 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation).

I'm impressed with anyone who will get in the ring. I might try it again one day with headgear. It's a spectacular workout and I'm sure it would be fun if you could get beyond the pain and fear and start using different tactics and strategies.

All other sports are now erring on the side of caution when it comes to concussions, especially American football. In boxing the whole point is to give the other guy a concussion. You don't fall down from getting knocked over, you fall down because your body forgets how to stand up. And once that happens, which is some form of minor (or major) concussion, everyone cheers you on, encouraging you to stand back up so that you can get concussed again. Amazing.

Pressure and strain are known to have large effects on superconductivity. In fact the highest known Tc of any material is HgBCuO under externally applied pressure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_superconductiv...).

"Among these, the enhancement in the dx2-y2 character of the in-plane electronic structure is likely to favour superconductivity."

They cite two of their past publications, "Optically enhanced coherent transport in YBa2Cu3O6.5 by ultrafast redistribution of interlayer coupling," and "Optically induced coherent transport far above Tc in underdoped YBCuO." If they had actually unequivocally shown pulsed YBCO to be superconducting at room temperature the title would be more like, "ROOM TEMPERATURE SUPERCONDUCTIVITY YES!!!!!"

The real demonstration of superconductivity is measuring a Meissner effect (exclusion of magnetic field) in the material (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meissner_effect). I haven't read the articles in detail, but it sounds to me like they have seen some properties that are similar to those found in the superconducting state, but they have not measured a definitive signature of superconductivity.

Anyway, focusing on finite groups, mathematicians spent many years trying to classify finite groups into different types. For instance, every finite group of prime length is a cyclic group (http://groupprops.subwiki.org/wiki/Group_of_prime_order). This is already very cool since it implies that for each prime number, there is exactly one group with that number of elements, anything that looks like another group can be mapped 1:1 with the cyclic group.

There are many other types of finite groups and the vast majority (this is an understatement) can be classified as one type or another. At some point mathematicians realized that although there are an infinite number of finite groups, maybe they could classify all finite groups into one type or another and set about doing so, with the caveat that there is a finite number of exceptions to this classification, and these exceptions are called sporadic groups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_group).

Here is where my knowledge is the fuzziest but also where things get awesome. Using a form of magic only available to mathematicians, it was predicted that an extremely large sporadic group existed somewhere out there, avoiding classification into one of the standard group types. I am guessing that certain hints to its existence were popping up here and there but have no idea as to what those hints might look like. In physics, particles have been predicted before (and at least one time using group theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eightfold_Way_%28physics%29), these predictions usually stem from attempting to explain experimental results. Mathematics lacks these experimental results so these sorts of predictions are all the more impressive.

Anyway, back to this extremely large group. It was given the name the Monster Group and an upper bound was given as to its size. If I recall correctly (I cannot find a citation), this upper bound was considered the largest useful number of all time (any child can name a number larger than a number given to them, but using it in some novel way is not so easy). Eventually the Monster Group was found, fulfilling the prediction, and its size given as 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000, far below the upper bound but still quite large nonetheless (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_group).

Also, mathematicians succeeded in classifying finite groups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simple...), it only took several hundred articles and tens of thousands of pages to do so.

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I don't agree here. First off, your two years of high school German, like my two years of high school Spanish, were likely a waste of time. I had the highest grade in class and couldn't speak a word of Spanish, although I could write simple sentences in present tense quite successfully.

I moved to a French speaking country when I was 23. Initially, like most Americans, I thought that learning languages was hard so why bother. After one year abroad I basically spoke 0 words of French. Once I decided to stay long-term I took a French class, it was once a week for two hours for about 7 months. I was teaching physics in French a few months later. Granted I wasn't fluent, but it was good enough and my students were incredibly patient. By the time my own French course started up again it was unnecessary, I was learning more than enough during the day so I quit.

The key part was that the French class was only in French from day one. You could not ask a question in any language other than French because the teacher couldn't understand you (in reality she simply feigned incomprehension). Amazingly, a good teacher can make you understand a language you don't speak by speaking to you in that language. For the life of me I don't understand why high schools in the US don't adopt this system.

Babies are great at learning languages and you have a massive advantage over them, you have the power of reason. You also have the massive disadvantage of people refusing to speak to you like a 2-year-old.

My advice, if you really want to learn German, is to spend the next 6 months speaking to someone in German for an hour everyday (there are some websites that let you do this remotely). Same time investment as before, but I'm guessing you didn't spend so much time last year actually speaking with someone. Babies don't learn to speak through books, they listen for a year and then start saying extremely simple things. Learning to read in German will do wonders for your vocabulary, but it won't allow you to have a conversation. As someone who is quite anti-social, I find this unfortunate, but the wiring required to speak another language gets put in much faster by speaking said language.

Also, don't bother learning how to speak in present tense, learn how to speak in the past and future. You want to be able to say what you did yesterday and what you are doing tomorrow. People ask you how your weekend was and what are you doing for vacation, they know what you are doing right now because you're talking to them. Surprisingly, I can't think of a language where it is harder to speak in the past or the future than in the present due to verb conjugations becoming largely trivial.

I want to emphasize that I was not an especially gifted student in my French class. We were all total beginners and by the end of the course most people were functionally speaking French.

If what you want out of music is to press the correct keys in the correct order then reading music will get you a long way. But if you are leaning more towards jazz or pop and making your own music then reading can be a horrible crutch. And the better you are at reading music the more you will rely on it and you rob yourself of developing a functional ear.

And what happens when you fall in love with an obscure indie artist where no transcriptions exist?

Concerning which string on a guitar is used, you can often tell by the tone of the note. Even with muted strings that give a percussive "pluck" you can often tell which note was fretted. For the most part if you are familiar with the style of music you can make very good guesses as to where on the guitar something was played, and if you cannot tell the difference then I would argue that it doesn't really matter.

Finally, out of the long list of musicians I admire in jazz, blues, and pop, I cannot think of one example where they admit they cannot play by ear. In the subset that teach I cannot think of one example where they do not strongly suggest learning music by ear.

It will be painful at first if you don't naturally have good ears, it was painful for me (which is why I avoided doing so on saxophone), but the payoff is huge. It changes you as a musician. I've heard songs on the radio where I knew the chord progression and thus knew how to play the song before even picking up the guitar, that is pretty cool. I might come up with a bit of a song in the shower or in the car and when I sit down at the guitar and figure it out. Neither of these would be possible if I hadn't put in the hours listening to bits of songs again and again.

At the same time, if you are a beginner or intermediate player, I'd recommend justinguitar.com to get started. His youtube channel is extensive, and he and Marty Schwartz were my two main guitar teachers.

Also, I've met people who have played guitar for some time but cannot play bar chords. This simply shouldn't happen. There will be a song you want to play where you will need a bar chord, and you will either have to learn how to play bar chords or learn a way to "cheat" on that particular chord. Bar chords are awesome, piano players would kill to have a movable shape that makes transcription trivial (they'd also kill for a capo). They are well worth the initial effort and once you can finally play them you'll realize that they aren't that hard.

"Food consumption refers to the amount of food available for human consumption as estimated by the FAO Food Balance Sheets. However the actual food consumption may be lower than the quantity shown as food availability depending on the magnitude of wastage and losses of food in the household, e.g. during storage, in preparation and cooking, as plate-waste or quantities fed to domestic animals and pets, thrown or given away."

This is the amount of food available for consumption per person, not the amount consumed. Waste at the grocery store, waste at home, and uneaten food left on the plate are not taken into account, and I would guess that all three are important factors.

From personal experience, I would say the average weight gain per year in the US is a few kilograms, let's say 2. This is 18000 calories in excess, which is just about 50 calories a day, or basically one apple too many. The clear lesson to be learned is to cut back on the apples.

There are some studies that agree with my anecdotal evidence: http://www.livestrong.com/article/142567-average-increase-we...

Am I alone in not liking this line? I don't see the correlation with code review. I initially thought this site was yet another "prevent drunken code commits" tool, which I'm not at all interested in, and not a code review tool, which I find quite interesting.

Scrolling down the page, I came across:

Codebrag is not about code reviews. Well, not only about that. It's about making your life easier by helping you write better code. And that means not staying late. And an empty office on Friday evenings. Because everything is "done done". Just kill the lights and enjoy your weekend.

This is where I closed the site. I don't think about code review as a tool to relieve me of work duties on a Friday night, I view it as a tool to help my software development. To be honest, as someone who works at a small company trying to become a big company, there has never been a moment where everything is "done done".

Just to clarify, I'm not dissing the site overall, it might be awesome, I just think the text on the homepage could be modified to tell potential users such as myself why I should be using Codebrag instead of Github for code review.