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selfishgene

232 karma · joined September 30, 2019

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selfishgene··on The Charmed Life of Frank Wilczek
https://twitter.com/frankwilczek/status/1183476893049380867

Shame on Frank for trying to downplay his connection to Jeffrey Epstein!

Pinker once tried to claim that "he never really liked the guy" either .... but signed on to Alan Dershowitz' legal defense "dream team" to help the latter find a "linguistically valid" way to interpret a law prohibiting the use of the internet to entice minors into prostitution in order to help Mr. Epstein avoid prosecution on racketeering charges in federal court that would have subjected his estimated $500 million estate to criminal forfeiture proceedings ... instead of Harvard and MIT's endowment !!!

Indeed there are also plenty of child rapists hiding within the Catholic Church, which is mentioned in the article.

But Frank is an even bigger fraud on this topic. Students and other faculty members should throw a few proverbial pies at the two-face whenever he attempts to give a public talk ... as they should his colleague and fellow Epstein acolyte Mr. Seth Lloyd:

https://thetech.com/2019/10/23/seth-lloyd-should-not-teach

selfishgene··on Australia: Sex consent app proposal sparks backlash
The lawyer in me asks why would a woman who has consented to 5 other sexual liaisons in the last 3 days be any more entitled to hide the true nature of her sexual behavior from the jury than let's say a member of the LGBTQ community who was involved in a sexual assault case?

It can just as easily be argued that the app which this police officer is proposing in the article is designed to help precisely this type of woman.

Of course details matter. Perhaps an audio recording of the entire encounter that is uploaded to the cloud and deleted after a pre-specified period of time, where both parties give consent orally and report how much alcohol they have consumed in the past several hours, would be a more practical solution to protect the "sexually adventurous" type of woman that the OP is describing here.

selfishgene··on California's Environment Quality Act (CEQA) Is an Abomination That Hurts Housing
It's not just in California where elitist property owners are passing snob-zoning ordinances to artificially inflate the value of their homes ... often by hiding behind environment quality or historical preservation acts.
selfishgene··on Computational Algebraic Topology, lecture notes [pdf]
I'm always interested in applications to signal processing:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-36104-3

You can download it for free from academic libraries that have SpringerLink.

selfishgene··on Incarceration in Real Numbers
Before buying into all of this "research," do realize that it is written by academics who are likely to be among the least impacted by releasing a large number of criminals back onto the streets, since many of them live and/or work near college campuses that have their own private police forces to protect them and naturally much lower crime rates than the neighborhoods where many of these criminals would likely return.

It is fashionable for professors to try to alleve the guilt and the shame that they feel for their "privilege" by making such proposals.

But if they focused attention instead on their own sins, like running a grossly inefficient business operation with far too many overpaid and underworked administrators in high-level positions, many students would appreciate graduating with fewer educational loans ... without having to resort to this type of behavior:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millions-college-st...

Caveat Emptor

selfishgene··on Show HN: Narrated – Personal Screen Recordings
What is the best open-source cross-platform alternative available?
selfishgene··on Donate Unrestricted
Would nudging tax rates a little higher on the highest income brackets and Congress taking steps to close the many tax loopholes that companies exploit to avoid paying their fair share of corporate taxes in this country not also help fix this vexing problem?

As usual, the question boils down to whether or not you prefer monopolists like Bill Gates who "beat the charges" back in 2002 or polluters like the Koch brothers deciding what "good work" gets done ... or the brilliant intellectuals that we elect to Congress like this beauty:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/aoc-republicans-li...

Tough choices for sure.

selfishgene··on Differentiation Under Integral Sign (2015) [pdf]
That is exactly why I recommended it along with his entire website. But thanks for adding the comment.

Suggested edit:

"... the way a world-class mathematician does."

(because it may have a lot to do with why his book is so much better than other texts on this topic like Rudin, Royden, and Cohn.)

selfishgene··on Differentiation Under Integral Sign (2015) [pdf]
Best place to learn about a lot of topics in math including the necessary background for understanding the Feynman trick and related maneuvers is Terrence Tao's website:

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/

Measure theory in particular:

https://terrytao.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/measure-book1.p...

selfishgene··on Guile – Scheme Implementation Supporting R5RS, R6RS, and R7RS Standard and SRFI
TeXmacs is an impressive project spanning several decades:

https://www.texmacs.org

It uses Guile as its scripting language and documents created within TeXmacs are represented as Scheme programs.

In addition to providing a LaTeX-quality WYSIWYG editor experience for scientific documents, TeXmacs can also be used as a computer algebra front-end for packages like Mathics, which provides an open-source implementation of the Wolfram programming language used in Mathematica:

https://mathics.org/

selfishgene··on Ask HN: Best Wysiwyg Text Editor?
TeXmacs for scientific publishing.

www.texmacs.org

selfishgene··on Harvard Apologizes to Terry Karl Who Endured Senior Scholar’s Harassment
Is former MIT president Susan Hockfield going to apologize for taking money from Epstein?

Is she going to apologize for not firing Sloan School hedge fund charlatan Gabriel Bitran after he confessed to a $500 million scam that the SEC only discovered by accident while investigating Bitran's buddy Bernie Madoff?

Bitran had a history of sexual harassment at MIT that Hockfield ignored too apparently:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-14/mit-sloan...

selfishgene··on Feynman's Integral Trick
There are some important mathematical subtleties that this article glosses over. More details can be found here:

http://fy.chalmers.se/~tfkhj/FeynmanIntegration.pdf

selfishgene··on Show HN: QuikPub – Write, Publish and Share rich text via short URLs
What about libel?
selfishgene··on Show HN: QuikPub – Write, Publish and Share rich text via short URLs
Can one edit or remove a post after creating it?

How long are posts guaranteed to stay available?

Do your future plans for the service include creating an authentication method so that users can edit/remove earlier posts or download all of their content and move it to another server if necessary?

How do you plan to deal with libel claims?

selfishgene··on Ask HN: Recommendations for Learning Logical Reasoning?
One of the best introductions:

https://forallx.openlogicproject.org/forallxyyc.pdf

Highly recommended. Also provides good preparation if you want to go on to study topics like non-standard logic and automated proof systems.

selfishgene··on U.S. intelligence officials say Chinese government is collecting Americans' DNA
... and at MIT apparently:

https://www.voanews.com/east-asia-pacific/mit-professor-arre...

selfishgene··on A Scientist Is Arrested, and Academics Push Back
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/06/china-technolo...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/fbi-is-investigating-more-than...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55177975

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/department-justice-s-na...

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/counterintelligence/the-chin...

selfishgene··on What Jeffrey Epstein Did to Earn $158M from Leon Black
And according to Signe Swenson, who blew the whistle on the protection racket that Rafael Reif was running for Epstein, apparently MIT got some of that $158M through the "Leon Black route"

https://www.axios.com/jeffery-epstein-leon-black-route-harva...

selfishgene··on What Jeffrey Epstein Did to Earn $158M from Leon Black
Don't know about law firms, but there were certainly universities standing by to help Epstein conjure up a strategy, like Harvard and MIT.

All MIT did to earn $850,000 from Epstein was send him a thank-you note personally signed by president Rafael Reif, who refuses to step down for it.

Not bad for 30 seconds of work.

selfishgene··on Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
Yes, but Element is also a client for many protocols, Matrix being one of them.

Maybe then I should have asked why still use Pidgin over Element?

selfishgene··on Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
In a nutshell, what reason is left to prefer Pidgin over using a more modern protocol like Matrix with the Element client and bridging to legacy services as necessary?

All the FAQ for Matrix offers on this point is the ability to unify ones identity across services.

Anything else?

selfishgene··on Who is able to make a whistleblower platform for Epstein/Maxwell whistleblowers?
I would assume that she could create an email address using a service like Proton and access it through Tor Browser.
selfishgene··on Twitter sued for allegedly refusing to remove child porn
Think of what Jeffrey Epstein was obtaining from MIT president Rafael Reif in the form of a personally signed thank-you note in exchange for donations to the MIT Media Lab that started back in 2002 with co-founder and accused co-pedophile Marvin Minsky and which continued after his conviction on Florida state child rape charges in 2008 at a time when he was being investigated by the FBI for violations of the Mann Act during "Operation Leap Year."

Epstein's donations to science were a form of "virtue signaling" designed to help him evade prosecution on federal racketeering charges for the sex-trafficking of minors.

The guy had never earned as much as an undergraduate degree in pursuit of his two loves in life, namely "science and pussy," as he once put it to a professor whose work he was funding at the time.

selfishgene··on Who is able to make a whistleblower platform for Epstein/Maxwell whistleblowers?
That's why she wants help setting up a secure site for leaks.
selfishgene··on Who is able to make a whistleblower platform for Epstein/Maxwell whistleblowers?
Can you provide a contact email in your profile?
selfishgene··on Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryptocurrency
More to the point, she was Fed Reserve Chairman under Obama, which makes her a prime suspect here.

Crypto currency is a direct assault on that agency's ability to levy the most insidious and regressive tax of all on the American people in order to subsidize the billions of dollars each year that Congress wastes on pork-barrel spending:

Inflation.

selfishgene··on Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryptocurrency
Much of government spending is an illicit use of taxpayer's money.

So what's the disconnect?

selfishgene··on Show HN: Beeper – All Your Chats in One App
... because divided you are conquered.
selfishgene··on Chinese scientists develop gene therapy which could delay ageing
Wonder if this would increase the risk of cancer in the process.
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