taserian

Who gets to define "good"?

One of my favorite stand-up routines talks about the infamous bumper sticker philosophy, and what happened when the person moved from a left-leaning location to a right-leaning one. https://youtu.be/pKBKLeTZbM4

&& precedence mans that the && arguments are bound first, so:

    .where(p -> p.getCategory == 2 || p.getCategory == 5 && isProductUnderDiscount(p))

is equivalent to:

    if (product.getCategory() == 2 || ( product.getCategory() == 5 && isProductUnderDiscount(product) );

The extra set of parentheses are not needed due to precedence, but have been included for clarification.

Hiya, Scott! I recently heard the first episode of Rationally Speaking podcast episode where you were the guest (yes, I'm catching up with the RS Archives during my long commute). I've also started reading QCSD (hey, if it's going to be our decade's GEB, we may as well give it an acronym. :: grin:: )

I've already corrected my very mistaken understanding of how QC works, as in the tagline of your blog. Are there any other concepts that we need to shake off that would make explaining these concepts easier for the layman? Do you have any words of wisdom for the masses?

I can speak from my own experience; even though English is my first language, I entered as a grad student and TA in a public US university as a foreigner, since my undergrad degree was done outside the US. After they determined that I was capable of speaking understandable English, they actually made me an instructor of record for a 300-level course that none of the active faculty was available to teach.

It was quite an experience.

Thank you for this! I've always wondered if there was anything similar being done.

I will say that this is quite a large collection of papers. Do you have any pointers as to which of these papers I should start with as a foundation?

I've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry, but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in [Languages].

I guess this is the next best thing.

That's a totally different issue. There are multiple products on Amazon that develop a "following" (either because the product is ridiculous on its face, or because it's so ordinary ), and manage to accumulate all sorts of reviews, from funny to poetic. See https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-amazon-reviews/ and https://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Dairy-Whole-Vitamin-Gallon/dp/... as examples.

A lot of the "rarity" with baseball cards was that they weren't inherently rare on release, but that the player on the card became a standout for the team afterwards, and therefore, owning the "rookie" card for them (when they were relatively unknown) was a game of patience and luck. Also, baseball has a avid fanbase that is focused on statistics, and the back of the cards would have the player's stats. I don't doubt that the statistics were available in published manuals back then, but having them on a card made straight comparisons across players easier than flipping across multiple pages.

I have a small velvet bag that I use to keep my cell phone safe from scratches in my pocket. You can keep the fingerprint sensor on, but drop it in a similar bag with the sensor at the bottom; that way, you keep the fingerprint security, but there's an extra step involved before you can use it.

My experience with coding was using the old BASIC books (like the ones at https://www.atariarchives.org/ ), and stubbornly typing my way to make these games work.

When they didn't, I found it enormously satisfying to find out how to work around the problem being expressed in print; there were enough variations in BASICs for different machines that the listing for a TI 99/4A program wouldn't work in straight AppleSoft BASIC, for example.

But the time between typing all the code and finding out if it worked was grueling. I'm not sure if the students of today would be satisfied with that large a report-back loop.

I lived in New York until the early '80s (I was 11 at the time), and I recall the commercial "Take the Train to the Plane". I always thought that they were part of the MTA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkL1LIUsmqc

It's a funny after-dinner speech (where some of the attendees aren't experts in coding theory), providing a somewhat tongue-in-cheek biography of Alice and Bob.

Also a concept used in the game Endgame: Singularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity

I recognize that premise about 3 being an optimal radix from https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/10...

What I feel is most important is reducing the amount of "friction". if the OS is a GUI Linux with Python, it's just a matter of:

- opening a terminal

- `python`

- `print "mikestew"`

The friction to get over is the Terminal ("You mean I have to type to get the computer to do something? Why can't I use my mouse?", and the situation if the above fails because you were using Python 2 or 3.

One of my favorite quotes from James Nicoll:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

A dear favorite of mine was Baldor's Algebra. Everyone else in high school was scared of it, but I found it to be very methodical and easy to follow from one topic to another.

Picture of the cover, with text in Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lgebra_de_Baldor

Slightly off-topic, but is there a resource that collects the music cited in Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach"?

I've never been good at reading music notation, so those sections of the book (which I need to re-read sometime soon) are glossed over, and I feel I'm missing out.

A local speed-dating event. 15 years together this upcoming February, and we have a middle-school age daughter who is a joy (I thought they were supposed to be challenging at this age?).

You might want to check out lesswrong.com

I'd recommend https://www.readthesequences.com/ as something to test the waters; if this is your style, then you'll enjoy lesswrong.com .

Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election?

For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D votes (D = X - Y) and there are less than D provisional ballots to count, is there a reason to count them?

(This being for a simple one-post election; if there are multiple posts where proportion of votes allows for a seat being won/lost by a party, the formula would have to be different.)

Some 10-12 years ago, I used to teach a simple CompSci 102 course on a military base while in grad school. A drill sergeant taking this class was a veritable fountain of stories of military mishaps; one that he liked to repeat was that before Thanksgiving break, he would tell his new recruits that they would be tested for drugs when they came back on base, and encouraged them not to indulge. And when they came back, a non-trivial percentage would invariably be kicked out due to drug usage.

To me, this said more about how casual users think about drugs than about what they believe regarding Army regulations; a disparity between these outlooks that the Army (represented imperfectly by this drill sergeant) was unwilling to budge on.

I've been searching for this myself for some time, but either I don't know the proper search terms, or the knowledge is scattered such that the terminology isn't fixed.

If "more and more issues are national issues", the average citizen is ill-equipped to deal with them. To propose that every citizen must know about everything that affects the nation is untenable.

My apologies for the late reply.

When I need an example of local authority, I always refer to the Catholic idea of subsidiarity, an organizing principle that states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority.

However, we've seen how well that has handled the improper behavior of priests.

What tends to happen in the US is that issues tend to get ignored at the local level, and they basically go up the chain of authority until it falls in the hands of the federal government, not because they want to handle the issue, and not because they're the most capable, but because they can't pass the buck any further. And when the issue isn't handled, it's easier to blame the federal government than to identify the inability/unwillingness of local authorities to do it themselves.

For more on analog synthesizers and systems, the documentary "I Dream of Wires" is highly recommended, and available on Netflix streaming.

I especially like how certain symbols we regularly use nowadays weren't always known that way. For example, the set of integers is now written as \mathbb{Z} , but used to be written as a fraktur "Z" with a bar above.

Why use the "Skype" branding? Why not call them simply "video feed seats"?