yaks_hairbrush

About the transaction costs issue... how do class action lawsuits rate in terms of transaction costs?

I'm with you that the libertarian approach is somewhat worse on the effectiveness scale than what we're capable of doing in our current system. But I'm not going to go so far as you and say it's nonsense.

A current issue in my area (Minneapolis metro area) is 3M's PFCs contaminating ground water in Lake Elmo, Oakdale and Woodbury. 3M released these chemicals into the area starting in the 1940s, when their health and environmental effects were not known. Regulation would therefore not have helped in this particular case.

The court system is working, though: the State of Minnesota is suing 3M for damages, and 3M is engaged in clean up. Note that this lawsuit is not alleging an infringement of regulations (at least, not to my knowledge), but instead is focused on 3M having negatively affected property regardless of intent.

This is one example of the court approach working (I've got my fingers crossed that 3M's gonna lose).

My point is, framing it as a property rights issue and handling it in the courts is a helpful thing and not nonsense.

> Your explanation ignores both externalities and transaction costs

Well, handling property damages in court is deterring "tragedy of the commons" by making putting the commons-over-user at financial risk.

> ... more subtle things like information asymmetries and cognitive overload.

You pay someone to give you information. We do this now: our taxes fund the EPA and they give us information.

> You can't just ignore the parts of economics that don't fit into your ideology.

I'm not a libertarian. To the best of my understanding, there are some things that really should be done by the private sector and not by the government (airport security, for example). There are also things that really should be done by the government and not by the private sector (the trend of privatizing prisons disturbs me).

You asked a question, though: how would a libertarian society's environment be protected. I offered up an option.

Two ways: first, people do not currently value environmental protection. When the environment deteriorates to a certain point, people will be motivated to do environmental protection in the absence of regulation.

Second, allow lawsuits for damage to property resulting from pollution. There could be a neat little lawsuit right now: NY and NJ residents vs. 5 biggest polluters in the world, on account of Sandy and the scientific evidence that Sandy was very much a result of AGW. (But then, it should be noted that lawsuits decided by courts is a governmental function.)

Here's a take on Ulysses written by a former math professor of mine.

http://www.dougshaw.com/Reviews/review1.html

I've not read Ulysses myself, having disliked Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

So, we're agreed that it's good that she didn't clear her plate on that meal?

> If you take in more calories than you need right now, your body will simply store them away for later, and you can eat a little less later on.

Given that it's a lot easier to overeat than to undereat in today's USA, the rest of chain proceeds as follows:

While you can eat a little less later on, you probably won't. Rather, due to eating while already full, your stomach will expand, and you will thereby overeat at subsequent meals (because food is plentiful). Eventually you will be at risk for health complications due to weight. An early death due to weight-related causes is surely a great waste of those extra calories.

The meal was chicken strips and fries from a restaurant kid's meal. Does not do well as leftovers.

Recently, one of my in-laws told my kid that she ought to eat everything on her plate. I responded "If she's full, the food is wasted whether she eats it or it goes in the trash."

I'll bet that pushes the percentage up to ~60%, since the article only talks about food thrown in the trash.

I am depressed (clinically diagnosed as major depression) and I am a parent... a stay at home dad, owing to my lack of employment (which is the root of my hopelessness). It's awful. I hate it.

Thanks in no small part to the kid, I'm getting more outdoors time, more exercise, better diet, and socialization with the kid's friends. My mood is still inching downward.

Oooh... you're getting into some serious math now.

The stable waves on a circle are precisely those waves which oscillate an integer number of times as they traverse. In other words, one for each integer. Further, every function on the circle can be expressed as a sum of the sine waves. That sum is called the spectral decomposition. (This is Fourier series.)

With clever choices of functions, you can get some profound results. For example, picking a saw-tooth wave and doing the spectral decomposition gives the identity

1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + ... = pi^2/6

And, by the way, the left hand side is the zeta function evaluated at 2.

And about functions that are zero at each composite... You may want to check out Dirichlet characters. They are periodic functions which behave nicely under multiplication. Whenever an integer and the period have a common factor, the character will be zero at that integer.

It's not going to be zero at all composites, but it's on the right track.

> signing some rights away.

If a "right" can be signed away, it's not really a right. I recall reading about a case where a woman agreed, in writing, to waive her right to maternity leave under FMLA. She then changed her mind, and the employer sued and lost on the grounds that rights cannot be signed away.

Looked at from that lens, you're arguing that a child's rights can be signed away. My argument is that therefore they aren't rights.

You're welcome!

> One of the things that can seem almost mystical at times about math to someone who has not studied math heavily, is even just simple things, like how pi and e seem to get into everything, even where you might not naively expect it.

Yep. Sure blew my mind when I saw a proof of quadratic reciprocity (a very neat result about square numbers in modular arithmetic) which used complex analysis (how on earth can complex numbers prove stuff about modular arithmetic!?)

> Maybe everything I said above is wrong in some way...

Not really. Your intuition upon seeing this visualization was pretty much right on: studying periodic functions is a way of understanding numbers.

> Or maybe what I've said is so obvious to someone who has studied math seriously that they just want to shout, "Duh!"

Not so much. It took some mighty smart folks to develop some ideas which are perhaps suggested, in hindsight, by this picture. The big one is Fourier series and transforms, which allow you to decompose periodic functions into their constituent sine waves. You can use Fourier analysis to get information about number theory, which was essentially your suggestion. However, that's not at all obvious without seeing this picture. Certainly, my first exposures to Fourier analysis were in the context of signal processing and solving PDEs. I had absolutely no inkling that it may be useful for number theory until actually seeing it. Even if I had seen this picture 7 years ago (when I knew signal processing and PDEs, but not number-theoretic applications), I probably would not have made the connection that you made.

So, I think your intuition was a rather non-obvious idea, and so your comment did not deserve the quick shoot-down. (And even if it were obvious to folks who have studied math, it would still be non-obvious to someone, probably).

> Dude, no offense, you are really making stuff up.

No. Parent has it essentially correct. Many new results in number theory are obtained by studying automorphic forms, which are the stable waveforms, on various spaces.

Things like the Riemann zeta function arise out of spectral transforms of automorphic forms.

Can't speak for OP, but I started learning algebra at 5. It happened that I really liked playing with calculators at age 2-3, and that helped give me an extremely solid mental arithmetic foundation.

Essentially, the special thing about me probably wasn't some super-human neural circuitry for understanding math. It was the fact that I was wired, somehow, to enjoy playing with a calculator. I had more arithmetic practice by age 4 than most kids have by age 11.

Note: This link goes to a "Page not found". To see the article, make the extension ".html"

So funny, and true in a lot of cases. Ultimately, though, I think your naked superman with X-ray vision just has problems with communication, working with people, and most of all adapting efficiently to his environment.

The X-ray vision guy is blatantly choosing to continue bumping into things where the more efficient solution is to put things in place, leave them there, and remember not to walk into those places. That's the failure to adapt to the environment. A mathematician who made an honest effort to, at the least, not upset the software could do pretty well. Probably.

First line:

> Mathematicians have never been comfortable handling infinities...

I stopped reading there, since that is badly false.

Wouldn't making a game guide be fair-use, similar to an unauthorized encyclopedia of a fictional universe (like Middle-Earth)?

Even so, I suppose you'd have to defend the fair-use in court.

I don't like Blizzard much anymore. I liked WarCraft 2 and 3, and Diablo 1 and 2 (liked is a bit of a strong word for Diablo 1 and 2, though... 'twas more addicting than fun). Nice gameplay, good for LAN parties, and a decent hacker culture on all of them. In fact, the excellent map editors in StarCraft and WarCraft 3 were inspired by some hacker-made Warcraft 2 map editors.

Now? Blizzard's doing all they can to control the whole experience. No LAN capabilities, shameful treatment of the bnetd folks, and others that have been mentioned here. Contrast to id games who open source their engines and invite folks to build on them.

A part of the trouble is that most reddits automatically show thumbnails of linked images and videos. Now it's more than "just a link."

Also keep in mind that there are no safe harbor provisions for CP as there are with copyright infringement. It makes no sense to flirt with illegality regarding CP, since one photo judged to be illegal kills Reddit.

I also don't see Wikipedia. Strange.

That's about it. I got my 13" MBA in October because I didn't like all the flux going on with the Linux GUIs, and I've not had very good luck picking Linux-compatible laptops.

OS X really fits my role for it well: A UNIX which works (nearly) perfectly on a laptop with a tight and stable GUI.

Oops... clicking the "Learn more" link also results in a blacked-out page.

One can easily be anti-drug while supporting legalization. I personally support legalization of more drugs, but I'm not going to do them myself and I'm going to do what I can to keep my kid off them.

How is the US government debt the problem? I just don't see it. Government debt certainly didn't cause the problem, we can still borrow at a 2% rate, and there's been little evidence of inflation.

I'm with you. The system, as it stands, is suboptimal, but it's pretty good. If I want to call my brother in Hawaii, it's easy to subtract 5 or 6 hours (HI does not observe DST) and know immediately whether it's a good time to call.

As far as the suboptimal aspects go, DST isn't very nice, and AM/PM is a bit superfluous in the age of digital clocks (compared to 24-hour time).

> While the IIPA says that [...] open source is evil, [...] because it "weakens the software industry and undermines its long-term competitiveness."

What the hell does "undermines its long-term competitiveness" even mean in this context?

> Under oath, Buckwalter said he did not examine Duncan on her first visit because he "did not have time," yet prescribed her 300 tablets of Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication, and the painkiller hydrocodone, a synthetic opiate.

Yikes! This guy is scary.

Of course they do. I do too: If I'm on the left side of the road, and a car wants to get by me, I'll get out of their way so they can drive past me in excess of the speed limit. No big deal, and no one gets hurt.

Link fix: http://www.ams.org/notices/201103/rtx110300368p.pdf

Current link is missing the "f" at the end.