Douglas_Knight02 September 2010 02:09:16AM* 1 point [-]

I couldn't sell the capsules I make because I don't measure them precisely enough (they vary by +/-10% or so).

If it's good enough for you, it may be good enough for customers; it's just a different niche. It may also be an illegal niche.

ETA: flexibility is a good reason.

Douglas_Knight01 September 2010 11:34:14PM1 point [-]

I can sit down and prepare a month's worth of capsules in 30 minutes.

Have you considered buying or selling capsules? It seems unlikely that this is something you should do yourself, but only for yourself.

Also, before you said that you filled 10 capsules per minute. Do you take 10 capsules per day? Do you mix piracetam and choline in a single capsule?

Douglas_Knight31 August 2010 06:38:13AM1 point [-]

Where are you getting your numbers? They sound to me like they come from the National Crime Victimization Survey. These are not reports to police, but the result of asking random people if they have been raped. I don't think that they sample prisoners, so they are probably highly biased against prison rape, but should catch some.

Douglas_Knight29 August 2010 05:39:36AM2 points [-]

I had a lot of early childhood exposure to both the occult and organized religion. I feel that by early 20s I pretty well exhausted everything mysticism and esoteric knowledge has to offer. I have a tendency to get defensive when entire traditions are dismissed by those who have only cursory familiarity. When a group of people pursue a discipline they believe to be useful for centuries, some of their methods and conclusions may be useful.

Could you write about what you got out of mysticism? (I suppose that the third sentence could be interpreted as a reason why not.)

Douglas_Knight12 August 2010 05:28:45AM1 point [-]

Is a duplicated error evidence for or against sabotage?

Heisenberg did not claim to have sabotaged it. Wikipedia claims that the story comes from selective quotation of the last letter here. But, when the bomb was announced, the imprisoned Heisenberg's reaction of frantic work is suspicious to me: it suggests that he knew where the mistake was and wanted to go back and do the work he had blocked (but I don't know the details; maybe he was working on something independent of the mistake).

Douglas_Knight11 August 2010 05:04:07PM2 points [-]

Yes, it's uncountable, so the probability of any particular real number is zero. I'm not going to go into detail by what I mean by a probability distribution here (though I'll note that cousin it used the word "integrate"). To uniformly pick a number $x$ from 0 to 1, use an infinite sequence of coin flips to represent it in binary. Infinity is impractical, but for natural questions, like: is $x$ between 1/5 and 1/sqrt(2), you will almost surely need only finitely many flips (and your expected number is also finite). And the probability that the answer is yes is 1/sqrt(2)-1/5; that is the sense in which it is uniform.

You can transfer this distribution to the set of all real numbers, eg, by logit or arctan, but it won't be uniform in the same sense. One can satisfy that uniformity by a measure which not a probability measure.

Douglas_Knight11 August 2010 03:36:02PM* 3 points [-]

You can have a uniform distribution over a continuous space, but not over integers.

I think it's worth adding that while you can have a uniform distribution over some continuous spaces, like the real numbers between 0 and 1, you can't have a uniform distribution over all real numbers.

Douglas_Knight10 August 2010 06:38:31PM1 point [-]

Of course I've seen lots of articles like that.

The first article opens with "the World Health Organization (WHO) has ended its ban on DDT" which is simply a lie. The third article makes the less verifiable:

Meanwhile, vast swathes of the anti-malaria community, including the malaria teams within national donor agencies, are quietly opposed to DDT. Agencies include insecticide spraying in their literature, but then run No-Spray programs.

but I have never seen evidence of this claim. In fact, I have seen it confabulated on the spot by people caught in the first lie.

Douglas_Knight10 August 2010 06:19:59PM3 points [-]

But the Malthusian argument is basically saying better that they die now to expedite growth later?

If one believes that it is better, for the individual or the group, to die in war or acute famine than to live malnourished, then peace and a stable food supply may be bad (but then one should apply the reversal test and ask such people whether they support war and high variance food supply).

But disease is not like war or acute famine. The survivors are often permanently affected, in many ways like the malnourished. So many arguments that consider malthusian conditions should support medical aid.

Douglas_Knight10 August 2010 06:06:47PM3 points [-]

Rich countries used aid dollars to pressure African countries to stop using DDT.

As far as I have been able to determine, this is false.

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