= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
It's not impossible. Games frequently allow you to use the arrow keys to move around while using the mouse to change the view direction (or vice versa).
I know that; I've played FPSes with that control layout for thousands of hours. I said "while controlling your vehicle with both hands" which means, for example, with a steering wheel, a throttle+joystick, or a keyboard+mouse with the mouse controlling something besides camera angle.
The problem with all this 3d headwear seems, to me at least, to be that they don't really offer any substantial improvement over a monitor and mouse. Our brains don't need stereoscopic displays to percieve a 3d world. Our brains are very very good at building up a 3d representation of a world from just a 2d image (something that comes in very handy in the real world when one of your eyes is closed or non-functioning). And moving around a 3d world with your hand seems to be about the same, if not easier, level of difficulty than moving around with your neck. And the main disadvantage with headwear is discomfort.
I'd give the Oculus Rift a 50% chance of success.
At least augmented reality headwear (such as google glass or the very amazing Meta Spaceglasses: https://www.spaceglasses.com/ ) have something to offer that can't be had by a traditional monitor. However, it still remains to be seen how much people will actually desire those things. I can definitely imagine the Spaceglasses being widely used by creative professions.
EDIT: Changed 'fatigue' to 'discomfort'.
The big advantage over a monitor is immersion. When I tried out an oculus rift I felt like I was inside the virtual space in a way that I've never felt while playing FPSes on a monitor. That's not a small thing.
Another advantage is that it increases how many input axes you have. Think of games where you're flying a spaceship or driving a car and you can freely look in all directions while controlling your vehicle with both hands. That's impossible on a standard monitor.
In response to
Meetup : Portland Meetup?
Excellent! I am excited for this. How will we make sure we see each other? Any suggestions are welcome.
How about we meet by the board games in the science fiction section? That's in the gold room. If I remember right it's near the asterisk on this map: http://www.powells.com/pdf/burnside_map_2011.pdf
I am 6'3", I will wear a black T-shirt with a realistic-looking lightning bolt on the front, and I will have a backpack with a helmet hanging from it.
Actually I looked up in Wikipedia how many licks it takes to get the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, and picked a number that seemed commensurate with the human-licker experiments.
The Chilling Implications you point out (how many licks does it take to get to the center of Hermione?) were totally lost on my consciousness until now. I wonder if that subconscious imagery had anything to do with why my brain produced that response from Hermione?
But still, probably not 187.
"187" is a slang term for murder, which comes from the California penal code. Is this a coincidence?
In response to
The Absent-Minded Driver
In #lesswrong, me, Boxo, and Hyphen-ated each wrote a simple simulation/calculation of the absent-minded driver and checked how the various strategies did. Our results:
- 1/3 = 1.3337, 1.3338174; Hyphen-ated: 1.33332; Boxo: 1.3333333333333335
- 1/4 = 1.3127752; Hyphen-ated: 1.31247; Boxo: 1.3125
- 2/3 = 0.9882
- 4/9 = 1.2745, 1.2898, 1.299709, 1.297746, 1.297292, 1.2968815; Hyphen-ated: 1.29634; Boxo: 1.2962962962962963
As expected, 4/9 does distinctly worse than 1/3, which is the best strategy of the ones we tested. I'm a little surprised at Piccione & Rubinstein - didn't they run any quick* little simulation to see whether 4/9 was beaten by another probability or did they realize this and had some reason bad performance was justifiable? (I haven't read P&R's paper.)
Boxo used his UDT in Haskell code ([eu (Strategy $ const $ chance p) absentMinded id | p <- [0, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 4/9]]); I used some quick and dirty Haskell pasted below; and I don't know what Hyphen-ated used.
import System.Random
import Control.Monad
main = foo >>= print -- test out the 1/4 strategy. obvious how to adapt
foo = let n = 10000000 in fmap (\x -> fromIntegral (sum x) / fromIntegral n) $ replicateM n run
run = do x <- getStdRandom (randomR (1,4))
y <- getStdRandom (randomR (1,4))
return $ trial x y
trial :: Int -> Int -> Int
trial x y | x == 1 = 0 -- exit at first turn with reward 0
| y == 1 = 4 -- second turn, reward 4
| otherwise = 1 -- missed both, reward 1
* It's not like this is a complex simulation. I'm not familiar with Haskell's System.Random so it took perhaps 20 or 30 minutes to get something working and then another 20 or 30 minutes to run the simulations with 1 or 10 million iterations because it's not optimized code, but Boxo and Hyphen-ated worked even faster than that.
I slapped together some C++ in under ten minutes, with an eye towards making it run fast. This runs a billion iterations in slightly under one minute on my machine.
#include <cstdlib>
#include <ctime>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
long long threshhold = 4 * (RAND_MAX / 9);
int main() {
srand((unsigned)time(0));
long long utility = 0;
long long iterations = 1000000000;
for(long long i = 0; i < iterations; ++i) {
if(rand() < threshhold)
continue;
else if(rand() < threshhold) {
utility += 4;
continue;
}
++utility;
}
cout << "avg utility: " << (double)utility/iterations << endl;
return 0;
}
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We learn a number of very interesting things in this chapter. I'll focus on one area
So it's confirmed it exists and that it isn't what people think and that it's power / mechanism isn't what people think.
This is important because thinking back to Harry's early experiments with Hermione, he discovered that if you don't know what a spell does or have been told something completely in the wrong space the spell doesn't work at all. If you know generally what it does, it still works as long as you pronounce it correctly. (The later is also confirmed by the 'for enemies' spell).
In the library Hermione told Harry that the spell is published but no one has been able to actually perform it (nominally due to difficulty). If they all think it does something other than what it actually does, that explains it and is consistent with the book's theory of magic.
Also worth noting, Hermione was killed shortly after she began looking into the stone in earnest.
This part also seems very important. We get a new "major player". This player is powerful enough that QQ couldn't just take the stone and also powerful enough to have taught Dumbeldore many things (and Dumbeldore is thought to be the most powerful wizard in centuries). So here is a behind the scenes power on par or stronger than either major player in the last war.
Nick Flamel seems to just be the most recent alias for this other player, who has probably been around for a long time. For my money, I predict NF is really Baba Yaga ("the undying"). She's been named dropped too often to not make an appearance, and her being NF allows her to have been around all along instead of being an unsatisfying last chapter walk on.
I've been under the impression through the whole story that Harry's father's rock is the philosopher's stone. Is Quirrel just referring to Harry here?
The Harry we know wasn't "born to the name now used", or really born at all, because his current self comes from a merger of the original Harry and Voldemort.
Harry is the repository of much lore about science.
Harry has taught Dumbledore many "secrets" about muggle science and rationality. (hasn't he? I can't remember any specifics because I haven't done a reread in a long time)