It has always perplexed me how WWII US cryptographers managed to get anything done, when the plaintext still looks like gibberish -- further complicated by a novel encoding betweeen a non-western script and EM signals.

I believe the Germans had a policy of starting every message with some standard boilerplate, so Allied cryptographers were usually able to perform known-plaintext attacks with only passive monitoring as long as they observed any one message while it was still unencrypted.

I posted some comments on the Eli Dourado page, but it looks like the conversation had long since stopped, so I'll repost them here:

-There could be a central monetary authority that conducts monetary policy (for Bitcoin), and signs its actions. That would kind of defeat the purpose of a decentralized currency though.

-Regarding the idea of making the money creation rate inversely proportional to total spending rate (“NGDP”), Wei Dai said:

The only problem I can think of with this right now is that a malicious attacker could try to slow down or stop money creation by doing a lot of transactions between accounts they control.

This isn’t so much a problem of attacks on the Bitcoin per se, but one inherited from the problems of current monetary theory: economists like Scott Sumner think it would all be so much better if monetary policy aimed to stabilize (the growth rate of) total nominal spending. But such a measure is uninformative and Goodhart-prone for the very reason you give: the goal can be trivially met by simply doing a bunch of “toy” transactions between people until NGDP is at the desired level.

Incidentally, this is why I think the idea of NGDP targeting is fundamentally misguided, as are the people who conclude it’s a reasonable solution.

Also:

Bitcoin is fully traceable, in the sense that you can see all transactions and for each transaction you can see the amount and the addresses of the sender and recipient. (An address is a public key, so you don’t necessarily know how they are linked to physical people.)

But how do you tell people who to send the money to without telling someone the connection between your identity and your public key (from which they can trace all further targets of the money from that key)?

Part 2, group II question:

What is the altitude of the highest point in Sweden?

Give an estimate in a subcomment. Please begin your answer with "I suppose the correct value is probably" or some other preface of comparable length; if you write just the number, it appears in the Recent Comments bar and can bias other respondents.

Wrote this in some free time during class (similar theme to Dorikka's):

When a shiny new theory you're makin'
That's non-obviously mistaken
Nature cares not a bit
How you justify it
If it disagrees with data taken

I figure limericks are good at sticking in someone's head, even if the structure makes you distort your point a little.

I'm currently studying physics at my university.

This may have been discussed before, but what level of interest in physics is there on LW? I seem to recall seeing someone saying they wanted to learn physics, but I don't remember if there were seconds to that.

Mostly I'd just recommend the same as everyone else, but I'd also recommend you to pay close attention to the environment of the schools. It might not make a difference for you, but it could certainly hurt your studies to, say, be an asthmatic at a college that's 1/3 smokers. Especially watch out for colleges that get far different light exposure than you do at home. This can seriously mess with your moods and that's usually not good for your studies.

On a different note, also make sure you're ok with the weather patterns at all your universities. I personally know 4 people from warm climes who dropped out of my university and moved home because they couldn't take the snow; don't waste your money like that!

Best of luck in your choice and your studies!

Edit: Once you get in and pick a field of study, try and get to know some of the professors in the department. Not only will this help eventually get letters of recommendation for grad school, it makes getting help on a tricky assignment that much easier :).

How come nobody has pointed out the absurd ignorance of how Anonymous works evident in this? Anonymous isn't a coherent group with a leadership or shared goals it's just a Smart Mob.

Judging from the comments, cooking seems to be a big area where Less Wrongers feel tentative. I'm really surprised

I don't find it surprising at all. At least for myself, my brain tags cooking under the category of "boring housework chores", giving me negative motivation to actually learn it. The "pay attention to recipes and follow directions carefully and it's easy" part may actually be making it worse, since it strengthens the image of a dull, uninteresting task.

Intellectual types often find basic household chores as the kind of things that aren't worth wasting their time and smarts on, not when there are more interesting / important things to do. I can certainly admit being guilty of this.

Hi all, I'm a physics student who's been lurking here since January or so...I'm generally pretty quiet.