The coin flip is a brilliant piece of technology for generating trustworthy random noise:

• Making a two-headed coin is forgery, which is a crime.
• Such trick coins can be foiled anyways by calling the toss in the air.

Thus when teaching the concept of a Bernoulli variable, we use the example of coin flips, because everyone already knows what they are. This is unfortunate because the very next concept we introduce is a biased Bernoulli variable, which corresponds to a "weighted" coin. But weighted coins don't exist! If it were practical to manufacture trick coins with arbitrary biases, coin flipping wouldn't be as popular as it is.

If there was a consensus among the 8 as to which tuning is better, that would be significant, right? Since the chance of that is 1/128 if they can't tell the difference. You can even get p < 0.05 with one dissenter if you use a one-tailed test (which is maybe dubious). Of course we don't know what the data look like, so I'm just being pedantic here.

Progress towards a robotic piano tuner: Entropy piano tuner attempts to accommodate "variations in string thickness, stretching, corrosion, dents, the harp flexing", etc. by minimizing the entropy of the power spectrum. Using it should be better than mindlessly tuning to a digital guitar tuner.

According to the website, professional pianists still prefer a human-tuned piano, but no one else can tell the difference. And the general opinion on piano tuner message boards seems to be that it's not quite good enough to replace a professional tuner's judgment.

This post is wrong. Thanks to SymplecticMan for the thought experiment demonstrating that a mixture of ideal gases follows a $T^{3/2}$ law rather than my proposed $\frac{1}{T}$ law. (It's also different from Newton's $T$ law.)

I made a pretty but unjustified assumption — that a cooling baking sheet can be modeled as a dynamical system where each possible transition is equally likely and in which heat is transferred in fixed quanta, one at a time. This contradicted Newton's law, and I got excited when I realized that Newton's law was merely a first-order approximation.

My mistake was not noticing that Newton's law is a first-order approximation to any model of cooling where heat transfer increases with temperature difference, so I had not observed any reason to favor my model over any other.

In penance I have acquired a copy of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics by de Groot and Mazur, with the intention of eventually reading it.

Another example is risk compensation: You make an activity safer (yay) and participants compensate by taking more risks (oh no).

Interesting, it felt less messy to me than, say, rationalist-adjacent research retreats.

lsuser says that as a result of his spiritual journey, "now if there is so much as a cardboard box on my kitchen counter, it bothers me". Has your spiritual practice changed your tolerance of clutter?

In other words, the zero-information oblivion that produced you once can produce you again, maybe in a different form.

Huh, that's Epicurus's argument against fearing death. But while Epicurus assumed there is no afterlife, you're using it to argue there is one!

Re: safety, it depends on exactly where you are, your skill in assessing strangers' intentions from a distance, and probably the way you carry yourself.

Speaking of which, I'd be interested in playing some improv games with you at less.online, if you want to do that!