Comment author: ArisKatsaris 01 June 2016 10:30:15AM 0 points [-]

Other Media Thread

Comment author: PipFoweraker 01 June 2016 07:25:43PM 1 point [-]

Today's SMBC will drag a smile out of many people here if thy haven't read it already.

Comment author: SquirrelInHell 24 May 2016 02:26:32AM 5 points [-]
Comment author: PipFoweraker 24 May 2016 04:19:19AM *  0 points [-]

Whoah. That gets many points. What an excellent layout! We need to know what boots are for it to translate, but that's a lot closer to an ideal solution than I've worked through.

Edit - I thought the diagram looked familiar!

Comment author: Elo 23 May 2016 01:29:35AM -1 points [-]

Australia, NSW. I am a young and healthy person with no existing conditions, also good vision and no wisdom teeth. (looking to get health insurance)

It seems that it varies from just hospital, through to full associated cover including money back for having a gym membership, massage and more. I am hesitant because it seems that I would pay more for that than I would otherwise pay for services that I would use (as a healthy young person right now).

Comment author: PipFoweraker 23 May 2016 01:53:46AM 0 points [-]

In your situation, in Australia, it's mostly about forward planning. Do you have any foreknowledge of likely changes in your health or family situation?

The insurance market in Australia has historically been pretty poor in terms of transparency and easy comparisons. I'm sure you've found the various compare-policy tools online. I'm assuming you don't want to piggyback on a family policy.

Are you looking for more data, or a list of considerations for insurance planning? If it's the latter, try browsing around insurance industry planner websites for their policy documents. I can probably get some friends in the industry to email me more comprehensive things if you want to work of their approaches.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 May 2016 01:18:20AM 4 points [-]

Bayes is mostly about conditioning, and so I think you can draw a Venn Diagram that makes it fairly clear.

Comment author: PipFoweraker 23 May 2016 01:48:51AM *  1 point [-]

Thanks! I've been playing around with it for a week or so but can't elegantly find a way to do it that meets my arbitrary standards of elegance and cool design :-)

Becomes easier when using non-circular shapes for Venn-ing, but my efforts look a little hacky.

Comment author: PipFoweraker 23 May 2016 12:58:21AM 4 points [-]

Reminiscing over one of my favourite passages from Anathem, I've been enjoying looking through visual, wordless proofs of late. The low-hanging fruit is mostly classical geomety, but a few examples of logical proofs have popped up as well.

This got me wondering if it's possible to communicate the fundamental idea of Bayes' Theorem in an entirely visual format, without written language or symbols needing translation. I'd welcome thoughts from anyone else on this.

Comment author: Elo 23 May 2016 12:22:52AM -1 points [-]

I am starting to look at the health insurance market.

This is a human-level search: where do I find the basic considerations to evaluate everything else with? Do you know of a good resource?

Comment author: PipFoweraker 23 May 2016 12:50:09AM 1 point [-]

In any particular geographical or topical area?

Comment author: Morgrim 14 May 2016 08:19:40AM 6 points [-]

When I was doing the survey I found the 'Highest Education Credential Earning' question difficult because the credentials listed don't match those in my home country, Australia. For example, we have a system of "technical certificates" that fall in between High School and Bachelor's degrees. (I think I chose '2 year degree' as the closest approximation, even though mine only took 1 year to complete.) And I know that doing a Bachelors in some areas is the functional equivalent of doing a Masters in others.

Would a question asking for how many years of post-schooling study one has completed be more or less useful? The wording could be tricky, since then there is ambiguity about whether to list time spent if one is part way through a qualification. If the majority of respondents are from places that match the listed options then mucking about with the question may not be of much value either.

Comment author: PipFoweraker 16 May 2016 01:29:11AM 0 points [-]

I ran into this issue as well, being relatively well credentialed professionally and through the TAFE / AQF framework. It's hard to know where to put the scale, so I normally do an equivalence of hours-studied-full-time-loading in my head and use that.

Comment author: CronoDAS 24 April 2016 04:10:05AM 3 points [-]

I'd have a bunch of Magic card names. ;)

Comment author: PipFoweraker 24 April 2016 06:53:55PM *  1 point [-]

Unfortunately, this. I did coverage work for WoTC for a few years and my custom dictionary is ridiculous.

For bonus points, I've also reviewed 200+ Spec Fic novels, so the amount of weird pronouns in the list is spectacular.

Comment author: SquirrelInHell 27 March 2016 10:20:40PM *  1 point [-]

Accepted your suggestion, thanks a lot!

I think "don't abuse X" has more value as a slogan, and it's more memorable (partly because of its tautological wordiness?). That's the reason I chose it initially, but your point of view convinced me that it's worth signalling intellectuality in this case.

Comment author: PipFoweraker 30 March 2016 07:57:28PM 1 point [-]

I have a non-specific recollection that, generally speaking, phrasing directions in the positive imperative ("Treat dogs well") rather than a negative imperative ("Do not treat dogs badly") leads to better rates of recall / compliance.

If it interests you I'll ask around and find a proper reference.

Comment author: Romashka 24 March 2016 07:59:06PM 1 point [-]

Is there a continuum of realizing that you are dreaming? I ask because I sometimes dream of the city where I live, and I would go, 'oh, this is my Dream Kyiv, with steep wooded slopes and broken bridges and a cathedral of The College (all somewhat resembling real places), let's see what we'll get now...' and when I wake up I often remember th overall image.

Comment author: PipFoweraker 27 March 2016 12:41:29AM 2 points [-]

There is a continuum that moves from complete dream-obliviousness (not being aware one has dreamed upon waking) all the way up to comprehensively lucid dreaming, where a dreamer is able to create and control their dream environment at will and then retain an accurate memory upon waking.

There are obvious problems with the self-reporting of dreams and dream recall, so the exact definitions of the continuum are fuzzy, but I'm not aware of anyone seriously disputing the continuum exists.

Also making matters more interesting is the mechanics of dreaming in terms of what frames of reference the brain uses to create the imagery of the dream. It's not surprising that people dream about places similar to their environments if we think about terms of raw data in the brain as it dreams.

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