the structure of the universe is isomorphic to the ideal math that we could use to explain and predict it. I would not be at all surprised to find out that somehow, "they are the same thing," whatever that might mean.

Tegmark's Mathematical universe hypothesis is one answer to what that might mean.

I think it's more useful to keep the meaning of "skill" as something like "the ability to do something well", which is what everybody expects you mean when you use the word, and talk instead about better and worse applications of skills. It's not the skill that's context dependent, but how useful or beneficial the application of the skill is in a particular scenario.

Survey completed. I cooperated without thinking about it much. I believed that TDT-like reasoning would probably lead a significant number of others to cooperate too, and I felt I should support the group.

When a concept is inherently approximate, it is a waste of time to try to give it a precise definition.

-- John McCarthy

The opposite intellectual sin to wanting to derive everything from fundamental physics is holism which makes too much of the fact that everything is ultimately connected to everything else. Sure, but scientific progress is made by finding where the connections are weak enough to allow separate theories.

-- John McCarthy

I'm the same. Great one-on-one, and extremely awkward when there are two or more other people, which I find to be very exhausting due to the extra conversation dynamics you note. It's also very difficult too when you're the sort of person who likes to periodically be silent for a period in order to think more deeply about what you're talking about -- with more than one other person there, somebody else will just start a new conversation on a new topic to avoid the "dreaded silence".

Do you mean complimentary, and not complementary?

It's much better now. The only issue remaining is that the 'Frequently Asked Questions" is just a tiny bit too wide to fit on one line inside the containing box, so the 'ns' of 'Questions' sticks outside of the gray box it is supposed to be inside.

On the topic of how the site looks in different browsers, and finding out whether the layout is borked on some browsers, you could use http://browsershots.org/.

At the moment though, it fails due to an internal server error when it tries to fetch http://friendly-ai.com/robots.txt. If you fix that, you should be able to easily see how the site looks in a bunch of different browsers on different operating systems.

I also see the FAQ page as broken with 'Questions' in the header appearing overlayed on the #2 and #3 items in the 'contents' list. With Firefox 8 on Linux at default zoom, and zooming down to make the fonts smaller than normal does fix it.

I agree with nyan_sandwich that things would be much improved if the CSS used ems instead of pixels, which are guaranteed to break if users have non-standard fonts or font sizes or their browser happens to have different enough default CSS rules.