jimrandomh03 September 2010 12:15:37AM* 2 points [-]

This should do it. Put a copy of jquery-1.4.2.min.js in the same directory (jQuery is a Javascript library for keeping browser compatibility bugs at bay).

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script>
function setColorScheme(colorScheme)
{
    setCookie("colorScheme", colorScheme, 30);

    if(colorScheme=="whiteOnBlack")
    {
        $("body").css({
            "background-color": "black",
            "color": "white"
        });
    }
    else if(colorScheme=="blackOnWhite")
    {
        $("body").css({
            "background-color": "white",
            "color": "black"
        });
    }
}

$(document).ready(function()
{
    var cookie = getCookie("colorScheme");
    if(cookie)
        setColorScheme(cookie);
});

function setCookie(c_name,value,expiredays)
{
    var exdate=new Date();
    exdate.setDate(exdate.getDate()+expiredays);
    document.cookie=c_name+ "=" +escape(value)+
    ((expiredays==null) ? "" : ";expires="+exdate.toUTCString());
}

function getCookie(c_name)
{
    if (document.cookie.length>0)
    {
        c_start=document.cookie.indexOf(c_name + "=");
        if (c_start!=-1)
        {
            c_start=c_start + c_name.length+1;
            c_end=document.cookie.indexOf(";",c_start);
            if (c_end==-1) c_end=document.cookie.length;
            return unescape(document.cookie.substring(c_start,c_end));
        }
    }
    return "";
}
</script>

Background color: <a href="javascript:setColorScheme('blackOnWhite')">white</a> | <a href="javascript:setColorScheme('whiteOnBlack')">black</a>

This stores the color scheme in a cookie, so it's preserved when you move between chapters. The setCookie and getCookie functions came from here. Given the example, this should be pretty easy to extend for things like changing text size and margins, if you are so inclined.

jimrandomh02 September 2010 01:39:46PM3 points [-]

The best solution would be to put some Javascript links on the page that change the text and background colors when you clicked on them. The downside to this would be that it would revert to default every time you went to a different chapter, though.

That Javascript is something I could reasonably write in ten minutes after I get home from work tonight. I'll do so and post it here unless someone produces a better solution before then.

jimrandomh02 September 2010 03:38:26AM* 2 points [-]

Firstly, if there's an unspeakable danger, surely it'd be best to try and not let others be exposed, so this one's really a question of if it's dangerous

Not quite. It's a question of what the probability that it's dangerous is, what the magnitude of the effect is if so, what the cost (including goodwill and credibility) to suppressing it are, and what the cost (including psychological harm to third parties) to not suppressing it is. To make a proper judgement, you must determine all four of these, separately, and perform the expected utility computation (probabiltiy * effect-if-dangerous + effect-if-not-dangerous vs cost). A sufficiently large magnitude of effect is sufficient to outweigh both a small probability and large cost.

That's the problem here. Some people see a small probability, round it off to 0, and see that the effect-if-not-dangerous isn't huge, and conclude that it's ok to talk about it, without computing the expected utility.

I tell you that I have done the computation, and that the utility of hearing, discussing, and allowing discussion of the banned topic are all negative. Furthermore, they are negative by enough orders of magnitude that I believe anyone who concludes otherwise must be either missing a piece of information vital to the computation, or have made an error in their reasoning. They remain negative even if one of the probability or the effect-if-not-dangerous is set to zero. Both missing information and miscalculation are especially likely - the former because information is not readily shared on this topic, and the latter because it is inherently confusing.

jimrandomh02 September 2010 01:05:55AM* 1 point [-]

I've considered buying capsules, but decided to get powder instead because it's cheaper and allows more flexibility if I change dosage or decide to pre-mix stuff. I couldn't sell the capsules I make because I don't measure them precisely enough (they vary by +/-10% or so). I currently take 5 capsules day - two of piracetam, two of choline citrate, and one of sulbutiamine.

Putting together capsules sounds hard, but it's actually quite easy. You get empty gel caps, which come as two unequally sized pieces that fit together tightly enough to stay in place but loosely enough to pull apart. Take the pieces of the capsule apart, pack some powder into the larger piece, put them together, and drop it on a scale. If it's within acceptable range, drop it in the 'done' container, otherwise open it back up and add some or remove some. After a dozen or so, you get the hang of it and can hit a 10% tolerance pretty consistently on the first time. Wear latex gloves so the gel caps won't stick to your fingers and you don't get hair and sweat in the powder tub.

(Edit: the discrepancy between my saying a month's worth of capsules in 30 minutes, and a rate of 10/minute, is due to setup and cleanup time; and neither of these numbers was precise to more than a factor of 2.)

jimrandomh01 September 2010 01:33:39PM0 points [-]

That's very interesting, but I'm not sure I trust the article's statistics, and I don't have access to the full text. Could someone take a closer look and confirm that there are no shennanigans going on?

jimrandomh01 September 2010 12:10:53AM1 point [-]

I think we already had most of the details, many of them in BOLD CAPS for good measure.

No, you haven't. The worst of it has never appeared in public, deleted or otherwise.

jimrandomh31 August 2010 10:54:24PM3 points [-]

I don't think there was ever any good evidence that the thought was dangerous. ... In which case, the thought seems to be more forbidden than dangerous.

If there was any such evidence, it would be in the form of additional details, and sharing it with someone would be worse than punching them in the face. So don't take the lack of publically disclosed evidence as an indication that no evidence exists, because it isn't.

In response to comment by Tiiba on Dreams of AIXI
jimrandomh31 August 2010 06:24:56AM3 points [-]

There is an enormous difference between the formal mathematical definition of "computable", and "able to be run by a computer that could be constructed in this universe". AIXI is computable in the mathematical sense of being written as a computer program that will provably halt in finitely many steps, but it is not computable in the sense of it being possible to run it, even by using all the resources in the observable universe optimally, because the runtime complexity of AIXI is astronomically larger than the universe is.

jimrandomh31 August 2010 06:01:30AM5 points [-]

I would have preferred a more specific link than that, to save me the time of doing a detailed investigation of Kurzweil's company myself. But I ended up doing one anyways, so here are the results.

That "Ray and Terry's Longevity Products" company's front page screams low-credibility. It displays three things: an ad for a book, which I can't judge as I don't have a copy, an ad for snack bars, and a news box. Neutral, silly, and, ah, something amenable to a quality test!

The current top headline in their Healthy Headlines box looked to me like an obvious falsehood ("Dirty Electricity May Cause Type 3 Diabetes"), and on a topic important to me, so I followed it up. It links to a blog I don't recognize, which dug it out of a two year old study, which I found on PubMed. And I personally verified that the study was wrong - by the most generous interpretation, assuming no placebo effect or publication bias (both of which were obviously present), the study contains exactly 4 bits of evidence (4 case studies in which the observed outcome had a 50% chance of happening assuming the null hypothesis, and a 100% chance of happening assuming the conclusion). A review article confirmed that it was flawed.

That said, he probably just figured the news box was unimportant and delegated the job to someone who wasn't smart enough to keep the lies out. But it means I can't take anything else on the site seriously without a very time-consuming investigation, which is bad enough.

The bit about Kurzweil taking 250 nutritional supplements per day jumps out, too, since it's an obviously wrong thing to do; the risks associated with taking a supplement (adverse reaction, contamination, mislabeling) scale linearly with the number taken, while the upside has diminishing returns. You take the most valuable thing first, then the second-most, by the time you get to the 250th thing it's a duplicate or worthless. Which leads me to believe that he just fudged the number, by counting things that are properly considered duplicates like split doses of the same thing.

jimrandomh31 August 2010 04:27:25AM1 point [-]

I like Ence as a separate word from Exp for two reasons. First, Exp is very strongly tied to a meaning in games that is in important ways opposite from the meaning we would want Ence to have. And second, I don't think "exp" counts as properly monosyllabic; the monosoyllabic prononciation /eksp/ has a consonant cluster that many languages and English dialects don't allow in speech, causing speakers to automatically expand it to /ek.spi/.

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