jpet
175
20
jpet has not written any posts yet.
jpet has not written any posts yet.
That doesn't look right--if she just flipped H, then THT is also eliminated. So the renormalization should be:
HH: 1/2
HT: 0
THH: 1/4
THT: 0
TTH: 1/4
TTT: 0
Which means the coin doesn't actually change anything.
Took it. Comments:
Hopefully you have a way to filter out accidental duplicates (i.e. a hidden random ID field or some such), because I submitted the form by accident several times while filling it out. (I was doing it from my phone, and basically any slightly missed touch on the UI resulted in accidental submission).
Multiple choice questions should always have a "none" option of some kind, because once you select a radio button option there's no way to deselect it. Most of them did but not all.
I answered "God" with a significant probability because the way the definitions is phrased, I would say it includes whoever is running the simulation if the simulation hypothesis is true. I'm sure many people interpreted it differently. I'd suggest making this distinction explicit one way or the other next time.
Your "dimensionless" example isn't dimensionless; the dimensions are units of (satandate - whalefire).
You only get something like a reynolds number when the units cancel out, so you're left with a pure ratio that tells you something real about your problem. Here you aren't cancelling out any units, you're just neglecting to write them down, and scaling things so that outcomes of interest happen to land at 0 and 1. Expecting special insight to come out of that operation is numerology.
Great article other than that, though. I hadn't seen this quote before: "We have practically defined numerical utility as being that thing for which the calculus of mathematical expectations is legitimate." For me that really captures the essence of it.
Hi all, I'm Jeff.
I've started mentally rewarding myself with a happy thought and a smile when I catch myself starting a bad habit ("Hey! I noticed!") instead of castigating myself ("Doh! I'm doing it again!"). Seems to work so far; we'll see how it goes.
I started using the Pomodoro technique today (pick a task, work on it for 25 minutes, break for 5, repeat). I'll had to adjust it somewhat to deal with interruptions during the day, but that wasn't too hard: when I get done with the interruption, I just have less time before the next break. (I'm keeping the breaks at :25 and :55 to make it easier to keep... (read more)
During-meetup report: is the meetup still on? Brandon and his sign aren't here, and I don't see a likely group. The waitress had no idea who I was asking about.
Two different baby showers, though. I could join one of those instead.
Update: located one other LWer. We talked about the sequences and whatnot for an hour; then I had to go. On my way out discovered the table with five more folks.
Lesson for next meetup: bigger sign.
I don't see how this differs at all from Searle's Chinese room.
The "puzzle" is created by the mental picture we form in our heads when hearing the description. For Searle's room, it's a clerk in a room full of tiles, shuffling them between boxes; for yours, it's a person sitting at a desk scratching on paper. Since the consciousness isn't that of the human in the room, where is it? Surely not in a few scraps of paper.
But plug in the reality for how complex such simulations would actually have to be, if they were to actually simulate a human brain. Picture what the scenarios would look like running on sufficient fast-forward... (read more)
One of the most popular such ideas is to replicate the brain by copying the neurons and seeing what happens. For example, IBM's Blue Brain project hopes to create an entire human brain by modeling it neuron for neuron, without really understanding why brains work or why neurons do what they do.
No, the Blue Brain project (no longer affiliated with IBM, AFAIK) hopes to simulate neurons to test our understanding of how brains and neurons work, and to gain more such understanding.
If you can simulate brain tissue well enough that you're reproducing the actual biological spike trains and long-term responses to sensory input, you can be pretty sure that your model... (read more)
Where in this system would you place a thorough and accurate, but superficial model that described the phenomenon? If I've made a lot of observations, collected a lot of data, and fit very good curves to it, I can do a pretty good job of predicting what's going to happen--probably better than you, in a lot of cases, if you're constrained by model that reflects a true understanding of what's going on inside.
If we're trying to predict where a baseball will land, I'm going to do better with my practiced curve-fitting than you are with your deep understanding of physics.
Or for a more interesting example, someone with nothing but pop-psychology notions of... (read more)
Ah, I misunderstood the comment. I just assumed that Gallo was in on it, and the claim was that customers of Gallo failing to complain constituted evidence of wine tasting's crockitude.
If Gallo's wine experts really did get taken in, then yes, that's pretty strong evidence. And being the largest winery, I'm sure they have many experts checking their wines regularly--too many to realistically be "in" on such a scam.
So you've convinced me. Wine tasting is a crock.
Parrots and other birds seem to be about that intelligent, and octopi are close.
Perhaps that's an argument for the difficulty of the chimp to human jump: we have (nearly) ape-level intelligence evolving multiple times, so it can't be that hard, but most lineages plateaued there.