All of Falacer's Comments + Replies

Thank you, that seems to have worked. Lightcone is now listed as eligible for matching on Benevity - will donate next week.

My employer's matching program currently doesn't accept Lightcone Infrastructure as a registered cause for donation matching, even though we're on your list of employer matching. We use Benevity, and the portal says that "a registration email has been sent to the cause", and that the cause should register through https://causes.benevity.org/ .

Is benevity registration on your list? I'd much rather donate with matching than without.

(From the UK, if that matters)

Is this a specific case of the general argument that "you can't ethically financially interact with people who are sufficiently poorer than you(r reference class), except through charity"? I think the arguments here:

• Sufficiently poorer people might not feel able to reject your offers
• SPP might not be able to make the best decisions
• You might be motivated to keep SPP that way, if you have the option of getting any utility from trading with them

are more general arguments than the specific case of factory building. I don't have a good answer to them, but kinda feel that it's disrespecting SPP's agency somehow?

I thought about it for about 5 minutes before deciding to script it, and got "fobs" and, annoyingly, dismissed "fres" as not a word.

I imagine if I had been more rigorous it wouldn't have taken long to get all the 4 letter ones, since they all have an internal vowel, which was the obvious place to start looking.

I wrote a check for this property for all the words in my system's inbuilt vim dictionary and got the following list:

Rubbish Words:

er, Livy, Lyly, na, ob, re, uh

Interesting Words:

an, fans, fobs, gnat, ravine, robe, serf, tang, thug

I'm in the same boat as you with regards to whether EPA/DHA has a bigger effect than ALA, but I was convinced enough to try to find some when I became vegetarian last year.

If you google "algal dha together" you'll find what I'm taking - meeting your criteria of vegetarian (vegan), eco-friendly and health-friendly (with aforementioned uncertainty)

ALA can also be found in flaxseed, soy/tofu, walnut and pumpkin, so you needn't stick to seaweed if you only want ALA.

I gave this a shot as well as since your value for E(T) → ∞ as T → ∞, while I would think the system should cap out at εN.

I get a different value for S(E), reasoning:

If E/ε is 1, there are N microstates, since 1 of N positions is at energy ε. If E/ε is 2, there are N(N-1) microstates. etc. etc, giving for E/ε = x that there are N!/(N-x)!

so S = ln [N!/(N-x)!] = ln(N!) - ln((N-x)!) = NlnN - (N-x)ln(N-x)

S(E) = N ln N - (N - E/ε) ln (N - E/ε)

Can you explain how you got your equation for the entropy?

Going on I get E(T) = ε(N - e^(ε/T - 1) )

This also looks wron... (read more)

We could really use a new Aral sea, but intuitively I'd expected that this would be a tiny dent in the depth of the oceans. So, to the maths:

Wikipedia claims that from 1960 to 1998 the volume of the Aral sea dropped from its 1960 amount of 1,100 km^3 by 80%.

I'm going to give that another 5% for more loss since then, as the South Aral Sea has now lost its eastern half enitrely.

This gives ~1100 * .85 = 935km^3 of water that we're looking to replace.

The Earth is ~500m km^2 in surface area, approx. 70% of which is water = 350m km^2 in water.

935 km^3 over an a... (read more)

Who are we expecting to have buried things there? I can come up with 6 possibilites, is there another you were thinking of?

Modern humans. In this most likely case it's probably not interesting, maybe some Propaganda Preservation Program from the Cold War.

Recent aliens. I would expect if any aliens were about to jaunt over, notice our space-faring potential and bury a cache for us to discover to mark our readiness to join the Galatic Federation, we would have probably noticed them in other ways by now.

Ancient aliens. Why would visitors before intelligent te... (read more)

Goldbach's conjecture is "Every even integer above four is the sum of two primes," surely?

Also, Gödel's incompleteness theorem states that there are theorems which are true but non-provable, so you get something like:

P(X) = (P(will be proven(X)) + P(is true but unprovable(X))) / (P(will be proven(X)) + P(will be disproven(X)) + P(is true but unprovable(X)))

Is there a reason to suspect that a counterexample wouldn't be a very large number that hasn't been considered yet? Consider sublime numbers: the first (12) is a number which will be checked by any search process, but there is another which has 76 digits and, I would suspect, could be missed by some searches.