All of lightpurpledye's Comments + Replies

Are you serious?

If so, huh?

Note: the hypothesis submitted by the people who proposed the experiment was correct: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/media/news_releases/2013/0416.asp

(Written before watching)

Skill #1. I would have failed this if I had not had the opportunity explicitly pointed out to me.

Skill #2.

a. Water forms a cylindrical shell around the towel.

b. Water is pushed into the parts of the towel which are least compressed, but does not exit from the towel.

c. Water flies off from towel equally in all directions perpendicular to the towel axis.

d. Water adheres to towel, in a spiral pattern following the way the towel is wrung out.

e. (Something else I haven't thought of.)

Skill #3. I'm not really sure what you mean by "i... (read more)

To be fair, we do also owe it to those who are effected by our actions (e.g. our children).

As a non-American, the way I listen to American public radio is via podcasts. And the programmes that I listen to are, in general, about topics I find interesting.

What about the aliens who landed on earth, murdered Fred and then went away again? Or the infinite number of other possibilities, each of which has a very small probability?

What confuses me about this is that, if we do accept that there are an infinite number of possibilities, most of the possibilities must have an infinitesimal probability in order for everything to sum to 1. And I don't really understand the concept of an infinitesimal probability -- after all, even my example above must have some finite probability attached?

This! I had already emailed Eliezer about this, so I was delighted when he mentioned it in the preamble for the current chapter (71).

An advantage that hasn't been mentioned thus far: audiobooks are very useful for people who are visually impaired.

Woah, I think that's a little overconfident...

You're saying that in the mid nineteenth century (half a century before relativity), the anomalous precession of Mercury made it seem 99.999999% likely that Newtonian mechanics was wrong?

After all, there are other possibilities.

cf. "When it was noticed in the 1800's that the perihelion of Neptune did not match what Newton's inverse-square law of gravity predicted, did we change the way math works? Or did we change our understanding of gravity?" In this case we actually postulated the existence of Plu... (read more)

The vim movement keys actually work surprisingly well in Dvorak. Up/Down are next to each other on your left hand, right/left are on the appropriate sides of your right hand.