http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/ufsk/how_art_can_be_good/cujne I prefer an explanation like... Ecosystems asymptotically approach a characteristic entropy... too much or too little randomness isn't good (1/f noise is more musical than white or Brownian noise -- Voss & Clarke 1978). Lifeforms are adapted to seek/produce such ecosystems. Success in this is associated with reward. Beauty is a manifestation of this reward. Art is synthetic beauty. This natural "complexity" isn't well defined/understood (Gell-Mann, Kauffman), but there is something universal about Occam's razor (Solomonoff, Vitanyi, Schmidhuber, Hutter). Entropy/information content is relative (uncomputability of Kolmogorov complexity), but the human sensory organs provide a context (though not a standard against which voting by audience members is meaningful), as does the common experience of living in society. The context of art is therefore also cultural. Audience isn't a good criterion. Some art forms have evolved depth and subtlety that requires more practice to appreciate than we should expect of a large audience. Just as planting eucalyptus in California isn't the great idea it may seem to be at first. Even if an individual can control for brand and tricks, most individuals do not, making it hard to measure with this criterion in practice. Also, the audience for a work can change abruptly over the course of history, making the measure of a work's value uncertain at any given time. Even if an objective definition of natural complexity were to be agreed upon, the context in which artistic information exists (human sensory signal processing, cultural experiences) is hard to describe precisely and differs from person to person. So beauty remains in the eye of the beholder, even though there's an objective process behind it, and even though humans will often agree about the quality of a work (especially if they belong to a clique of humans who have mastered the skills necessary to appreciate the work). http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/6h82y/medicine_doesnt_matter_medicine_extends_your_life/c03uan8 In all these dusty comments, the point of the article got lost. 1/6 of our GDP is medicine. More than the war. More than all manufacturing. Either our medicine is inefficient or we're really sick (it's ineffective), or both. The comments are going back to the turn of last century. Healthcare spending in the U.S. has skyrocketed this decade. Is the average person seeing a corresponding benefit? I'm not. Medicine was better in the '80s. You went to the doctor and it cost $60. No referrals. Many vaccinations in the U.S. aren't cost effective, by the way. In most of Western Europe, where the policy is actually set by cost/benefit analysis, they don't do varicella, for example (I can point you to Welsh study for starters, and there's a mainland EU one as well). Here the policy is set by what you can scare parents about. Before you downvote, consider adult behavior. How many get flu shots? How many get varicella boosters (this in fact will change for those who had the vaccine as a kid, you can pretty-much count on that). It's easier to tell the doctor to jab your kid than it is to get yourself jabbed. But there are worse inefficiencies. For example, I recently had a pain in my belly. I went to the doctor; she diagnosed me with an inguinal hernia. I could tell she did the exam wrong (in the ol' nutsack), so I got a second opinion, and sure enough, no inguinal hernia. But he did want an ultrasound. So now I'm (and you're; thanks so much) $250*2=$500 in the hole for 20 minutes of M.D. time. I had to take off work again to go back to the same building as the 2nd doctor (different floor), and have some Czech battleaxe scan me. Now we're $2000 in the hole not including my lost work time and I would have had to go back to the 2nd doctor a second time if I wanted to talk about the results. What should have happened: the 1st doctor wouldn't be able to practice, because the market wouldn't support her. The 2nd doctor would have extended his arm and grabbed the ultrasound gun and scanned me on the spot, and put the results on my thumb drive. Did I mention that the poor portability of medical records represents a barrier to market efficiency (high transaction cost for switching doctors)? Did I mention that healthcare is the only major industry still using paper? Banks went electronic in the '70s. Kaiser's spent $4B (with a "B") on an EMR system that apparently isn't any good. And they're a nonprofit. There are deep administrative AND scientific problems in medicine. People here are using the term "evidence-based medicine" to refer to Western medicine in general, but this term has a precise meaning within Western medicine (look it up). It's a movement that should get more airtime. Politicians are talking about the administrative problems, but even there they aren't hitting oil. The number of insurance providers we use is really irrelevant. The market would select the correct number (including 1 if that is the correct number) in most cases, or Congress can guess; it doesn't make a huge difference. At least, it's not going to bring us in the right order of magnitude. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6w7e6/just_out_of_curiosity_do_you_have_an_opinion_that/c0517xy I don't believe in global warming. More precisely: * I think it's likely that anthropogenic greenhouse gasses are or will effect the climate, but I've done fairly extensive literature searches and don't believe the relationship is well understood. * The results of the warming (and don't not call it warming for political reasons, yes we all know there may be local cooling and erratic weather patterns) are not unlikely to be beneficial to human life and/or the ecosystem. * That said, we should probably avoid changing the status quo as long as the climate is poorly understood. Nuclear power is the easiest way to do that, and there's a suspicious lack of interest in it (Gore happily demonstrates his complete ignorance of it). Solar is another great idea, and it's fantastic to see the investment going into it. Wind I think sucks from an environmental (and engineering) perspective. * I basically agree completely with Freeman Dyson, except for the part about growing genetically modified grass everywhere. Is he insane? * Cities have been thriving below sea level for hundreds of years, but that said there are several coastal cities I wouldn't mind flooded. When we rebuild them we can tell the architects to put in 75% less human misery this time. * Before electricity, and before all this hoopla, the weather was still erratic. And it was already our fault. Political and religious power-mongers have been saying this shit for millennia. The weather isn't a human convenience, and humans aren't the center of the goddamn universe. In order to be scared of this shit you have to simultaneously hate the modern culture that brought it about AND fervently cling to every last vinyl-sided detail of it, because it is the only thing that is threatened by climate change. * Even if you disagree with all of the above, there have been several worst-case damage assessments done by economists, and they all show that climate change is less of a concern than malaria. And neither of them is as serious as vinyl siding and corn syrup. But heck, it's easier to get all political about the weather than to use one's brain to bring about any kind of positive change in civilization. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/70mdr/the_moral_hazard_myth_the_single_bad_idea_at_the/c05digx I'm sure our insurance system has many flaws, but the problem we're seeing isn't one of insurance. A regular checkup, involving less than 10 minutes of time with an M.D., costs $300 in California. Insurance distributes risk. It can't magically fix this kind of pricing. Yes, I understand that insurance paperwork and rigmarole make up an alarming portion of that $300, but there's something else going on. The problem is with how healthcare is practiced. There are scientific problems (thankfully evidence-based medicine is addressing some of these, but the movement is still in its infancy), wrong fundamental assumptions about what healthcare is (what kind of magician would you have to be to solve a health problem in 10 minutes?). We have a shortage of doctors (partly because medical training curricula are grossly outdated and inappropriate). Additionally, our illnesses are getting harder to treat. The low-hanging fruit of disease were cured half a century ago. So we're living longer, and because of increased economic competition our lives are more stressful, and we've increasingly fed our numbers with factory-farmed foods, and we get diseases that can't be fixed with a magic pill. The healthcare system has failed to respond to these conditions not because of how we insure people against illness, but because it is a guild system. Guilds aggregate information very poorly. In fact, they're designed to prevent the exchange of information. The "practice" is a pure guild setup -- keep the know-how in our group. Aside from lawyers, piano tuners, and a few cheese makers in the Netherlands, medicine is the last stronghold of guild economics. I'm completely in favor of providing a minimum standard of care for every American citizen -- anything less is beneath us as human beings. But it's not going to fix the runaway spending. What's the figure now -- 20% of our GDP? It's an order of magnitude more than we spend on the military, including the war in Iraq. I sure hope we're not that sick. Edit: For proof that something is very odd about the healthcare system: try to get a CT scan yourself. Call up a radiology center and offer to pay for it yourself, up-front. You probably won't succeed. What kind of market are you dealing with? A guild market. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/73i8t/instead_of_being_the_result_of_an_accumulation_of/c05kzvo The oxidative stress theory of aging is clearly incorrect, but this "developmental drift" model can't be the whole picture, either. In social animals like humans, individuals past reproductive age can still make large contributions to the reproductive success of their kin/clan/neighbors. But the old of any species can also be a burden. That's why there is most likely a programmed, active contributor to aging, in addition to effects of evolutionary neglect. De Grey misses this possibility also. Even if his anti-aging therapies work, the fact that they will be elective hardly mitigates their potential downsides as he claims. The modest life extension provided by existing medicine (also completely elective) is already causing fiscal problems. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7gcsq/a_plan_for_better_source_code_diffs_and_merging/c06l4k8 Great idea, but why stop with version control? Why should source code be text in the first place? It could be written directly in tree form. There would be no formatting, only cells with restricted values. Like intellisense on steriods. Python's logical whitespace can be seen as a babystep in this direction. Repositories would be much smaller, merges lightning fast. And by uncoupling formatting from content, programmers would be free to invent new visualizations that might make code easier to read and navigate (after all, text evolved to suit prose). Find-and-replace would be logical too -- no more horseplay. In fact, if you needed to change the name of a class or variable, it would be updated everywhere all at once, without any extra steps. Moreover, the diff would know that no change took place, since cell names are not logical. http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/7il3q/thank_goodness_fdr_didnt_bail_out_the_us_piano/c06ravy Terrible analysis. I'm opposed to the auto bailout for a number of reasons, but a comparison to the piano industry isn't one of them. (I'm the owner of a 1922 Lester grand, which I inherited from my grandmother, who was a piano teacher.) The collapse of the piano industry was worldwide, and stemmed not from the great depression but rather reflected a global decline in the popularity of Western classical music and jazz.** Today, most people around the world are musically illiterate by early 20th-century standards. Not just in their inability to read music, but even with skills like hearing out harmony parts in songs. Chinese pianos are garbage. It's one thing if you can manufacture the same item more efficiently. It's another if you make an entirely new item that only has the appearance of the old one -- enough of an appearance to sell into a dying market. The opposite is true in the case of American cars. Japanese cars (which are largely made in America anyway, so it's nothing to do with improved manufacturing efficiency in other countries) are generally of superior quality. And while I would like it very much if a global depression caused people to stop driving even after a recovery, I doubt very much that this will happen. ** The cause of this decline is debatable, but is likely due to improvements in music recording technology. Before modern audio recording, the only affordable way to record music was to write it down, and the only affordable way to hear it was to play it yourself. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7ly5k/scientists_plan_to_ignite_tiny_manmade_star_this/5a9e Coinkindinkly, I met a couple of guys who work at NIF just last night in a cafe. Livermore has been working on laser-driven ICF since the '60s. It's basically been a ramp-up to lasers powerful enough to break-even, which these should finally do (in "2010 or 2011"). But even this system, which cost 3 billion and occupies a 700,000 ft^2 building, can only fire once every 3 hours, max. Even if they're eventually able to design a system that can fire multiple times/second, they'll still need to figure out how to make fuel capsules cheaply enough to burn hundreds of millions of them a year (316M @ 10/second). That's not easy to do, because they must be very nearly perfectly spherical in order to implode correctly. When all that's done, you're still left with the problem of getting electricity out of the thing. Almost all the energy of DT fusion is released in the form of energetic neutrons. To make power, these neutrons need to captured somehow -- typically in a lithium blanket. And you need special materials that are resistant to the neutron flux to hold the lithium. With any luck, the lithium heats up and you can cool it with water and make steam and drive a turbine. Perhaps a better use for the neutrons is to drive a subcritical fission reactor. Hence, the LIFE project: http://lasers.llnl.gov/missions/energy_for_the_future/life/ Instead of the lithium, you use a blanket filled with fissile material. DT produces so many goddamn neutrons you can fission almost anything, including natural (unenriched) uranium and unreprocessed spent reactor fuel. But really, the whole thing is sold on the basis of doing experiments in lieu of nuclear testing on our weapons stockpile. I doubt it's really very helpful in that respect, and it's certainly of dubious interest for any other kind of research despite the song and dance. That said, super-powerful lasers are really really cool. Here's a ridiculous video of them growing an 800-lb. nonlinear optics crystal in a rotating vat: http://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/video_gallery/mov/kdp_crystal_growth.mov That's a KDP crystal. Similar nonlinear crystals (KTP) are used to period-double infrared lasers to visible green in nearly all green laser pointers. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7msu8/if_you_could_push_a_button_and_make_all_religion/8bb9 I was raised in the Lutheran church but have been an atheist since age 16. I think the need for war expresses itself in religion, and at its worst, religion is a convenient excuse for war. But it is not the cause of war. Likewise for decency and humanitarianism. Rather, I observe that humans have an innate capacity for religious experience -- to interpret some events as more significant than others, for unknown reasons. Humans are also highly social animals. If we can share our religious experiences with others, it can strengthen them tremendously. That fact that this is pleasurable suggests (though by no means lets us conclude) that organized religion was beneficial to us in the past. (I like to fantasize that tribal organized religion was the bee's knees, back when people were ignorant enough for it to be satisfying... which basically ended with urbanization...) To be honest, as an atheist I do feel that such a thing is lacking in my life. In my late teens and early 20s, my 'personal religion' was very gratifying (atheists' personal religions rock). But as I'm older, less horny, more jaded, and a parent, I do explicitly feel some small regret for not enjoying a weekly outpouring of nonsense with my fellow man. Nothing to be done for it, alas. Maybe TV is a decent replacement. I haven't had a TV since I was 18, but my kid is old enough now that we're watching DVDs as a family, and I'm surprised at how enjoyable it is. I think it goes a long way to explaining why otherwise intelligent atheists get involved with stuff like Myers-Briggs, the greenhouse effect, and of course, militant aetheism. Actually -- and I'm rambling now -- I remember figuring out that the answer is singing. Choir singing was basically the only thing I liked about church. The problem is, the meltdown of WASP culture that occurred from 1969-74 took WASP music with it (jewish culture is unfortunately so old that its sacred music is too primitive to be satisfying). And so if one wants to sing in a choir, one has to go to a choir club, where people get together seriously after work and rehearse for their next charity concert. One cannot casually sing at lunch, because one's friends and coworkers are musically illiterate. For athletic people I think exercise fills the gap. Unfortunately, like Linus, I get nothing out of it (other than the health boost). http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7njc3/top_10_signs_of_evolution_in_humans/aymo Good try, but I had to vote down. It's extremely difficult to make these kinds of arguments, because you have to prove that something isn't adaptive. The Jacobson's organ is still very much functional, and the appendix probably is also. And their explanation for wisdom teeth is just wrong -- they were not extra molars, but rather backup molars which swung into place once the rear molars wore out (much like shark's teeth). This is why they come in later, and why they almost always get impacted today -- not because our jaws are too small, but because our rear molars are still there. If you've had your wisdom teeth extracted, you can open your mouth and look in the mirror and see that there is in fact plenty of room for them in principle. I'm not aware of a current use for goose bumps, so this may be the best of the lot. http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/7plj0/the_real_cause_of_the_financial_crisis_from_the/c071anh I think the real solution is to have a society where real investment opportunities are available. Why is it that 300M people must funnel their life savings through a few square blocks in Manhattan? Why do stocks get bid to 10 and 20X their book values while scientists beg for $15K grants from a government bureaucracy? Why do you have to be an old boy to get in on an IPO? The real investments in society are not available to investors. Personal and small business loans are made or denied based on 6 bits of information in some COBOL system in Florida. Then those loans are bundled and sold with only a fraction of a bit of information (or less) attached to each. Instead, I suggest putting the capacity to loan closer to people with information about the endeavor. At best, banks are outdated: http://www.ripplepay.com Probably something like this is just to good for people to accept. We can't allow ourselves to live in eden. So keep the banks, but at least construct social norms that permit microloans and such, instead of putting such services out of business. http://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/7qj56/how_many_people_here_are_actually_interested_in/c0741fx Actually my main interest is in building an understanding of auctions, voting methods, and capital markets using as much common ground as possible. I'm currently working on a NetLogo simulation of coalition forming under various voting methods (and by working, I mean I'll start any day now, really :P), trying to understand Hanson's market scoring rule, and contemplating distributed banking schemes like ripplepay (.com). I'm pretty sure I've figured out the pros/cons of different auction methods (actually since most of them are not mutually exclusive I call them auction features), including an auction feature of my own invention that I suspect is novel (but I'm still doing literature searches). I'm not sure how many Austrians support a gold standard, but they seem to miss that: 1. The prior value of gold or any commodity is always perturbed beyond recognition by using it as a medium of exchange (Ron Paul, for example, has said gold is better because it has inherent value). 2. The amount of value in society increases exponentially (give or take) due to the exponential increase in human knowledge (evidence: people are willing to pay exponential interest on loans). Any monetary system that doesn't expand in step is deflationary, and therefore bad. Full-reserve banking is therefore a fantasy, unless you want a static society. Which is fine value-wise, but you'll get put onto reservations by societies willing to risk the panics. It surprised me how macroeconomics consists of waring, simplistic theories. Friedman is another culprit. There's truth in all three schools: Keynesian, Austrian, and Quantity, but they all seem to make a mantra out of one aspect of economics while denying the rest. Meanwhile, the whole thing is completely data-poor. Even if distributed banking had no other benefits, the ability to gather data in realtime would be worth it. http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/8477h/this_tornado_grades_you/c087bfo Let me try to distill this a bit... Step 1: You are in charge of grading your students. Step 2: We will judge you by how high their grades are. Nope, nothing could possibly go wrong here. Step 3: The Federal government will also be in charge of grading your students somewhat. That's got it! Much better! I can't help but get hopeful when I hear politicians like Obama talk about "real education reform". And can't help but be feel my heart sink when that turns out to be more standardized testing, etc. This stuff was supposed to be a boon in the '50s already. How is this reform? Real education reform might be... 1. Better-qualified teachers. Pay is probably already sufficient to retain them in most areas... think of any bright, fresh graduate of a Bachelors or Masters program in the field to be taught. 2. A more efficient labor market for teachers (I have no magic solution to the union problem, unforch). We ought to be hiring a ton of fresh graduates and weeding out the ones that don't wind up loving teaching within 2 years. 3. New teaching methods (more independent projects, fewer boring homework assignments). 4. New curricula (computer programming as basic literacy, 2nd language as basic literacy, etc.) 5. More natural light in schools. Use of outdoor classrooms where feasible. 6. Updated physical education programs -- let students choose yoga or karate as an alternative to competitive sports. 7. Charter schools in inner cities. This, at least, politicians are in favor of. I'd hate for the rest of America's schools to get so bad before the unions can be circumvented (or bred tame). http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8n7qy/oh_yeah_take_this/c09u11f APOD never gives enough info on how the image was obtained. These things all look so manipulated... it's non-interesting for me. What I loved about astronomy was that I was actually looking _at_ the object. Looking at an image of it is already less interesting. Looking at an image with an unknown level of digital manipulation just doesn't register. Yes I understand there are things we couldn't see without such techniques. No I'm not saying I can tell for sure whether this image has been touched... which is precisely the problem: the constant distortion becomes part of the expectation of what we can see in space, to the point where you can't tell anymore. http://www.reddit.com/r/obama/comments/8m19o/sign_obamas_petition_to_support_health_care_reform/c09q6cm What is this petition for? I can't figure it out. The three principles are vacuous as stated. For me the problems with healthcare are mostly scientific (I support evidence-based medicine) and economic (death to guild markets!). Politicians can't do much about it. The two things they could do, which I would sign a petition for, are: 1. Decouple health insurance from employment. It makes no sense. Single-payer probably a good idea. Obama originally said he wanted to decouple from employment, but then did a 360, saying something about it being too ingrained and too hard to change. Like Obama, I'm a pragmatist, but I fail to understand what's so hard about decoupling healthcare from employment. COBRA already does it to some extent. 2. Standardized data format / API for medical records, so that private companies can offer hosting solutions for patients and software for clinics. Plus some sort of IP model where patients own everything about the content except the right to edit it... perhaps the doctors are like authors and the patients like publishers. http://www.reddit.com/r/obama/comments/8m19o/sign_obamas_petition_to_support_health_care_reform/c09q6u6 Actually, if society is so great I think it ought to be able to take care of the dissenters. Western society is transforming the state of the world at such a pace... what if someone objects? Wouldn't it be cool if society were so desirable and so prosperous, that it could afford to compensate them? I think it should and I think it actually can. Healthcare is the start of this. You might not agree that anyone who doesn't want a 9-5 should be supported by the state, but certainly our society isn't so hot if it can't care for the ill. Having people suffer and/or die in the streets degrades society far more than the cost of caring for them. And I don't want to hear that 'volunteers will do it if it's important' or 'private donations should take care of it'. Let's get together and do it purposefully and be done with it. And let's not buy into the myth that if we reward incompetence that it will increase. There's always going to be a little of this, but the number of people who are willing to live off basic state services is inherently limited. Most people enjoy contributing to society. That's not to say programs shouldn't be carefully designed to limit their appeal -- and this can be done better than it has been in many cases. I think that on balance our system of government restricts personal liberty too much, taxes too much, etc. But I can't deny the part of me which derives from the fact that primates are social animals. Buying out the dissenters seems like a more than appropriate nod to this part of our nature. Sorry for the rant. http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/8t0fl/can_science_end_the_threat_of_terrorism/c0ac1co There is a fundamental asymmetry in our universe between the difficulty of creating and destroying -- destroying is much easier. Science (or more accurately, technology) *enables* terrorism. It lowers the cost of destructive power, so that fewer actors need to fail (go crazy, etc.) to inflict damage. In the limit, everyone will have access to cheap, handheld devices capable of wiping out all life on the planet. Game theory is the best preventative. The independent actors (humans) need to have optimal strategies for survival and happiness that don't involve them blowing anything up. Society is supposed to be structured that way, and to a large extent, it is. But there's a conflicting pressure on the design of societies -- the desire for men to shut other men out of the gene pool. War was historically a great way to dispose of excess men. There's a reasonable argument that drug prohibition is another. Anyway, if you examine the portion of fundamental Islamic terrorist recruits that have sex with a woman on a regular basis, I will bet you it is substantially lower than among their employed, moderate peers. But even with optimal society design, there is still the problem of failure. There's no known way to build a perfect machine. Humans and AIs will always have a chance of going nuts. Thus, society is ultimately doomed. http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/8t0fl/can_science_end_the_threat_of_terrorism/c0ac58j I wrote: >How much antimatter is required to destroy the planet? About 2.5 x 10^6 kg gives you the estimated energy of chicxulub (10^8 Mt). That's a cube of antilead 6 meters across. Granted, that won't take out all life, but it could do substantially more damage than chicxulub if dropped down a hole. This video mentions some other ideas, including an attack on the Earth's orbit, and a gray goo scenario (which is what I originally had in mind): http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/naked-science/3899/Videos#tab-Videos/06662_00 http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8uxhz/water_pollution_may_be_a_bigger_world_threat_than/c0aifzg The idea that the weather is our fault has been used by politicians and prophets to win power for millennia. I don't know of any offshore dealings by Gore, but he's certainly profited from his film and gained a seat at the table with his rhetoric. Anthropogenic CO2 is probably contributing (or will) to global warming. This is hard to show conclusively, but the basic argument is sound and the precautionary principle is a good idea in any case. However the severity of the consequences of global warming are completely overstated in most of the discourse on the matter. Additionally, anyone with doomsday CO2 scenarios would be talking about nuclear, not speculative wind or solar technologies. Wind and solar make sense in some areas, but don't even register on the 'immediate global carbon phase-out' scale. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/975bj/we_believe_in_the_freedom_to_read_say_no_to_drm/c0bocv3 I thought it was great that iTunes music dropped the DRM. But it doesn't really matter, because the whole system was designed around it. I've never bought any music through iTunes. I'm part of a musicians' collective and I have many GB of original mp3s traded there. And a bunch I've format-shifted from CDs (I've spent over $20K on CDs in my life and I still have all of the discs I've shifted). And I still have to ride the candlestick enema sleigh every time I move data on or off my iPhone.* It still requires iTunes (effectively), still can only sync to one library at a time / 5 "computers" at a time, still can't be backed up in a straightforward manner, still can't mount as a storage-class device, still can't play ogg or FLAC, and all the iTunes downloads are still in candlestick-enema AAC format. The question really isn't about DRM or not. It's about whether you're designing systems to empower people, or to fuck them raw for every dollar they have with a candlestick enema. It's about whether you care about the continuity of human information, and lowering the costs of exchanging that information, or whether you care about candlestick enemas. So don't count on roping publishers in with DRM and then removing it 5 years later. /* The other day I realized I recorded my son singing "twinkle, twinkle, little star" when he was 18 months old using Speakeasy for the iPhone. Since the developers haven't gotten around to independently re-implementing some sort of e-mail or webDAV thing to get the files off (as every iPhone app developer basically has to do), they're forever stuck in the iPhone's DB. If anyone knows a way to open the db files in the app sync folders, I'd be grateful. On the other hand, I have a similar recording of my mother, originally made in the early '40s on a magnetic wire recorder. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9b461/when_i_was_young_my_parents_were_friends_with/c0c3bnw The clash between urbanism and ruralism is coming to a head on a global scale. The majority of the population became urban in 2007, never to revert again. Nowhere is this clash more evident than in the U.S., with its major axis lying East-West between two oceans and an extensive rural infrastructure that supports comfortable, low-cost rural living. At the same time, the pace of technology has forced culture to change faster than it's used to doing. Changing gender roles and the increasing irrelevancy of Christianity have tended to have a polarizing effect. It hasn't helped that politicians have been able to gain power by feeding this polarity. Nixon was the first to do this, changing the republican party into a 'culture preserving' enterprise and launching the drug war. Regan stepped it up by playing ball with televangelists. And Bush Jr. leveraged a terrorist attack to take it to the next level. http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/9ch9b/hey_grammer_nazis_suck_on_this/c0c8pxp A lot has changed since 1788. Language does not sit still. In the Elizabethan period, spellings were not standardized at all. Now they are. Now we have keyword search on terabytes of documents, which wouldn't work nearly as well without standardized spelling. Some people even think we should switch to a language like this: http://www.lojban.org http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9dorc/total_area_required_to_power_the_world_with_solar/c0cdo9d It's hard to see solar delivering > 20% grid efficiency. The most-deployed utility scale designs are parabolic troughs, which are hitting 14% efficiency after decades of development, without taking storage into account (SEGS uses natural gas for load following). The most optimistic claims out there are for dish/Stirling systems; 30% efficient. Coupled with the best energy storage available (pumped hydro; ~ 75% efficient) you can presumably get 23% for off-peak power. Ausra claims a > 90% correlation between insolation and grid demand in the U.S., but I doubt that will continue if we move to EVs (and we will). A generous estimate for insolation is 2000 KWh/m^2*year (locate facilities in areas that have higher insolation and you ratchet up grid losses, or can't find water for cooling and hydro storage). So that's about 400 KWh/m^2*year to the grid, not including build-out costs (land used to obtain raw materials, etc.). The global demand for grid energy is about 20T KWh/year (but we shouldn't plan to build this, since demand is expected to skyrocket over the next 20 years...) So to power the grid with solar we need 50,000 km^2 of prime real estate (about twice the size of Maryland). That's just grid power. The headline says "power the world". According to Wikipedia, global energy consumption is about 140T KWh/year. That makes 14 Marylands, or 350K km^2 out of an available 150M km^2 on Earth. The headline also says "solar panels". PV panels are much less efficient and have far higher build-out costs than solar thermal. They're great for rooftops but they'll never "power the world" in anything like their current form (the largest commercial PV plant is only 60MW). According to Wikipedia, per-capita energy use in the U.S. has been relatively stable since 1980, at about 100,000 KWh/year. That means 6 * 10^14 KWh to give everybody our lifestyle, or 4.3 times our previous estimate, or 1% of the Earth's land (compare to 1.5% currently used for all urban areas). All of this would be more useful with another carbon-free technology for comparison. For instance, LFTRs could probably do the same job using a fraction of a percent of the land, including Thorium mining and everything, while producing less waste. The lifespan of a PV panel is about 20 years. I don't know the lifespan of a Stirling concentrator dish but even if it were a mature technology I doubt it'd exceed 20 years. Imagine rebuilding 50,000 km^2 of large, mirror-covered rotating dishes every two decades... http://www.reddit.com/r/lectures/comments/9e1x6/predictably_irrational_minilectures_5_min_videos/c0cfe3q I'm sure this will get downvoted, but I think behavioral economics is B.S. I keep wanting to like it. But all the results I've seen can prima facia be explained without recourse to any new models. Take the basketball ticket experiment -- what's to say the value of breaking plans made subsequently (perhaps involving other people's schedules, other monetary commitments, etc) isn't worth $1230? Even if the results do require a new model of "irrational agents", where is this model, and what are its predictions? Ariely's TED talk was about organ donor programs. He implies that people are irrational for not checking to opt out at the same rate they failed to opt in. How do you control for the hypothesis that people just don't give a fuck about organ donation (since it happens after you're dead), and accurately assess that the cost of making a choice isn't worth it, and therefore accept the default quite intentionally (and rationally)? For the record, none of you can have my organs -- I'll opt out no matter how you ask. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9jykk/every_american_voter_should_be_required_to_look/c0d32wu There are two broad effects in the decline of American economic superiority: 1. The successful completion of post-WWII reconstruction -- the resulting international competition, and ensuing calls on the overextended dollar. Bretton Woods died in 1971, but the effects of this death are still unfolding today. 2. The transition to an "information economy". Since the late '70s, huge swaths of manufacturing have been exported to Asia. 1981 was just around the time "made in Japan" and "made in Taiwan" became ubiquitous. China came online in the '90s, as did serious domestic immigrant labor. Greenspan proclaimed all this as something new, but many empires seem to have died after having exported manufacturing. American firms may add a lot of value to Asian labor (e.g. iPods) but this value seems to be appreciated mostly by Americans (iPhone is the first device Apple is seriously trying to export... we'll see if it's successful). So what do you trade with? Somebody (above) rightly pointed out that public debt is only part of the picture. People tend to think the government has some magic way of printing money. It prints money the same way citizens do -- by asking a bank for a loan. When you use a credit card, you are printing money. It is printed under the assumption that you will use it to generate a commensurate amount of value. If you borrow to renovate your house, perhaps that comes true. But if you borrow to buy a bunch of booze and cigarettes... There's quite a lot of unsecured private debt in the U.S. -- over $3000 for every man, woman, and child. It effects the government's ability to raise taxes, and tax receipts are the basis for the Fed's loans to the Treasury. In terms of GDP the current debt is not unprecedented, but in terms of discounted future tax receipts it is possibly off the scale. So you can argue about Reagan and Clinton, but the real graph probably looks more like a wall from 1971 to the present day. Households went from single to double income in that time and the private savings rate is lower now than when we started. http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/9o2rl/squat_toilet_apparently_this_is_the_way_to_avoid/c0dl9rb Shitting in the woods always felt much better to me. And I always thought this was mostly due to the squatting posture. Summing up the reduction in comfort over a lifetime of toilet use, it seems the installation of a squatting toilet -- or moving to a rural area where I could use the ditch rotation method -- is worth serious consideration. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/9rxqo/if_you_need_to_explain_evolution_to_a_creationist/c0e5nxw Punctuated equilibria are often not due to "sudden changes in selective pressures", but rather to something more fundamental about dynamic systems. We see it in the famous clocks video, for instance http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0 even though the fitness rules are static. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9t1zr/a_robber_targeted_three_victims_in_a_single_night/c0eb7m0 I think the suggestion is that if we allow anyone who desires to carry a handgun to do so, then everyone will be safer, and have the additional freedom of carrying a gun. I think that's probably correct, though I don't claim to have an airtight argument in its favor. I mean, ideally no one would want to carry a gun, but then the freedom to carry one would hardly hurt. On the other hand, having the freedom despite that no one exercises it would seem to be the easiest way to establish that you'd reached the ideal of no one wanting to. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9ve0y/i_always_say_inappropriate_stuff_in_the_airport/c0emuun Let's see... The M67 grenade contains 184g of "Composition B" explosives, which have a higher energy density than plain TNT, but let's use TNT's energy density of 4184 J. That's about 214 Wh. The 15" MacBook Pro's battery pack is rated at 73 Wh, which means it may store up to about 140 Wh total (but I think it unlikely all of it could be converted to heat quickly). So I'll give it to him, but it's a bit of a stretch. Frag grenades like the M67 kill by producing shrapnel from their metal containment vessels. Laptop batteries don't have such containers, so probably we should be comparing to a concussion grenade, like the MK3A2, which contains 227g TNT... http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9z7g2/so_i_was_pulled_over_tonight/c0f4fdv In fact, the very existence of police can be explained using the notion that there are surplus men (we are descended from far fewer men than women, and they were expert at sending the other men off to wars, and more recently, to prisons). It's why women just don't tend to 'get' the problem with cops. Even if you're not attractive, chances are you've never experienced the rivalry that takes place between young men and police. And no, I don't think going 10-15 miles over the (arbitrary) speed limit is a "legitimate" reason to be stopped by someone brandishing a gun. It's completely absurd. We could eliminate speeding (on highways at least) by charging or delaying cars by clocking them between exits. Instead we opt for this cowboys and Indians game -- dudes hiding out in the bushes with laser guns to shoot at passing motorists! It's insane. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9z7g2/so_i_was_pulled_over_tonight/c0f4g07 You can call them whatever you like, but infractions carry very serious consequences, including large monetary fines (enforced by the same threats as any criminal judgment), suspension of the right to travel (which can be really damning if you don't live in an urban area), and so on. And they are even more insidious than real crimes in many ways, since they are adjudicated in farcical traffic courts, where judges act as both the bench and prosecution, where the word of a single arresting officer is sufficient evidence for nearly any conviction, and where the cost of fighting any of it is generally kept higher than the cost of the punishments, so that huge sums can be extracted from travelers into local treasuries. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/b7in0/al_gore_oped_response_to_recent_events/c0ldbl2 "Unimaginable calamity"? No. Serious problem, yes. Of course either way, we can easily replace all fossil fuels with nuclear power within a few decades, using far less land per gigawatt and causing far fewer deaths per gigawatt than any other method of generating energy. And burn up all the nuclear weapons in the world, and burn up all the nuclear waste in America, and have enough high-quality ore left to last a minimum of 200 years (assuming the use of breeder reactors, with 9B people each consuming the current U.S. avg of 100 MWh/year). Or we could go on whining like an opportunistic windbag. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/bamxa/mit_professor_dan_nocera_at_poptech_thanks_to_the/c0lx887 How much obnoxious and misleading bullshit can this guy fit into 20 minutes? * Why call it "artificial photosynthesis" instead of "electrolysis"? To be obnoxious and misleading, that's why. * Why plot four data points (one of which is a giant square), draw a curve that passes through none of them, and claim you've explained the known universe? To be obnoxious and misleading, of course. Heavier things cost more? Mass production makes things cheaper? Wow! You could have made a real graph to support this paradigm-breaking hypothesis. * Why talk about the latent energy in the MIT swimming pool when electrolysis is an under-unity process useful for STORING energy only (NOT generating it). To be obnoxious and misleading! * Why use the term "energy" to talk about power, using units of power? You know. * Why claim that 'Lithium battery people' are "lying" and that -- trust me, I'm a chemist -- Lithium batteries can't be improved? Despite the well-known fact that Lithium batteries have been and are continuing to dramatically improve in both power AND energy density? You know. http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/b7nv8/how_close_are_you/c0lec24 2-second hypothesis: the cradle of agriculture, if not some critical contested territory between H. erectus and H. sapiens, is located in Afghanistan. Looks promising: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan#Prehistoric_Afghanistan http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/bzflh/why_do_they_keep_referring_to_this_as_an_oil/c0pd9z8 Here's how to hold BP accountable: clear regulatory hurdles for small/modular nuclear reactors. Fully fund breeder reactor development. Automobiles will electrify at an electrifying rate. Convert our trucking fleet to natural gas, or make synthetic fuels from water with high-temperature reactors. Solar panels can make sense for covered parking with charging. In 20-30 years we can virtually rid ourselves of coal and oil, dramatically reduce our need for natural gas, provide an immense boost to the economy with reliable, clean, CHEAP energy, and lead the world in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Get educated about nuclear power and insist that environmentalists and politicians get their facts right (the right order of magnitude would be a good start). The Chinese are not afraid of nuclear power and they will shred us economically if we sit still while they bring 200GW online in the next 20 years. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/bzpsi/theres_been_a_lot_of_uninformed_ecopanic_lately/c0peazw It's not whether there'd be an ecotastrophe. It's what this level of failure at animal husbandry says about us as a people. Bees are up there with dogs among our domesticated friends. Imagine dogs getting sick and dying everywhere. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/cbrtl/the_largest_oilrelated_catastrophe_ever_texaco/c0rhkgf We're nowhere near peak Lithium. There are 15MT known reserves in Bolivia and Chile alone. The energy density of Lithium batteries appears to be already sufficient, given that the Tesla S will hit the market next year with over 200 miles of range, vastly more interior room, and better performance than other sedans in its class. Lithium in car batteries is also recoverable, at the end of the battery's life. High-speed charging will require grid upgrades in some cases, but there appears to be ample time to charge vehicles at night and while people are at work. Edit: The 15MT mentioned are enough for about 2 billion Tesla S sedans (300-mile range model). That's considerably more than the ~ 400 million cars in the world today. All people now living could sit in these cars simultaneously, with room to spare. 85KWh/8000cells * 1cell/3.6V * 0.3gLi/Ah = 7.08kgLi 15MT/7.08kg ~~ 2 x 10^9 http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cd3lv/surface_area_required_to_power_the_whole_world_by/c0rr6fr Stirling dish systems are the most efficient utility-scale solar systems demonstrated to date. However, I don't think they could scale to power the world... the materials requirements would be insane. Power towers may do better, since you're only covering/tracking with mirrors, centralizing the balance of plant. Triple-junction cells with 400 sun concentration are interesting, but the devil is in the concentration part (thermal management, etc). There have been plans for a demo plant, but I haven't seen any results yet. You're right about the salt... so far, ~7 hours of storage has been achieved, leading to a 65% annual capacity factor in Spain. Or so they claim. The numbers seem to be handled entirely by people directly involved with subsidizing the project. Not that I don't trust them, but they don't make their data and methods available (at least not that I've been able to find). The EU reports are fairly useless. Then again, all this is kinda pointless given that we mastered fission 50 years ago. According to Chris Uhlik, the Sempra / First Solar PV plant outside Las Vegas is 3% efficient, if you draw a boundary around it on Google maps. Using wikipedia's numbers, the Andasol-1 plant in Spain is about 4% efficient (3.2e14 J/km^2 / 7.9e15 J/km^2). Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxCUYPzHsug Sweet baby jesus, look at all that stuff, for a 50 MW plant! Here's a 2 GW fission plant: http://papundits.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/diablo_canyon_nuclear_power_plant.jpg Editt: Here's a 75 MW solar plant in Florida: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/business/05solar.html That thing in front is a 4 GW gas plant for "load following". What a joke! http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cd3lv/surface_area_required_to_power_the_whole_world_by/c0rs7uz It's a hard issue because it's so misunderstood, even by lots of smart people. Me too, two years ago and prior. There are several kinds of waste. Spent fuel rods contain (in very rough numbers) 1% fission products, 1% transuranic elements, and 98% natural Uranium (U238). The transuranics are fissile and can be extracted from the spent fuel and burned. France does this. They have to be extracted because the kind of reactors we use can't sustain a chain reaction when the fission products are mixed in. New kinds of reactors can burn them in place. The U238 is fertile and can also be burned in new kinds of reactors. Where by new, I mean reactors we've demonstrated in labs since the '60s. The fission products are closer to waste, but many of them decay to stable materials that can be sold, such as Xenon and Nickel, in a few years. The rest decay to background levels in ~ 300 years. Even if we call 100% of the spent fuel waste (which would be crazy, because it contains an unbelievable amount of energy), its volume is several orders of magnitude less per GWh than the waste of ANY other energy technology. This is unavoidable due to the differences in energy density -- even with our current reactors that only extract 1% of it, you get 16,000 times more energy per kg than from coal. ("Renewables" too, in the mass of the components required to collect them, weighted by their MTBFs.) In the case of the U.S., we've been getting 15% of our grid power from nuclear since the '80s, and all the spent fuel is still at the plants. They're not big plants. A fourth kind of waste is mechanical parts that have been exposed to neutrons in the reactor. These are legitimately waste, in that they have no fuel value and are too variegated to do anything with other than bury. Of course they can be buried. The military operates WIPP with no trouble. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cg940/cornell_researchers_team_have_been_performing/c0sf5c6 This just in: millions of baby boys have their penises mutilated every year. Bioethicists strangely silent. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cllew/do_you_realize_how_incredible_gasoline_is/c0tgaqy We have them - lead sulfate car batteries aren't built for energy density. Lithium-ion batteries today are approaching 1MJ/kg. The theoretical limits of chemical batteries are known, with Li-air at the top. If you only weigh the Lithium, you get about the same energy density as gasoline. If you weigh the air too, about half the energy density of gasoline. Unfortunately, these cells can be very dangerous. They are also not field-rechargeable (yet). Fortunately, in a field-rechargeable chemistry like Li-ion, the Lithium isn't a consumable fuel. The fuel (electricity) weighs essentially nothing, especially if you make it from Thorium in a breeder reactor. And when the car is junked, the Lithium can be recycled. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/cpks0/interesting_find_richer_kids_are_more_likely_to/c0ub8gp Paternal age is known to be correlated with austism, and older men are more likely to have more money, and having more money also causes couples to have children later. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d1tf7/midwives_under_fire_a_lancet_article_suggests/c0wyclh The optimal rate depends on things like average maternal age. Some of modern obstetrics can be seen as removal of traditional evolutionary constraints on childbirth. For instance, as the C-section rate increases, the constraint on neonatal head size (or at least, its relationship to female pelvis size) goes away. We had two kids on the bed. We were both healthy and in our 20s. Much better outcome for all concerned. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d1tf7/midwives_under_fire_a_lancet_article_suggests/c0wydk4 Pitocin is a hack treatment par excellence. Impossible to titrate the dose of a hormone like that (let alone in the middle of a hormone cascade between two animals as they break apart). There are cases where it can be life-saving (stopping maternal hemorrhaging) but it is most commonly administered to speed labor, at which purpose it is flatly contraindicated. Analgesia also flatly interferes with the mother's ability to feel and respond to the child. Remember, the head is completely deformed as it passes through the pelvis. IQ points are potentially up for grabs at that moment. The financial incentives of performing procedures (and malpractice disincentives of not performing them) are a problem, but I stop short of accusing doctors of fitting treatments to their dinner schedules. Over time, economics does tend to select for certain behaviors. Here's one meta-analysis on analgesia and C-section: http://www.medicine.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/band34/b34-3.html http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d1tf7/midwives_under_fire_a_lancet_article_suggests/c0wye57 Monitoring is very distracting to laboring women. The instrumentation is encumbering. Our CNMs used handheld dopler for heartbeat at critical points in our deliveries. It's more appropriate than wiring women up in triage. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d1tf7/midwives_under_fire_a_lancet_article_suggests/c0wyeh3 You forgot one of the most significant interventions: getting in the car to go to the hospital. Tends to stop labor right when you don't want it interrupted. Another one is not knowing who's around you. We switched from OBs to CNMs in the third trimester of our first pregnancy when our OB practice wouldn't even begin to guarantee who'd be doing the birth - you get whoever's on call (we were getting different people every office visit!). Then you've got the nurses fluttering in and out doing busywork all around you - and you may very well see more than one shift of them in the course of your labor. How many people here prefer to be at home to take a shit? What if I asked you to drive to the McDonald's down the street while you're brown-capping? A crude analogy but it will give you a better idea of the kind of thing labor is than... most OBs seem to have. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d1tf7/midwives_under_fire_a_lancet_article_suggests/c0wyfg0 Hospitals have a strong bias towards what gets mothers in and out with infants with a pulse as quickly and reliably as possible. Nobody correlates any of that to outcomes a year, or 20 years, later. And nobody correlates it to cost efficacy (since costs are pushed into the labyrinth of insurance, and then onto new parents who are not in a position to consider costs). Actually we do know that babies born by C-section are at higher risk of childhood asthma. A few other such correlations are known. Here is one study of home birth outcomes: http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abridged/330/7505/1416 http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d1tf7/midwives_under_fire_a_lancet_article_suggests/c0wyhpd They cut the cord early so they can rip the placenta out early, which reduces the risk of maternal hemorrhage by a fraction of a percent. Typical distortion of risk/benefit in obstetrics. (Edit: The cord blood is loaded with stem cells... leading to the practice of parents banking it in case the child can use them for a therapy later in life. Our midwife said, she prefers to give them to the child now.) Combined neonatal risk that can be mitigated by medical intervention in less than 10 minutes is on the order of 1:1,000,000. If you have a clear shot to a hospital and have toured it previously and can get there in 10 minutes, there is little reason not to start at home (provided your midwife is competent and detects problems right away). http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d3n0h/congratulations_to_urenco_usa_for_building_the/c0xc75z Who needs Uranium enrichment when you can make weapons-grade Plutonium right in your reactor (and get it out without shutting off the lights)? They also have a positive void coefficient. Not passively safe. That's the reason CANDU reactors aren't legal in the U.S. It's also a reason the ACR-1000 uses light water coolant (though the project is basically dead at this point). Existing CANDU designs also suffer from low core power density and low fuel burnup, and they produce a lot of tritium. More accurately, the NRC has refused to license those designs that have been submitted. A good overview of CANDU reactivity control is available here: http://canteach.candu.org/library/19990103.pdf Oversight can prevent weapons use of any kind of nuclear facility. You haven't said why you think it's easier to oversee a reactor than an enrichment plant. Also let's not forget, CANDU reactors do require enrichment. And it's much harder to enrich water from 1e-4 to 1e2 than it is Uranium from 7e-3 to 4-e2. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d62k8/obama_science_is_more_essential_for_our/c0xvc72 Biden blames republicans for the recession. Defends letting tax cuts on the wealthiest 2% of Americans expire. Obama met commitment on Iraq. Stimulus is working. Government must support American manufacturing. Electric cars won't happen without government support. Will double "renewable" energy capacity by 2012. Personalized medicine via NIH and the recovery act will cure diseases. It's a Biden stump speech with almost no tangible content of any kind, let alone anything about science. However it's apparently all just his commentary on this report http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/Recovery_Act.PDF which obviously contains the missing details. Yes, it must. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/d6rat/what_happens_when_you_give_homeless_people_a/c0xzzax The way I see it is, there is always going to be some fraction of people that can't function in society. And if society's so great, that fraction ought to be small enough that society can happily afford to take care of them. http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/db249/study_killing_off_mosquitoes_will_have_little/c0yxk6o Heard of site-specific selfish genes? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1691325/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/a-genetically-engineered-swat/ http://www.oxitec.com http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/detgk/diaspora_will_probably_never_be_a_facebook_slayer/c0zpat9 Yes, great idea. We had something like it once. It was called the world wide web. It failed. Turns out people can't run web servers. Then freenet and mojonation; failed. The future is commodity computing, owned and operated by corporations, supported by advertising. I don't like it any more than you do. Once again, to displace an entrenched product, you have to be MUCH better. Not a clone. Facebook got the other half of the population to correspond over the internet. What is Diaspora going to do? http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/dldqv/theres_a_reason_why_classical_composers_used_all/c113mdl Unfortunately, this entry is misleading. It is far from clear that key coloration referred to intonation differences in circulating temperaments. Another explanation is absolute pitch effects, but this is also debated. It seems to have been a fad of the classical period. It may have been something more like wine criticism, which persists despite never having demonstrated reproducibility. http://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/dldqv/theres_a_reason_why_classical_composers_used_all/c117d7r Yeah, it's quite new, all created on a mailing list from 1997-2006.† The wedge products were introduced by Gene Smith. I'm self-taught. There are good introductory materials here or try my own (somewhat dated) overview. † The lineage is roughly... * Nicola Vicentino (1511–1576), adaptive JI, 31-ET * Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), 5-limit tonespace * Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894), psychoacoustic basis of consonance * RHM Bosanquet (1841–1913), regular mapping, generalized keyboard * Shohe Tanaka (1862-1945), triangular projection for 5-limit tonespace * Adriaan Fokker (1887-1972), periodicity blocks * Harry Partch (1901-1974), extended JI * Erv Wilson (1928- ), extended tonespace, scale tree * [mailing list] (1997-), complete theory of regular temperaments http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/dr3a1/fun_fact_the_set_of_all_musical_chords_is/c12c5kp Yep, major and minor triads sound perfectly normal in quarter-comma meantone (e.g. 31-ET), the standard Western keyboard tuning for hundreds of years before 12-ET. They also sound perfectly normal in something like porcupine temperament (e.g. 22-ET, though most Western music is incompatible with it). In short, one of many papers that shows some nifty group theory having to do with 12... but not so much with how we hear music. http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/esid8/from_sex_to_phones_to_star_wars_what_would_older/c1annv8 I think it's more complicated than this. Our risk tolerance as a society has been going down across the board. And our wealth has increased greatly.* With a warm, reliable SUV and flexible hours at work, it starts to make more sense to drive them to the bus stop. Not that I condone such behavior. I was born in '77 and walked to the bus stop until I could drive. Edit: It occurs to me there's a third possible factor: the rise of bedroom communities (with women entering the workforce). We encountered this when we realized that even if one of us did stay home with the kids, there'd be no other parents/kids around during the day to hang out with. The neighborhood as an institution wasn't there. You have to drive to and pay for scheduled Mom & kids yoga classes and so forth. If your kids are down the block and you know folks are likely to be around and paying attention, and everybody has everybody's phone number, it's a lot easier to justify letting your kids roam free. * Wikipedia offers a variety of data sources: Census Bureau, Family income by percentile, 1947-2007 Published research, Household income distribution, 1967-2003 Census Bureau, Median household income by race, 1967-2009 Census Bureau, Median personal income, 1975-2005 All of them show the same thing: While income dispersion may be increasing, all groups are making more today than they were in the past. And that certainly fits with the stories that have been shared here. http://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/fendj/french_president_nicolas_sarkozy_has_announced/c1fidv6 France's current grid capacity is about 100GW. They plan to bring 4GW new nuclear online by 2020. 6GW wind (nameplate) is really about 2GW average, so this represents less than 2% of their grid mix. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fkt7t/nemerle_factor_alice_ml_and_other_programming/c1gpo60 Haven't you heard? You have to be obsessed with some sort of fictional universe subject matter to be a wikipedia admin. I've been editing wikipedia since 2003 and every time I've had a conflict -- yes, in 100% of cases -- I go by their user page and see something that makes me think they post from a furry suit. They go around deleting technical content if they can't recognize it in the top 5 results of a Google search (3 of which are wikipedia and wikipedia dupes). Also, they're physically incapable of posting a reply in a discussion without linking to a policy page each time. If there's something the existing admins could do to encourage contribution of high-quality information, it would be for them to find sources and cite them properly, format articles properly, etc. But they find it more rewarding to deface pages with templates. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fkt7t/nemerle_factor_alice_ml_and_other_programming/c1gprpc I don't have a problem with the general expectation that the contributor of content should be the one to source it. I think the problems start when: * There's a culture of "challenging" unsourced content. The challenger ought to be ashamed if his challenge doesn't demonstrate that he undertook a serious effort to find sources before speaking up. 9 times out of 10, I find the challenger hasn't even bothered. * It is possible to slap a template on a page, which then requires a process to remove. Simply disable this functionality! * The culture rewards people for the amount of time they spend on wikipedia, rather than the quality of their contributions. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fkt7t/nemerle_factor_alice_ml_and_other_programming/c1grmga Wikipedia is now a primary source of information and it needs to live up to it: * Most people who use wikipedia use it as a primary source (even people like Scott Aaronson). * Most of the true content on wikipedia does not have a citation. * Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/3 of the sourced content cites something that does not, in fact, support it. That's because the admins who go around slapping templates on pages and deleting content will spare sourced content without digging up the reference and checking it. Actually wikipedia has always been a primary source. The notion that it is an encyclopedia is merely a contrivance that allows the culture to externalize debate. As such it was probably essential to the success of the project. However wikipedia is now by far the greatest assemblage of human knowledge in history (probably even in relative terms). The project has tremendous responsibility and needs to grow some better tools for meeting it. The citations on wikipedia (spent much time checking them?) are of very low quality. Wikipedia is the largest and most accurate source of information in history because wikis excel at aggregating knowledge from where most knowledge resides: the minds of living people. http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h81jm/time_magazine_online_article_lists_10_least/c1tex4c Here's how it works: For jobs in the normal labor market, the stress level (including physical stress) is roughly proportional to compensation. For jobs under the auspices of a union/practice/guild (doctor, lawyer, sales), it's inversely proportional. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/hph6x/a_first_look_at_the_windows_8_user_interface/c1xf9cn Touch is great but keyboard & mouse is simply superior in terms of total interaction bandwidth. Touch on a monitor or wall is exhausting, it only works on a table or in your hands. And a monitor is just better with keyboard & mouse, because hands and gaze naturally fall in different places. So the two paradigms really do want different things; they don't mix well. (It would still be good to have one OS for both kinds of devices, which would simply switch modes. Windows 8 might be a win there.) Beyond that is the issue of the filesystem. I like that he mentioned it, I like that it's still accessible to users, but I'm not seeing any improvement in how it operates. I'll argue that the defining characteristic of "post-PC" is not touch but the 'removal' of the filesystem. Apple has been at this a while with iTunes and iPhoto. Ironically, not an hour before I found this video, my wife had to walk her mom through renaming a file on her (Mac) desktop. Even among people who know how to rename files, few bother to be good curators of their filesystem. But I refuse to admit that we're doing anything other than selling people short by hiding the fs. Instead I think we should be getting the hint that filesystems and file management tools need improvement. And Microsoft had a grand initiative to do this, with WinFS. This was during the dark ages immediately after Gates left. They barfed. (To be fair, WinFS goes back to Cairo in the mid '90s.) Apple barfed too. Their filesystem blows chunks and they killed their effort to switch to ZFS. Time Machine is nice, but it's a poor substitute for real revision control. That would be feature #1 -- make the fs git-like. Good enough to replace git for programmers, even. The other feature would be metadata good enough to replace the iTunes, Aperture, etc. dbs. Finally, there would be powerful reporting in Explorer/Finder, to make inspection and bulk editing of file properties easy. Spotlight search was a big win, but you can't edit out of its results view properly. My favorite example of not selling users short is Google. When everybody else thought people were too stupid to search and needed "portals" and focus-grouped ranking criteria, Google came along with its blank page and powerful algorithms that exposed the structure of the web directly to users. (The web was more like Wikipedia then -- searching it was actually useful.) Edit: I think it was only a day or two after I wrote this that Jobs said many of the same things in his iCloud keynote. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ir9qb/new_data_suggests_google_isnt_raining_men_34_of/c261odb The whole point of social networks is to get women to use the internet. 34% is low. Facebook and Myspace both have female majorities. http://www.slideshare.net/oreillymedia/facebook-demo-20090415 (slide 3) http://bit.ly/luBzj6 http://www.checkfacebook.com The key thing is that instead of direct messaging or topic-driven public messaging (which had been 90+% male since the BBS era), it's relationship-driven public messaging. The great women's restroom in the sky! http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mkwf2/why_do_humans_procrastinate_and_how_can_it_be_beat/c32hk80 Actually, Ainslie was first to discover hyperbolic discounting, and he showed that animals do it too, and even that pigeons will try to avoid tempting but suboptimal choices. Kahneman & Tversky helped popularize this work but added little to it. Their contribution was loss aversion and prospect theory, which has been used to characterize certain behaviors but, contrary to popular belief, has yet to produce a model of market prices any different from existing 'rational' models. http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/mru40/those_who_support_democracy_must_welcome_the_rise/c33fqu9 Also, Athenian democracy lasted only about 70 years before it succumbed to shirt-tearing public speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleisthenes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_Golden_Age#End_of_the_Age_of_Pericles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleon#Rise_in_popularity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades#Rise_to_prominence http://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepolitics/comments/11cs6h/i_dont_understand_the_claim_that_mitt_romneys_tax/c6v8233 TPC reports a $5T revenue shortfall over ten years. Current output gap is $1T/year. Closing that gives revenues of $2T over the decade, plus significant savings on safety-net programs. If closing the gap takes two years and the economy settles down to the growth rate it had in the '60s (4.4%) for the next eight, vs. the baseline of 3.3%, we get an additional $360B of revenue over the decade. How much can we expect in savings in safety net programs? Well, we're spending $230B/yr more this year on "Income security" than we did in 2007. That doesn't include increases in medicaid or other health programs for the poor http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?granuleId=BUDGET-2013-TAB-3-1&packageId=BUDGET-2013-TAB TPC didn't consider spending cuts. Here are recent federal budgets 2007 2.7T 2008 2.9 2009 3.5 2010 3.7 2011 3.6 2012 3.8 The delta from 2008 to 2009 is $600B, or $6T over ten years. So there are plenty of ways to make up a $5T shortfall on a holistic basis. And I'll argue that tax policy proposals made during a campaign should be viewed on a holistic basis. Of course, it's a lot to assume that Romney administration policies will close the output gap in two years etc., even in whole. But it is possible. What Romney has actually said is that he will 1. not enact a tax policy that increases deficits 2. not enact a tax policy that increases the share of federal revenue paid by the wealthy and of course it is possible to enact rate cuts etc. that only kick in if certain economic or budgetary benchmarks are met (in fact, conditional fiscal policies are attractive for many of the same reasons that conditional monetary policies are). Regarding deductions, Romney said he will limit them, not eliminate any particular deduction. Total deductions would be capped per return. He's also suggested means testing for social security -- a policy typically favored by democrats. See also: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-reply-from-martin-feldstein.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/08/delong_vs_felds.html http://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/228rosen.pdf http://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/13fpg2/to_reduce_inequality_tax_wealth_not_income/c73rxah I think the solution is to tax income, but at a rate proportional to the sum of income over a person's filing history. This solves the problem of having to assess the worth of everybody's assets -- we already have the past income records. And it solves the problem of the artist's daughter having to sell the paintings she inherits to pay the taxes on them.