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Seconded. Read GEB.

How do statisticians decide on what a good sample size is?

Certainly they can't use the science of statistics to determine the sample size, since a good statistical study would require using a good sample size.

A while back I thought of doing the same thing for Unicode characters... am I a genius too?

This reminds me of C.P.Snow's infamous "The Two Cultures" essay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

White text on a black background is much easier on the eyes than black text on white background. And, as far as the fonts being too small, you can always enlarge them with CONTROL-+ in opera. I think firefox has a similar feature. Don't know about IE or the other browsers.

From Simply Scheme's preface:

"The only trouble with SICP is that it was written for MIT students, all of whom love science and are quite comfortable with formal mathematics. Also, most of the students who use SICP at MIT have already learned to program computers before they begin. As a result, many other schools have found the book too challenging for a beginning course. We believe that everyone who is seriously interested in computer science must read SICP eventually. Our book is a prequel; it's meant to teach you what you need to know in order to read that book successfully."

"Godlike genius.. Godlike nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! I've failed my way to success." --Thomas Edison

It's pretty sad that people have to have something so simple spelled out for them and given a catchy motto like "The Five Whys".

Even sadder that it would be hailed as some revolutionary problem-solving technique.

Just another fad.

Now if only there was something like this for Opera!

The argument for why the article's author thinks "the worst argument in the world" is invalid comes from a book by Alan Sokal, a physicist with a real chip on his shoulder against Postmodern philosophy.

Sokal is perhaps best known for what has come to be known as the "Sokal Hoax": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_hoax

I strongly recommend anyone interested in this article and in learning about the more recent incarnation of the analytic/continental feud in philosophy read the articles Sokal has collected on his hoax: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/index.html

Outside these articles, Sokal and his sympathizers rarely acknowledge that there could even be any reasonable response to their allegations of buffoonary and charlatanism. Unfortunately for Sokal and his sympathizers, this pose leads to the conclusion that they are either inadvertently or deliberately ignorant of much of philosophy.

Please allow anonymous comments.