ealloc

As a non-EE, something that confused me briefly is that "L-R" doesn't seem symmetric but the scenario is symmetric. But I see now that you'd hear L-R in your left ear and R-L in your right ear. The R current goes the "wrong way" through the left speaker and causes the coil to move opposite the way it does in the right speaker (and vv).

When you send money to another individual what kind of check is there that you've sent the money to the right address? I read there's a confirmation step but in the event you accidentally sent the money to a random person that person could confirm too. Maybe a CRC on the phone number?

I would phrase it as "press into the screen with another finger" maybe. Common screen coordinates (to me) are left/right (x), up/down (y), and in/out (z). The instruction is trying to refer to the z coord, but using the common word for the y coord.

The 'value' of the currency ultimately comes from people's opinion in it, and whether or not it is legal tender is just one influence on that opinion. You might be forced to accept payment in a currency but that doesn't mean you value the currency much. Eg the Zimbabwe dollar.

> if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically.

True, but just to be clear: In the first link in the article it's shown how people speaking languages with no blue/green distinction are significantly slower at selecting the 'odd one out' when given a set of blue shapes and one green shape. Furthermore, this effect is only significant in their right visual field, whose images are processed by the left (more language adept) part of the brain.

Pink slime is gross. A once-bacteria-laden mush of animal leftovers? No thanks. I don't eat food purely for nutrition (it's easy to get enough nutrition) but because it is appetizing too. Pink slime sounds tasteless and textureless. Health wise am not too worried about the ammonia itself, but by the implication that the meat is so full of bacteria that it requires a relatively large dose of ammonia to make it edible.

On the other hand, I have no problem eating lab meat, 'chemically treated' and genetically modified food in principle, depending on the exact chemicals used. For example, I would like to avoid food coated with dangerous pesticides (including if the plant was GM'd to produce the pesticide). Benign pesticides are fine.

I imagine lab meat could be even cleaner and more appetizing than normal meat, once the process has developed enough.

Randomness doesn't come from the Heisenburg uncertainty principle, it comes from the Born rule.

(and by the way, all this talk of randomness mainly applies to the copenhagen interpretation. Other interpretations, like many-worlds, do not really have 'randomness', though the meaning of the born rule in such an interpretation is unclear)

> Simply handing people money to spend is not stimulative because it does not create value. Put another way, taking money from A and giving it to B so B can buy things from A does not (and cannot) make A wealthier.

Sure they can, according to some models.

Here's the argument: Say A and B produce goods for each other, and so A might buy something from B for $5, and B might come back and buy something from A with the same $5. They are happily creating value, trading back and forth. Now, say something scares A so that he wants to save some of his money instead of spend. Then B is getting less income from A, and so she also becomes worried about her future income and spends less. Then A gets even less money, and is even less willing to spend. As you can see there is a feedback cycle where A and B produce (and spend) less and less. This is a recession.

Now give B some money, possibly even taken from A. Now B is getting a more reliable income, an is more willing to spend on A, who thus earns more and becomes more willing to spend on B, and so on in positive feedback.

This is basically Krugman's "Babysitting Co-op" scenario.

I think the parent is referring to libdvdcss, which is the library that cracks the DRM encryption on the dvd. Without it you wouldn't be able to skip unskippable parts, nor even play the dvd using non-authorized dvd players like vlc.

libdvdcss is developed by the videolan project, which is the umbrella project for vlc.

you can encode all characters in the basic multilingual plane with a single utf-16 code unit, while in utf-8 BMP characters have variable lengths from 1 to 3 bytes.

If Notch only allows BMP characters and uses utf-16, internationalized string maniulation is very easy, as easy as ASCII for kids to mess with.

I believe "PC" has historically meant (or often been used to imply) "IBM PC compatible" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible) which Apple/Mac was not, until they switched to x86.

By going UTF-16, he would make the game much more accessible to those not using a latin alphabet.

If I was designing the game, I would favor internationalization vs space efficiency in the virtual computer. That way russian kids would get to have fun learning to write silly programs too.

Say the 'acutal' rating for an item is p. (ie, if you got an infinite number of people voting, the ratio of upvotes to total votes is p).

Now say your users vote, and they upvote with that probability p. The number of upvotes k you get out of n votes will follow a binomial distribution B(k;n,p). The binomial distribution has mean np and stdev sqrt(n p(1-p)), and is very close to gaussian in shape. Since the stdev is a rough measure of the 'width' of the distribution, common way to describe the error is (mean +/- lambda*stdev), where you can tune lambda to your desire. If you increase lambda you get a wider confidence interval, and therefore more certainty that a measurement will be within that confidence interval.

Now, say you measure k upvotes out of n votes. You can divide by n to get p0, your estimated rating based on those votes.

An easy estimate for the error of this measurement is to assume that p0 is approximately correct and equal to p. Then the expected number of upvotes would be n p0 with stdev(n p0(1-p0)). Divide this by n to get the fraction of upvotes, to give a final estimate for p of p0 +- lambda sqrt(p0(1-p0)/n)

Now, your estimate (p0) of p is not quite right, and therefore your estimate of the error (which depends on p0) is not quite right either. The wilson score attempts to correct for that. We don't know p, but imagine if we did, we would expect any measurement p0 to be in the range p +- lambda sqrt(p(1-p)/n). That is, we expect

        abs(p - p0) < lambda sqrt(p (1-p)/n)

If you solve this equation for p in terms of p0, you get a formula given in the article, ie, the confidence limits for p given p0.

Wikipedia is a reasonable starting point:

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

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