ideonexus

This was Louise and Aylmer Maude. I'm afraid I don't know much about the different translations. I do think I would like to read this book again one day, knowing the character arcs. I just learned the Pevear and Volokhonsky version leaves the French untranslated, which is how Tolstoy wanted it. That sounds like a great translation to read next.

I just finished Tolstoy's War and Peace. I think it deserves both the hype as a masterpiece and the jokes as a sprawling verbose epic. He's like Jane Goodall observing and deconstructing human beings at all social levels from the serfs and peasants to the Russian aristocracy and Napoleon himself. His characters are so real and their motives so transparent in the way he describes them, and they are this microcosm living individual lives inside the macrocosm of the French invasion of Russia. Throughout all of it are the rambling philosophical speculations of the author that are filled with brilliant insights but always seem fuzzy on making any strong points.

What I loved most about the book was how it conveys the complexity of life and the absurdity of historical analysis and the focus on "Great Men" against such complexity, which he compares to physicists trying to understand macro-phenomenon without taking into account the micro-phenomenon that add up to the macro effect. The whole books is an illustration of this through the many lives it follows in the major historical events taking place around them.

It's fascinating to me to watch different online cultures debate this and watch each culture cherry-pick the studies that best support their position. Do you believe in gender differences in personality and aptitude? You can find dozens of papers to support that position. Do you believe such differences do not exist? You can find dozens of papers to support that as well. There is a deluge of research on this topic going back decades--even centuries depending on your filters.

It's like the old nature vs nurture debate. I grew up with academics constantly bringing up the questions of blank slates versus inherent human nature in my schooling. Then I started hanging out with young Ph.Ds in a wide variety of sciences. I learned from them that the debate itself is generally regarded as nonsense by many modern academics. Anyone who has deeply immersed themselves in the research knows that there is a vastly complex web of interactions between genetics and environment that is impossible to untangle with our current tools and methodologies. Anyone who tells you otherwise is merely exposing their Dunning–Kruger.

That's how I feel about this gender-differences debate flaming up all week on HN. I completely understand the passions it raises on both sides, but everyone is talking past each other because no one is understands this subject well enough to be humbled by its incredible complexity and how much we still don't know about it.

Magical piece. I have a related question, what are my fellow HNers doing for the eclipse?

My original accommodations fell through (over-booked), and now I'm driving the family 12 hours west to camp in a friend's backyard in Nashville the night before the event (much lower chance of cloud-coverage west of the appalachians). At this point, everything along the path of the totality, hotels and camping, is completely booked.

The day of the eclipse, my biggest fear is cloud-coverage. So I'll be checking the weather and planning to hit the road at a moment's notice. I worked landscaping in college, and it's not hard to drive one town over to avoid clouds, but with so many people attending this thing, I anticipate a high-probability of traffic congestion.

The fact that you are a parent makes your position even more incomprehensible. If you truly know "exactly what it's like" then you would have sympathy for the parents who experience these tragedies and would be offering preventative solutions instead of demonizing them and demanding punitive measures.

I find the callousness in this post extremely distressing.

You don't understand what having a child under the age of six months is like. You are incredibly sleep deprived, making errors at work and are a danger on the road. My wife and I piled up a barricade of boxes to the door of our balcony because we were terrified that one of us would hallucinate at 4am and drop our newborn off the fourth floor.

So when I read about a mother who thought she had dropped her infant off at daycare with her four-year-old, and instead found her dead in the backseat when she got off work that night, my first thought was, "That could have been me." When I read about a parent who backed her car over her infant, I immediately remembered the morning I backed over my lunch because I had been up all night with a screaming newborn and my morning routine got off a beat when my neighbor interrupted it to ask a question.

The real tragedy here is that we could probably greatly reduce these incidents by giving new parents extended maternity leave or providing them some other form of social support. Unfortunately, the same mindset in this country that considers these tragedies "criminal" are also the same people who think giving a new mother time off is some kind of free ride.

If you read stories about these tragedies and your gut reaction is "shitty parents" who "want to kill their children," then your ethical mindset is completely alien to me. I don't know how to teach you the importance of compassion and sympathy for your fellow human beings.

A great application for this is in randomizing playlists. My friends, who are also CS grads and should know better, have often complained that their MP3 players, CD carousels, etc play the same music too often claiming that the random is broken, when a song repeating in a short period of time or other songs never playing is what you would expect from a truly random selection. Using this algorithm, you'd be sure to hear all of your songs. I'm guessing most music services already do something like this.

Hasn't this already happened? Remember the Project Veritas videos of ACORN employees giving advice to a pimp on how to run his child prostitution ring that were all over the news in 2009? Multiple investigations found the videos where so heavily edited as to be fake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos_c...

The original videos were everywhere, ACORN was driven to bankruptcy, and the investigations revealing the videos were faked got hardly any news coverage. The art project described in this post is very quaint in comparison to this very real life event.

Yeah. The evidence is pretty overwhelming at this point:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/us/2016-presidential-campaign-...

The fact that Reality Leigh Winner is being charged with leaking classified information on the Russian government's phishing-attack on computers at an American voting machine company confirms that leak was valid. Then last week a DHS official said the Russian government was targeting voting systems in 21 states. And these two things happened just this month. The evidence has been mounting for over a year now.

Does anyone know where I could find the Gygax article mentioned, "Four & Twenty and What Lies Between"? I loved his explanation of probabilities with dice and cards in the 1989 "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Dungeon Masters Guide" (apologies for my book-scanner errors):

As the DM, the tools of your trade are dice — platonic solid-shaped or just about any other sort. The random numbers you generate by rolling dice determine the results based on the probabilities determined herein or those you have set forth on your own. In case you are not familiar with probability curves, there are two types which are determined by your dice: linear (straight line),'which has equal probability of any given integer in the number group, and bell (ascending and descending line), which has greater probability towards the center of the group of numbers than at either end. The two curves are illustrated thus:

[Image of linear curve for 10-sided dice, with each number having a 10% chance of coming up.]

Linear probability develops a straight line of ascending probability when used as a cumulative probability as shown above.

Bell distribution, when used to delineate the probability of certain numbers appearing, develops o curved line like this:

[Image of a bell curve for a 3d6 roll, with 3 and 18 being the least probable and 8 through 12 being the most probable.]

A single die, or multiple.dice read in succession (such as three dice read as hundreds, tens and decimals) give linear probabilities. Two or more dice added together generate a bell-shaped probability curve.

Before any further discussion takes place, let us define the accepted abbreviations for the various dice. A die is symbolized by "d", and its number of sides is shown immediately thereafter. A six-sided die is therefore "d6", d8 is an eight-sided die, and so on.-Two four-sided dice are pressed by 2d4, five eight-sided dice are 5d8, etc. Any additions to or subtractions from the die or dice are expressed after the identification, thus: d8 8 means a linear number grouping between 9 and 16, while 3d6 -2 means a bell-shaped progression from 1 to 16, with the greatest probability group in the middle (8, 9). This latter progression has the same median numbers as 2d6, but it has higher and lower ends and a greater probability of a median number than if 2dl2 were used. When percentage dice are to be used; this is indicated by d%.

The d4 can be used to generate 25% incremental probabilities, random numbers from 1 to 4, with 1 it generates a linear 2-5, etc. It can be used to get 1 or 2 (1 or 2 = 1, 3 or 4 = 2) or in conjunction with any other dice to get linear or bell-shaped probability curves. For example, 2d4 = 2-8, 3d4 ^ 3-12, d4 d6 = 2-10, d4 d20 (as dlO) = 2-M.'when rolled in conjunction with another die, the d4 can be used to determine linear number ranges twice that shown on the other die, thus: d4 reading 1 or 2 means that whatever is read on the other die is the number shown; but if the d4 reads 3 or 4, add the highest number on the second die to the number shown — so if d8 is the second die 1 to 16 can be generated if a dl 2 is used 1 to 24 can be generated. If a d20 is used either 1 -20 (assuming the use of a standard d20 which is numbered 0-9 twice without coloring one set of faces to indicate that those faces have 10 added to the number appearing) or 1-40 (assuming that one set of faces is colored) can be gotten by adding 0 if 1 or 2 is rolled on the d4 and 10 or 20 (depending on die type) if a 3 or 4 is rolled. Linear series above this are possible simply bv varying the meaning of the d4 number; 1 always means add 0, but 2 can be interpreted as add the value (highest number) of the second die, 3 can be twice value, and 4 can be thrice value. Thus, a d4 reading 4 in conjunction with a d8 (linear curve 1-32) would mean 24 d8, or 25-32.

What applies to d4 has similar application with regard to d6, d8, dl2, and d20. The d6 has 16 2/3% intervals, d8 has 12 1/2% intervals, and d20 can have (1-2 = 1,3-4 = 2,5-6 = 3), while 1 to 5 can be easily read from a d20 (1-2 = 1, 3-4 = 2,5-6 = 3,7-8 = 4,9-0 = 5).

The d20 is used often, both as dlO and d20. The bell-shaped probability curves typically range from 2-20 to 5-50, i.e., 2, 3, 4 or 5d20 added together. Also common is the reading as above with one decimal place added to the result to get 20-200, 30-300, etc. In the latter case, a roll of 3 on one die and 0 (read as JO) totals 13, plus one place, or 130.

Non-platonic solid-shaped dice are available in some places. The most common of these is a ten-sided die numbered 0-9. As with the d20, this con be used for many purposes, even replacing the d20 if a second die is used in conjunction to get 5% interval curves (1-20). Also, the die can give 0-9 linear curve random numbers, as the d20 can.

Other dice available are various forms of "averaging" dice. The most common of these has six faces which read: 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, 5. The median of the curve it generates is still 3.5, that of a normal d6, but the low and high numbers, 2 and 5, are only half as likely to appear as 3 or 4. There is a 33 1/3% chance for either of the two latter numbers to be rolled, so the probabilities of absolutely average rolls are far greater. Other such dice have zeros on them, several low numbers, and so on. These sorts of dice, along with poker dice, "put & take" dice, or any other sort can be added in order to give you more flexibility or changing probabilities in random selection or event interpretation. For example:

The author has a d6 with the following faces: SPADE, CLUB, CLUB, DIAMOND, DIAMOND, HEART. If, during an encounter, players meet a character whose reaction is uncertain, the card suit die is rolled in conjunction with 3d6. Black suits mean dislike, with the SPADE equalling hate, while red equals like, the HEART being great favor. The 3d6 give a bell-shaped probability curve of 3-18, with 9-12 being the mean spread. SPADE 18 means absolute and unchangeable hate, while HEART 18 indicates the opposite. CLUBS or DIAMONDS can be altered by discourse, rewards, etc. | Thus, CLUBS 12 could possibly be altered to CLUBS 3 by offer of a tribute or favor, CLUBS 3 changed to DIAMONDS 3 by a gift, etc.

In closing this discussion, simply keep in mind that the dice are your tools. Learn to use them properly, and they will serve you well.

[Edited for some scan errors.]

If you see this kind of behavior in the workplace, I highly recommend the technique of "echoing" as a means of overcoming it. In meetings I've seen it happen many times where an introvert makes a brilliant point, which gets completely lost when some manager who likes to hear themselves talk follows them. When this happens, I find it incredibly powerful to raise my hand and say, "I'd like to bring us back to [introvert's] point that..." The women in the Obama White House made this techique popular [1], and it's extremely effective in getting quieter more thoughtful ideas the attention they deserve.

As an introvert myself, I support a workplace that is encouraging and respectful of women because that is a workplace respectful of introverts as well.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/10/25/...

My wife is a 3D print-designer, who takes her prints to craft shows. We've quickly learned that the best way to increase sales is to have a large variety of designs rather than a smaller selection of high-quality designs. She can make $30 selling one high-quality replica of a historic landmark that took her weeks of painstaking modeling time, but she has to find the one person who wants that print. Alternatively, she can mass-produce refrigerator magnets of birds, flowers, and animals that take just a few hours of modeling time and output them in such a variety that she can easily sell dozens in a day at $5 each.

It's what makes Amazon so profitable and AliBaba such a threat. It's the "longtail" business model, but for ideas. Like Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

> Therefore, it's possible to simultaneously hold the view that politics is super important and they don't want it on HN.

I grudgingly fell into this category. For a long time, I was frustrated that certain technology-related political topics were being banished from HN, but watching what is happening to other online communities I must accept that this is the best practice. I used to love Slashdot, but that community has grown completely toxic, and I blame the flame-war political discussions for its decline.

I heavily follow the Science Online community on twitter because I loved the sense of wonder I got from the articles all the PhDs were sharing. Now I open twitter, get infected with their outrage, and take it out on my political-opposites on Facebook. I've had to limit my social media exposure and unfollow a lot of people in an effort to stay out of that bad mental place.

I need a place where I can forget about politics and recharge my sense of wonder. We need to keep HN a sanctuary for rationality and promoting human-improvability.

A big part of the problem is public misunderstanding about what it means to be an atheist. When people find out I'm an atheist, they often take it as a personal attack on their belief in god. Coming out of the closet as an atheist opened me up to all sorts of social problems. People defriended me on facebook, others started attacking me in comments, and I still get books from relatives who think I'm an idiot for not believing in god.

But I don't walk around all day thinking, "There's no god." The concept of god simply isn't something that ever factors into my thinking. I believe in science, rationality, the Enlightenment. I believe in all the human beings all over the world who I rely on and who make my life wonderful.

But I am also painfully aware of "Religious Privilege" in America. I must carry the words, "In God We Trust" on my money. My children are forced to pledge allegiance, "Under God" every morning at school. At the Coast Guard base where I used to work as a contractor, our group lunches and other gatherings were opened with a prayer to "Our Lord Jesus Christ." I was even asked to resign from our moral committee shortly after I requested we change our "Christmas Party" to a "Holiday Party."

Is it any wonder people are reluctant to admit they don't believe in god?

> The one emotion that outpaced anger in Berger’s study was awe, the feelings of wonder and excitement that come from encountering great beauty or knowledge, such as a news report of an important discovery in the fight against cancer.

I find this incredibly encouraging. I try to be mindful of what feelings I spread on social media. I've seen too many friends fall into the "perpetual rage" trap, where they grow addicted to news that makes them angry and keep seeking out angrier and angrier pundits and ultimately fall into obstinate-pouting and irrationality.

The sense of awe and wonder are what I try to spread the most of online, but it's difficult. Spreading outrage is easy. It doesn't take much thought and the memes fit into headlines. Awe and wonder require research and understanding. What's amazing about a scientific discovery doesn't fit into a headline. You have to read the whole story to get what's epic in the article.

If the cure for outrage is awe, then we have to figure out how to squeeze awe into 140 characters.

I see our names as unique addresses for our identities and I feel lucky that I share my name with only one other person in the United States. I want people to find me when they google my name and not that other person. I enjoy googling my name and finding nothing but search results referring to myself.

My brother, a choreographer and filmmaker, has the same first+last name as a lawyer in DC and they compete for search results. In recent years, my brother has begun branding himself as first+middle+last name to distinguish himself from that lawyer.

If you are concerned about privacy, then having a common name may provide you some benefit, but if you are concerned about your own personal brand, then having a unique first+last name identifier is hugely beneficial.

While the scope of the article is confined to manufacturing, which impacts less-specialized labor, I felt a sense of dread reading it for what it means for people losing their jobs to software. Fresh out of college in the late 1990s, one of my first "high tech" jobs was manually building HTML pages for job listings, copying-and-pasting advertisements from word documents all day long. One day, I recommended the company contract a programmer-friend of mine to automate the process and two weeks later I was looking for work--my job replaced by a script that ran a few minutes every morning.

Over the years I've watched various professions devalued to search engines and spreadsheets, from paralegals to accountants. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's progress and it's freeing up time. The bad part is that we live in a society with an antiquated work-ethic, where your value is measured in capital and the number of hours you put in each week at your job. Automation isn't the problem, living is a culture incapable of valuing leisure time is what needs to change.

The Office of Educational Technology produced a report on Educational Software, what the biggest problems are and where the greatest opportunities are for solving them. It's a great read with lots of suggestions if you want to learn about a field, public education, that I personally feel is still severely behind the curve when it comes to the Information Revolution:

https://tech.ed.gov/developers-guide/

I highlighted passages of note here:

http://mxplx.com/Reference/id=2090

It's a great opportunity in a field that, despite budget cuts and under-funding, still has millions of dollars to put into software that could meet the needs of school districts across the country. Most of what's out there now is sorely lacking, leaving teachers and schools to use a patchwork of solutions to meet their needs.

The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx. I took a subway there once on a visit to NY. I was both inspired by the science center there, and dismayed to find it surrounded by antiquated residences and roads. It was like a vision of the future in a garden surrounded by the mundane suburban sprawl of reality. Futurism is still the closest thing I have to a religion, and so I admire that in Bel Geddes vision. My favorite bit of futurism is Robert McCall's "The Prologue and the Promise" mural found in the Disney Epcot center [1]. If we aren't striving for a better future, then what are we living for?

For the idea that "Inside Every Utopia is a Dystopia," the 1973 story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin [2] has always most starkly impressed this concept into my mind. In it, Omelas is a perfect utopian city where life is perfect, except this perfection is dependent on the incredible suffering of a single child kept hidden away in a dark place. At a certain age, child's suffering is revealed to each citizen. Most residents learn to live with this fact or rationalize it away. It's a serious oversimplification of certain dimensions of our own modern societies, but it is a powerful metaphor for thinking about how much our cheap modern conveniences rely on the services of minorities and the impoverished who serve us and manufacture our many shiny things. I wish this essay had delved deeper into this concept.

[1] http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...

I was in Chess Club in high school. It was our first year establishing the club, the teacher hosting it didn't have any great insights into chess, we had no books, and so we just sat for hours every afternoon staring quietly at chessboards playing one another. I remember our minds being blown when we discovered you could achieve mate with just a king and a rook versus a lone king. We had formerly believed this meant a draw.

Skipping around on this site is a delight for me. We discovered so many of these tactics in our many hours of play, but we didn't have names for them beyond "fork" and "pin." Now I suddenly find I have a vocabulary for describing these tactics and situations to my kids when they get older. I can't wait to show them the "Back Rank Mate" with just a king and rook left on the board.

I love the fact that you can do so many shapes and maze styles. Very impressive.

There's a really nice responsive HTML5-JS random-maze generator, from Gosh Darn Games that's navigable with arrows. Nowhere near as advanced, but my kids love it:

https://www.goshdarngames.com/html5-maze-post-mortem/

The whitewashing didn't bother me, but the stupidwashing was offensive. Hollywood took one of the deepest, most brilliant cyberpunk classics and dumbed it down to the point of being insulting.

I've been recommending to my friends that they stay away from this film to prevent them having a bad impression of GitS. Instead, I am recommending they watch every episode and movie in the original GitS. Watch many of them multiple times to appreciate just how innovative this series is even today.

I entered a Google-Blacklist screenwriting contest last year to promote non-stereotyped tech characters in media.* I wrote a pilot about a couple raising a family while running a makerspace. The reviewer didn't like it because it was too tech-focused and most people wouldn't get it. Then they got really hung up on the fact that my couple was mixed race, and said that it was not only wrong of me not to draw more attention to this fact, but that the whole first episode should have focused entirely on it. The review was so obtuse, and knew so little about my audience and the subject matter it was astonishing. It reminded me of an English teacher friend who did away with peer reviews, arguing that having other students who are as inexperienced as you critiquing your work will only hurt you.

*I'm fairly certain now it was either a scam or another one of those Google side-projects they fund and forget about because winners were never announced.

We already have a well-established method for challenging climate research. It's called the "Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis" report [1]. It comprises 1,500 pages, surveying the results from thousands of journal articles, and is written by 259 experts from fields including meteorology, physics, oceanography, statistics, engineering, ecology, social sciences and economics. The IPCC regularly updates and republishes this report to include more recent findings and data.

Anyone who has bothered to download and even skim this report knows how exhaustive, thorough, and--most of all--conservative it is in its predictions and findings. It dedicates a significant amount of space to pointing out where its predictions have failed and where the data does not support the theory of global warming.

Anyone who wants to "challenge" climate research by completely circumventing the existing dialogue that has been taking place in peer-reviewed journals for decades now to take their case directly to the policy-makers is a charlatan.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

I share your experience of blogging for 10 years before letting my blog go into neglect. I was a science blogger, and in 2007 we were a very small community of educators, PhDs, and science enthusiasts (I was an enthusiast). It was really exciting then because everyone knew each other and we had a yearly "Science Online" conference where just a few hundred people would show up and hang out. Then twitter, facebook, and the blogging world exploded. My traffic went up, but my engagement dropped to zero. I would gladly trade the traffic for thoughtful conversation.

It reminded me of the BBS days, where communities were small and local and we'd get together at the mall or house party to meet one another in person. Then everyone went to WWW, and suddenly I was just another post in a thread of hundreds.

I'm not sure how to get those small, close-communities full of engagement back. The best I have now is hanging out in-person at my local gaming shop and chatting with the locals on facebook.

I really appreciate this idea, but is there a reason is has to be an app? I check all news through the browser (phone and desktop), and I'm leery of installing an app to read news. I think such a concept would make a great website though.

In the DC area, we had two weeks of 70 degree weather in February. The cherry trees blossomed because of it, and then they wilted off the trees because temperatures dropped to normal.

I saw Fox News manage to put a anti-global warming spin on it by only reporting that cold killed the cherry blossoms, leaving out the fact that they normally blossom in April.

Agreed, I submitted the same link with the title "Semantic Analysis of Donald Trump Sub-Reddits," but even that leaves out the fascinating idea of "subbreddit algebra" that the article goes into. Articles like these are why I love 538. It's like popular science for statistical analysis.

Carl Sagan was famously denied tenure at Harvard and membership in the National Academy of Sciences for his science advocacy. Different takes on it range from "jealousy" of his peers over his broader popularity to anger from them for his making science accessible and explaining concepts in a way that allowed readers to understand them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan

I used to see this with my peers in computer programming in the 1990s. There was a lot of anger and jealousy when everyday normal people started putting up websites. Several of my CS friends were of the opinion that this was almost polluting the WWW with bad code.

A major disconnect here comes from a lack of gaming literacy among critics. I read a great paper recently, Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming as a Constellation of Literacy Practices, where the author talks about how RPG games are actually quite literary in the sense of reading and writing than people give them credit for [1]. But what really impressed me about the essay is that he presented a screenshot of an RPG video game and pointed out that few critics could explain what was going on in the image, even though it was instantly familiar to me despite not having played the game.

Critics are not game-literate, so they can't appreciate them. They know nothing about mechanics like strategic imbalance, the Skinner box, achievements, power creep and other concepts I myself am only becoming familiar with thanks to the thoughtful folks at ExtraCredits[2]. They don't know anything about how video games tell stories, challenge players with moral choices, or the brilliant innovations artists have had to come up with to work around hardware limitations in both graphics and music over the decades. If you aren't literate in gaming, then of course you can't appreciate the many many layers of artistic expression from algorithms to writing to graphics to music and mechanics that go into making a game.

Video games are more profitable than films now. Critical theory surrounding video games simply needs to rise to the level of other mediums before more people will respect it. Remember, films were originally considered such a waste of time no one bothered to preserve 75% of silent films[3]. As the new generation of game-literate kids grow up, I trust that games will get the respect they deserve.

[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2304/elea.2007.4.3.29...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_films