jsweojtj

That might work for imaging, but what's your fix for spectroscopy?

I'm glad that you agree that the original post was incorrect in stating that:

> Bedford's Law is apparently just a fancy name for the phenomenon where 1's appear much more frequently than 9's in any random sample of numbers.

because, as my example shows, it's false for the case of random numbers sampled uniformly across five orders of magnitude. You're also right that it's possible to construct a distribution (such as taking -log(rand())) where this behavior is observed.

Even this explanation is incorrect. Evenly sampled data across many orders of magnitude give an even distribution of leading numbers. See my comment for code here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21541264

There are many distributions which do lead to the distribution of leading digits that follow Benford's law, just not uniform. Nor "uniform over several orders of magnitude".

It's not true for any random sample of numbers. Spin up a Jupyter notebook and paste the following:

    %matplotlib inline
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    import numpy as np
    import seaborn as sns
    sns.set_context('poster', font_scale=1.3)

    n_values = 10000
    lower_bound = 1
    upper_bound = 100000
    nums = np.array(
        [int(str(x)[0]) for x in np.random.randint(lower_bound, upper_bound, size=n_values)]
    )

    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 8))
    sns.distplot(nums, kde=False, bins=list(range(1, 11)), ax=ax)
    ax.set_xticks(list(range(1, 11)))
    fig.tight_layout()

And you'll see it's essentially a uniform distribution of leading digits.

Let's track the argument from the top of the thread.

> "...And I agree we should use ads to promote our own products, but I'd still block companies that compete with our core from gaining any advantage from us. I'd also keep blockingGoogle but otherwise wouldn't extend the block to anyone else."

> "These actions may look anti-competitive, but these companies are all foreign (China, South Korea, Japan)."

> Explicitly mentions Google.

> Google has a bigger ad network than Facebook so how is that a monopoly?

Do you find this statement anti-competitive: "I'd still block companies that compete with our core"?

But Google isn't foreign and he explicitly says to keep blocking it?

I think you're thinking of the oil-drop experiment for the charge of the electron that was done 110 years ago (1909). And the experiments in the subsequent decades. Feynman, in 1974, so 45 years ago, used it as an example of problems in science. So, in response to the original post saying that particle physics has been doing things more or less correctly for decades is not tarnished by your example.

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...

I'm curious, where are you heading with this counter argument? That perhaps, something like 900k Americans living in Europe are in the US Armed Forces, leaving 100k regular US citizens. So then, if all 5k of the US citizen renouncers worldwide are in Europe, then 5% of the remaining 100k _does_ count as "many"?

I doubted that "many" expats give up their US citizenship so I tried to find some numbers. Found some secondary sources like: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2018/05/14/fewer-ame...

which states that, worldwide, just over 5,000 Americans renounced citizenship in 2017. There are also about 9 million Americans living abroad and ~1 million living in Europe. So, no, I don't think that even if all 5,000 were in Europe that 0.5% renounced their citizenship would count as "many".

> They lived at a time when there were surely more asteroids hitting the Earth than now (the system was younger, so there was more debris flying around), so they surely had more warning than we do: craters, smaller impacts, etc.

This is a tangential point, but they weren't living in an appreciably younger solar system. 65 million / 4.5 billion is ~1.5%. So, the solar system (and the Earth) was 98.5% of its current age.

What fields are you drawing from in your personal experience?

Just like Neptune! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Le_Verrier

Thank you for posting that article! It was really well written and thought provoking.

And a correlation of 0%

What can you do (remote viewing-wise)?

43 years later (Trinity test was in 1945, he died in 1988).

Your links to the original paper are broken in that writeup.

While not exactly an answer to your question, you could go through the process described here: http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

Which would probably burn that into your brain pretty well.

> The correct statement is that all respectable theories of physics (to date), including the Standard Model, include an irreducible number of values which must be plugged into them "by hand". In other words, once you've written down your theory, there are some parameter values in it about which the theory itself gives you no guidance; you could give them different values, and the theory would still work. It would just be describing a universe with different properties than ours. In order to make it describe our universe, you need to get those values from experiment.

100% yes.

> It is not that the fine structure constant has some particular status as "more fundamental" than others.

Agreed, as I wrote above "as the fine-structure constant is one of fundamental constants of the universe", it's in a class of fundamental constants (or one of the irreducible values to be plugged in to use your phrasing).

> If constant #1 can be computed given the theory and constant #2, then they are not independent, and the choice between them is arbitrary; a convention.

Sure. You can choose one input over the other once you have made at least one other measurement.

Are you arguing something like, "there are X irreducible inputs to the Standard Model. For any particular input, a, you might be able to swap it out for a different one, g, so that you still have X irreducible inputs, but now they are a different set. Therefore, because we swapped a for g, a is not a fundamental constant"?

Do you take issue with the phrasing of the passages in this wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionless_physical_constan...)? Specifically:

1) > ...physicists ... reserve the use of the term fundamental physical constant solely for dimensionless physical constants that cannot be derived from any other source.

2) > Fundamental physical constants cannot be derived and have to be measured.

And 3) its classification of the fine-structure constant as a fundamental physical constant?

Your latest comment seems to be replying to someone with a fascination with the specific number 1/137, which I do not have, and some related tangents. I'll try to refocus the points of contention between us.

This whole thread started because the top comment said that a physics theory predicted the value of the fine-structure constant. Which is wrong, as the fine-structure constant is one of fundamental constants of the universe and one _whose value is not predicted by any theory_.

At this stage, two claims are in tension.

The first is your claim, that QED predicts the fine-structure constant once you measure the magnetic moment of the electron using several thousand Feynman diagrams.

The second claim is Feynman, himself, literally writing in his book titled _QED_, that we have no idea how to predict the value of this constant.

Could it be that Feynman overlooked the fact that he, himself, predicted the value of the fine-structure constant? He thought that not being able to predict its value was such an unsolved problem as to call it "one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics"? That "all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it"?

The long and the short of it is that I think you're missing something much deeper. Yes, _once you measure_ something that has a tight coupling with the fine-structure constant, you now know the value of the fine-structure constant. But, before you made that measurement you DO NOT KNOW and further CANNOT PREDICT the value of the fine-structure constant. If you could, you'd be able to claim your own Nobel prize.

I'll leave this quote here as my response:

> There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e – the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out, without putting it in secretly! — Richard Feynman, Richard P. Feynman (1985). QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. Princeton University Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-691-08388-9.

[my emphasis added]

I can't tell whether you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. Let's make it easier. Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The value of the fine-structure constant is not predicted by any physics theory.

Exactly. Its value comes from being measured.

It does not predict the fine structure constant, that is an input into the model.

I'm really curious now. How were you testing their understanding of overfitting? Like what was the setup/questions?

*lightning

Did you mean something besides "Matlab" in one of these instances?

"Second place for me goes to Matlab... I can't say anything about Matlab..."

Isn't "self-serving narratives" an unobservable? Aren't you heading down the path of your self-described pseudo-science?

Global inequality has been going down, not up.

References:

- https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/global-income-inequ...

- https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality#the-la...