335 karma · joined July 21, 2010
Answer: Not anywhere in the Scientific American article. Also, not in the abstract of the paper. Actually have to read the paper, to find out that the claimed tetra-quark is 2 quarks & 2 anti-quarks.
What's the best timing precision possible on the different reception times, to get better triangulation (if there was at least a 3rd LIGO)?
What's the odds of seeing one event when starting it up, and none since then?
How long will it take for any new events to be announced?
In their analysis of the human auditory cortex, Norman-Haignere et al found six distinct functional groups of neurons. One of those groups is identified as a "music area". Another one of the groups is a close match for the evolutionary pre-cursor that I predicted - a group of neurons that respond to speech sounds, whether or not those sounds belong to the listener's native language.
The initial assumption of my theory is that the primary function of music is to temporarily alter mood. Evidence for this function comes from the strong effect that music has on some people who are "addicted" to daydreaming.
My theory suggests that the response to speech-like sounds also induces an altered mood, when an infant is learning language for the first time. This alteration in mood helps the infant to identify language as a special stimulus which is important and which needs to be processed and understood as something that follows its own peculiar and complex set of rules which are not particularly related to the rules that describe all the other aspects of reality that the infant is learning about. The altered mood may also help the infant to learn that the meaning attached to some language utterances relates to things beyond immediate reality, ie things that other people are thinking about which are not in the "here and "now". (This would relate to the similar effect that music has on our emotional reactions to things we are thinking about that are not in the "here and now".)
Is there an objective scientific definition of the word "banal" as applied to music?
What I read is the author saying: "Other people like pop music, but I don't".
"I'll have to check with _my_ lawyer before I sign this".
I'm fairly sure that 'my' lawyer does not consider herself to be one of my personal possessions.
This is just normal English, not necessarily an assumption of total ownership.
I realise that I haven't properly documented the rule that applies for note lengths, which is that the first note in the song and in each bar default to 1 beat, and all other notes default to the length of the previous note.
Also, if you write a song and the note lengths in a bar don't add up to the correct bar length, then Melody Scripter will give you a parse error.
What I think we should really be complaining about is that educational books are not sufficiently entertaining.
Many of the startup websites promoted on Hacker News go to extreme lengths to reduce "cognitive load" - to make everything as easy as possible for their users to understand what they are doing.
Entertainment is content presented to us in a manner which does not require unpleasant effort on our part to maintain our attention as readers, listeners or viewers.
When text-book writers put the same effort into making their content entertaining as startup websites put into the UX of their websites, then we will have an educational revolution.
Actually, for most people, video is more entertaining than books, so the best results will come from making entertaining videos on technical subjects.
It is much easier to be entertaining if your content is "fluffy", and some of the most entertaining content is about "almost nothing at all", like Seinfeld, for example.
But that is no excuse for neglecting the need to make serious content as entertaining as possible.
To get some ideas about how to make technical content more entertaining, try the following:
* Search for your favourite technical subject on YouTube, and watch the most popular videos.
* Still on YouTube, search for "vlog", or "youtubers", or anything else that leads to videos made specifically for YouTube which include visual and verbal presentation of non-fictional content and commentary. (For example, see Ray William Johnson.)
* Observe the difference.
* Don't just observe the difference. Revisit the technical videos, and identify each point of pain, where the video requires effort of the viewer in a manner that would never have occurred in the "entertaining" videos. It could be things as simple as an extended interval where nothing happens at all, or too much talking and nothing happening on the screen, or the talking consists entirely of reading words that are already on the screen, or action on the screen but no talking, or too much talking about what the presenter is going to talk about. Etc.
What is "obvious" to Bertrand Russell is bad economics.
When the peasant puts his money in a stocking, he causes a slight deflation, so prices decrease, which increases the value of everyone else's money. So everyone else effectively has more to spend, if they want to.
However, everyone else would be prudent to assume that the peasant will eventually spend his money, which will correspondingly cause prices to rise again.
It might seem that an earlier gain is offset by a later loss.
But, those who benefit from the slight deflation can choose to invest the increased value of their monetary holdings into industry. At a later time, when the peasant decides to spend his money, the products of that industry will be ready for purchase.
Thus, with nothing more than surplus cash and a stocking, the peasant has driven investment in industry, productive employment, and long-term growth in the wealth of society, the benefits of which he has foregone since he chose not to seek a return of interest on his savings.
But he loses me when he starts critiquing object-oriented programming.
This is how I "arrive" at object-oriented programming:
* I begin writing an application to implement an idea.
* My hurriedly written code starts out as a whole lot of functions acting on various bits of data.
* At some point I realise that certain functions are really methods on one or more classes of object.
* I refactor my code into class definitions.
* My code is now better organised and more readable.
I don't have to put _all_ my code into classes - there are often a few utility functions that end up just floating around by themselves, not belonging to any particular class. (So I prefer languages that "allow" me to do object-oriented programming over languages that _require_ me to do it.)
But, for me, object-oriented programming is a natural way of organising code. Despite what Zed says, "things" do exist in the real world, and in our applications, and "types of things" (i.e. classes) exist in our heads as ways to think about those things.
If I have to write code in some programming language that doesn't "do" objects, I get frustrated and annoyed (because I will eventually want to organise my code as classes and methods, but I won't be able to).
(Ironically long) explanation at http://thinkinghard.com/blog/PitchBlurb.html.
Lots of examples in one web page at http://thinkinghard.com/blog/index.html.
* Our Internal Revenue Collection website must be really good, because no one ever complains about it, even though we have a conspicuous link to the complaints form on every page.
* Why would anyone ever hesitate to make a complaint to the Ministry of Internal Revenue Collection if they felt they had something to say?
There's no real-time execution, but it does show a (more or less) word-to-word relationship between Javascript and English, which is an alternative (and complementary) way to "explain" code to someone learning Javascript.
Note that my English "translation" is totally hand-crafted. From the description, Choc allows hand-crafted translations of individual library functions, but applying those translations to a program still gives you a mostly automatic translation which is not as easy to understand as a hand-crafted translation would be.
This seems to miss the whole point of bitcoins. To "free" your US Dollars, use them to buy some bitcoins, transfer the bitcoins to some other exchange, sell them there, and somewhat less than 22 months later, you have your money.
The article does not report any difficulty in withdrawing bitcoins from Mt Gox.
(After researching this topic a further 5 minutes, I do notice that the USD bitcoin price is a bit higher at Mt Gox than at, for example, Bitstamp, which amounts to taking a 9% loss if you use the method described above to withdraw your USD from Mt Gox.)
99.99% of online educational videos suck. For example, watching the video is so painful that all I can think about is "how do I get out of here?". (Possibly I am spoiled from watching too many popular vlogs on YouTube.)
The other 0.01% of online educational videos that don't suck prove that it is possible to make such videos. The best examples I can find are RailsCasts and "Math Antics" (the first is for grownups, the second is aimed more at children, but I would watch something like Math Antics that had more advanced content).
On the Internet we have constructed systems that accept contributions from people that can be as little or as much as they want to contribute - like Wikipedia, or newsy sites like Hacker News, or Github. These websites succeed where those that require too much up-front commitment fail. Like Nupedia (or even SourceForge, in the old days, when it was the "go-to" place for open-source development).
Out in the real world we still demand (mostly), mandatory minimum levels of commitment. Or, where work can be casual, it gets paid much less than the "regular" jobs.
There are opportunities for any company that can work out how to make use of those who want to work, at least some of the time, but who are unable or unwilling to commit to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year.
We could blame the contributors of Nupedia for the failure of that website. And we could blame all those open-source programmers who were too lazy to jump through the minimal set of hoops that SourceForge required for contributors, for the demise of that website. But we know that better alternatives exist, which are more tolerant of slackness and lack of commitment from their contributors. So we can see that those older websites were not the best possible way to organise how to get people to contribute their efforts.
Sliding is better than clicking, because you can't click on something without actually looking at it. But once you've started sliding a slider, you can continue to slide it without looking at the slider.
In the course of development, I found that it is non-trivial to make a popup window inside a Chrome extension which acts on a target tab, because "window.opener" is not available. So I developed a test extension at https://github.com/pdorrell/test-popup-extension which does that, and which runs its Javascript code interchangeably inside or outside the extension.
For example the Twitter patent was granted, even though there is prior art (mine), and even though I submitted my prior art as soon as I found out about the patent. But I got a reply along the lines of "too late, the patent has been granted". It turned out that the application was kept secret until it was granted, thus guaranteeing protection from any prior art not already known to the patent office employee assigned to that patent.
The "new" US patent laws require an application to be made public after 18 months, but there could be thousands upon thousands of older patent applications benefiting from the secret option.